What history doesn't teach us

There is nothing worse than war. History books often depict war, in which the nation consuming the history, was part of a great event an emotional uprising against a dreadful enemy and fittingly a romantic ending with scenes of victorious troops marching through the deviated ruins of the enemy cities.

As children we are brought up on the heroics of people who had fought a battle, often dying  in the battle standing their ground shooting until the ammunition ran out and then, through hand to hand combat being killed by overwhelming forces. My history books were full of jingoistic tales right across the globe of our victorious troops "winning".

The reality of war is different and one sees it played out in Syria today. That convenient term, 'collateral damage' doesn't do justice to what happens to unarmed civilians caught up in conflict.
The women and children, their lives snuffed out in an instant, as high explosives obliterate  a building but what we don't see are the people in those buildings blasted apart.
It reminds me of the 9/11 Twin Towers as we watched the buildings collapse little realising what it was like for the 3000 people in the building as it shuttered into the ground.
Nations who have experienced war on their home territory have a different perspective from those who sent army's thousands of miles away to fight.
The worst conflagration has to be civil war where people who ordinarily would be fellow countrymen turn against each other in conflict. Some of the worst sectarian massacres are perpetrated by neighbouring people who, virtually moments before, were in harmony but fed the propaganda, turn and instigate despicable horror on each other.
Bosnia and the Serbs, the Hutus in Central Africa and now the Assad Dynasty and his Alawite Shia followers with no love lost for the Sunni.
With the break up of the Ottoman Empire and the French colonisation of Lebanon and Syria, in the 1920s, the segregation, or semi partition of Syria into regions which reflected the religious make up, cemented the disregard that certain groups have for each other today. The areas and cities most under bombardment by the Alawite Shia are Sunni and so this bitter religious feud continues all over the Middle East with no end in sight.
Of course the exodus of people from the various conflicts in the Middle East into the nearest stable area, Europe have frightened us. Not solely because of the logistics of resettling the millions who may come, but the cultural impact of establishing a large religious group with its religious laws and who at their heart have an ongoing feud established on the death of Mohammed in 632.
Taking a difficult brother or sister into your family is hard enough but when they are not of your kin then you have to be a very very Good Samaritan.
Of course being a 'Samaritan' opens up a whole new biblical can of worms !!!