to the football world cup will be coming to cats are the nation has made no secret of its desire to one day host an olympics with 2032 now looking at increasingly realistic targets and the richardson al-jazeera doha. qatar for a quick check of the headlines here on al-jazeera the u.s. has posted a record number of coronavirus deaths and cases in a single day figures from johns hopkins university show more than 3700 people died while another 250000 were infected is the world's worst affected country by far the white house has announced u.s. vice president mike pence will be vaccinated against kobe had 19 on friday president elect joe biden will also receive the vaccine as early as next week both men will get the shots in public to boost confidence in the medication the world

health organization says the coronavirus pandemic could worsen in europe early next year germany has begun an emergency lockdown london and its surrounding areas are moved into the highest level of restrictions but the u.k. prime minister's plans to ease those over the christmas holiday is being criticized by some medical experts the smaller christmas is going to be a safer christmas and a shorter christmas is a safer christmas when we see 3 households can meet on for days i want to stress that these are maximums not targets to aim for but of course it's always going to be safest to minimize the number of people you meet and garters government is asking for international help to provide medical supplies to contain the corona virus outbreak there the stripper's reported a new record of 935 new cases in one day. the u.s.

government's confirmed it was the target of a recent hacking campaign that affected a number of its critical networks the treasury and commerce departments were among dozens infiltrated the f.b.i. is investigating who was responsible u.s. media say russian government hackers were behind the cyber attack. parties to the iran nuclear deal including senior iranian diplomats of held virtual talks to discuss the state of the agreement they're set to meet again next week as the symmetries. to reverse its violations of the deal and a chinese space probe has returned to earth with the 1st rock samples collected from the moon in decades the successful return of the chinese 5 pro concludes one of the most complicated missions in china's aerospace history so those were the headlines the news continues here on al-jazeera after this train station thanks so much. this underwater treasure is a risk of disappearing coral bleaching caused by rising temperatures. the great.

strain the eric eric egypt's. tourism industry based this we will instantly if we have another bleaching event of these might. continue they just will not be the opportunity for the corals to recover in between those. sides as supporting for strong climate policy from the government to reduce emissions without this the situation will finally get worse. hey there welcome to this dream i'm josh rushing sitting in for for me ok today now look if you're watching this live on you tube want you to help me out see that box over there that is a live youtube chat and we have a producer sitting there waiting to get your questions and your comments to me so

that i can ask them during the show today and what a show it is we're talking about war and that's the title in the subject of one of the hottest books at 2020 it got picked as a top 10 book by the new york times for nonfiction and we're lucky enough to be joined by its author margaret. millon professor mcmillan is a professor of history at the university of toronto in americus professor of international history and the former warden of st anthony's college at the university of oxford in oxford is where she's joining us from today good day professor how are you very well thanks all right so let's start with the book you've written a lot of books about that the 20th century and then you wrote this one which is of course about the 20th century which is known for these great wars but it's actually a much more broad look at history on this one topic of war why did why did you write it i'm also curious are you surprised at all by the response to it well the 2nd question is easy to answer yes i am it's something i've been thinking about for

a long time but i thought it will come out it's a book that a few people might like be nice it got some nice reviews that i am i am surprised it's something i've been thinking about it for a long time if you do history war comes in and out of history a lot it has a huge impact on history and i suppose war was in my own background like it's in the background of a lot of people my age my father was in the canadian navy in 2nd world war both my grandfathers were in the festal who are stopped as it was something i heard about as a child and for some reason it's a subject the whole subject of war through the ages is something that has always fascinated me it's interesting because every history book i've ever read it's a war is a prevalent part of it but the book isn't just about war are there category of human experiences that you might put on the same level like. love or sex or economy or like what what kind of category are you placing war in terms

