While the sentiment of this meme is nice, it makes some false assumptions and is in fact incorrect.
- A civilization doesn’t spend money on peace unless you consider everything in trade outside of war to be peace expenditures, in which case, no civilization spends more on war.
- Assuming this is targeting the US, we spend $739 billion on primary/secondary and $604 billion on post-secondary education. Combined, that vastly exceeds the $721.5 billion in the US defense budget.
- A civilization may be forced to spend everything on war in order to preserve the civilization from outside threats. This doesn’t make them less civilized.