Dan Snow's History Hit - Why Do Humans Wage War?

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

Why, despite knowing the devastation it causes, do humans insist on starting wars? Countless battles have littered the pages of our shared human story. Powerful leaders, hungry for glory and conquest, have always relied on conflict to achieve their goals.To understand the persistence of violent conflict in the human story, Dan is joined by Richard Overy, one of the great military historians and author of 'Why War?'.This was originally released as a History Hit subscriber-exclusive episode.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Max Carrey.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail].

Welcome, everybody. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. The first battle was fought in Canaan, in what is now Israel. The Egyptian pharaoh, Thutmose III, who ruled over the Egyptian empire, what was probably its maximum territorial extent, marched north to secure that empire. At the head of a force of perhaps up to 20,000 infantry and charioteers, there were client kings who'd risen up in rebellion, and he was here to restore Egyptian control. An enemy force of 10,000, 15,000, perhaps more, waited at Megiddo. They were commanded by the rebel ruler of Kadesh. Thutmose moved fast. He knocked

them off balance. He advanced using an unexpected route. He caught his enemy unprepared. He positioned himself at the very centre of the Egyptian line, possibly in his chariot, if flattering depictions on temple walls were anything to go by. His first name, Menkepere, is the manifestation of Ra, and his enemies may well have felt that the embodiment of the sun god was charging down on them that terrible day. Led by their pharaoh, the Egyptians smashed the enemy line. Their foe fled, but the Egyptians, as so often in history, stopped to loot their camp. And this produced a great haul of plunder. But it did mean the defeated troops were able to get into the city of Megiddo and bar the gates. Dothmosis dug a ditch around the city, erected a wall, and he settled down for a siege.

It took around eight months, we think. But in the end, the hunger, the hopelessness, the disease broke the resolve of the rebels. And they surrendered in a mighty temple in the Egyptian capital, Karnak, it's recorded that his army took home hundreds of prisoners, 2,000 horses, great stallions, nearly a thousand chariots, suits of armor, bows, cattle, over 20,000 sheep, plus the trappings of royal power of the kings of Megiddo. This is the first battle in human history for which we have a sort of reasonably reliable account, which we think actually may have happened in a way that we can get a grasp on. It was fought,

we think, in 1457 BC. We have quite good Egyptian sources for what happened there, and it's interesting that first battle, Megiddo, given its name to Armageddon, the last battle. And between those two terrible confrontations, there have been so many battles littering the pages of our history books. I always find accounts of Megiddo strangely familiar. You get men hungry for glory, powerful leaders seeking to extend their domain or exert discipline over their subordinates. You have huge armies of young men who hag and stab at other young men whom they've never met, with whom they have no personal beef. And those young men scream and bleed and die and

conquer. And at the end of it all, at the end of the fighting season, the victors march home with the spoils of war. Three and a half thousand years ago, and yet, depressingly, I could be describing what's happening in Ukraine now, what's happening in Congo or Myanmar over the last few years. Ukraine, now what's happening, Congo or Myanmar over the last few years. It is this great central question about our race. In fact, it may be the most important question about our race. It may determine whether or not we can survive. Why do we fight? Why do we go to war? Many of our greatest minds have wrestled with it. You've got Einstein and Freud, who 100 years ago produced a pamphlet together on the subject, and historians and anthropologists and philosophers and psychologists and archaeologists, all of them have debated this exact question. Is it innate? Are we predisposed to go to war?

Or is it the state? Has the building of these giant hierarchical structures that control every aspect of our lives, have those forced us into wars which we would otherwise have avoided? And I suppose, why has it been so much harder to eradicate massive organized violence than it has been to overcome gravity, to get to the moon, to eradicate smallpox? Well, here to help me think about those questions and hopefully answer a couple of them, we've got one of the best in the business. We've got Professor Richard Overy. He's an honorary research professor of history at the University of Exeter. He is one of the greatest military historians alive at the moment. Why war? Simple as that. There's no more important question. Enjoy. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima.

God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Richard, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. My pleasure. How far back, Richard, does you so much for coming back on the podcast. My pleasure. How far back, Richard, does organized violence go?

