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The gravamen of Geyl’s charge against Toynbee is not that he makes sense of the past: it is that to do so he resorts to quite ludicrous distortions, … - Michael Howard (historian)
" "The gravamen of Geyl’s charge against Toynbee is not that he makes sense of the past: it is that to do so he resorts to quite ludicrous distortions, selecting evidence to conform to his views and ignoring all that does not. The abuse of history in fact lies less often in the motives of the historian than in his methods. It was after all the most honourable loyalties and affections which led Cardinal Gasquet to attempt the vindication of the monastic orders against the charges of Protestant historians; the formidable Coulton may have been inspired merely by acrimonious anti-Popish spite; but Coulton was an honest scholar, and Gasquet, one is forced to conclude, was not.
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About Michael Howard (historian)
Sir Michael Eliot Howard OM CH CBE MC FBA FRHistS (29 November 1922 – 30 November 2019) was an English military historian, formerly Chichele Professor of the History of War, Honorary Fellow of All Souls College, Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford, Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University, and founder of the Department of War Studies, King's College London. In 1958, he co-founded the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
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Additional quotes by Michael Howard (historian)
Many Christians, of whom I am one, see no moral dilemma inherent in the possession, and if necessary the use, of nuclear weapons to deter their use against our own peoples by a Soviet state whose leaders are explicitly unconstrained by those considerations of "bourgeois morality" which so properly worry us. It is the initiation of the use of these weapons that causes so many of us such profound concern; and we have come to depend on that initiation because we have acquiesced in a decision to maintain a standard of living far higher than that of our adversaries, rather than provide the resources needed for a convincing defence by non-nuclear means of the territories of Western Europe.
Hobbes's ideas seemed at least as relevant to the middle decades of the twentieth century as they had been to those of the seventeenth. (Happy the generation now growing up in our universities whose natural affinity appears to be rather with Rousseau!) A situation in which recourse to force is such an imminent probability that one's whole life and policy has to be adjusted to it is not, save in the most formal sense, a state of peace. It is for that reason that I equate peace with that unfashionable term 'Order'; an emphasis which probably brands me as a temperamental Tory rather than a temperamental Whig.
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So long as the conventional balance remains so uneven, the Western strategy of relying on the first use of nuclear weapons to defend ourselves is not only morally dubious but politically incredible. But the responsibility for this strategy does not lie with the United States. It lies with the governments and peoples of Western Europe who have, for the last thirty years, refused to take the necessary measures to provide for their own conventional defence.
That is where the CND is so dangerous. Their present campaign is sending a signal both to Moscow and to the United States, not simply that the peoples of Western Europe are not prepared to defend themselves with nuclear weapons, but that they are not prepared to defend themselves at all: a signal that could create a quite terrifying degree of instability by presenting the leaders of the Soviet Union with options that hitherto have been firmly closed to them.
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