The European Civil War

You, like me, may never have heard of the European Civil War - until now! It turns out it's a rebranding of some bloodletting that you know under other nomenclature:

The European Civil War is a term that is used to characterise both World War I and World War II and the inter-war period as a protracted civil war taking place in Europe. It is used in referring to the repeated confrontations that occurred during the first-half of the 20th century.

You may think this is a crazy term, since a civil war is a war within a nation, but the two world wars were wars among nations. That's what I think, too.

Of course, if you vaguely imagine that the European Union was a nascent nation as of 1900, then you can kind of see the point of this. As long as you don't think too much about the United States and Japan and China and Canada and so on, who also seemed to be involved in these sprawling troubles.

The Wikipedia article, quoted above, is written very strangely, I think by non-native speakers of English, or else by professors of international studies.

I only learned about the Euro Civil Dustup because Richard Fernandez was complaining about the new European History Museum:

The whole problem of explaining the present is so nettlesome that the European Union’s “House of European History” museum decided to omit the mention of World War 2 altogether by the simple expedient of declaring 1946 the Year Zero for European history.

But of the unpleasantness of 1939-1945 it will only say that there was an event called the “European Civil War”, which presumably was fixed by the European Union

The public relations of the EU often seems to depend upon papering over disagreements, trying to forget, in order to forgive and get along.

But I understand this is Holocaust Remembrance Day.
So let me just say,
some things are sufficiently rotten
they should never be forgotten.