by Andreas Peglau^[1]

(This is an partially unchecked translation by DeepL. Please excuse any errors that sure have occurred.
Here you can download this text as pdf.)

 

Since humans have existed …

“War is defined as an organized conflict involving the use of weapons and violence, carried out by groups acting in a planned manner. The goal of the groups involved is to assert their interests. … The acts of violence that occur in this context are aimed at the physical integrity of opposing individuals and thus lead to death and injury.” (Wikipedia)^[2]

The proposition “War is the father of all” has been handed down from the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus (approx. 520 BCE – 460 BCE).”^[3] In 1642, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote of the “war of all against all” as the original, natural state.^[4] Almost three hundred years later Sigmund Freud picked up another saying, quoted by Hobbes from the Roman playwright Plautus, and maintained that “Man is a wolf to man,” a “savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien,” based on a “primary” — that is, a given, inherent — “mutual hostility of human beings.”^[5]

Were this so, we wouldn’t have to mull over how wars come about or whose interests are transacted in wars: it is just in our genes somehow …. This would also mean that wars could hardly be avoided in the long run. And if they could be avoided at all, then that would be only at the cost of suppressing our true nature, our ‘natural disposition.’ Even today, the thesis of war as an original, quasi “natural” state is still held. Two examples:
In 2009, upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, Barack Obama, the US president who would be responsible for more days of war than all his predecessors, proclaimed:^[6] “War came, in one form or another, with the first human being.”^[7]

In 2024, the website of the “Future Institute” founded by trend researcher Matthias Horx informs us:  “Ever since humans have existed, there have been warlike conflict.”^[8] Here, they even claimed to know exactly: “The most violent societies are — or were — the very ones that for us are instead assigned the attribute ‘peaceful’. Hunter-gatherer societies had the highest murder rates, and in most regions of the earth tribal wars raged without end. In the natural primitive state, you took for yourself what you could get; members of another tribe did not count as ‘our own people,’ and inhibitions against killing had hardly developed, especially in the many situations of scarcity“ ^[9] Compared to this “natural primitive state,” bourgeois democracies, where impoverishment, exploitation, oppression, and warmongering are regulated by law, must — or should — appear as pure salvation.

Journey to prehistoric times

So let’s take a look at the current state of knowledge about the evolution of humankind. Since archaeology often relies on assumptions and “analogical conclusions”^[10] due to the limited amount of evidence available, and since most of the theories are disputed among experts and even a single new discovery can often turn the picture upside down, some of the following information, especially regarding dates, is only provisionally valid. I hope that the conclusions I draw from this will be more lasting.

It is currently widely accepted that the line leading to modern humans split from the line leading to modern chimpanzees around six million years ago.^[11] This initially resulted in creatures that still resembled apes, also known as “pre-humans.” The “early humans” and “early humans” that developed from them are considered to be the first representatives of the genus “Homo,” dating back two to three million years.^[12] The existence of “anatomically modern humans,” Homo sapiens, has been proven for approximately 300,000 years.^[13]

There is general agreement that the use of fire contributed to the process of becoming human. We learn about this on the Planet Wissen (“Planet Science”) website:^[14]

“Some findings indicate that our ancestors … already used the power of fire about 1.5 million years ago. But the question of when humans succeeded in starting fires on their own is still hotly debated, even among researchers. Many assume that this was possible for Neanderthal man with the help of flints 40,000 years ago.”

If the figures given here are correct, our ancestors would have been handling fire for just under a million and a half years without figuring out how to make it themselves. It is not surprising that other scholars, such as the historian James C. Scott, assign a much earlier date for it: about 400,000 years ago.^[15]

400,000 or 40,000 years? Behind this remarkable vagueness of 360,000 years is concealed a basic problem of the investigation of our earliest stages of development: although we have many theories about the vast majority of the time during which increasingly human beings existed, we know very, very little.

No representative statements

In the 2021 book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow summarize the current state of research:

“For most of this period, evidence is extremely limited. There are phases of literally thousands of years for which the only evidence of hominin activity we possess is a single tooth, and perhaps a handful of pieces of shaped flint. (…)

What were these ancestral societies like? At this point, at least, we should be honest and admit that, for the most part, we don’t have the slightest idea.… Most of the time we don’t even really know what was going on below the neck, let alone with pigmentation, diet or anything else.”^[16]

In 2024, archaeologist Harald Meller, historian Kai Michel, and evolutionary biologist Carel van Schaik confirmed: “We are dealing with a vanishingly small number of preserved human bones.” ^[17] One estimate they cited put the number of “Homo sapiens remains older than 10,000 years” at 3,000.^[18]

The total number of prehistoric, primitive, early, and modern humans who had populated the Earth up to that point is estimated — necessarily highly speculatively — at more than seven billion.^[19] Since the population of human-like beings apparently grew only slowly at first, the vast majority of them belonged to the Homo sapiens group.^[20]

A few thousand remains scattered across half the Earth from billions of individuals, fewer and fewer of which can be found as time passes: this illustrates how shaky all generalizing conclusions about early human-like creatures and humans are. There can be no question that skeletal remains of a few individuals are sufficient to make representative statements about large groups of living humans.

Teeth and skull bones, which make up the vast majority of these finds, do not contain any information about psychosocial aspects or the mental and emotional state of their former owners. Nor do they reveal whether they were warlike or peace-loving.

The “first direct evidence of what we’d now call complex symbolic human behaviour, or simply ‘culture’ … dates back no more than 100,000 years.” And it is only since about 45,000 years ago that such evidence has gradually become more common.^[21]

At this point, however, Homo sapiens had already been around for about 250,000 years. But even what we think we know about the psychic constitution, motives, goals, and social behaviors of human beings in those 250,000 years rests almost exclusively on more or less plausible assumptions, with the exception of the last five millennia.

