[fdlkolok] Perpetual war

Consider characterizing European history as a single unending war that has been going on for centuries.  (Inspired by 1984.)  Several related radical ideas:

War may be continuously happening even in periods without the use of physical weapons and bloodshed.  Other tools of oppression were at work in times of "peace", causing harm.

(Though outbreak of what is normally called war -- "hot" war -- is economically striking because it is drastically a negative-sum game: in principle, there always could have been a Pareto superior outcome avoiding hot war that would have made everyone better off than the eventual outcome of the hot war.)

What were they fighting over?  Some of the wars seemed to be class struggles, but some not.  It could be that all the class struggles are illusions, perhaps propaganda, hiding the deeper underlying conflict.  When we study the "end" of some European hot war, did the underlying conflicts that started it ever get solved?

It would be naive to assume this war hasn't jumped the Atlantic into the Americas through European colonization and migration.  Is the "slow-rolling crisis" (Obama) of the current race riots part of the same conflict?  (Inspired by: There were race riots in the 1960s, 1990s, and now.  Has anything changed?)  That they seem to be about race could also be the same illusion as class.  If it is part of something much larger, then, without understanding the full extent of the problem, efforts to fix things will likely fail.

There seem to be some long-lasting civil wars in sub-Saharan Africa, lasting decades already.

What is really going on?  There doesn't seem to be any issue unifying conflicts throughout the ages.

Possibly: humans are simply incapable of peace, though this seems very strange, as it would make us more likely to go extinct.  We could again hypothesize a parasitic microorganism which benefits from human death.

The conspiracy theorists would have us believe that there have been shadowy puppeteers orchestrating all of this through the centuries.

I cannot claim to be the first to notice that "perpetual war" might be happening, and that it is strange that it is, but it does seem to be fairly rare.  Why?  ("Our war is special, different from your war.")  Why hasn't it as a possibility for explaining conflict shaped policy toward making the world an actually peaceful place?

Or the characterization could be wrong.