Where do you come down on the whole innate nature of human beings? Well, this is, of course, a huge debate. Many historians and social scientists argue that we're only talking about war if we talk about the modern state, you know, from 4,000 or 5,000 years ago, because states can organize war, can pay for it, can mobilize soldiers and so on. But there are plenty of anthropologists, archaeologists, and others who say that violence must have started much, much longer before. It seems implausible that human communities of hunter-foragers from 100,000 years ago didn't find, at certain points, a need for collective violence to protect their food supplies, to keep away other predatory communities and so on.

The archaeological evidence, of course, is rather slender for this. But if you look at the way in which we've recorded the violence of hunter-gatherer communities in the last 200 years, where some form of warfare is often endemic, I think we can, without too much difficulty, project that back to an earlier age where people fight about the same sort of thing. resources, vengeance, accusations of sorcery or witchcraft and so on. I'm really with the school that takes violence a long way back. It seems to me when human beings get together, differences arise and violence is one of the tools that we have to resolve those differences. It certainly is, yeah. I mean, evolution psychologists argue, in fact, that this is one of the things that gradually developed

with human communities, that being aggressive, either in defense or in attack, became something that was normative, something that people psychologically adjusted to, so that it became part of our toolkit, if you like, for survival. And that's something which is deeply rooted in human evolution. And we can still see it manifested today. Look at a playground, look at kids fighting each other in the playground.

It's not the same, of course. But no, evolution psychologists argue that we need to see where all this comes from. And it probably comes from very early roots. We need to see where all this comes from. And it probably comes from very early roots. You do buy into the idea then that it was the successful groups of our hominid ancestors who were able to work together to organize effective group violence, and therefore it's become encoded into our DNA. Oh, well, whether it's encoded in our DNA, I think it's perhaps another rather complicated question.

But yes, successful groups, yes, prospered. And biologists, even if biologists argue now that human groups probably manifested what other animal groups do, which is a thing called inclusive fitness, which essentially means that you try and spread your genes, and

you protect your kin. And groups that are better at spreading their genes, like capturing women, in fact, from other villages or other communities, killing competitors, protecting that particular gene group, were more successful and they would expand more. And that was a driving force in early evolution. That's a little bit of biology for everyone.

What about the psychology? Because I was very interested in this in your book. And this is Einstein and Freud. You bring in all sorts of fascinating characters in the 20th century. War as a psychological phenomenon. Did you buy into Freud's conclusion that humans do have a death drive?

Well, no, I don't buy into that. Instead, I think rather than the death drive, that evolution psychologists now argue that we have various psychological modules in the brain which help us to survive and navigate as animals. And that one of the modules, or perhaps a combination of them, is the capacity for collective violence when it's needed, whether it's in defense or whether it's in attack. And I think that's a pretty persuasive argument.

Psychoanalysts, on the other hand, argued from the 1930s onwards that it was all connected with the early development of the infant and so on, that warfare can be found in the nursery, and that when you reach adult age, you normally suppress this, be found in the nursery and that, you know, when you reach adult age, you've normally suppressed this, but it doesn't take long to release it. That is really, of course, what Freud was talking about underneath, you know, we carry this death drive, as he calls it, this urge of destruction, and that's what lies at the

root of war. I don't think any psychologist really would accept that today. What I'm very struck by is defining war is really interesting here, because there is evidence of sort of blunt force trauma on ancient skeletons, violent death. Tell me about the archaeology. What do you think the archaeology is letting us know about organized violence? Well, it's a very interesting point, because for a long time in the 20th century, archaeologists were not much interested in war.

It's not what they wanted to find. But in the last 40 or 50 years, there's been a huge increase in interest in manifestations of collective violence and the archaeological evidence necessary to support it. I suppose the real difference is between, I mean, famously John Keegan, for example, who argued that there was a threshold and that only in the civilized state did you reach that threshold where you could organize a thing called war.

Whereas the archaeological evidence shows that something we can call warfare, collective violence, one group against another, often savage violence, and we have plenty of evidence of how savage it could be, goes back much, much further. I mean, we have pretty clear evidence in the last 10,000 years, well before states were formed. And I think some of this archaeological evidence

is pretty compelling. But the most compelling one is osteoarchaeology, the damage to the skeleton. And I spent a lot of time reading the Journal of Osteoarchaeology, which I never expected to do. And, you know, there's photograph after photograph of projectiles embedded in spinal columns and heads bashed in with axes.

