Psychological warfare is part of civilization. Civilization, no matter how one defines it, is not a static thing. It is an immense fermenting, active, often turbulent composite of the _whys_ and _hows_ of the way men and women think and behave. The short-run factors in a civilization are often as important as the long-run ones. Though the United States from 1860 to 1960 has been a steady part of the west European, predominantly Christian civilization, the United States has undergone immense changes of fashion, belief, appetite, preference, and behavior. With any changing, developing civilization, "war" may seem like a very static term, so that the Civil War and the war of the Western powers against Germany of 1939-45 may to some degree seem comparable phenomena. They are comparable, but only within sharp limits. =The Meaning of War.= Nowhere is the transitoriness and changeability of modern civilization more evident than in the significance which intelligent men and women attach to the term _war_. War was "noble" in 1861-65, but in 1941-45 it was "noble" only for the most perfunctory and most hollow oratory. Push the contrast farther: "psychological warfare" was an unknown element in 1861-65; by 1941-45 it had become fashionable. (One can seriously doubt that President Lincoln ever worried about Northern citizens becoming "un-American" under that rubric, though he had plenty of traitors to worry him.) The years 1945-53 were momentous. A whole string of new ideas, new terms, and new behavior patterns appeared within the USA in a mere eight years. What the next twenty years will bring is deeply uncertain. War is coming to mean the effectuation or prevention of revolution, not the half-savage, half-courteous armed conflict of sovereign nations. War is getting to be chronic again.[55] War between entirely comparable states such as the United States and Canada, Mexico and Cuba, Indonesia and India, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, or any similar combination, is getting to be more and more unthinkable. War between ideologically dissimilar states, such as North Korea and South Korea, Communist China and Nationalist China, Viet Minh and Viet Nam, USSR and USA, is getting to be virtual normality.