The insightful commentator, Victor Davis Hanson, has just written a book that caught my eye, called The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation. I am compelled to add this to my reading list, because I daily read in the Book of Mormon about not just one—but two—nations that descended into darkness and then were utterly destroyed, completely swept from the earth.

Though, of course, he did not use the Nephites and the Lamanites as examples, Hanson, as a military historian, looks at four other nations whose people, culture, religion, and way of life became absolutely obliterated and lost to time.

What’s fascinating is that the lost nations he examines are from very different times and places in history, but, in each case, their demise shares characteristics with each other. Destruction follows a certain blindness. Even as demise is knocking at their door, the people miss it and don’t make the necessary adjustments required to save themselves.

Hanson said, “It wasn’t just their physical space, their populations…but their language, their culture, their civilization, their religion disappeared within a generation. So, for today, we don’t know much about Punic culture in North Africa or the Aztecs in Mexico.”

He said, “There are lots of ways that states and their peoples can vanish from history, and all sorts of causes explain their disappearance. Both nature earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, plagues, and climate change and humans sometimes wipe out vulnerable populations. Indeed, entire cultures have often been obliterated, sometimes quickly, sometimes over decades.”

What Hanson studied was how a society comes to end through desolating wars.

Book excerpt:

The wartime end of everything has usually followed from a final siege or invasion. The coup de grâce predictably targeted a capital or the cultural, political, religious, or social center of a state. And the final blow resulted in the erasure of an entire people’s way of life and often much of the population itself. Strangely, the transition from normality to the end of days could occur rather quickly. A rendezvous with finality was often completely unexpected. Yet absolute defeat too late revealed long-unaddressed vulnerabilities, as economic, political, and social fissures widened only under wartime pressures. Waning empires rarely wished to accept, much less address, the fact that their once sprawling domains had been reduced to what the defenders could see from their walls.

Naïveté, hubris, flawed assessments of relative strengths and weaknesses, the loss of deterrence, new military technologies and tactics, totalitarian ideologies, and a retreat to fantasy can all explain why these usually rare catastrophic events nevertheless keep recurring-from the destruction of the Inca Empire to the end of the Cherokee nation to the genocide of a populous, vibrant, and Yiddish-speaking pro-Jewish people in Central and Eastern Europe.

The continual disappearance of prior cultures across time and space should warn us that even familiar twenty-first-century states can become as fragile as their ancient counter-parts, given that the arts of destruction march in tandem with improvements in defense. The gullibility, and indeed ignorance, of contemporary governments and leaders about the intent, hatred, ruthlessness, and capability of their enemies are not surprising. The retreat to comfortable nonchalance and credulousness, often the cargo of affluence and leisure, is predictable given unchanging human nature, despite the pretensions of a postmodern technologically advanced global village…

Unfortunately, the more things change technologically, the more human nature stays the same— a law that applies even to the United States, which often believes it is exempt from the misfortunes of other nations, past and present. This book makes clear, however, that there is no certainty that as scientific progress accelerates and leisure increases, and as the world shrinks on our computer and television screens, there is any corresponding advance in wisdom or morality, much less radical improvement in innate human nature.”