And I think that, you know, to just say this is fighting, you know, not war, is I think very misleading because it's clearly a continuum we're talking about from these early manifestations of violence through tribal violence onto the proto-state and finally to the state. I've always been fascinated by the archaeology of the, is it the Tollens Valley battlefield in what is now northeast Germany from sort of three and a half thousand years ago. A vast Bronze Age battle took place and we know so little about the protagonist,

but it is just fascinating and in some ways a tragic example of big organised violence stretching way back in our history. Yeah, I mean, the frustrating thing, of course, is that the overwhelming bulk of evidence of an archaeology of one has been destroyed. Weapons of anything except stone and Les Chronicles metal have disappeared. Most skeletons have simply disappeared too.

We rely on a very thin range of evidence. But by the time we get to 2,000 or 3,000 years ago, of course, the evidence is plentiful. But, yes, occasionally we see massacres, for example, where there are disarticulated bodies and so on, crania

bashed in from 5,000, 6,000, 7,000 years ago. And I think it's very difficult to simply say, well, yes, that's a massacre, but I think it's very difficult to just simply say, well, yes, that's a massacre, but is that actually war? To me, these are forms of collective violence which provide the roots of our understanding about modern war. There are examples, aren't there,

on the cusp of anthropology, archaeology and history. There are examples of cultures that seem less violent. I'm very struck by the prevalence of violence in these completely distinct civilizations and cultures all around the world that seem to, even when they evolved with an isolated geographical boundaries, you still see the prevalence of violence.

But on the other hand, there are some cultures who seem to have kicked the habit. Well, I think there are rather few, actually. Anthropologists in the 20th century, Margaret Mead was a famous one, Paul Ruth Benedict, two of the great anthropologists of mid-century, were very concerned to find peoples that were not violent. And they thought, you know, that it had to be possible to show that violence was not something general. But the examples they chose were very soon shown by other archaeologists to be, in fact that violence was not something general. But the examples they chose were very soon shown by other archaeologists to be, in fact, extremely violent not very long ago.

It's just they've become more peaceful because, of course, they were under the control of a state. And, you know, the tribal violence they practiced could no longer be effectively carried out. Yes, of course, there are also, you know, tribal societies which are manifestly less violent. I think we shouldn't assume that human communities 10,000, 20,000 years ago all behaved the same. They obviously didn't all behave the same.

But what's striking, I think, is that there are very few cultures where warfare doesn't feature to some extent, and in a great many cultures from long ago up to the present, where making war is a central feature of those societies and a central feature of cultures that endorse it. So let's look at the four drivers that you identify towards conflict. Let's start with resources. And you've got examples, well, from literally the earliest times right up to the present of why resource drives us to war. Can you tell me a bit about that? Yeah, well, I think this is a fairly obvious thing, but it's stressing that the search for resources, additional resources,

long ago because of population pressure or because of the decline of the hunting stocks and so on, or just simply greed because you think that another child has got something you really let you get your hands on, it's manifestly going to be a major driver for warfare. And it's been a major driver for warfare right the way through the classical age and up to the modern day. An example I use in my book, which will not surprise people, because Adolf Hitler,

who believed that what Germany needed was living space, more agricultural land, the resources it needed to become a superpower, and that they were going to be found somewhere in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

So the resources have remained a driver of war, right the way through human history. And I think will remain a driver as key resources dry up in the 21st century. You know, we are seven and a half billion people. Many resources are finite. So I think resource wars are going to be a feature of the 21st century as well. I think resource wars are going to be a feature of the 21st century as well. You listen to Dan Snow's history hit. Stick with us.

I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes.

Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. As a child of the 90s, when we were told that history had come to an end and there would be no more wars, we had this utopian belief, I think,

that the kind of globalised economy would allow different powers or fantastically rich and powerful individuals to sate their appetite for wealth and power on the market. You don't have to own Siberia in order to exploit its mineral resources or gain a share of the wealth that's created there because you can do so in a kind

of free market, free trading sense. And that now seems, with the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine and that more nakedly sort of old-fashioned forms of aggression, that it feels like the kind of resource war is sadly here to stay. Most resources, of course, today are traded peacefully, as indeed they were in the past, is when you reach a moment of crisis. We need to remember that China, for example, has enormous resource power in the sense that it has scarce resources available, which it trades with other states. But one might see in 10, 20, 30, 40 years' time,

a greater degree of resource selfishness. We can't rule that out. I mean, nobody imagined in the 1930s that Japan and Germany would go to war in order to seize oil supplies because they were short of oil. That is actually what they did. And in the middle of the 21st century,

we're going to be very short of oil. Let's see what happens. There's a fashion, isn't there? You see optimists who see Russia's struggles in Eastern Ukraine at the moment. There's a great fashion to say, well, of course, Japan and Germany, that desire for oil actually end up completely destroying both those two societies. Russia is now in terrible trouble in Eastern Ukraine.

And yet the lesson from history is that, sadly, I think resource wars can work. I mean, Frederick the Great sees Silesia, one of the richest provinces of his neighbour, Maria Theresa, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Austrian Empire. You'd have to argue strategically for Prussia that was successful. Yes, no, indeed, of course the resource was at work. I mean, if you look at the Roman Empire, the Roman Republican Empire, it was built on seizing the resources of other peoples, extracting tribute from seizing slaves, and it made the Roman Empire rich and successful. You know, resource wars, people calculated long in the past, I think, about what chances they had of getting the resources and keeping them,

but that was the object, and almost certainly the Neolithic man, too, thought about, you know, how can I take control of that flint mine? And they took control of it, but not so violently. So, yes, resource wars can work. The bullet out of Germany and Japan in the 20th century, of course, is that there was more involved in the war, of course, than just simply resources. And they bit off far more than they could chew in confronting the end, the rest of the world. confronting in the end the rest of the world.

But resource wars in the 21st century, well, will there be one? Or are they now zero-sum wars? I think we can't be certain about this. What I think is certain is that resources are finite, and at some point it might well prompt a renewed round of violence. What I think is so fascinating about us human beings is that we can build this superstructure of belief on top of a pretty base desire to get hold of resources. So we say to ourselves throughout history, I want that territory, I want the resources it provides, but I've come up with

an extraordinarily complicated and rather magical justification for me doing so on top of that. And it strikes me belief is often, well, perhaps a successful resource, or perhaps it sometimes requires belief to motivate you, demotivate enemies, somehow legitimize your conquests. Well, it could do. I think many of the wars for belief, certainly the ones I talk about, belief is really autonomous. It is a point where you get intense religious enthusiasm, which prompts warfare in defense of the faith. We think of crusades, we think of, well, we think of modern jihad in defense of Islam in the face of Western secularism. Islam in the face of Western secularism. I think the temptation of, I think among social scientists, is to see belief as something that's used as a bit of a facade, as you suggested. You know, you justify what you're doing by referring to belief, but actually what you're doing is, you're doing something for social and economic motives and so on. I think that's overplayed.

and economic motives and so on. I think that's overplayed. I think that belief can become important for itself. And indeed, for early societies, it certainly was, where they animated by a cosmology that we often don't now understand or know about. But it will drive them to fight neighboring communities where there are accusations of sorcery or a belief that your gods require you

to go off and see sacrificial victims as the Aztecs did. So I think to see belief as something connected to other forms of warfare can be misleading. I think in my book, I come back to the idea that when people say that they're fighting for religion, they very often are fighting for religion. That's what drives them. And of course, it's surrounded by political and social realities as well. But belief can be a major driver in itself. How should we think about belief, slightly extend the definition to think about European colonial wars of the 19th and 20th centuries or the ultimate colonial war, the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, with the idea, in that case, the idea of smashing communism, Judeo-Bolshevism, Slavism. Is that

something that you find sits alongside belief as a historical cause for war? that you find sits alongside belief as a historical cause for war? I think the colonial argument is an interesting one, because, of course, people assumed in the late 19th century that Europe was civilized and much of the rest of the world wasn't, and they defined what they meant by civilization, and they thought they were exporting these ideas to the rest of the world. The powerful belief in so-called white man's burden and so on, which justified, in fact, often very cruel wars of colonial expansion.

