Why war? The question asked by Einstein has still not been answered

With the world wracked by bloody civil conflict and terrorism, it is as relevant as ever, writes Ellis Thorpe

There will be those who remember the late 1960s, especially the Vietnam war, when groups of protesters embraced flower power and urged us to make love not war.

Splendid idealism that didn’t work. We haven’t stopped making war, even though Vietnam was settled in 1975 after the Communists captured Saigon and an exhausted US pulled out.

Today the paradoxical question Einstein once asked Freud – “Why war?” – is as relevant as ever, as conflict on a horrendous scale in the form of bloody civil wars and terrorism rages throughout the world.

So much so, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to generalise from history and say for human beings and their groups, that there is an endemic propensity for war and violence. Moreover, when a group, country or nation is at relative peace and ruled by law, it is paradoxical that it’s a peace maintained by violence used by a legitimate superior force.

Proposals for an international organisation with legitimate force “to maintain law and order” between nations came into popularity after the carnage of the First World War.

The proposal is said to have been inspired by the idealism of President Woodrow Wilson in the context of 1933 and the rise of Nazism, at around the time Albert Einstein was asking “Why war?”

Einstein had written to Freud, posing the question of why human beings were so violent towards each other as individuals and in groups