The End of Everything: We’ve Been Here Before

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, September 8, 2025

The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation by Victor Davis Hanson seems to be the creation of a member of the MICIMATT in good standing, an advocate for heightened hostilities, an accuser of Obama for “appeasing Iran,” and the actual author of a 2020 book called The Case for Trump. The 2024 preface to The End of Everything makes clear that the author is a believer in Israeli propaganda, and a supporter of the U.S. and NATO and an enemy of their enemies. The book itself makes clear his fascination with wars and their details, tactics, strategies.

And yet, this book — from this source! —  is a warning of recklessly risking nuclear apocalypse. The book recounts four past occasions when an entire society was destroyed. Ignorant of or discounting numerous more recent genocides, such as that in Tasmania, that exterminated populations, Hanson claims the Aztecs were the most recent people to be eliminated. He recounts the final destruction of Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, and the Aztecs. The point seems largely to fill a book with details, but also to warn that the entire Earth could meet a similar fate, that each of these groups failed to heed the warnings, and that we are failing to heed the warnings.

Of course, unless we act, Palestine may soon be added to that list, and the acceptability of exterminations of at least part of humanity established for a certain segment of the remaining population of the Earth.

The lessons that this book offers seem to me to include a warning against arrogance and in particular against glorifying past cases of survival or triumph. Then there’s a warning, according to Hanson, that one cannot count on help to ever arrive. “Help” is of course understood as military action and nothing else. I would simply add a warning against too much longing for that variety of help. I think there’s also a lesson here about understanding the “enemy.” To Hanson’s advice not to count on an enemy holding to past agreements, I would add advice to be careful about imagining that your side has kept past agreements, and caution about assuming that past agreements have met the needs of those not running the governments on both sides.

The key lesson, however, seems to be not to refuse compromise, not to insist on impossible terms, not to double down on hostility as one’s situation grows more hopeless, thereby sealing your fate, and — in a nuclear age — everyone else’s.

And I would append a few more lessons: First, don’t imagine that all of history consists of incidents that indulge fascination with mass slaughter. More often than people have failed to compromise and make peace, people have successfully achieved their actual survival along with their exclusion from the history books. Second, don’t let warmaking be profitable if you want an even chance at preventing it. Third, nothing but the sort of proud denial of reality exhibited in these ancient tragedies prevents unilateral nuclear disarmament, and nothing other than that will save us if negotiation and agreement have been foresworn.

I’ve added those last lessons and put my own spin on the others. Hanson may, for all I know, believe he’s offered a strong case for invading China immediately. Nonetheless, if you think such a case is even possible, I encourage you to read this book — it might set you straight.