History repeating..?

No one can surely argue trying to distort or change Britain’s historical and colonial heritage is helpful in understanding the past rather than learning from it.

But Brian Nevill (History is history, September 19) makes a distinction between the course of history and its consequences rather than accepting how time and again we are drawn down the road of conflict and international rivalry.

Clearly he is motivated by the scale of sacrifice in the Second World War, rather than asking how it came to be that an obscure son of an Austrian customs official and homeless artist went on to form a populist Nazi political party and unleash the horror of European conflict and devastation on a hitherto unknown scale.

Modern historians have rightly pointed out how people simply forget