No major war or act of mass killing in the twentieth century began without the aggressors or perpetrators first claiming innocence and victimhood. - Timothy Snyder

The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don’t know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that. Some of the Germans who voted for the Nazi Party in 1932 no doubt understood that this might be the last meaningfully free election for some time, but most did not. Some of the Czechs and Slovaks who voted for the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1946 probably realized that they were voting for the end of democracy, but most assumed they would have another chance. No doubt the Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in their country’s history, which (thus far) it has been. Any election can be the last, or at least the last in the lifetime of the person casting the vote.

We certainly face, as did the ancient Greeks, the problem of oligarchy — ever more threatening as globalization increases differences in wealth.

Between July 1942 and June 1943, only 4,705 Jews were admitted to the United States — fewer than the number of Warsaw Jews who were killed on a given day at Treblinka in summer 1942.