A report from June 6, 2023 that already 200,000 years ago hominids — human-like ancestors — supposedly buried their relatives revealed once more how provisional these assumptions often are. Prior to that, this had been conceded only as regards Neandertals and Homo sapiens — moreover, only since 100,00 years ago. These findings, the report says, “call into question the previous understanding of human evolution, according to which only the development of larger brains made possible complex activities such as burying the dead.”^[22]

A compact compilation of early archaeological findings and the assumptions derived from them can be found in the book Weltgeschichte der Psychologie (World History of Psychology), written by psychologist and anthropologist Hannes Stubbe.^[23]

Care instead of murder

R. Brian Ferguson, another anthropologist, has examined hundreds of Homo sapiens skeletons that were older than 10,000 years, in various places of dicovery, to determine whether they showed signs of interpersonal violence. The result: this was the case in only about three dozens of them.^[24] In other words, he found no archaeological evidence of war more than 10,000 years ago. Furthermore, the violence did not have to be intentional.

In fact, there is evidence of interpersonal violence even in prehistoric times; the earliest dates back approximately 430,000 years. ^[25] After combing through the entire three million years since the emergence of the genus Homo in their book Die Evolution der Gewalt (The Evolution of Violence), Meller, Michel, and van Schaik conclude that they “have not overlooked any significant traces” and that “there is not even a handful of evidence for the intentional killing of humans.”^[26]

But even if these killings were murders, which can never be determined in the absence of eyewitness accounts, murder is not war. And a single murderer—about whom, unlike the victim, no information can be obtained—cannot be considered representative of the human population at that time.

Harald Meller and his co-authors also note:

“If one looks for prehistoric evidence of war, murder, and manslaughter, one finds instead evidence of care and nurturing. Paleoarchaeological findings testify that humans helped and supported each other; otherwise, many injuries would have been a death sentence.”

As an example, they cite a Neanderthal who also died around 430,000 years ago and who “suffered from a whole range of degenerative diseases, trauma, a shortened right arm, and probably blindness in the left eye, as well as severe hearing loss” yet reached an age of “forty to fifty years” — which was only conceivable with “daily support” from his group, including wound treatment.^[27]

  

Criteria for “war”

Furthermore, not every intentional act of interpersonal violence, not even every conflict fought with weapons, is a war. To consult Wikipedia once again:

“A fundamental challenge in classifying wars is the question of when a war can be called a war. In political and scientific analysis, a distinction is often made between armed conflict and war. An armed conflict is defined as a sporadic, rather random and non-strategic armed clash between warring parties.“^[28]

In “large research projects,” it goes on to say, “the threshold of 1,000 deaths per year is considered a rough indicator that an armed conflict is escalating into war.” Other “definitions of war” also require “a minimum of continuous planning and organization on the part of at least one of the opponents” or “that at least one of the fighting parties must be a state that is participating in the conflict with its armed forces.”^[29]

A find that had long been considered evidence of the oldest armed conflict only partially met the above criteria. R. Brian Ferguson reports on the excavation in what is now Sudan:

“Brought to light during an expedition in the mid-1960s led by Fred Wendorf, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, this graveyard, known as Site 117, has been roughly estimated at between 12,000 and 14,000 years old. It contained fifty-nine well-preserved skeletons, twenty-four of which were found in close association with pieces of stone that were interpreted as parts of projectiles.“^[30]

Since then, 61 dead people of different ages and both sexes have been found there; 41 skeletons show signs of injury.^[31] However, it could not be determined whether these dead were buried at the same time or over a period of several years. In his book Als der Mensch den Krieg erfand (When Man Invented War), prehistorian Dirk Husemann points out that Fred Wendorf discovered “another burial site from the same period nearby” in which “not a single dead person with injuries” was found. It was therefore considered possible that at site 117, “only those who had died a violent death were deliberately laid to rest.”^[32] It has since emerged that “many of these people showed signs of injury”—mostly from arrows or spears—“that had already healed at the time of their death”;^[33] this was the case for three-quarters of the adults.

Dirk Husemann’s conclusion is therefore likely to be correct: a massacre can be “ruled out.”^[34] However, these findings do provide evidence of “recurring interpersonal violence.”^[35]

5,988 million years without evidence of war

But even if we wanted to classify the injuries and killings in Sudan some 12,000 years ago as signs of war, despite our complete ignorance of the circumstances, this would mean that, based on six million years of human existence, there is no evidence of war for 5,988 million years, or 99.98 percent of that time. If we instead take the three million years since the emergence of early humans, i.e., the genus Homo, as a reference value, we can say the same for 99.96 percent of this time. And even if we only use the 300,000 years of Homo sapiens existence that have been proven so far for comparison, it can be stated that for 96 percent of the lifetime of “anatomically modern humans,” there is no evidence whatsoever of any kind of armed conflict. Nor is there any evidence for the Neanderthals, who existed as a separate species up to 450,000 years ago.^[36]

Harald Meller, Kai Michel, and Carel van Schaik also state that for this infinitely long period of time, “there is no archaeological evidence of war or even sporadic conflicts between groups.” Archaeology speaks “a clear language here: from a human historical perspective, collective, organized slaughter seems to be a recent phenomenon.”^[37]   

Why on a fertile planet with inexhaustible resources,^[38] ask psychologist Christopher Ryan and psychiatrist Cacilda Jethá in their book Sex at Dawn, on a planet, which, moreover, was essentially uninhabited,^[39] should people have gone on strenuous migrations in order to kill other people somewhere or to be killed themselves?

This fits in with the fact that no scenes of war have been found in the thousands of prehistoric cave paintings that have been discovered to date.^[40]

It was only around 7,000 years ago that several mass graves appeared, which experts largely agree are evidence of warlike massacres.^[41] The earliest pictorial representations, in which archers appear to be facing each other in hostility,^[42] are currently estimated to be around 5,000 years old.^[43]

Wars, it can be assumed, were primarily a result of the emergence of authoritarian social structures and the accompanying unequal distribution of wealth, perhaps further fueled by natural disasters and their manifold effects.^[44]

Let us therefore note the following: statements such as those quoted at the beginning by Barack Obama or the Zukunftsinstitut (“Ever since humans have existed, there have been warlike conflict”) are in no way verifiable and therefore unscientific.

Anyone who nevertheless propagates such ideas must be asked on what basis and with what motivation they are doing so. In Obama’s case, the answer is obvious: portraying war as a deeply human trait must have made it easier for him to wage war himself without feeling guilty.

