What Size News Article Will These Wars Be in the History of the World?

One of the most pleasurable things I do in life is read, and very few books of late have I found more joyful and enlivening than a book written by British scholars and academics called Chronicle of the World. This massively large British tome came out in 1989. (I have been reading the 1996 edition, sometimes referred to as the American edition.) It is a world history book where the important events of history are written down as though a journalist is reporting on a current event taking place. The reading of historical events as though they are articles in a newspaper makes experiencing history this way both unique and intriguing. And what adds even more flavor and authenticity to this meal are the colorful illustrations and all the lively photos that accompany many of the stories, giving one the sensation that a person actually is reading a newspaper article.

And here are some examples from this book of how history is turned into journalism: "Sappho, poetess who loved women, dies" Greece, c.600 BC; "Indian society divides into caste system" India, c.575 BC; "Mongols capture Beijing" China, 1215; "Ruler seized as Incas are massacred" Lima, Peru, 1532.

And after each article title a news story follows. Some are very short, few are long, most of the articles being medium in length (four or five paragraphs). Here is the beginning of how a journalist covers the bubonic plague in the Middle Ages:

"Black Death claims third of European population" Europe, 1348 Hundreds of thousands of people - men, women and children - are dying in every country of Europe, struck down by an epidemic of an apparently incurable plague which the healthy and afflicted alike call "the Black Death".

Seeing very large historical events being reduced to smallish news stories, some no bigger than a small-town doctor obituary, is always a humbling experience. The great and grand problem or problems that consumed your era that everyone worried about may very well end up only being a very small story in the annals of history.

It is because politicians and kings and priests act like endowed gods doing battle in the name of God, people pretend that the thing that they worship is in the arms of the mob and about to be lynched, and scholars and academicians and intellectuals focus so much on the present that we come to believe whatever problems we are experiencing in our time and place are very important and matter very much in world history. It is the prejudice of existence.

Lately, I have found myself musing over what size of a news article in world history these wars in the land of the Prophet will be. Thinking this way takes a lot of the hyperbole and complexity out of the equation, now feeling like a journalist and historian being told I can only write one article about the whole thing. All this war making, book writing, human killing, speech saying, soldier murdering, computer watching, child maiming and professor arguing must now somehow fit into the size of a news article. Maybe it will be a third of a newspaper page, maybe a little longer, maybe even a lot shorter. I can remember when a professor in my youth presented a lecture to us covering the Vietnam War titled "America's Attempt at the Containment of Communism in Southeast Asia." It only took up half of our class time. Now it can be said in ten or fifteen minutes, and even much less if you know your subject matter.

What length will this news article be? It is hard to say. Are these wars coming to an end? Will it get worse? Is the horror about to escalate to the unthinkable? And will it become a significantly smaller story because of other tragedies arising and overshadowing it? If climate change turns into the monster that some proclaim and fear, then these wars might end up being but a tiny news article. Or, if another war morphs itself into the splitting of atoms, all this war waging in the world of the Muslim may only be a footnote of a larger news article related to this other war.

Everything is perspective.

In American history, the Civil War is huge and mountainous; yet in the history of the world, it is almost puny and barely worth a paragraph of modest size. And while many have died and there has been untold suffering, so far these wars are not even in the game compared to the Great War, the Spanish Influenza, or the Taiping Rebellion of nineteenth-century China, each of these events costing millions and millions of lives. But these wars seem to be escalating and growing in horrification, so maybe this story has a chance of making a bigger-than-normal news article after all.

But am I getting ahead of myself? I have been making the assumption that in retrospect things will become clear why all of this suffering is taking place. Yet many things that occur in history remain blurry and without known causation, much to the chagrin of historians. Maybe this will be one of those events. Yet a good news article needs a correct and honest title. And often content determines the size of a news piece. And in this future life my editor wants me to make a decision. So what might the title of a news article describing these wars be if it were written several hundred years from now?

"Western Imperialism and the Forcing of an Alien Culture on Muslims Causes the Rise of Islamic Extremism"; "Hatred of Modernism and Fear of Secularism Causes Traditional Muslims to Try to Bring about Their Glorious Religious Past"; "Islam and Christendom Clash"; "Chaos Reigns for Many Years in the Middle East"; "Petroleum Leads to Long Wars in the Muslim World"; "Jihadists Create a New Caliphate Despite America's Attempt to Foil"; "Armed Conflict Escalates to Horrifying World War and the Usage of..."

We all have our beliefs and facts and prejudices.

And so choose your poison.

Man is savagedom and history is savagism.

Barbarism is always of our past in our present and of our future.

Whether one decides to study the recent politics of Germany (my Papa was only twelve years old when the end came for megalomaniacal Hitlerism) or the ancient Assyrians (like Sparta and Prussia they existed for war and more war), barbarianism and its carnage has forever been part of our humanity.

Yet history gives us hope.

The Japanese with their militarism and cultural sadism of the 1930s are not the people of Japan today; the Cold War between the West and the Communist world is no longer a war-inevitable situation (although Russia and the West are still clashing, it is not nearly as hopeless as before); the evil Germany of fascism and the Holocaust has become a very good land of democratism and liberty; and many countries in Central and South America are doing much better in their economic conditions and their attempts at government for the people with all of its inherent freedoms.

Things can turn out good.

Nothing is yet written.

(Would it have been naïve of me when I was describing what a news article of the future might say about these wars if I had said: "Wars Lead to Democracy Becoming a Way of Life in the Arab World," or "Science and Reason and Secularism Cause the Moderation of Religious Fanaticism Among Muslim Society After an Era of Much Violence"?)

Yet, in the Muslim world everything seems to have gotten worse and that is the truth. Hopefully this presently hopeless situation may find itself becoming better over the next few years. But right now that news article being written in our world of tomorrow seems to be growing larger and larger.

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