"We do not live in the past, but the past in us."  Conquest is a major part of that past and a major shaper of the cultures of the world today.  Wars of conquest have changed the language, the economy, and the moral universe of whole peoples.  As a result of conquests, the Western Hemisphere is today a larger region of European civilization than Europe itself.  Even those in the Western Hemisphere who hate European civilization express that hatred in a European language and denounce it as immoral by European standards of morality.  The history of conquests is not just about the past, it is very much about the present and about how we came to be where we are economically, intellectually, and morally.

... on-site observation made vivid what words or photographs could only begin to suggest.  There is nothing like being inside the great mosque in Cordoba, seeing its grand design and the fine craftsmanship with which it was constructed a thousand years ago, to appreciate the achievements of the civilization from which it came.  And to see, a short walk way, a bridge built another thousand years before that by Romans--still carrying heavy traffic today--is to see another great civilization's cultural impact when Spain was part of the Roman Empire.  To walk through a graveyard in an old village in Australia's Barossa Valley and see all the gravestones written in German, in this English-speaking country, is to get a sense of the tenacity of the German culture, even when transplanted 10,000 miles from home.  From the Ancient walled city of Jerusalem to the ultra-modern city-state of Singapore, each place told its own story in its own way.