Well, you don't have much choice, do you?

I just heard a long documentary on NPR about two Polish Holocaust survivors of the Nazi camps. Just before that they had a review of a new book on the American slave trade. You don't have to go into medieval times to see unbelievable cruelty, organized on an industrial scale.

The Soviet Gulags, the Cultural Revolution, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the Balkan ethnic cleansing...the list goes on and on and on...

And we are not immune. What we did to the Red Indians was no different, just safely back in the mist of history where we can't see it too clearly from our comfortable present.

And we don't dare blame our horrors on evil religions or ideologies or dictatorships. Every rapist, every schoolyard bully, every crooked cop or ghetto thug, drug dealer, gun merchant or outlaw motorcycle gang represents a bottomless well or unspeakable horror. And so does the crisp, impeccably dressed and groomed executive in his tastefully appointed suite. We don't need supernatural demons or alien monsters to give us fear and horror, its in our DNA. We're a hideous species, not because we are violent or cruel. Nature, after all, is violent and cruel. We are worse because we enjoy it.

Oh, my piglets, we are the origins of war: not history's forces, nor the times, nor justice, nor the lack of it, nor causes, nor religions, nor ideas, nor kinds of government, nor any other thing. We are the killers. We breed wars. We carry it like syphilis inside. Dead bodies rot in field and stream because the living ones are rotten.

Eleanor of Aquitaine (in "the Lion in Winter").