Evolution

This morning, while still in bed letting my mind associate its way through the world I started thinking about the 19th century war between Sweden and Russia, which took a lot of soldiers' lives in battles around these parts of the country. This got me thinking about how wars are waged and fought: Often there are two or more leaders sitting at a table discussing how to draw borders on a map or share mutual resources, and when these discussions run into a dead end they give orders for their armies to attack each other.

I slept a lot in school, and hence am not too familiar with world history, but I have a general grasp of what has happened through the ages. Allow me to try to recap a little:

• In pre-historic times - neanderthals, homo erectus and those guys - a handful of cavemen would toss rocks and beat wooden sticks at another handful of cavemen, probably with no better excuse than "nobody but me can piss on that tree" or similar.


• In ancient times - romans and greeks conquering the world - kings and emperors talked more or less peacefully about a piece of land or (as in the case of the greeks and the spartans) some woman and when they can't agree they let their armies fight it out.


• In medieval times - for some reason also known as "the dark ages" - the armies would fight blindly for years until one side got the bright idea to kill the other side's leader, and suddenly the war was over.


• In modern times - democratic world leaders teaching dictators how to run their countries - the size and number of mushroom clouds decides which country has the most power, and armies are used to defeat those countries who currently does not have nukes but could potentially show a bigger and better cloud in the near future.
  

I live in Sweden and haven't had any first hand experience of war, so I can only relate to it through what I have seen in news, Discovery documentaries and Hollywood movies. At my last job I had a trainee from Iraq, who (naturally) had real, first hand experience of war, and when I asked him about what he felt about a friend of mine who was born in Iran he said "I don't care where he's from - we did not fight that war, our leaders did."

Today, we can see this evolution of war in the actions of football "supporters":
The hooligans are going from rocks and sticks to firearms these days; how long before football is all about mushroom clouds?