of human experience. war is one of the great challenging experiences for humans i suppose it brings out both the best and the west and human nature it can have a profound impact on societies or it could be something that's fought somewhere else by other people and we don't think about it very much but i think it intensifies what it is to be human and in war you're faced with well you being in war so you know better than me you're faced with the most elemental decisions you have to try to save your life you might have to try and take another life you do things for other people you might not do in peace time and so it is something i think which is not natural to us necessarily but it is an enormously testing part of what it is to be human you know it not natural i must not natural experience of war which i've been to many many times as a journalist and only once as a ring as a marine you have a reason that you're there a purpose the adjustor i'm just but you know why you're there as

a journalist when you're there obviously you're there it's important to witness it but at the same time. you feel foolish putting yourself in that kind of like who finds himself on about a field without a weapon it's just a weird weird thing and you you ask yourself these questions like what am i doing here but you document in your book you know the time people being on the battlefield the cameras when they 1st where there were cameras and what have you found about the way people reflect on war. well i think it depends whether you're there is an observer and i think if you're only there is an observer i mean of course your life is in danger and you're part of it in some ways but you are facing and so you are not a good experience in the same way and what i'm very conscious of is i'll never really understand what it is to be in combat and what i try and do is read about it look at pictures about it and i think so just those who find themselves have often tried to capture that in the 20th century their own memoirs and then when she cameras came in the 1st floor who or it was possible for so to carry

a very small cheap camera in the pocket of his uniform they tried a sane juror coordinate as much as they could in their own ways because i think they probably sense this was something that they wanted 'd and if not to remember fondly but to but to capture because it was such a crisis moment in their lives we have a question for you from someone from our community this is caroline ball she's an academic librarian in derby and she has a question about steven pinker's book which you mention a few times in your book here let her ask you as several times in this book you mentioned steven pinker and his book the better angels of our nature in which he argues that san violence has declined in human societies throughout history and i wonder having written this book that focuses exclusively on who or what you think about that argument are we listening to the better angels of our nature and becoming less violent or are we got staying the same or maybe even becoming more violent i wonder what you think about. steven pinker's book is enormously

challenging and i think very important but i would make a distinction i've been thinking about it a lot since i've read it never read other books which which take i take issue with him and what i would say is that we may be becoming in some societies less prone to random violence or less prone to use violence in everyday lives but we don't expect people to come outside pubs anymore and brawl and we disapprove of it if that happens and it used to happen a lot more and we don't enjoy public executions of public displays of cruelty so i think in some ways perhaps a better angels of our natures at least in some societies have run at it but more is quite different it's not random violence more is organized violence and you can take someone who is perfectly peaceful and doesn't want to kill us and 10 that person into someone who isn't disciplined warrior who will do it and i think the crucial thing about war is that it's organized and in some ways the violence exists in a war yes there is violence will the violence exciting or its purpose if it's intentional

and sometimes i think it's a great deal more devastating and cruel in the random violence and when we just lash out at it but are you making the argument that you think peter is wrong an essential argument that these are the least by when times in human history. well i think it depends what you're talking about if you're talking about 7 societies yes they are said enjoying least less violent times although i mean there are exceptions his own country the united states has one of the highest homicide rates in the world you know it's way out on the end of one scale for most of the developed world but what i think about war is it's not that sort of violence and it uses silence as an element but war is highly organized an answer apologist sentiment i've been thinking about it in the sense war is the most organized a lot of human activities and you apply islands in war but you do it often in very cold and calculating way and so war is not the same as the violence you might see in societies where violence is endemic where people used to beating each other up and trying to kill each other or simply being cruel to each other war is organized

purpose of violence and so i would say that in some ways in that you get a nice a but we still have a tremendous capacity to organize ourselves for destruction and for killing others you talked to us about how wars shaped culture was really i really enjoyed the last chapter or your book and you think about it going all the way back to homer in the iliad through because i'm born a cow or all the great writing that came out of war one he just i don't know if that's fully appreciated as much as perhaps it should be. i think or does 2 things with culture want is that war can vote the response in and people great creativity and they try to make sense of it i mean some of the great racing that came out of the 1st world war was those who were engaged in that war trying to make sense of the war itself of this tremendous industrial killing machine which europe had built and painters and musicians as well i think try and make sense the more they try to understand it because it's such a challenge to understanding who we are and what we are and so who are think will

