Just about the entire human species learned, in the first half of the 20th century, the lesson that you and the neocons seem determined to forget. Watching the endless European Wars climax in the absolute blood bath of WWI, and then shortly later to be repeated to a greater extent in WWII, humans learned that the resort to violence, driven by people who are willing to use force to solve problems, leads to inevitable escalation (there are always such people on both sides), and endless repetition.

After WWII, with the wise leadership of American liberal ideas, we attempted to establish some global values and institutions that would be dedicated to resolving conflicts peacefully, and we used them to navigate through a half century of unprecedented peace and prosperity. With nukes on the table, we all uderstood the importance of resisting escalation. Modern conservatives have been relentlessly trying to undermine these institutions and these ideals, and have taken up the traditional recourse to using force if you think you have it over your opponents. You are plunging us back into the nightmares of the early 20th century (and before). Only this time with WMDs around. You people are the most dangerous humans to ever strut your stupidity on the world stage.

History only repeats in its broad outlines. History never repeats itself exactly. That means the task for humans is to figure out what the the lessons of history are for our actions and behavior in the present.

One of the lessons of the Holocaust is that when an entire subset of people are demonized because of a particular ethnic, racial, religious, or national identity, that entire group of people become subhuman in the eyes of others. That is when genocide happens. One of the lessons of the Holocaust is that this kind of mass murder can happen any time an entire group of people is defined by a single characteristic. If we think the lesson is that we must never let the Jewish people be exterminated again, then we have not learned the most important part of the lesson. The Nazi Holocaust happened only once. It will never happen again. But genocide can happen again, and obviously has, many times. And *any time an entire group of people is dehumanized because of ethnicity, religion, race, etc.,* we start to create the conditions in which genocide can happen again.

I also disagree with your notion that history proves peace movements lead to war. My reading of the last century tells me that war leads to war. World War I led to World War II. World War II, although it defeated a terrible evil, led to another great evil: the nuclear arms race, and the very real possibility of global nuclear conflagration. World War II also led to the Cold War (which also fed the nuclear arms race, of course}. The Cold War created the ideology of anti-Communism; and anti-Communism led to a U.S. foreign policy so obsessively focused on keeping other countries out of the Soviet sphere of influence that successive U.S. administrations were completely blind to any and all evils they might be encouraging in the name of fighting Communism. And that blindness played a huge part in the development of fanatical Islamist ideology and the rise of Islamic terrorism.

I’m not saying that the danger of appeasement is not ONE lesson history has taught us. But to focus on that one danger, and to see every element of foreign policy through that one lens, to the exclusion of any other possible lessons 20th century history may have to teach us, is not only short-sighted, but also very, very dangerous.