At this time, we are looking back a hundred years, to regard the horror and carnage of a war which took the lives of twenty million victims, and attempting to analyse the first basic cause which created this suspicion and hostility, that drove decent people of one nation to hate the ordinary people of another nation, sufficiently to turn all the industrial might of all nations, to death and destruction.
You will remember that an assassin murdered an Archduke in the Balkans. But how could that single senseless act of individual terrorism, then become a reason for millions to die, all across a continent?
I think that the reason is still here with us, in the tribal devotion of SNP, Plaid Cymru and UKIP, all political parties whose first consideration is nationalism.
While all of the supporters of these parties consider themselves to be highly civilised, responsible adults, it is extremely difficult to deny the suggestion that the sum total of all those different nationalist movements, in all those countries, was a prime cause of all that slaughter.
You might have thought that a hundred years of careful thought, might have given birth to a different attitude.
C. N. Westerman, Glamorgan
