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A time of progress, marvels and miracle have been old hat (interesting expression, eh) with us for a long time. I could mean the little flying glass bubble cars we’re supposed to be flitting around in now or any number of other modern innovations, but as is my custom, I’ll disappoint Reader readers once again. 
Why? Because there is such a worthy number of spring-like shoots and blooms to appreciate.  

Take genocide, an occurrence too familiar to the Central European folk in my background but who I sadly know too little about. But then, how can an individual today start comprehending the enormity of a millennia worth of enemy attack? How? 

Look around you right now and imagine a past where one in five of those you know is eagerly snuffed by troops coming from across the Baltic. Why are they attacking? To fix and convert you, of course, same as these days but sourced from long ago. 

Let’s quibble. Is one in five killed enough to qualify as genocide? It’s not a weak result, but then not up to the Armenian example of a mere century past or the cleansings that too frequently appear in Asia and Africa.  

Of course, being sensible about the subject, we have to admit any genocide starts small, at times with one or first family, group or town before it gets rolling and is able to accomplish more worthy numbers. 
Take Warsaw at the end of WWII. The city largely in ruins while the Soviet Socialists held back, waiting for the National Socialists to deal with clumps of civilians hiding here or there. Shot singly or group incineration hiding in a basement the result for the person is the same. Dead is dead, one more, counted or not, in a genocidal tally. 

The marvel isn’t, and is absolutely not that humans create genocides. O no, we’re old hat in that department as we are, I’ve to say, calloused in accounting. 

So calloused we’re able to ask without retching if one in five is a qualified genocide. For the individual one death is all they have to offer. But for groups what sort of number or percentage is needed to satisfy the strict requirements of genocide judges? Being largely left to the popular press (or blog, etc.), the answer is whatever they’ll say it is. 

In ongoing history we hear of one Middle Eastern genocide wherein genocide is decried whilst population numbers increase, which in genocide history would be unique and miraculous (tell the Pope). But no. we go about doing and accounting for horrific acts in peculiarly human fashion, usually with lies, denials or diversion. 

 The colonial heyday is oft posed as genocide central, but do we look at what occurred after the colonials were driven out and were no longer in the way of getting rid of those in the way? Ah, no, we do not. 
Free of repressive colonials North Africa (a collective example) has been eager to obliterate any who stand outside a particular political theology. 

To survive in that part of the globe a minority needs be invisible and silent, in no way upsetting to the regulated routine of daily public prayer affirming democratic dictatorship of one-and-only theology. 
Unless, and it would prove interesting to attempt, populations were to be mixed to remove all majorities there’d be some imbalance. And, sad to say, the minorities needed to dilute majorities are too few in number to accomplish the task. 

Time has shown, however, the practicality of remodeling society by reducing majorettes, very good for the mass grave business. 

 But, back to the marvels and miracles of our advanced age of info galore and (assumed) wisdom arising there from. Hah-ha! 

Look all the info we got at tips of fingers and thumbs, even. Ain’t we something special, more so than church-lady special. But as evidence going back into thousands of years seems to support, our particular hu-people, hu-person-being (ever avoiding toxic man) skill is with narrative more than fact. 

We loves a good story and remembers they gooder, too as well, Doans We? 
 I’ll stop being a short article jerk and get to the feature. A good or believable tale will wag the body of the deadest dog out there. 

Who, after all, wants to or is capable of making sense of several thousand years of Persian (known to us as Iranian) dreams of being supreme? 

The famous Greek 300 were far from first facing Persian desires as in one form or other Persia-Iran spent millennia waring with Romans, Dacians, Turks, Egyptians, Arabs or anyone else lucky-unlucky enough to be for whatever reason in the vicinity. 

A U.S. historical perspective of 200+ does not go well against a history of 2,000+. Both perspectives real, but how to reckon with? Other than knowing something is there, good fortune to you. 

Is pride and power deflating to say not a thing we can do about history, and about the same for the present other than a possible maybe to sorta-kinda attempt to make things a present or two less awful than our instincts might take us. Not much, but perhaps all we have because we who live according to stories struggle with making sense. 

Take current affairs, Gaza. Is a name with a long history of involvement and mentioned above involved? Why yes. 

Persian Iran doing its time-honored thing. Unexplainable, as is recalling the role of Ottoman Turkey right there, same place little more than 100 years ago. 

From the river to the sea was long controlled by Ottoman Turkey. In WWI allied with the Axis, the Turks fought battles at Gaza and Beersheba, etc. so, in a little over four generations did Turks become Palestinians who (it might be suggested) could be owed more in recompense from many generations of past masters than from more recent sources of conflict? 

 B’ what about Rome? Was it-they tiring of pesky Jews renamed Judea to Palestine, possibly making Palestine into southmost Italy. Or maybe Palestine is Phoenicia or the mysterious Sea People.