Settlements imposed by violence and policed by victors lead to resentment, antagonism, hatred and the build-up of a desire for revenge, including the restoration to the vanquished of lost territories.  The logical outcome of such a situation is preparation for a war of independence by the vanquished, countered by military occupation, rigid suppression, and exploitation by the victors in the previous struggle.

War is taken for granted as an instrument of policy.  It is employed by civilized nations and empires as a means of expansion.  Wars of independence and restitution follow conquest, dismemberment and annexation.  Civilized nations and empires prepare for war and wage war as a normal aspect of civilized life.

Civilization, and in particular western civilization, is a time-bomb, built to detonate and scatter its fragments far and wide.  It is a type of booby trap in which humanity has been caught periodically and horribly mangled.  Without exception, each civilization has contained the forces and equipment needed for its own annihilation.  At no time reported by history has this formulation been more obvious than during the decades immediately following war’s end in 1945.  Destructivity was lifted to new levels of efficiency by electronic communication, the tank and the airplane.  It was further escalated by atomic fission and nuclear fusion.  Advances in science and technology had made dramatic increases in the tempo of production and construction.  Utilization of atomic energy had stepped up destructivity to the nth power.

Based on assumptions that oft-repeated experience has proved to be false and misleading, civilization in the 1970’s is unstable and insecure.  Most civilizations are strangled in their cradles or plundered and demolished in the course of the never-ending political, economic and military conflicts which have marked and marred civilizations since the dawn of history.  The national and imperial survivors of these struggles in every known instance have been largely or wholly led by military adventurers and plunderers in search of booty, fame and power.  With professional plunderers, destroyers and murderers occupying the seats of power, it is only a question of time and occasion before rising overhead costs and the misfortunes of war result in their overthrow and replacement by better organized, better armed invaders who slaughter and enslave their predecessors and usurp and abuse their power.  Of necessity, civilizations are self-destructive, built as they are on the ebb and flow of power struggle.

Successive conflicts involve an indefinite volume of overhead costs, which grow with the intensity and extent of the expansive survival struggle, creating a series of crises along a path that leads to self-destruction and the return of the experimenters to a condition of pre-civilized self-containment.

We in the West, looking back on our own immediate history, refer to this pre-civilized status as the Dark Ages.  Actually, such Dark Ages are the transition stages between two periods of experiments with the building of civilizations.  In view of this oft-repeated experience, modern man must look upon an epoch of civilization not as a way of life, but an adventure of suicidal self-degradation and ultimate self-destruction.