In 1931 Albert Einstein invited Sigmund Freud to join him in establishing ‘an association of intellectuals – men of real stature’ the purpose of which would be to ‘make an energetic effort to enlist religious groups in the fight against war’. Freud replied skeptically, asserting the existence of perennial human ‘instinct to destroy and kill’ – the antithesis of the ‘erotic’ instinct ‘to conserve and unify’:

“There are as you perceive, well known opposites, Love and Hate, transformed into theoretical entities; they are, perhaps, another aspect of those eternal polarities, attraction and repulsion, which fall within your province ….. Each of these instincts is every whit as indispensable as its opposite, and all the phenomena of life derive from their activity, whether they work in concert or in opposition … With the least speculative effort we are led to conclude that [the destructive] instinct functions in every living being, striving to work its ruin and reduce life to its primal state of inert matter. Indeed, it might well be called the ‘death instinct’; whereas the erotic instincts vouch for the struggle to live on. The death instinct becomes an impulse to destruction when, with the aid of certain organs, it directs its action outward, against external objects. The living being, that is to say, defends its own existence by destroying foreign bodies … The upshot of these observations … is that there is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity’s aggressive tendencies … Why do we, you and I and many another, protest so vehemently against war, instead of just accepting it as another of life’s odious importunities? For it seems a natural enough thing, biologically sound and practically unavoidable” ~ Page 634

Yet the twin urge to rape and murder remain repressed in a civilized society. It is only when civilization breaks down or is broken down, as happened in both Bosnia and Rwanda, that the urge is unleashed. And only under certain circumstances does it escalate from progrom to genocide. To repeat: economic volatility very often provides the trigger for the politicization of ethnic difference. Proximity to a strategic borderland, usually an imperial border, determines the extent to which the violence will metastasize. ~ Page 635

The War of the Worlds remains science fiction. The War of the World is, however, historical fact. Perhaps, like Wells’s story, ours will be ended abruptly by the intervention of microscopic organisms like the avian influenza virus, which could yet produce a worse mutation and pandemic than that of 1918. Until that happens, however, we remain our own worst enemies. We shall avoid another century of conflict only if we understand the forces that caused the last one – the dark forces that conjure up ethnic conflict and imperial rivalry out of the economic crisis, and in doing so negate our common humanity. They are forces that stir within us still. ~ Page 646