provoke among great artists a very thoughtful and often passionate response do you think a passes going into that extraordinary painting you did to the italian f.o.c. defenseless basque town in the spanish civil war one of the 1st times that civilians had been bombed from the air and it caused a tremendous response and produce one of the great paintings of the 20th century but culture also shapes when we look at war and we know that culture can react to the horrors of war and portray them that cultural artifacts can also try to portray or something glorious and the portrayal of who or something glorious and it's there in the end even the horror of war is there as well as also influence people in their attitudes towards war many of the end soldiers who went off to fight in the 1st war were particularly from the middle and upper classes had been educated on the classics and they thought they were going off to fight a noble war like the trojan wars or like their own wars and so it works both ways war can be is cultural cultural responses and cultural creations but those

creations in some cases can also help shape our attitudes towards and help nation make us perhaps ready to fight in some cases there's also something in that about the way that we remember war i want to bring in another comment this is from an associate professor of history uva going to charlottesville virginia painter for sessions. one really important impact of war on society is how the war is remembered and how memories of war are used politically in the present if we take the imperial wars that europeans and americans fall in the 18 and 1000 hundreds for instance where the you see them now as and stances national glory or race this violence is really about what empire mean see today and how it relates to your contemporary values who we see as the heroes of the villains of war as the

palace is as much about who we identify with in the present as it is about what happens historically. when we look at the fights about monuments that have been going on over the last couple of years of her home or monuments european colonial monuments this is what's really going on. and i think that's very true and i think it's church history in general that we are constantly reshaping our views the question asking different questions of it depending on what we're preoccupied with in the present and what concerns we have about ourselves you know i think i quite agree so when you look at the debate happening in the united states over the civil war monuments what's your take away from that what does history tell us about that debate well how we look at monuments changes and a lot of the civil war monuments will put up actually i hadn't realized how recent some of them was some of them could up in the fifty's when the civil rights movement was beginning to get going and i think there could have very deliberately by white supremacists in the united states to show that we won and you lost and and

to to to the black americans and you had better watch it and now of course as american society is coming to terms with its own racism and with the tensions between the races those monuments again are being seen in a different light and i think this happens a lot that how we see things is very much affected by what's happening to us today and i think it's quite right and proper that we should question such things as we question our histories. why does it seem normal bet every country on earth needs to train some of its young people to be killers and not unrestrained killers but some kind of control killers where it's ok to kill here and then but not here and now. how does that normalized well it's partly fear i think it's fear that if we don't prepare ourselves others might attack us i think it plays a very large part in preparations for war and thinking about war and always has done but there are those who believe and have believed that training people to be

ready to fight is actually good for the nation it helps to be it's a mark of the nation strength it's good for young people to be given discipline i mean that was quite prevalent in a lot of european countries for example before the 1st floor war that somehow military flourishes were what you wanted discipline and willingness to sacrifice willingness to die for your country or for whatever cause and so i think there are a number of things that drive societies prepare for war and one is clearly fear but sometimes there are those in society who say we need to get ready because we may want to fight a war to take what we want and the japanese militarists before the 2nd world war believe in a strong armed forces so they can seize more land on the mainland of china so they could make a stronger japan and so there are many motives for wars and many reasons why people still prepared to fight them is there some years in parts of the book where you talk about the technological advancements that have come from war away from stair

ups to silk shirts to. still ships and airplanes we have to have a comment from this is from a professor of history in florence italy. now the reaches societies of earth are fast approaching the moment when they may be able to wage war almost entirely by machines and those who made systems without exposing their own men and women to destruction. so how do these change war the propensity of our societies to wage war and the huge differential between the richest and the poorest society in these i mean the relationship i think is in the question and i don't see any uncertainties cost. i want to add to that from our you tube community d.d. a 1000000 says the west has made war worse than it was people used to fight with swords on a battlefield without children without women innocent men the western world has

