"In the dialectical vortex of war and peace, humanity has consistently woven the dual facets of violence—when the flames of war ignite, violence manifests in the form of 'jingguan' (mounds of enemy heads) and scorched-earth policies; when peace descends, it transforms into mortgage interest rates and algorithmic black boxes, continuing to gnaw at the fabric of civilization. The record in the 'Zizhi Tongjian' of 'selecting the weak among men and women to provide military rations' mirrors the carefully designed 'last-place elimination system' used by contemporary corporations during layoffs: the former converts human bodies into calorie units in a besieged famine, while the latter alienates labor into redundant costs on financial reports during economic downturns. This transformation of violence, much like a virus continuously mutating its outer protein shell to bypass the host's immune system, retains its core logic of consumption.

The war of the cold weapon era condensed violence into a quantifiable and cruel aesthetic. In the tragic scene of Chang'an with 'less than a hundred households' after the Yongjia Rebellion, each vanished household registration represents shattered family ethics—fathers forced to exchange children to eat in order to preserve clan bloodlines. This ethical dilemma recurred in the 1942 Siege of Leningrad, where intellectuals exchanged handwritten copies of 'The Divine Comedy' to stave off hunger, merging Dante's parchment verses with human fibers into the digestive system. However, what truly chills is not the blood-soaked revelry on the battlefield, but the sophisticated transformation of violence mechanisms in peacetime: when the 'mutual cannibalism' recorded in the 'Ming History' evolves into the modern urban 'thirty-five-year-old career curse,' the act of consumption shifts from physical space to the dimension of time. White-collar workers, to secure their positions, proactively consume antidepressants to extend their working hours, which is another form of civilized self-devouring ritual.

The fundamental difference between wartime violence and peacetime violence lies in the threshold of energy release. The 'building of jingguan south of the city' in the 'Later Han Dynasty' required the biochemical energy of hundreds of thousands of corpses, while a 0.25% interest rate hike by the Federal Reserve can cause millions of infants in third-world countries to suffer from malnutrition due to rising milk powder prices. The modern financial system has created more efficient tools for wealth transfer than cold weapons—when a commodity price fluctuation triggers riots in an African country, traders on the New York Stock Exchange may not even realize their keystrokes indirectly crushed numerous bodies. This process of violence becoming intangible allows peacetime exploitation to possess the destructive power of war, without requiring the explicit trauma of 'nearly half the population lost' in the 'Southern History' as an annotation.

However, humanity's attempts to tame violence have always been accompanied by paradoxes. The Geneva Conventions strictly prohibit attacks on civilian facilities, yet they have spurred precision-guided weapons for surgical strikes against water and electricity systems; labor laws limit daily working hours, but the gig economy traps workers in perpetual fatigue through fragmented order dispatch. Just as the 'Chicken Ribs Compilation' revealed market rationality by recording the price system of human flesh, modern platform economies have developed 'correlation models between rider red-light violation probability and order premium,' transforming life risks into commercial parameters using algorithms. These violence devices, cloaked in the guise of civilization, dissect the bottom line of humanity more profoundly than the butcher knives of ancient battlefields—when a food delivery rider rushes through a red light to save time and suffers a traffic accident, the backend system immediately dispatches new orders to fill the capacity gap, which is remarkably similar to the cruelty of 'infants impaled on spears for amusement' in historical records.

In the eternal pendulum swing between war and peace, what is truly terrifying is not violence itself, but humanity's ability to find moral justifications to whitewash violence. The narrative of 'the locust plague from Guandong to Dunhuang' as divine punishment in the 'Zizhi Tongjian' concealed the human-caused essence of land annexation leading to weakened disaster resistance; today, some regions glorify the 996 system as a 'fighter agreement,' which is also a linguistic packaging of systemic exploitation. When drone operators on the Russian-Ukrainian battlefield press the kill button thousands of miles away, their psychological trauma is far less than that of ancient soldiers who stabbed enemies with bayonets—technological mediation dilutes the moral tremors brought by violence, just as securitization operations conceal the bloodthirsty nature of capital.

The key to breaking this cycle of violence may lie in the gray areas between war and peace. The Peace Memorial Museum rebuilt on the ruins of the Hiroshima nuclear bombing tells the extreme of violence with twisted steel bars; Iceland, in the 2008 financial crisis, refused to bail out banking giants and instead expanded public education investment, these two ways of dealing with trauma reveal different possibilities. As blockchain technology attempts to dissolve financial hegemony with decentralized architecture, and bioengineering is committed to developing low-cost artificial meat to end the threat of famine, humanity is exploring survival paradigms beyond violence. But just as the record of 'roads filled with stench' in the 'Taiping Yulan' will never disappear from history books, each step of civilizational evolution is engraved with the names of those consumed, reminding us: true peace lies not in the presence or absence of violence, but in the ability to establish an order that frees the weak from fear—this requires wisdom more arduous than inventing weapons, and a conscience braver than writing history."