By David Warren.

Half of one century has now gone by, I realized this week, while various news reports were advising me of the latest catastrophes. There is, of course, no connection between any of these events, or between any two events on this earth.

And there is no such thing as a religious war, as opposed to a war from irreligious, entirely miscellaneous causes. Except, every war is a religious war, and has always been.

This becomes clearer when one looks into conflicts. Questions of causation are normally reduced to the narrowest measure, because the more they are considered more broadly, reality becomes too large.

I had this actually painful experience of the "eternal" a mere half-century ago, in watching, at the time through Western television, the fall of Saigon and the conclusion of what the media had packaged as the "War in Vietnam."

Shockingly few years had been added to the heap of my knowledge, and the liberal or hippy attitudes of the then-young were already being expelled from my soul.

Because I had been in Vietnam, and watched some of this war at close quarters continuously; and because I knew intimately so many of the people who had lived and died in it, this became for me the big and decisive background event.

This was "real" in a world that was foundering in immaturity and unreality, and all the other events of the time would be colored by this sobering event.

I was not a neutral, and reasonably could not have been, through all the years when I had been aware of the terrible clash that was happening there, and when as a growing child I'd been living in a Southeast Asian country, where Vietnamese news was next door.

For better or worse, I was a prodigy at reading newspapers, magazines, and books from an early age, and had parents, especially a father, who was interested in things.

The war that the (relatively) free Vietnamese were fighting against a horrible enemy - communism - was already large enough to be discerned over time and far away.

The "war protests" in America were, for me, what was abstract. The idea that I was a wicked warmonger, simply because I had more direct access to the truth, was, however, something that I encountered first-hand when I came home to Canada.

Perhaps all my subsequent life has been colored by that, as well as my reading of history. It would seem to be at the root of my skepticism, for in Vietnam itself I had discovered that the most respectable Western journalists were quite indifferent to the truth, i.e. liars.

And they were paid for their lies by Western media, and were celebrated and honored in what presented itself as high society.

Reading back, at least through the nineteenth century and adventurously beyond, I found the same "bias" again and again, and the destructive consequences of this glib, "secular, progressive" slant.

It wasn't a pendulum, swinging from side to side; one moment this side in fashion, next moment, that. The left side was always in fashion, and the right side always out of fashion, until the left was relegated to the right because for alleged "reasons." (Fascists, and Nazis, were originally on the left, for instance.)

Vietnam became an intellectual training ground, on this chart, and on several unrelated levels. I learnt, for instance, that sincere Christians, regardless of nationality and race - and thus certainly including all Vietnamese religious - were basically trustworthy and, in the main, "on our side"; for so were the sincere Buddhists I had transactions with.

Alas, for a world in which everyone is sincere, the abandoned individual must use his judgment. (To say one shouldn't judge is to talk nonsense; it is to be defenselessly stupid.)

But communists, one was to discover, were actually the enemy, and friends to the satanic. I think everyone who has lived under communism, and is not profiting from being a communist himself, sooner or later comes to this conclusion; usually sooner. This isn't subtle: "Communists are not your friends."

Yes, ...