ations of 1939-45 were part and
parcel of the same picture. The same may be said for the revolt of the
colonial peoples, downgrading all European "victors" in the war of
1914-18, and the social revolutions following 1945 that shook up the
planetary power structure and opened the way for socialist-communist
forces to begin socialist construction in one country after another.

Some European states had become super-states, armed to the teeth,
surrounded with their satellites, dependencies and colonies. They
expanded, exploited and battled as they played the absorbing and ruinous
game of "Beggar My Neighbor". Politically and economically the struggle
reached and passed its high point between 1914 and 1945. The subsequent
years have revealed the aftermath--a down-graded Europe and an ascendant
Asia.

Empire building has been made prohibitively expensive by the revolution
in science and technology; if the human family is to survive in
anything like its present numbers, a way must be found to end the use of
war as a means of attaining social objectives. New techniques, chiefly
non-competitive, must be discovered and employed in the maintenance of
social relations.

Not only must war be abandoned as a means of achieving social
objectives, but exploitation of nature and man must be superceded by a
planet-wide life style that conserves natural wealth and shifts the
center of economic endeavor from competition to cooperation.

Abandonment of war as an instrument of policy and the renunciation of
exploitation of man by man and nation by nation as a means of enrichment
would put an end to the scandalous and corrosive extremes of riches and
poverty that have cursed every civilization of which we have a written
record.

Western civilization, like its predecessors, had consisted of rival
nations and empires competing for living-space, wealth, position,
expanding territorially as they exploited nature and available labor
power for the advantage of the few.

Civilization as a life style, built around the competitive struggle for
wealth and power, using war as an instrument of policy and multiplying
the techniques of expansion and exploitation, has had a series of
experimental tryouts already under way at the dawn of written history.
Under no circumstances has civilization proved to be wholly rewarding
and satisfying. The current revolution in science and technology has
rendered civilization unreformable as well as obsolete.

The