Jonathan Glovers' (1999) Humanity: A Moral History of the 20^th Century explores why atrocities occurred – from World War I to the Rwandan genocide – and insight on how we can learn from this history to prevent similar events from occurring again. This "thought provoker" post presents a limited selection of those insights; those interested in conflict studies as well as ethics ought to add this to their essential reading list:

On Nietzsche:

• "For Nietzsche, this is all misguided… The idea of loving your neighbour is a disguise mediocrity. People too weak to override others disguise weakness as moral virtue, though this may be a necessary stage on the way to something higher: he says that the 'bad conscience is an illness, there is no doubt about that', but goes on to say that it is an illness as a pregnancy is an illness. The man Nietzsche admires will overcome bad conscience, which is the mark of slave morality, and will want to dominate others." (p.14-15)

• "Some of us drawn to those ideas may feel aghast at where they took Nietzsche. Struggle, egoism, dominance, slavery, the majority having no right to existence, peoples that are failures, hardness, the festival of cruelty, the replacement of compassion for the weak with by their destruction. If such a world is really the result of Nietzsche's thought, it seems a nightmare." (p. 17)
  

On escalation and the prisoner's dilemma:

• "It was assumed that countries pursued their national interests and that war was legitimate in support of vital interests. On these assumptions, each country had to plan against being attacked. Although most governments did not want war, they were in a prisoners' dilemma, where individual pursuit of national self-interest made it hard for them collectively to avoid the worst outcome." (p. 193)
  

On (mis)information:

• "Governments also want to keep their own public committed to the war. In Britain in the First World War this was the main function of the newly created Ministry of Information. In a document published in 1918 about its work, this was accepted: 'Propaganda is task of creating and directing public opinion. In other wars this work has not been the function of government.' But 'in a struggle which was not of armies but of nations, and which tended to affect every people on the globe, this aloofness could not be maintained.' Sometimes leaders know that an informed public would see the human cost of war as too great, so the facts are carefully filtered." (p. 167)
  

On "tribalism":

• "The common view is that real tribes are in Africa, where the same tribal hatreds have been fought out in battles since the Stone Age. Calling the conflict in Northern Ireland is a kind of rebuke: you are behaving like primitive tribes in Africa. But this picture is wrong. These other conflicts are tribal in more than metaphor: in Ireland, Yugoslavia and elsewhere they are literal enactments of tribal hostility as those in Africa. The picture in Africa is wrong too. Some of the tribal divisions are recent creations. The origins of African tribal war and massacre are more complex than the 'ancient hatreds' account allows." (p. 119)