<aside> 💭
Let him who desires peace prepare for war.
-Flavius Vegetius, De Re Militari (AD 390)
<aside> 📋 Navigate Here 👇🏼
</aside>
<aside> 📌 THE IDEA OF MASSACRE
War in competition for resources is older than humankind. But the idea of waging it to exterminate the enemy was a surprisingly late development. Perfection is a hard idea to access because it is so remote from real experience. Most people’s accounts of perfection are pretty humdrum—just more of the same, mere satiety or excess. Most visions of paradise seem cloying. But there were truly radical utopians among early people. They included the first perpetrators of ethnocide and genocide, the first theorists of massacre.
It has often been argued that humans are “naturally” peaceful creatures, who had to be wrenched out of a golden age of universal peace by socially corrupting processes: war, according to the influential anthropologist Margaret Mead, “is an invention, not a biological necessity.” Until recently, there was a dearth of evidence with which to combat this theory, because of the relatively scanty archaelogical record of intercommunal conflict.
</aside>
<aside>
</aside>