Are we at the pinnacle of our civilisation?

I wonder perhaps if this is it? This is as far as humanity can progress towards being something like Star Trek's Federation, a glorious post-war, post-money civilisation that can colonise new worlds and spread across the stars. I mean, we just can't seem to keep our shit together. Look at the Euro-zone. Too many voices clamouring for attention, all saying that it isn't their fault. Too much pride. Too much of the blame game. It seems like we can't even have an international game of football without a crap-load of racists being unable to contain their pre-programmed prejudices. 

I feel like I owe some recognition to the hate-mongers there. I mean, that's a hell of an achievement, managing to create a new generation of Neo-Nazis when World War II is still relatively well-remembered across the globe and Auschwitz is just up the road. That's some top-notch brainwashing equipment you've got there. Or did you just find some cryogenically frozen Hitler Youth in a bunker somewhere?

But I digress. Only slightly though, because the conditions that led to WW2 are in fact showing their unpleasantly apparent faces again here in 2012. The massive rich-poor divide. The uncaring wealthy governments forcing crippling austerity on poorer neighbouring countries that have just had their economies crippled. The resulting resentment and racism that occurs when those people are faced with forced austerity. It makes sense, if you think about it. They are told by their weak and out-of-touch ruling elite that while they, the wealthy few are not to blame, you the poor must make a huge change in lifestyle and essentially culture, forced on you by a foreign people and a foreign government with whom you have no control over and whom you find distinctly alien. All it takes then is one person to stand up and scream "Down with the foreign oppressors! Down with the traitor government!" and the rusty gears of the war machine start grinding again.

If any part of that sounds familiar then look in a history book, or go to Wikipedia. Check out "France after world war 1", specifically the " Treaty of Versailles¹". Now doesn't that all sound a bit familiar? If you change the word "war" to "debt crisis" then re-read the article, then it really does start to sound like a broken record. Nations with the upper hand making the nations with the lower hand pay. And accept that they should pay, that they deserve it. That they are mud, and that they deserve to be made to pay because they are in some way an inherently inferior people, as demonstrated by the fact that their nation has the lower hand. Then racism. Then war.

The biggest stinky present that we got from WW2 was nukes. Nukes are bad. Many crappy action movies have demonstrated what happens when bad or crazy people get hold of a nuclear warhead. I dread to think what would happen if Jason Statham doesn't stop the terrorists detonating the Black Hole Bomb developed during the Debt Wars.

¹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles