Peter Kriger

When Hernan Cortes brought down an empire of millions with a few hundred men, he let a secret out of the bag that we have been trying to forget ever since. A civilization is astonishingly easy to knock over. And almost nobody has to die for it to happen.

The Elector of Saxony owned five thousand holy bones, and he had them printed in a catalogue with illustrations, because a collection nobody can browse is a wasted asset. Eight years later his own university professor published a list of complaints about precisely this line of business.

Todos lo admitieron al mismo tiempo. Internet entero levantó la vista de su teléfono y confesó que sí , que piensa constantemente en el Imperio Romano. Lo convertimos en una broma, porque así solemos hacer con las cosas que nos asustan un poco.

Everyone knows the story. A Christian empire sold narcotics to a civilization that did not want them, and when that civilization objected, the empire sent warships. It is the most morally convenient episode in the Western canon, which is exactly why it deserves to be handled with suspicion.

In 1830, respectable physicians warned that the human body would come apart at thirty miles an hour. In 1889, a Boston paper explained that the telephone would end visiting, conversation, and eventually friendship. In 1954, the United States Senate spent three days investigating comic books.

Every age is certain its witches are real. The old world had servants of the Devil; later centuries had wreckers, subversives, and enemies of the people; we have our own quiet vocabulary for the ones we agree to destroy.

Tout le monde l'a admis en même temps. Internet tout entier a levé les yeux de son téléphone et a avoué que oui , en effet, il pensait constamment à l'Empire romain. On en a fait une blague, comme on le fait souvent avec ce qui nous fait un peu peur.

The First World War is usually explained by asking what people wanted. Historians have spent a century sorting the guilty from the merely reckless, and the argument has produced magnificent scholarship without producing agreement. This book asks a different question.

In 2007 a man published a book about the future. He held no chair in futurology, ran no consultancy, and had no institutional reason to be believed.

Five thousand years ago, somebody poured a season's worth of grain into a shared building and immediately ran into a problem that has never once gone away: who gave what, and who gets it back? The answer was to write it down.

Christopher Columbus set out to end the world. He said so in writing, at length, with scriptural citations. He believed his voyages had been foretold by the prophets. He believed the gold of the Indies would finance the recovery of Jerusalem, without which the last act of history could not begin.

We talk about privacy the way we talk about clean air: as something we once had in abundance and are now carelessly using up. The historical record tells a stranger story.

Nobody ever needed it. For the whole of human existence before the sixteenth century, our species got along on honey, fruit, and the occasional raided hive, and no one recorded the deprivation.

Alle gaben es gleichzeitig zu. Das ganze Internet blickte von seinen Handys auf und gestand: Ja , tatsächlich denkt es ständig an das Römische Reich. Wir machten einen Witz daraus, denn so gehen wir mit Dingen um, die uns ein wenig Angst machen.

Everybody admitted it at the same time. The whole internet looked up from its phone and confessed that yes, actually, it thinks about the Roman Empire constantly. We turned it into a joke because that is what we do with things that scare us a little.

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.

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.

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 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.