one hundred years we, in the Western world, have created a
greater material wealth than any other society in the history of
the human race. Yet we have managed to kill off millions of our
population in an arrangement which we call "war." Aside from
smaller wars, we had larger ones in 1870, 1914 and 1939. Dur-
ing these wars, every participant firmly believed that he was
fighting in his self-defense, for his honor, or that he was backed
up by God. The groups with whom one is at war are, often from
one day to the next, looked upon as cruel, irrational fiends,
whom one must defeat to save the world from evil. But a few
years after the mutual slaughter is over, the enemies of yesterday
are our friends, the friends of yesterday our enemies, and again
in full seriousness we begin to paint them with appropriate
colors of black and white. At this moment, in the year 1955, we
are prepared for a mass slaughter which would, if it came to
pass, surpass any slaughter the human race has arranged so far.
One of the greatest discoveries in the field of natural science is
prepared for this purpose. Everybody is looking with a mixture
of confidence and apprehension to the "statesmen" of the vari-
ous peoples, ready to heap all praise on them if they "succeed in
avoiding a war," and ignoring the fact that it is only these very
statesmen who ever cause a war, usually not even through their
bad intentions, but by their unreasonable mismanagement of the
affairs entrusted to them.
In these outbursts of destructiveness and paranoid suspicion,
however, we are not behaving differently from what the civilized
part of mankind has done in the last three thousand years of
history. According to Victor Cherbulliez, from 1500 B.C. to
1860 A.D. no less than about eight thousand peace treaties were
signed, each one supposed to secure permanent peace, and each
one lasting on an average two years!'
'From H. B. Stevens, The Recovery of Culture, Harper and Brothers, New