So you can find belief in a variety of rather different contexts. In the Russian example, I mean, we talked about invading the Soviet Union for resources. Well, of course, the Soviet Union was also invaded because it was the home of communism, and Hitler hated Marxism and wanted to extirpate it. So you get resources, and you fulfill your ideological goal at the same time. As you're speaking, I was reminded of, is it Cecil Rhodes who called British expansion in Africa

philanthropy plus 5%%. So this sort of civilizing, hugely philanthropic mission to conquer Africa, but taking a nice little return on top of it as well. Let's come on to power, which is very interesting because you define power that has a distinct place within these causes. And so tell me how you came to see power as separate from desiring resource domination. Well, I didn't see them as entirely separate. I think I would stress power is usually power for something. And that can be anything from seizing territory,

extracting tribute, seizing women as sexual beauty, booty. There are many ways in which, you know, you exercise power in order to achieve something. But what I would argue is that there are plenty of examples in history of individuals, and they're usually kings or emperors and so, but they needn't be, who see power just for its own sake, extending power for its own sake.

The Roman Empire, or the Roman Republic, in fact, extended power for its own sake. It justified its own civilizing mission in Europe and the Mediterranean in terms of exercising power over other peoples, which would be good for them. The idea of power for its own sake is also a very important way to understand how warfare has developed.

I use the example of the great leaders, Alexander the Great and Napoleon Hitler, who set off in the pursuit of power by waging endless warfare. Warfare was the root of their power, and they believed that war was essential to underpin it. These are hubristic individuals who arrogantly think that they can take their own people and go off and wage war, destructive war on a huge scale. I argue, I think, that that's in some ways the most dangerous explanation of the cause of war

because it's completely unpredictable. Who would have found Napoleon in the 1780s or Hitler in the 1920s capable of waging massive European-wide war? Nobody would have remotely guessed it. There may be somebody, you know, today in 21st century world who has the same ambition and, you know, we have no way of being able to detect who they are. I've said this on the podcast before, it's so fascinating.

There is a Cromwell and a Bonaparte just living amongst us, just cruising around. And if the great seismic plates of history shift, they're thrust to the fore, and we find the whole of Europe at their whim. But this is the bit where I wonder if psychologists can be useful. I sort of radically shift my opinions on this, and I was very influenced probably by the Marxist historians who talk about the economic substructure. But looking at Putin, looking at President Xi, it feels like we are all vulnerable to the individual. Xi seems to be taking his decision over Taiwan in a kind of personal discourse or dialogue

with emperor's past. And in the same way, we know that Putin has talked about the people he's thinking about, the people he's addressing, Catherine the Great and Peter. These wars, correct me if I'm wrong, but it feels like they're quite individually driven. Presumably, you would say the same about Hitler in 1939 and his decision to invade the Soviet Union in 1941. And perhaps, I think, some time of the kind of dystopian thinking in the German high command in 1914 as well. So now that we live in these gigantic hierarchical states individual psychology probably matters quite a lot in terms of what

driving us to get impelling us towards war well i mean it's right and power seeking for its own sake is something which which i argue is something that in the set individuals do rather than you know elites or you know the broad institutional structure of the state. I mean, there are plenty of examples of that. I think the problem is that, you know, for psychologists, it would be difficult to find, well, first of all, they couldn't find the evidence. But secondly, difficult to argue that all these people

share the same psychological traits. If we had them all on a carriage, they'd all be more or less the same kind of thing. So they wouldn't. They're shaped by circumstances as well. They're driven by their own sense of ambition. And I think that suggesting that we need to look out for a particular psychological type and lock them up is not going to work. I mean, they're ambitious, but they also depend particularly on circumstances and the

willingness of others to accept what they're doing and so on. So there are quite complicated psychological things going on between leaders and led, not just, you know, the leader himself or herself. I wish we could reduce it to a clear set of psychological explanations, but I think it's going to be very difficult to do. And people have studied the psychology of Adolf Hitler,

for example, during the Second World War. The Americans had psychologists busy doing that, trying to produce a profile of what is this man like. More recent assessments of Hitler also tried to, you also tried to present him as a narcissistic personality and to discuss what that means psychologically.