Similarly, it probably suits today’s warmongers in governments and the mass media to point to a supposed innate willingness or even desire to destroy and kill in order to make the “war readiness” they strive for palatable to us, according to the motto: “You want it anyway!”

Basically, if you believe that humans are inherently destructive, you don’t have to ask the annoying question of what makes people “evil” in the first place.

 

Limits of knowledge

The lack of objective evidence likewise means that we cannot prove a consistently peaceful early phase of mankind, a paradisal, primitive-communist or matriarchal state from the earliest human times. In 1996, the archaeologists Brigitte Röder, Juliane Hummel, and Brigitta Kunz concluded after thorough research that matriarchy “can neither be proven nor disproven with archaeological sources. One of the greatest problems of archaeology is that up until today it has no key in hand to the thought world of past societies.”^[45]

For the last 50,000 years, cave drawings and figurative representations—which require interpretation — offer insights into this world of ideas. However, a more reliable “key” only developed with the possibility of recording written languages in a lasting manner, for example as cuneiform script, around 5,000 years ago.^[46] The fact that even this key is not precisely shaped — that written traditions are often wrong, distorted, and almost always incomplete — is already pointed out by the justified sentence that history is always written by the victors. In the famous case of Easter Island, it was the conquerors and slave traders who wreaked destruction on the natives, a destruction that they themselves had caused and initiated among them.^[47]

Defamatory statements about “primitive” cultures are common in historical accounts. For example, Neanderthals were and still are sometimes portrayed as muscle-bound, “mentally deficient aliens who could hardly be surpassed in dullness and lack of culture”^[48] — even though numerous finds have long since confirmed that this species, which disappeared only about 40,000 years ago, was equal to Homo sapiens in all essential aspects, just as “human” and in some cases interbred with them through reproduction.^[49] Hannes Stubbe notes: Even if some scientists “find it difficult to admit, we must today accept Neanderthals as fully-fledged human beings with all mental, psychological, and social functions, powers, and abilities”. ^[50] And Neanderthals also had larger brains than we do…^[51]
Martin Kuckenburg has done justice to Neanderthals as the “first Europeans” in several publications.^[52]

With regard to the topic of “warlike tendencies,” two further examples of distortion of reality are worth highlighting. Only blatant data manipulation, which has since been exposed in detail^[53], allowed psychologist Steven Pinker to claim that “collective violence … has always existed everywhere”^[54] — and to derive from this an idealization of bourgeois-capitalist social structures.^[55] Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon^[56] was particularly brazen, first giving the Yanomami people axes and machetes in 1964, then using these and various false statements to claim in bestsellers that they were extremely violent. In 1995, the Yanomami banned him from entering their territory for his persistent slander.^[57]

But Chagnon, and Pinker anyway, continue to be treated as key witnesses to the brutality of indigenous peoples and inherent evil of mankind.

Historian Rutger Bregman has collected examples of the mendacity of the “standard narrative” of the “evil savage” who must first be made socially acceptable by a “good” (western) civilization. He has critically examined supposedly scientific experiments, studies, and publications on the image of humanity and concludes that humans are “basically good”.^[58]

Does the described lack of reliable data on human (pre)history mean that we cannot answer the question of whether we are born warriors? Yes indeed we can.

An innate readiness for war and killing would have to show itself always and everywhere, if only by the fact that it has to be continually suppressed. In order to reject the statement that we are born warriors as unreliable, we need therefore to prove only that history went — or could go — differently. This is entirely possible for the last few millennia.^[59]

 

Hunters and gatherers

According to Harald Meller, Kai Michel, and Carel van Schaik, we should “bury the prejudice dating back to Thomas Hobbes^[60] that the lives of our close ancestors, who were hunters and gatherers — often referred to as “foragers” — were “lonely, miserable, disgusting, animalistic, and short.”^[61] Apparently, they were taller than the average person today, and their life expectancy may have been between 70 and 90 years, according to Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá. Anthropologist Robert Edgerton also believes that in Europe urban populations probably “did not match the longevity of hunter-gatherers until the mid-nineteenth or even twentieth century.”^[62] These nomads were apparently “perfectly adapted to their habitats” and would have had little reason to start conflicts over a lack of resources.^[63]

This is also suggested by research on 148 deadly acts of aggression in 21 earlier and more contemporary hunter-gatherer communities conducted by anthropologist Douglas P. Fry and philosopher Patrik Söderberg.^[64] They summarize their findings as follows: The background to these deaths was mostly personal motives such as jealousy or revenge, rarely a family feud, and even much rarer a conflict between political communities or war. In about half of the communities, there were no fatal incidents involving more than one perpetrator.^[65]
Hunter-gatherer societies also did not exist only before the emergence of states, which were first founded around 6,000 years ago, but alongside them for thousands of years.^[66]

As James C. Scott points out in his book Against The Grain^[67], this parallel existence was due in no small part to the fact that hunter-gatherer life remained an attractive alternative to settling down. This is because in these newly founded states, life expectancy and quality of life did not increase at first, but rather decreased — among other things, because the close co-existence of people with each other and with domestic animals caused epidemics, and because people were now forced to obtain everything necessary for life primarily in one and the same place.

However, there were also examples of peaceful coexistence in the large cities that were emerging. One of these settlements was Catal Hüyük (or Çatalhöyük) in Anatolia.^[68] It existed for about 1500 years beginning in 7400 BCE, had an area extending to 13 hectares and several thousand inhabitants. Access to food and material possessions were apparently distributed quite evenly; there is no evidence of a central authority responsible for order, let alone oppression, and there is just as little evidence of violent crime or murderous struggles.

However only 5% of this settlement has been archaeologically explored so far.^[69] Nonetheless, this is also a strong indication that wars are NOT a constant of human-kind.
By means of ethnographic research carried out up to the present day, it can also still be proven beyond doubt that human beings are able to live peacefully with each other over the long haul.

 

Learning from the most peaceful societies

In 2021, Douglas P. Fry, who has been researching opportunities for peacekeeping for many years^[70], and social psychologist Peter T. Coleman presented their “Sustaining Peace Project”^[71] in an article. Since 2014, their group of psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, astrophysicists, environmental and political scientists, and information and communication experts has been working to achieve „a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of lasting peace.” Contrary to common media portrayals, Coleman and Fry write that there are still many societies that have lived in peace within their borders and with their neighbors “for 50, 100, even several hundred years.” This „refutes the widely held and often self-fulfilling belief that humans are innately territorial and hardwired for war.”^[72] Among other examples, they cite the ten neighboring tribes in the upper reaches of the Xingu River in Brazil, the Swiss cantons, and the confederation of the Iroquois.

