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The Crusades

In the last few years we've come to realize that the accounts that we read about in our school history textbooks
aren't a bunch of irrelevant stories of long-since ended events. Those textbooks had a tendancy to imply that
the events written about came to nice, tidy conclusions. However, we've been forced to realize that many
current events are really part of long-standing themes and trends instead of isolated, unique spasms. Many
events seem to be connected. We thought the Crusades were some weird, confusing holy wars that ended
in the Middle Ages. But, today's news make us wonder if new chapters might be added to the crusades saga
in the 21st century.

After all, we thought the 1914 assassination of the Archduke of Austria-Hungary in Sarajevo was just about some
frustrated fanatic of a Serbian nationalist movement that was only a couple of decades old. That event was
the tripwire that set World War I in motion. And, the war ended in 1918. Only roughly 80 years later did we realize
that the assassination was part of a still-vibrant centuries-long story when violence in the Balkans started to make
headlines in the news again during the 1990's. We found out the assassination by that Serbian nationalist was just
another episode in the ethnic fighting that had been going on in the Balkans since the Middle Ages.

After all, only with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 did we come to understand that the conflict of World War I
had not really ended in 1918. Now we realize that the events of the rest of the century were just a continuation of it.
World War II was just unfinished business left over from the first war. It came out of the unfair Versailles Treaty,
the illequiped Weimar Republic, and the overburdened German economy. The second war mutated into
the Cold War and led to the breakup of the Soviet Union. World War I and World War II led to the end of colonialism.
We now realize the collapse of the Soviet Union finally brought the conflict of World War I to a close. But, we also
know that the end of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe unleased those old ethnic hatreds in Serbia, Bosnia, and
elsewhere again.

Are things ever tied up into the nice, neatly-wrapped packages that history textbooks tend to present them?
We've been forced to the realization that the past is never really ended. Then is now.

The Crusades might be a case in point.

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