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I don't think it's accurate at all to say that the West is warlike and the East is peaceful. Atilla the fucking Hun was "eastern". So was Pol Pot. So was every samurai you've ever heard of. People are warlike, it happens at an individual level and a cultural level.
Now, I'm FASCINATED by the notion that lanuage shapes thinking and behavior patterns. When I was fluent in French, many years ago, I noticed that when I was speaking French, things looked and seemed different to me. The relationships between objects was different. The way I thought of certain actions changed. It's clear to me that Francophones think differently about some things than Anglophones do, and that that's reflected very clearly in the two languages.
Now, you still have the chicken-and-egg problem to deal with. Did certain thinking arise culturally and get expressed in the evolution of that culture's mother tongue? Or did the language shape the thought patterns? Or does it even matter?
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