They identified the following as particularly conducive to peace: a higher common identity/ connecting collective activities and institutions/ norms, values, rituals, and symbols directed against war/ a “language of peace” in the mass media, where available/ politicians, entrepreneurs, clergy, and activists who contribute to developing and realizing a vision of peace.^[73]

This raises the question of what is available today in Germany or the EU. Coleman and Fry also classify the latter as a peace-loving society. But their article dates back to 2021 …

For further reading, the Sustaining Peace Project website^[74]  recommends Fry’s book The Human Potential for Peace.

Anatomy of Human Destructiveness

As early as 1973, psychoanalyst and social researcher Erich Fromm compiled reports on different ethnic groups and the quality of their social relationships. In his groundbreaking work The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness^[75], one reads that even in the second half of the 20th century there were stable, life-affirming, unwarlike, often matriarchally-oriented social associations in which there was no need to hold down an alleged instinct to kill.^[76]
Fromm summarizes:

“While we find in all cultures that people defend themselves against threats to their lives by fighting (or fleeing), destructiveness and cruelty are so minimal in so many societies that these great differences cannot be explained if we are dealing with an ‚innate‘ passion.“^[77]

Incidentally, Erich Fromm’s book is to my knowledge the most comprehensive compilation of arguments from psychoanalysis, (social) psychology, paleontology, anthropology, archaeology, neuro-physiology, animal psychology, and historical science that speak for an innate human tendency to cooperation and peacefulness.
I would like to highlight just a few of the points that are directly relevant to our topic:

– Aggression itself, derived from the Latin “aggredere” = to approach someone or something, to attack something, is not only not a bad thing, but a vital, healthy part of our repertoire of actions. Only with its help is it possible to set boundaries, assert ourselves, and defend ourselves. We need this ability right from the start of our lives in order to push ourselves through the narrow birth canal and be born. Both animals and humans possess the ability to be aggressively healthy in this sense. It is always linked to threatening situations or challenges. The assumptions of an “aggression instinct” (Konrad Lorenz) or even a death instinct (Sigmund Freud) are baseless speculation.^[78]

– Under certain circumstances, aggressive behavior can also be associated with destruction, for ex-ample when a lion kills an antelope or when people kill in acute self-defense. But in animals, as in mentally healthy humans, this destruction is never an end in itself.

– Neither animals nor mentally healthy humans behave in a sadistic, deliberately hostile, or pleasurably brutal manner. Only people who have been made destructive and are therefore severely psychically disturbed want war.

– Humans are capable of mentally anticipating both real and unreal, merely suggested vital threats. The latter can also trigger biologically based aggression or destruction in humans, serving the  purpose of species or self-preservation. This has been — and continues to be — used by power elites to generate mass readiness for war.

– A meaningful existence, fulfilling interpersonal relationships, and profound psychotherapy can help to alleviate or heal the effects of socialization that leads to destructiveness.[79]

The question of whether we come into the world as potential killers can also be examined on the basis of individual biographies. The biographies of people who have committed such serious crimes as instigating war and mass murder are predestined for this.

Goebbels

Joseph Goebbels,^[80] born 1897, became later as Nazi Propaganda Minister one of the main proponents of the Nazi state’s anti-Jewish, anti-Communist, and anti-Russian warmongering.

A passionate enthusiast in his childhood and youth, Goebbels wrote poems, plays, and piano pieces; he read Gottfried Keller, Theodor Storm, Schiller, and Goethe among other authors. He fell in love and hoped for a life full of love and recognition.

The fact that this hope visibly failed was due in part to the clubfoot he developed as a child — or rather, due to negative reactions to this disability. For his strict Catholic parents, it represented a ‘affliction’ that was best denied. Among relatives and class-mates, it triggered aversion and even disgust, as later also among some of the women he desired.
Over time, the substitute object “fatherland” came to the fore in place of unfulfilled love for other people. But still in 1919, as a 22-year-old with a “völkisch” (nationalist) attitude, Goebbels successfully applied for a doctorate under a Jewish professor and described him to be “an extraordinarily kind” and “obliging man”.^[81]
In 1920, Goebbels reflected on the initially victorious ‘leftist’ mass uprising in West Germany against reactionary Freikorps (volunteer paramilitary troops) and the Reichswehr (the German army) thus: “Red Revolution in the Ruhr region …. I am enthusiastic from a distance.”^[82]

In search of a ‘genius’ who might redeem him and Germany, he first heard of Adolf Hitler in 1921—and was disappointed. He wrote: “Just seeing a swastika gives me the urge to shit right then and there.”^[83]

But professional and private frustrations, unemployment, hunger, existential insecurity followed,^[84] and mental problems accumulated: feelings of futility, suicidal thoughts, alcohol abuse, nervous breakdowns. At this point “phases of deep depression” alternated with “outbursts of fanatical will.”^[85]

In 1922, he learned from his fiancée that she was a “half-Jew”; he was irritated but did not end the relationship at first.^[86]
In 1924, he was still able to find positive sides to Karl Marx’s Capital.^[87]

But gradually he fell completely under the spell of National Socialist ideology and the Führer cult, not least because they allowed him to suppress feelings of inferiority and depression. Now — as he wrote — “a white cloud in the sky above took the form of a swastika.” The unconditional follower of Hitler was ready.

Admittedly, this process took almost 30 years.

Hitler

Hardly anyone else has been the subject of so many publications as Adolf Hitler. Recently a book has appeared that brings together the current state of knowledge about his childhood and youth: Hitler —Prägende Jahre (Hitler—formative Years).^[89]

From this book one gets the same picture again: the pubescent Hitler was obviously increasingly characterized by self-esteem problems compensated by ideas of grandeur; doggedness, stubbornness, and verbal aggressiveness also increased.

But this was no surprise, even common, given the often brutally oppressive treatment of children and young people typical of the time, to which he was also exposed.