added fuel to the fire causing the us and so she's on not the answer to war or becoming worse and also i'd add one more thing that have you noticed that the recent drone war that happened in. vision with our many other use of drones for military writers are saying this stigma is a new age of warfare. because if you wanted to comment about what it what the commit was. well i thought the 1st remark was was was very good and i have to end pessimistic because what's happening is it's possible to wage war a great distance on people who have a c. or people who never engage with and that may make the waging of war much much easier i mean so much of the war that has happened in the world since 1945 not all that but a lot of it has being powerless fighting well away from their own territory sending their armed forces abroad and it's impossible for people in countries like united states or canada my own country or britain to see war as something that others do it happens elsewhere and i think that is very very dangerous and i do worry about

the growth of artificial intelligence and more the growth of self guiding machines and more and i think that is really where i think developed nations who want to waste that sort of war however will find that more may come to them one of the things that the military in developed countries are wearing a lot about now and they rightly show this urban warfare and the possibility for small urban guerrillas or small groups of people often suffer cruises to wage war even on very powerful countries so i think i see the future for us moving both in the very high tech level and often far away from the countries that are waging war but also war are a low level which will cause a great deal of misery as far as the west being responsible for using technology in war i think it's not just the west any peoples that has come across a new technology has i think photo about how it might be used for war the mongols learnt that the horse could be useful in war it made them very effective worriers

and they learned how to make very very powerful compass it blows through the developments in steel production of steel was a great help to some of the armies that rampage through the middle east so that i don't think in the west to certainly in in recent centuries been responsible for a great deal of the technological advance in war and a new for a great deal of the destruction of war but it is i think something that is throw human history when a new technology comes along societies have often wanted to see how they can use it for war and that i think is pretty much something that that is part of humanity. you know for what i saw in iraq and afghanistan i wouldn't be surprised if you told me that the u.s. deployed more laptops and computers to those wars owns than they did guns i mean is really a signal that the information age innermost that quote from your book about rommel saying that the war is fought by quartermasters long before the battle begins i think you know so much that is put toward that kind of controlling and

understanding information and logistics and supplies and and all that but what happened in as or for john which i just hinted at is that this thing a been in a stalemate between these 2 territories for the you know like 20 or 30 years and then they came in with a bunch of drones and within a month were able to force their millions into really a terrible compromise it was because of drone technology so when you can do that without risking the life of the young people from your country there becomes a disconnect between the political will that's required for politicians to conduct war and actually doing it is are there examples of that historically that where countries from able to pay mercenaries to fight wars for them so that they didn't require the political will of their people. walk necessary was have been common throughout history and mercenaries have often come understandably from the poorest parts of the world because it's a way out of it and in the wars in europe in the 16th and 17th centuries the

lessons came from places like switzerland ireland scotland because those were the poorer parts of europe and young men didn't have much opportunity in life and war gave the release a chance to leave and possibly survive and possibly going on in the world but i think what we've also seen is always a search for a particular and developed societies for types of technology that will enable you to span the lives of your own men and there was great hope after the 1st world war that the airplane will make mass armies on the ground are necessary and it will be possible to wage war at a distance using machines and i think this is something that societies keep on looking for the sort of solution that will enable them to get the edge over their enemies and not have to sacrifice their lives and the young people and i think what's also happening and it happens in different societies at different times is a number of societies no longer are willing to see their young people sacrificed in war i think the 1st and 2nd were more had a huge impact on public opinion in the countries that fought them and i think in

