Another example of the poverty of historical explanation: Enigma

No matter what, we have to believe we know why things happened. Some people believe in vast impersonal historical imperatives, others in sinister conspiracies, yet others in divine providence.

A couple of months ago, Greg Cochrane, in his interesting and crabby blog West Hunter, brought up an example of the poverty of historical explanation: for a couple of decades after the Second World War, historians wrote accounts of what had happened in that war, and why, without any knowledge of a signif...