y.

The means used to achieve these objectives have varied from time to time
and from place to place. The basic pattern of civilization has
appeared, disappeared and reappeared.

Each civilization has made heroic efforts to reform itself when
submerged in a time of troubles that made its institutions and its
practices intolerable to those in power or those groups and classes
which had grown so desperate under its exploitation and oppression that
they preferred death to continuance of the established order.

Each civilization has made its contribution, retaining its essential
form while modifying its practices to meet the requirements of
particular situations. Western civilization is no exception to this
general rule.

Following the all but universal principle that "action and reaction tend
to be equal and opposite," subjugated, occupied peoples revolt against
"foreign" occupation and exploitation. Again western civilization is no
exception, as the movements for independence and self-determination that
followed the 1946 post-war collapse of the European empires clearly
showed.

Reaction against western civilization went beyond revolt to include the
rejection of the obsolete concepts, forms and practices inherent in
civilization. Rejection has been accompanied and followed by proposals
for replacing civilization by concepts, forms and practices more in
keeping with the social relations and situations resulting from the
current world revolution.

Most reforms of civilization have been attempted during the life of
western civilization because during that era both the structure and
functioning of civilization have been called into question. In no
civilization (Egypt, Rome or the modern West) have the essential
principles of civilization been seriously modified. Again and again,
during the times of trouble that marked the breakdown of successive
civilizations, particular institutions were rejected but civilization as
a way of life has been accepted and re-established in the course of each
new cycle.

During previous cycles the breakdown of a civilization had been followed
by a period of rest and recuperation before the beginning of the next
experiment. The breakdown of western civilization, a negative reaction,
has been accompanied by a planet-wide drive to replace the concepts,
forms and practices of civilization by the concepts, forms and practices
of socialism-communism.

Socialism-communism as a way of life f