27 January

This year is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Have we learned anything as a result of it? I don’t think so. Why did the Germans do this? Modern team sports claims it was ‘anti-semitism’. But the Germans are no more anti-Semitic than any other country, it was a convenient scapegoat hobbled together by the Nazis and then marketed to its own population. Germany did this because it was humiliated after WW1. Humiliation is the most toxic personal and collective emotion. Nearly all serial killers have a history of some form of humiliation in their lives. Societies are the same. The Germans were deliberately humiliated after WW1, which was the direct cause of Nazism in the decades that followed. Humiliation destroys status, human’s most prized asset. Without status they have no identity. A key to peace is gracious victory. Look at Trump right now, and his campaign of revenge on all his enemies. He in turn was deliberately humiliated by Obama and others. It’s a self-reinforcing spiral of escalating violence and genocide. I make one exception for the Ashes, where England should be humiliated until the end of time.