And Hitler was able to preserve another side for a long time, namely, an emotional vibrancy. The Jewish doctor Eduard Bloch, who had tried in vain to save the mother of the then 18-year-old Hitler from dying of cancer, described decades later how he had perceived the son on the day of his mother’s death:

“Adolf, whose face showed the overtiredness of a sleepless night, sat next to his mother. To capture a last impression of her, he had drawn her …. In my career I have never seen anyone so destroyed by grief as Adolf Hitler. … No one at that time would have guessed in the least that he would one day become the embodiment of all wickedness.“^[90]

Not even Goebbels or Hitler can therefore be accused of having been born monsters, of having been born with a natural talent for war.

Incidentally, studying soldiers can occasionally give rise to hope. US military expert Dave Grossman proves that “the greatest challenge facing armies is overcoming the reluctance of soldiers to kill other human beings.” The “inhibition to kill” can only be overcome through “desensitizing drill and targeted training.” In World War II, US soldiers were so unprepared for killing “that only 15 to 20 percent of infantrymen even fired a shot.”[91]

In a Nutshell

1) The assertion, ever since humans have existed, there have been warlike conflicts cannot be proven and is therefore unscientific, dubious, and misleading.

2) The question whether we are “born warriors” can very well be scientifically examined — and answered with a clear NO.

Anyone who has children of their own, or has sufficient contact with young children, can also briefly consider whether they perceive these children as gratuitously aggressive or even destructive — as ‘born warriors’ to whom one could ascribe a willingness to kill.

There are now numerous findings from various branches of science that prove that we come into the world with the potential for pro-social behavior, for love, friendship, cooperation, and peacefulness.^[92] And this potential is eager to be realized! Even the politicians who today again instigate war and mass murder, even those who then carry out these murders, were born not many years ago as good human beings.
In other words, we all have what it takes to be good people within a good society.

Building on this, a plausible speculation about human early history or prehistory is once more possible. A thesis accepted by many scientists today is to assume a “psychic unity” for all rep-resentatives of Homo sapiens. Neanderthals can certainly be included here.
In other words: ever since there have been modern human beings, they have been equipped with similar psychic predispositions. Graeber and Wengrow write in this regard: “even those who make their living hunting elephants or gathering lotus buds are just as sceptical, imaginative, thoughtful and capable of critical analysis as those who make their living by operating tractors, managing restaurants or chairing university departments.“^[93]

Thus one can assume that even our most distant human ancestors were no more warlike than we are by birth.

And today?

If there is the potential in us to be good people in a good society — what is the reason if this potential does not unfold?

Because of the fact that we do not live in a good society.

Children are in no way less valuable than adults. Compared to the latter, however, they have hardly any opportunities to determine their own living conditions.

In a world like ours, which is characterized by authoritarian hierarchies, exploitation, oppression, family and state control, and environmental destruction, there is little room for the development of psychologically healthy children.
The resulting suffering and deprivation, their often inadequately satisfied needs, cause grief, pain, and anger — which, as a rule, may not be adequately expressed to their educators.

For this reason these feelings get dammed up until they reach destructive proportions — a condition later reinforced by humiliations at school, in training, and in the professional and working spheres. Since even such dammedup feelings are usually not allowed to be acted out officially — unless, e.g., one becomes a soldier — they are hidden behind a façade of social conformity, politeness, and niceness.

This is how the “authoritarian character“ comes into being, even still: bowing to those above and stepping on those below.^[94]

And this has highly alarming consequences for the entire social fabric. These destructive emotions are not only permanently present in a subliminal form. They can at any time burst out of hiding, given the occasion. This is all the easier when the media and politicians provide socially weaker or demonized “strangers” as targets. In earlier Germany, these used to be Jews, communists, and Russians — and now they are Russians again, and soon probably Chinese as well.^[95]

In this way, through the mass socialization of destructive psychological structures and media manipulation, attempts have been and are being made to train people to be “fit for war.” The more we have dammed-up aggression and the more we are impaired in our self-esteem, the more usable we are for all kinds of destructive purposes, whether these are dressed up with nationalist, neo-fascist, fundamentalist, imperialist, environmentally destructive, anti-children, anti-women, homophobic, or xenophobic ideologies.

If the dammed-up explosive rage on a mass basis offered an outlet, the underlying convictions are interchangeable: terror and murder can be perpetrated with the alibi of ‘right-wing’ as well as ‘left-wing’ world views: for the glory of God, for Allah’s sake, for the benefit of an eco-dictatorship or — as at present — as a component of Western, neoliberal, “rule-based” world order.

The psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich described the basic process in his 1933 book Massenpsychologie des Faschismus (Mass Psychology of Fascism): The suppression of children makes them “fearful, shy, fearful of authority, well-behaved in the bourgeois sense, and educable.” Children first pass through “the authoritarian miniature state of the family … in order to be able to fit into the general social framework later on.” The pent-up life energy, which after undergoing this educational process can no longer be released naturally, now seeks substitute outlets, flows into natural aggression and thus increases it “to brutal sadism, which forms an essential part of the mass psychological basis of the war staged by a few for imperialist interests.” People who are psychologically deformed in this way “act, feel, and think” contrary to their own interests in life.^[96]

In this way, we are MADE into “warriors.”

But since it is in our nature to be peaceful, supportive, and prosocial — we cannot be “human” without other people, nor can we exist without them at the beginning of our lives — being trained to be “war-ready” makes us sick.

Alternatives, perspectives

The question remains: What must happen for people to BECOME as peaceful as they apparently are when they are born — or, even better, for them to REMAIN as peaceful as they are?

Since I have already expressed my views on this many times,^[97] I will be very brief.

We still need a radical overhaul of economic and political conditions, a departure from our increasingly destructive neoliberal capitalist social structure. However, this alone is not enough, as the ultimately failed experiment of “real socialism” has shown. A psychosocial revolution must also take place.

Wilhelm Reich summed up the underlying connection as early as 1934: “If you try to change the structure of people alone, society resists. If one tries to change society alone, the people resist. This shows that not a single thing can be changed on its own.“^[98]

For our present time, this could be concretized as follows: adults should work on their inherited mental disorders — mostly by recourse to psychotherapeutic knowledge — and at the same time ensure that their children and grandchildren are spared from developing these disorders in the first place.

