Peter Kriger

Jeder weiß, was Kriege verursacht. Hass verursacht Kriege. Grausamkeit, Gier, der Mob, der Tyrann, der gebrochene Mann, der etwas beweisen will. Wenn man die Schlimmsten unter uns beschuldigt, scheint die Rechnung aufzugehen. Es funktioniert nicht.

You have lost a fight to a housefly. Everyone has. It was not close. Measured in its own body lengths, a fly moves faster than any aircraft humanity has ever built, rolls faster than a fighter jet, and reacts ten times more quickly than the hand coming toward it.

Todos sabemos qué causa la guerra. El odio causa la guerra. La crueldad, la codicia, la turba, el tirano, el hombre destrozado con algo que demostrar. Culpa a lo peor de nosotros, y la lógica parece funcionar. No funciona. Un hombre cruel, actuando solo, puede arruinar una calle.

For four hundred years, most of the Middle East was not a collection of countries. It was a set of provinces, and provinces do not have foreign ministries. They have tax registers, religious courts, and a distant capital that keeps the important decisions for itself.

For three centuries, the people of the North were the primary security problem of Christian Europe. Today their descendants award the Peace Prize, mediate other nations’ wars, and appear at the top of every index of trust and decency anyone has thought to construct.

Everyone knows how the Middle Ages ended. Gunpowder arrived, the armored horseman became a museum piece, castles fell, feudalism collapsed, and the modern world walked in through the breach. It is a wonderful story. Almost none of it survives contact with the evidence.

Around the year 1200 BC, the most connected world that had ever existed came apart.

A barbarian king sacked Rome in the year 410, and fifteen hundred years later teenagers are still being blamed for it. They do not know this. Neither, for that matter, did the cathedral builders, the horror novelists, or the engineers now training machines in dim rooms.

Some films refuse you everything. They withhold explanation. They dwell on rain and rust and silent faces. They impose a length that feels, for the first twenty minutes, like an insult. And then they move into you and stay for the rest of your life.

No hominid was ever built to rule an empire. The equipment we carry for reading a face, keeping a promise, fearing the disapproval of the people around us, and feeling another person's pain was forged for groups small enough that everyone knew everyone.

For five centuries we have told ourselves a flattering story: that the peoples who lived along the Great Lakes and across the Canadian Shield were simple, and that the newcomers who arrived by ship were advanced. This book takes that story apart, gently and completely.

Un rey bárbaro saqueó Roma en el año 410, y mil quinientos años después, todavía se culpa a los adolescentes. Ellos lo ignoran. Tampoco lo sabían, por cierto, los constructores de catedrales, los novelistas de terror ni los ingenieros que ahora entrenan máquinas en salas oscuras.