Why did the Germans and Japanese keep fighting after 1943 when every rational hope of victory had disappeared?

A historian is battling all the time to remember as much as possible.

The Armenian genocide showed what could happen when empires were beaten into nations.

I refuse to accept that Western civilization is like some hopeless old version of Microsoft DOS, doomed to freeze, then crash. I still cling to the hope that the United States is the Mac to Europe's PC, and that if one part of the West can successfully update and reboot itself, it's America.

Empires, essentially, create order. In their absence, you don't end up with lots of happy, little nation-states full of people sitting around campfires singing John Lennon's "Imagine." What you end up with is civil war, anarchy.

The British press has an insatiable appetite for making public things that should be private. It's a prurience that I've never understood.

I think the condition of imperial denial is a handicap because if you do not recognize that you are essentially performing the functions of an empire, you are incapable of learning from the mistakes of past empires.