The psychoanalyst Hans-Joachim Maaz introduced a corresponding concept of “therapeutic culture” in 1989 in the period of upheaval in the GDR in his book Der Gefühlsstau (The Emotional Blockage)^[99], and has since developed it further into “relationship culture”^[100].

Accompanying children lovingly into life, actively striving for good and equal partnerships, fulfilled sexuality, and mental health, privately and publicly denouncing authoritarian, anti-life or even warmongering norms in the family, school, work, media, church, politics and state and looking for like-minded people with whom to resist them – this has now become even more important and explosive.^[101]

The most succinct description of the long-term goal of such efforts comes from Erich Fromm: a healthy society in which “no one is threatened any longer: not the child by the parent; not the parents by the superior; no social class by another; no nation by a superpower.“^[102]

 

***

 

Notes and sources

[1] An earlier German version of this article was published on my website in 2023 and on apolut in 2025 (https://apolut.net/sind-wir-geborene-krieger/). The philosopher Stephen A. Cooper, who researches religious history in particular, as well as Wilhelm Reich had corrected and revised my English translation of this earlier version. To use this again in the new text was a great help to me. Also the productive exchange with prehistorian and cultural scientist Martin Kuckenburg contributed significantly to the revision of my older article.

Since I borrow here from various fields of science for which I have no special qualification, and I mainly use secondary sources, I recommend you formulate your own impressions with the help of the books highlighted in the text. And check the internet regularly for updates, especially on archaeological finds.

[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krieg#Ebenen_der_Kriegsf%C3%BChrung.

[3] Heraclitus, frag. 215: “War is the father of all and king of all, and some he shows as gods, others as men; some he makes slaves, others free” (trans., G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philoso-phers [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957] ), 195.

[4] Thomas Hobbes, De Cive: The Latin Version, ed. Harold Warrender (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1983), 81: “I first show that the condition of human beings outside civil society—a condition one may call the state of nature—is none other than a war of all against all, and that in this war all people have the right to all things” (trans. Stephen A. Cooper).
[5] Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychologi-cal Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. 21 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961 [orig. 1930]), 111–112. Freud does not attribute the saying from Plautus, Asin. 2.4.88 to Hobbes, who had cited it in the dedicatory opening of De Cive (p. 73). On the fact that the saying defames wolves, see: https://andreas-peglau-psychoanalyse. de/der-mensch-ist-dem-menschen-kein-wolf-ueber-eine-eklatante-freudsche-fehlleistung/.

[6] Since May 2016, Obama has been “officially the US president with the most days of war.” Under his administration, the US had waged “a total of 2,663 days of war” (https://www.spiegel. de/panorama/krieg-barack-obama-ist-der-us-praesident-mit-den-meisten-kriegstagen-a-00000000-0003-0001-0000-000000567071). In addition, “drone killings became state doctrine, and every week he signed the so-called ‘kill list’” (https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/drohnenkrieg-obamas-toedliches-erbe-100.html), which claimed the lives of several thousand innocent people – as “collateral damage.”

[7] https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article5490579/Seine-Rede-zum-Friedensnobelpreis-im-Wortlaut.html.

[8] https://www.zukunftsinstitut.de/artikel/warum-gibt-es-noch-immer-kriege/ I was unable to find this article still on the institute’s newly designed website in March 2025.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Martin Kuckenburg (1993): Siedlungen der Vorgeschichte in Deutschland, 300.000 bis 15 v. Chr., Dumont, 10.

[11] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menschenaffen#Entwicklungsgeschichte. The website https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominisation mentions five to seven million years, while https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stammesgeschichte_des_Menschen cites 7.9 million years. It is highly speculative to draw conclusions about the psychosocial characteristics of modern humans based on the behavior of modern chimpanzees (and bonobos): In six million years of independent development, a lot can have changed in both species. Anthropologist R. B. Ferguson has researched studies that suggest that today’s chimpanzees are “killer apes” – which is often interpreted as a legacy of humanity. The result: of the 27 killings among conspecifics recorded or suspected at 18 chimpanzee research sites “in a total of 426 years of field observations,” “15 came from only two highly conflictual situations […]. The remaining 417 years of observation yield an average of only 0.03 killings per year.” Furthermore, Ferguson considers it likely that these fatal conflicts “are not an evolutionary strategy, but a response to human intervention” in the chimpanzees‘ habitat (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/war-is-not-part-of-human-nature/. See also Martin Kuckenburg, 1999: Lag Eden im Neandertal? Auf der Suche nach den frühen Menschen, Econ, 154ff.

[12] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stammesgeschichte_des_Menschen.

[13] https://www.mpg.de/11820357/mpi_evan_jb_2017. However, since there is “a wide range of variations in the appearance of modern humans,” “there is no consensus on what ‘modern’ humans are and when they first appeared in the fossil record” (G. J. Sawyer/ Viktor Deak: Der lange Weg zum Menschen. Lebensbilder aus sieben Millionen Jahren Evolution, Spektrum 2008, 174). In the case of earlier, pre-human hominids, the evidence is becoming increasingly unclear. In many cases, bones whose ages differ by hundreds of thousands of years or whose sites of discovery are thousands of kilometers apart are pieced together to (re)construct the assumed hominid species (ibid., e.g., 13f.). The much-publicized “Denisova Man,” for example, is said to be “reliably documented” not only by DNA analysis, but also by a finger bone (age: 48,000 to 30,000 years), a toe bone (age: 130,000 to 90,900 years), two molars (one older than 50,000 years, one younger than 50,000 years), all found on the border of Kazakhstan, and a lower jaw excavated in very distant Chinese Tibet (age: 160,000 years) (https://de. wikipedia.org/wiki/Denisova-Mensch; https://www.mpg.de/5018113/denisova-genom).

[14] https://www.planet-wissen.de/natur/energie/feuer/index.html

[15] James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 3. Compare Hannes Stubbe, Weltgeschichte der Psychologie (Lengerich/Westfalen: Pabst, 2021), 27.

