Opinion
By Vassilis Nedos
Our perception of history is often misleading, especially when we fail to break free from the mind's knee-jerk reaction to the present. We tend to rely on an inherent sensory response that links current events directly to the past just to justify how things unfolded. In this way, politics gets tied to history, and uppercase History becomes an inescapable truth. The year 2026 might eventually prove to be a pivotal turning point for the Middle East, or perhaps West Asia, since the term Middle East is anchored in a 19th-century Anglo-Saxon perspective.
The year 2026 on the Gregorian calendar is 1448 for Muslims. For Jews, it is 5787, a framework where everything leads to a final conflict at the end of history. Because people cannot seem to untangle themselves from the endless cycle of violence in the region stretching from the Levantine coast to the Persian Gulf, some take this as proof that the hour of final reckoning is drawing near. Yet in this cradle of ancient civilizations, these final conflicts have actually been repeating since the dawn of recorded time. For context, to the Byzantines, this would be the year 7534 from the creation of the world, a calendar the Ecumenical Patriarchate used until the mid-18th century and the Russian Orthodox Church kept even longer. From the Egyptians, Hittites, and Assyrians to the Persians and the successor Hellenistic kingdoms, and later from the Romans, our own Eastern Romans, and the Sassanids to the Arabs and Ottomans, geography shaped this land into a crossroads of civilizations, a melting pot, and the violent midwife of monotheistic religions.
The eternal motion of history is not enough on its own to prove a distinct rhythm, a repetition, a norm, or a unified pattern. Invoking history is actually quite insidious because it targets the slippery terrain of collective consciousness. In transient, day-to-day politics, these collective perceptions are weaponized to showcase the inevitable triumph of one narrative over another. Regardless of what anyone claims, the history of the Middle East today and tomorrow is still unwritten, and the same goes for the surrounding region that directly connects to Greece as a structural part of this corner of the world. That is exactly why decision-makers must view facts and future prospects with absolute clarity, rather than through the lens of narratives that usually exist only in the minds of the people who manufacture them.
