解放军文职招聘考试Civilization and History

 Civilization and History

Most of the people who appear most often and most gloriously in the history books are great conquer­ors and generals and soldiers, whereas the people who really helped civilization forward are often never men­tioned at all. We do not know who first set a broken leg, or launched a seaworthy boat, or calculated the length of the year, or manured a field; but we know all about the killers and destroyers. People think a great deal of them, so much so that on all the highest pillars in the great cities of the world you will find the figure of a conqueror or a general or a soldier. And I think most people believe that the greatest countries are those that have beaten in battle the greatest number of other countries and ruled over them as conquerors. It is just possible they are, but they are not the most civilized. Animals fight; so do savages; hence to be good at fighting is to be good in the way in which an animal or a savage is good, but it is not to be civilized.

Fighting means killing, and civilized peoples ought to be able to find some way of settling their dis­putes other than by seeing which side can kill off the greater number of the other side, and then saying that that side which has killed most has won. It means that might is right.

That is what the story of mankind has on the whole been like. Even our own age has fought the two grea­test wars in history, in which millions of people were killed or mutilated. And while today it is true that peo­ple do not fight and kill each other in the streets, that is to say, we have got to the stage of keeping the rules and behaving properly to each other in daily life while nations and countries have not learnt to do this yet, and still behave like savages.