[16] David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 79.  Kuckenburg (as in note 11, 13–15) describes the handicaps of archaeology and paleoanthropology in a very similar way.

[17] Harald Meller & Kai Michel & Carel van Schaik (2024): Die Evolution der Gewalt. Warum wir Frieden wollen, aber Kriege führen, dtv, 136.

[18] Ibid., 152.

[19] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/projekte/artikel/wissen/acht-milliarden-menschheit-wachstum-e418385/ For hypotheses about violent fluctuations in prehistoric populations, see: https://science.orf.at/stories/3221020/.

[20] Since fewer and fewer skeletal remains are being found among the 3,000 remains as time passes, the total number does not increase significantly when going beyond the circle of Homo sapiens. Even of the “many millions of Neanderthals” who are believed to have lived in total, “only the remains of two to three hundred individuals” have been found so far (Rebecca Wragg Sykes, 2022: Der verkannte Mensch. Ein neuer Blick auf Leben, Liebe und Kunst der Neandertaler, Goldmann, 63).

[21] Graeber & Wengrow (as in note 16), 81. The radiocarbon method, which is often used for dating, only works for the last 60,000 years: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiokarbonmethode.

[22] https://science.orf.at/stories/3219658/

[23] See Stubbe (as in note 15), 15–67.

[24] R. Brian Ferguson, “The Birth of War” (https://www.naturalhistorymag.com/htmlsite/0703/0703_feature.html). There he writes: „Apart from Site 117, only about a dozen Homo sapiens skeletons 10,000 years old or older, out of hundreds of similar antiquity examined to date, show clear indications of interpersonal violence“. Because in „Site 117“ – see below – he found 24 of such skeletons I speak in total about „three dozens“.

[25] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Cranium-17-bone-traumatic-fractures-A-Frontal-view-of-Cranium-17-showing-the-position_fig4_277326376.

[26] Meller et al (as in note 17), 146.

[27] Ibid., 139.

[28] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krieg. In the English version of wikipedia it reads: „War is an armed conflict between the armed forces of states, or between governmental forces and armed groups that are organized under a certain command structure and have the capacity to sustain military operations, or between such organized groups. It is generally characterized by widespread violence, destruction, and mortality, using regular or irregular military forces“ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War).

[29] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krieg.
[30] R. Brian Ferguson (as in note 24).

[31] https://www.scinexx.de/news/geowissen/kein-steinzeit-krieg-in-jebel-sahaba/.

[32] Dirk Husemann (2005): Als der Mensch den Krieg erfand, Thorbecke, 34.

[33] As in note 31.

[34] Husemann (as in note 32), 34. Meller et al (as in note 17), 154f, argue similarly.

[35] Ibid., 155.

[36] Wragg Sykes (as in note 20), 25. Today, there seems to be widespread consensus that the theory that Homo sapiens wiped out the Neanderthals cannot be upheld. See ibid., 451–454; Martin Kuckenburg (2005): Der Neandertaler. Auf den Spuren des ersten Europäers, Klett-Cotta, 282–296; Meller et al (as in note 17), 142.

[37] Meller et al (as in note 17), 146f., 162.

[38] 35,000 years ago, there were thought to be a maximum of three million people on Earth (Scott, as in note 15), 6.

[39] Christopher Ryan & Cacilda Jethá, Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010, 202) refer to Marshall Sahlin’s essay “The Original Affluent Society,” in Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1972), 5–41 (essay available at: https://www.uvm.edu/~jdericks/EE/Sahlins-Original_Affluent_Society.pdf).

[40] Rutger Bregman: Humankind: A Hopeful History, trans. from the Dutch by Elizabeth Manton and Erica Moore (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2020). The oldest known cave painting is 45,000 years old (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%B6hlenmalerei).

[41] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massaker_von_Kilianst%C3%A4dten, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massaker_von_Halberstadt, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massaker_von_Talheim, https://de. wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_Silesia; https://www.scinexx.de/news/archaeologie/war-dies-der-erste-krieg-europas/.

[42] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felsmalereien_in_der_spanischen_Levante. See also Husemann (as in note 32), 61f.

[43] The first evidence of weapons being used for hunting dates back around 500,000 years (https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/fruehmenschen-jagten-schon-vor-500000-jahren-mit-stein-speerspitzen-a-867412.html). The only weapons that can be “unequivocally confirmed” as hunting weapons are spears dating back 300,000 years, which were found in Schöningen, Lower Saxony, among the bones of numerous wild horses that had been killed with them (Martin Kuckenburg, 2022: Friedrich Engels‘ Frühgeschichte und die moderne Archäologie, no place of publication, 79). But being able to hunt animals with these weapons does not mean wanting to kill humans with them. In 2025, after applying a controversial dating method, the spears were estimated to be only 200,000 years old (https://www.welt.de/wissenschaft/article256093064/Archaeologie-Die-Schoeninger-Speere-sind-100-000-Jahre-juenger-mit-Folgen.html).

[44] See Scott (as in note 15), 159–164.

[45] Brigitte Röder/ Juliane Hummel/ Brigitta Kunz (2001) [1996]: Göttinnendämmerung. Das Matriarchat aus archäologischer Sicht, Königsfurt, 396. See also Graeber & Wengrow (as in note 16), 238–244.

[46] Scott (as in note 15), 20. See also https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geschichte_der_Schrift. For more details, see Martin Kuckenburg (2016): Wer sprach das erste Wort? Die Entstehung von Sprache und Schrift, Theiss.

[47] Bregman (as in note 40), 115–134.

[48] Kuckenburg (as in note 36), 9.

[49] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neandertaler#Verwandtschaft_zum_modernen_Menschen.

[50] Stubbe (as in note 15), 33.

[51] This might but does not necessarily mean that they were more intelligent than us (cf. ibid., 25).

[52] See, among others, notes 16 and 36.

[53] R. Brian Ferguson (2013): Pinker’s List: Exaggerating Prehistoric War Mortality, in Douglas P. Fry (ed.): War, Peace, and Human Nature, Oxford University Press, 112–131 (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273371719_Pinker’s_List_Exaggerating_Prehistoric_War_Mortality). For the claims and data manipulation of Steven Pinker see also Bregman (as in note 40), 78–91; Ryan & Jethá (as in note 39), 183–186.

