We see this word “inhumanity”, but as I have seen noted by many people, can we really call “inhuman” acts which have been common throughout recorded history, and which presumably preceded it? If they opposed them, the Assyrians would tie conquered peoples to the ground and skin them alive, or cook them over slow fires.
The Mongols put entire cities to the sword, creating a massive pile of heads when they conquered Baghdad.
The Romans enjoyed watching people kill one another in duels, and loved watching people being fed to wild animals. How long did they watch, one wonders? Did they watch the lions literally eat their victims? Why not?
I was listening to Steven Pinker on the radio the other day. He has written a book discussing how violence in general has actually declined in the last half century, maybe more (I have not read the book). I do not normally agree with him on much of anything, but this thesis seems to me to have merit.
As he mentioned, torture used to be something that spectators observed. Western Europe was tremendously creative in the development of implements of torture both because it was useful as an instrument of State repression, but also because PEOPLE LIKED IT. According to Pinker, whole families, children included, would watch people get their intestines wound around a spool, or watch their arms broken with large hammers. As he commented, it was something that initially was abhorrent, but for which a taste could be cultivated.
In point of fact, my interest in the French Revolution began with Terry Gilliams movie “The Brothers Grimm”. In that movie, Jonathan Pryce, as an effete French aristocrat (or revolutionary equivalent), has classical music playing and his wife and others in attendance, as a woman is getting ready to be torn apart by a new implement of torture. Instead, the woman’s poodle somehow gets into the machine, and is shredded.
This left an effect on me. I wondered if it was really like that. I want you to imagine what it MUST have been like on what I recall being called the Place de la Revolution. Thousands were beheaded in front of enthusiastic crowds, sometimes for crimes as minor as not wearing the right colors, or simply having offended someone with the power to get them condemned. How much blood must have spilled? Did they clean it up? They are French; I think not. How it must have stunk in the summer!!! And who gathered the heads and bodies? If you have 20 bodies and 20 heads, that is a lot of cleaning up.
Please watch this video, once. It is horrible, but I think most Americans lack the capacity to imagine a world where people are truly indifferent to human life. We agonize over dogs. We spend fortunes on their health, and many people bury them when they die.
Yet much of the world is not like this. They do not have empathy. They do not care about anyone who is not immediate kin to them.
Having watched this, I want you to realize that this is what human life is worth in Communist nations. I don’t read Chinese, and cannot say for certain this is not Singapore or Hong Kong, or Macau, or elsewhere, but please just IMAGINE for a moment the mindset it takes to contemplate the deaths by starvation of tens of millions of innocent, working men, women and childran, as Anita Dunn’s hero Mao did.
To be a Communist is to be morally equal to the man who, having once run over the child, decides it is easier to run over her again; or the second van, which could easily have avoided her, but ran her over anyway, like roadkill.
I want to be clear: Bill Ayers, on reliable testimony, calculated that tens of millions of “unreeducatable” Americans would have to die in Nazi-like camps they planned to build in the Southwest. There is credible evidence that this man was the actual author of Obama’s books, and that they were in fact friends, which would seem to be implied by the fact that Ayers got Obama on some committees he controlled.
Pinker is right that violence has decreased. Yet, it is not gone. Many of the people who SHOULD be protecting our Enlightenment heritage of reason, which has enabled the decrease in violence (not least through the success of the free market economic system), are in fact rejecting it, and by so doing, issuing de facto calls for returns to much more brutal, less kind, less empathetic, less GOOD times in human history. They are calling for retrogression, under the very thin guise of supposed progress.
NONE of this is necessary. We have people who don’t eat animals on principle effectively supporting people who want a return to their personal version of the Third Reich. They don’t see this, because they don’t THINK. They don’t reason. They feel, which is what they have been taught. They have been taught to feel because it is easier to manipulate.
If these OWS demonstrations were happending 200 years ago, there would already have been many murders. All you need to get an unorganized mob moving is a call to violence. It is as old as time.
Please do not underestimate the accomplishment implied by a nation that weeps for dogs. Please do not underestimate how uniquely kind in human history the modern WEST is. History is filled to overflowing with horrors.
Please do not take what we have built here for granted. It can all end, and it can end quickly. No more Starbucks. No more Ben and Jerry’s. No more kindness. This is nothing to desire, and nothing to work for, but for the most wicked.
We can keep building, or we can tear down. In my view, if we choose the latter, both those who did it, and those who did nothing to stop it, will face a judgement that has been long in coming.