Whatever it is that lies ahead of us, it is new: for we seem to have entered one of those phases in human history which only future analysts can attempt to disentangle with the imperfect vision of hindsight and the blunt scalpel of human knowledge; but they cannot know what it was like to be alive now, to know what we know now, to feel what we feel now, to be ignorant of our future as we are ignorant now. These our are gifts, uniquely ours, and they perish with us for all time.
Just as we cannot imagine what it was like in the summer of 1914; we cannot imagine what it was like to entirely ignorant of the imminent implications of the place-names Ypres and Verdun, the Somme and Tannenberg. Such innocence existed then; it was broken when a great empire sought the extradition of a group of terrorists, and then went to war when it did not quite get all it wanted.
No terms available
This time around, all-out war was declared at the outset. It cannot be undeclared. Our present cannot be negotiated away, nor our enemies - and they are our enemies - talked into surrender. There are no terms available for peace between those on a jihad and their victims, other than abject and bloody capitulation by the latter. So war it is. I do not welcome it, merely recognise its presence in our midst, and sense that we are about to make vast and terrible discoveries.
They might be technological, as they certainly were in 1914-1918 and 1939-45. The horses of August 1914 had by August 1918 been totally replaced in offensive operations by tanks. The handful of powered parasols of 1914 had mutated by 1918 into hundreds of ground-attack aircraft, operating under radio direction, and four-engined Handley Page bombers, capable of bombing Berlin from British bases.
Or our imminent discoveries might be political and extravagantly beyond our wit to predict now. Could anyone in 1914 have foreseen the imminent fate of the great empires of Europe within less than half-a-decade, all dead? And certainly, nobody could possibly have foreseen the future of a quartet of no-hopers shortly before war broke out.
In Vienna, a hungry and unemployed artist, an antic figure, is wheedling pennies by carrying bags for passengers in the Westbahnhof station. In Paris, a poverty-stricken Russian exile is weeping in despair over the theft of his last possession, his bicycle. In Ch'ang-Sha in China, a young student is painfully learning about politics under the great democrat Sun Yat Sen. In Russia, a terrorist escapes from jail and discovers to his horror that the socialist group he belongs to is in tatters.
Then came along the first World War, and turned these men respectively into Hitler, Lenin, Mao Tse-tung and Stalin; in time these men turned their lands into charnel houses, and brought terror, ruin and death to hundreds of millions. That such individuals could be rescued from obscurity by the cataclysms of war and then brought to such murderous eminence is outside the power of human prediction. But much of the 20th century was entirely unpredictable to those who lived through it.
Bag-carrying beggar
Who could have realised that when the Jewish Bolshevik Zinoviev promised the annihilation of all non-compliant people in the Soviet Union, he was laying the basis for government for much of the world for much of the century? Who could have foreseen that the bag-carrying beggar in Vienna of a few years before would turn out to be the greatest proponent of organised murder of all, and that his victims would be the very group that the ideological founder of genocide came from? And out of the holocaust of six million innocents, incomprehensibly, a state.
In 1939, there were 445,000 Jews in Palestine, outnumbered three to one by 1,500,000 Arabs. Nine years on, and Palestine is Israel, with hundreds of thousands of Arabs, now called Palestinians, either evicted or fleeing. The new state had 717,000 Jews and 65,000 Arabs. Who could possibly have predicted that outcome of Hitler's war? Who could have seen when war broke out that by 1945 the obscure science of rocketry, practised by a few eccentrics in tiny, under-funded laboratories, and the recondite arts of atomic research, would be close to a marriage which would come close to destroying this world, and one day still might?
Incalculable consequences
Now we are at war again, and largely because of a fundamentalist hatred of a state which was an impossibility in 1939. Moreover, we must presume that the consequences of this war will be as incalculable as the consequences of the previous two, which in their hideously random precision have brought us to this pass.
Yet what are we to do? Bin Laden is a genocidal madman, an Islamic Hitler who is determined to wield his mesmeric power and his genius to do evil. His war is only now beginning, and we will know no end to its consequences, even after he is gone, any more than we are free of the repercussions of the two great wars of the last century.
This should be our lesson. There is no end to history, no conclusion to human folly. We are kith of Cain, kin of Lamech, his grandson, the inventor of metal weapons, and once again we follow their command. Lamech's sword is unsheathed, and it absolutely must be matched; but, that said, the heart that is not heavy now is a heart in thrall to Satan.