With new insight into the death drive that no law could eliminate, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud was blunt about the futility of humanization. In 1915, when World War I was only in its second year, he wrote: “Not only is it more bloody and destructive than any war of other days, [but] it is at least as cruel, as embittered, as implacable as any that has preceded it. It disregards all the restrictions known as International Law, which in peace-time the states had bound themselves to observe.” “It is more utopian to hope to make war humane than to eliminate war,” one German international
...more
