Volume 19, Issue 1 (2003)

In this and the next issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy we will look at issues of war in the twentieth century; at how the nature and purpose of war have changed; at how evil stalks the human condition, how we forget, most likely because we want to forget. Some truths are too terrible to bear. They require us to ask questions of ourselves that our psyches are not equipped to answer and so they close down for the sake of our survival. Had we slaughtered dumb animals in the manner in which we slaughtered ourselves during the century we have left behind, we would have filled the air with our wails of anguish and protest.

The twentieth century will be remembered for many things endless lists of scientific breakthroughs in physics, medicine, biology, genetics, and communications that were unthinkable mere decades before the impact of discovery in these fields transformed the way we live and think and communicate. Each discovery had an exponential impact on the next, each accelerated the next; the obsolete became the commonplace.