[54] Meller et al (as in note 17), 37.

[55] https://scilogs.spektrum.de/menschen-bilder/wird-alles-immer-besser-ein-kritischer-blick-auf-steven-pinkers-geschichtsoptimismus/.

[56] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Chagnon

[57] Ryan & Jethá (as in note 39), 223–227; Bregman (as in note 40), 111f.

[58] Bregman (as in note 40).

[59] In anthropology, due to the lack of evaluable remains from prehistory, it is not uncommon to draw conclusions about the way of life of early Homo sapiens from traditions handed down over the last few millennia or from field observations of hunters and gatherers up to the present day. But these are also speculations. Especially since there are hardly any ethnic groups today that are completely cut off from the rest of the world. See Kuckenburg (as note 43), 136f.

[60] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hobbes.

[61] Meller et al (as in note 17), 113.

[62] Ryan & Jethá (as in note 39), 204, 236, 238.

[63] Meller et al (as in note 17), 113.

[64] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/250920560_Lethal_Aggression_in_Mobile_Forager_Bands_and_Implications_for_the_Origins_of_War.

[65] Ibid., p. 272.

[66] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staatsentstehung.

[67] Scott (as in note 15).

[68] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%87atalh%C3%B6y%C3%BCk.

[69] Graeber & Wengrow (as in note 16), 212–214, 223.

[70] https://www.uncg.edu/employees/douglas-fry/.

[71] https://sustainingpeaceproject.com/.

[72] https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/what_can_we_learn_from_the_worlds_most_peaceful_societies.

[73] Ibid.

[74] Douglas P. Fry (2005): The Human Potential for Peace: An Anthropological Challenge to Assumptions about War and Violence, Oxford University Press; https://sustainingpeaceproject.com/.

[75] Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1973).
[76] As recently as 1998, the ethnographic atlas listed 160 “purely matrilineal” – i.e., only maternal descent – “indigenous peoples and ethnic groups.” That was around 13% of the 1,267 ethnic groups recorded worldwide (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matriarchat).

[77] Fromm (as in note 75), 172.

[78] For more on this, see: https://andreas-peglau-psychoanalyse.de/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Mythos-Todestrieb-pid_2018_02_Peglau.pdf.

[79] Also my therapeutic work constantly proves to me that it is possible for people to overcome destructive influences.

[80] See Goebbels, Joseph (1992) [1990]: Tagebücher 1924–1945 in fünf Bänden, ed. by Reuth, Ralf Georg, Piper; Longerich, Peter (2010): Goebbels. Biographie, Siedler; Reuth, Ralf G. (1991) [1990]: Goebbels, Piper, see in particular 11–75.

[81] Ibid., 52.

[82] Ibid., 47.

[83] Ibid., 52.

[84] Ibid., 68–73.

[85] Ibid., 63.

[86] Ibid., 73.

[87] Longerich (as in note 80), 58.

[88] Reuth (as in note 80), 104.

[89] Hannes Leidinger & Christian Rapp (2020): Hitler – Prägende Jahre. Kindheit und Jugend 1889–1914, Residenz. See also: Brigitte Hamann (1998): Hitlers Wien: Lehrjahre eines Diktators, Piper.

[90] Leidinger & Rapp (as note 89), 152. For details, see Brigitte Hamann (2010): Hitlers Edeljude: Das Leben des Armenarztes Eduard Bloch, Piper.

[91] Meller et al (as in note 17), 124.

[92] In addition to the books used in this text, see Gerald Hüther, Die Evolution der Liebe. Was Darwin bereits ahnte und die Darwinisten nicht wahrhaben wollen [= The Evolution of Love: What Darwin already sus-pected and the Darwinists do not want to admit] (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2012); Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of the Sub-jective Experience (New York: Other Press, 2002; Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); Stefan Klein, Der Sinn des Gebens: Warum Selbstlosigkeit in der Evolution siegt und wir mit Egoismus nicht weiterkommen [= The Meaning of Giving: Why selflessness triumphs in evolution and we don’t get anywhere with egotism] (Flörsheim am Main: Fischer, 2010); Joachim Bauer, Selbststeuerung: Die Wiederentdeckung des freien Willens [ = Self-Regulation: The rediscovery of free will] (Munich: Blessing Verlag, 2015). Also check out Erwin Wagenhofer’s film documentary (2013), Alphabet—Angst oder Liebe, which illustrates this in a touching way (https://www.alphabet-film.com/).
[93] As in note 16, 114f. See also Bregman (as in note 40), 79f.

[94] This alludes to a German proverb (nach oben buckeln, nach unten treten = “bow to those above, step on those below”) that expresses the brutality of the relationships between social classes in author-itarian societies. Cf.: https://duepublico2.uni-due.de/servlets/MCRFileNodeServlet/duepublico_derivate_00045266/05_Peglau_Autoritarismus.pdf.

[95] See also https://andreas-peglau-psychoanalyse.de/andreas-peglau-utopie-oder-dystopie-zitate-und-notizen-zu-china-mai-2020-bis-oktober-2021/.

[96] Wilhelm Reich (2020): Massenpsychologie des Faschismus. Der Originaltext, Psychosozial, 38, 40.

[97] For example, in Andreas Peglau (2024): Menschen als Marionetten? Wie Marx and Engels die reale Psyche in ihrer Lehre verdrängten (https://andreas-peglau-psychoanalyse.de/menschen-als-marionetten-wie-marx-und-engels-die-reale-psyche-in-ihrer-lehre-verdraengten/), 70–74.

[98] Wilhelm Reich (as in note 96), 195.

[99] See also: https://andreas-peglau-psychoanalyse.de/psychische-revolution-und-therapeutische-kultur-vorschlaege-fuer-ein-alternatives-leben/.

[100] See: https://www.marxist-revisionism.org/index.php?page=article_detail&article=100&id_author=1&id_article=100&id_article_id=100&id_author_id=1&id_article_id_

[100] See: https://hans-joachim-maaz-stiftung.de/hans-joachim-maaz/buecher-von-hans-joachim-maaz/.

[101] See also https://apolut.net/im-gespraech-andreas-peglau/.

[102] Erich Fromm (as in note 75), 395.

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