by Mike Pyatt
After every inexplicable tragedy, like a mass shooting, pundits scratch their head, and the narrative commences cultivating palatable reasons to a growing secular culture that instinctively rejects the possibility of absolute evil. Memories are short and selective. At the conclusion of WWI, there was a naive movement, that world powers must do whatever it takes to remove the causes for war and conflict from the earth. Idealist and humanist mislabeled WWI, “The War to end all wars.” One of the fathers of science fiction, British writer, historian, and social gadfly, H.G. Wells was considered a prophet by his humanist contemporaries, though he was known primarily for his novels, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, and the Time Machine. He predicted some of the technological advances of the 20th Century, and wrote about the evils of war, advocating a naive pacifist approach. When war descended upon Europe, he concluded that the German buildup, since the nation’s 1871 unification, was driven by a corrupt industrial and political system, that needed to be eradicated. The unbounded optimism of Western man, reached exhaustion, facing his extinction in his own manufactured, misguided nobility.