Again, we're really working in the dark. We don't have these people on the couch in a psychiatrist's office. We have to make do with what we see. And not all narcissists require locking up and removing from society. Just speaking up for a friend there. You finish off with this definition of security,

and you point out that, frankly, most wars have been fought between neighbours in the past. I was reading Carton de Wyatt's book, General Carton de Wyatt, who served all around the world in the First and Second World War and before. He just had a brilliant summary of why the Poles and the Czechs had problems after the First World War. He goes, because they're neighbours. And so, of course, they fought. That was the end of his sort of analysis of that situation. But you say there's

much in that. Well, there is. I mean, you know, there's been plenty of research by scholars to demonstrate that almost all the wars of the last 300 years have actually been between neighbours. to demonstrate that almost all the wars of the last 300 years have actually been between neighbors, and a very high percentage of them have been arguments over the frontier, territorial arguments, erudentist arguments, and so on. And it's, I think, evident throughout recorded history, anyway, that the frontier is a tinderbox, that there are always going to be arguments over the frontier,

particularly where frontiers in the past were not very clearly defined. So the Romans didn't have frontier and border force. They tried to keep outposts along the rough idea of their frontier. But it was a porous frontier, and so you were often making war to defend what you saw as a nationage or territory. Now we have defined frontiers, but that doesn't stop the arguments over frontiers. The conflict in Kashmir, the conflict between India and China, or between Pakistan and India. Well, the conflict in Northern Ireland in the 1960s.

Frontiers are placed sites of potential violence. And, I mean, in most cases, of course, frontiers are secure and defined. People can protect them. But there's no doubt that in a world of nation states, 190-something nation states, people are constantly on guard for their frontier constantly aware of any threat to their frontier and i think in the 21st century one of the problems you might face of course is

mass migration huge population growth uh growing problems caused by climate change and so on and and in africa for example you know the threat of mass migration to cross frontiers, which will then involve a good degree of violence as states try to suppress the movement of migrants and so on. Frontiers are, as I said, tinderboxes, and they have been throughout history. Particularly when you find large caches of resources just the wrong side of that frontier, or embattled fellow communities of believers on the wrong side of that frontier. So it all links up, as you've said many times. Did you end this book feeling deeply depressed about the state of our species? Well, I was depressed before I started.

Okay, good. I can't say that I'm any less depressed now. I mean, I do think that the human scientists in the last century, exploring all the explanations for the causes of war in increasingly sophisticated ways, I think what really depresses me is not that we don't understand the causes of war, because I think we do understand them much better now

than we did. It's that understanding the causes of war doesn't stop war from happening. I mean, you know, we all wish that, you know, Putin had sat down with a couple of history books and said to himself, perhaps this isn't a good idea, but he wouldn't. And even if he had, I think you decide on war

because of current circumstances. And although we would like to think that it's disappearing, it evidently isn't disappearing, certainly not in the 21st century. So that, I think, is really what's depressing us. Whatever institutional and ideological checks we have to try and maintain the peace, to try and maintain international stability, there's a kind of dynamic in the human condition, which means that we reach for war at certain points when we feel that it's advantageous or unnecessary. And that's not going away. Well, okay. Okay, Professor Richovery. I was going to ask another question, but now I'm too

depressed to ask one. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast tell everyone what your book is called my book's called why war question mark which was the title of a little pamphlet that einstein and freud produced in 1932 following their conversation about exactly that question it seemed to me that it's still a pertinent question a century later richard thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you, Dan. Thank you so much to Richard Overy for coming on the podcast. Given how precarious the situation is in Ukraine, in Congo, in Gaza and elsewhere, this felt like a timely episode to share with you. And we'll be following this line of inquiry into our strange, well, perhaps not so strange, human propensity for war in a bonus episode for subscribers tomorrow.

We're going to be exploring the Nazi mindset with the brilliant historian Lawrence Rees. It's a fascinating one, so make sure you sign up to get that episode tomorrow. And when you sign up, you get all our episodes ad-free, as well as all our amazing documentaries, our TV documentaries. Just click on the link in the show notes. See you tomorrow. Bye-bye. episodes ad-free, as well as all our amazing documentaries, our TV documentaries, just click

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