“The First World War shook the scaffolding of progress because it was deadly and unexpectedly long: it showed that technology could be two-faced. The war delivered one other insidious attack on the idea of progress by raising a moral question which the believers in progress had taken for granted: had the morality of Europeans improved during the long era of 'progress?”

The Great Seesaw: A New View of the Western World, 1750-2000 (1988)

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Geoffrey Blainey 72
Australian historian 1930

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