many countries is a real distaste now for risk rescue risking the lives of those they would have risked in the past we have another comment for someone in our you tube community right now it is as nationalism the main cause of modern acceleration of war i know nationalism played a big role in the great wars of the 20th century and now we see nationalism on the rise again with people like trump impulse narrow impress it should we be it is a canary in the coal coal mine that we should be watching for. i think nationalism has been a factor in war and it is very much from the 18th to the end of the 18th century onwards before that most peoples did not organize themselves or identify themselves as being part of national groups but they didn't begin to do so nationalism as we know as a very powerful force it's like a religion in a way that people will do it for the sake of something they see as much bigger than them much more important than them which will out live then and people are prepared to sacrifice and die for this thing called a nation it's enormously important as

a way of identifying ourselves and i do worry because what nationalism so often is not to say we're a people and bring us together it also points out those who are excluded it draws a line and it says they're not part of us and they're our enemy and so nationalism tends to want to find opponents attention much when enemies and therefore i think is very dangerous and we're seeing i think arises of nationalisms around the world which i do think a potentially very dangerous indeed i mean the recent clash in the high mountains between india and china engaged nationalist passions in both countries and there was a tendency to look on the other the people on the other side as somehow you are mortal enemy who have to be confronted so yes i agree with the questioner market which your favorite book on war now that i've heard your book was the next one you'd recommend to me well i start with the end because it is both a masterpiece and a foundation i think of of world literature but it also brings out the horror and

yet the fatal attraction of war you know the killer says this great warrior and he's terrifying and in some ways in human but he's also greatly admired and so i think i'd start with that but i think it's hard to list all the things i think are wonderful i tend to like the novels and the works of literature because they seem to me to capture something about war. i know it's really mountain o'brien's the things we carried a life that's an excellent one my favorite is we die alone about the norwegian guy yon buzzard i think it's miller mispronouncing his name john wells road have you read that book we highlight i have and i know i'll make a notes i'm a great admirer of tim o'brien and that an american novelist i mean i think his description in viet nam and the things they carried of what the selves went through but he also gets at something which i think is a very important component of kind of war and that's the camera that's the feeling that those who are fighting have for each other and i think he gets that very well

indeed i don't i mean it's a wonderful book. what will people remember. say 20300 years from now what will be remembered about the 20th century if we're still rather be left in the dust bins of history as told genocide well i think people will look back at the 20th century as there are already looking back at saying you know what an extraordinary century i mean in some way such great progress enormous scientific and technological advances social advances not uniform but certainly changes often for the better in societies and also what horrors it produced how could this century have income pissed so much that was good about humanity in some much as bad how could it produce these hideous to taser ships the the nazi dictatorship suddenly dictatorship a whole host of other dictatorships matters dictatorship totalitarian states how could it have improved the lives of so many people and also introduce killing on

a mass scale it's one of the most bloody centuries i think in human history and yet it has this paradox and it also produced tremendous advances and advances in the way we think about each other advances in human rights advances in the sense the common humanity i don't know how people the future will characterize the 20th century i think it will continue to be this extraordinary puzzle. you know buzz aldrin once told me that you know hundreds of years now look back on the twister the only thing that will be remembered as war 2 and landing on the moon real quick i've got less than a minute but i want to know if you had a nephew come to you and say they were thinking about joining the military or nice in less than a minute what would you advise them going to read about it read the memoirs of those who feel if this is what you want and there are very good things about being in the military yes you will get an education you'll learn who are from your people people you meet you'll meet some wonderful people but remember that base what you're doing is preparing if necessary to chill others and be killed. sage advice

margaret and they could definitely course places a start in your book war that's what i'd recommend to start there and visit a v.a. hospital maybe. margaret thank you for the time today and everyone in our audience thank you i'll see you next time. grease the birthplace of democracy but ethnic tales from the northeast tell a different story degree they bounce to control our. believe their religious leaders jailed journalists silenced schools closed and a surge in the far right they say that if you don't like you can vote. i'm dirty but i'm most of the people in power investigates westen thrice contested space on al jazeera. held for over 3 years in an egyptian prison cell

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