Cruelty

Cruelty

A

ll life is suffering”, said the Buddha, this being the First Noble Truth of Buddhism. This planet is one where everything devours or is devoured by something. Cruelty thus seeps out from every nook and cranny of the system; there is no escaping it. Some people feel this so keenly they even refuse to eat meat. But the majority are not so squeamish. Does cruelty confer an evolutionary advantage? One would think so, for it seems to be a major constituent of human nature. Perhaps there exists a gene for cruelty.

            The catalogue of human cruelty, like the catalogue of human stupidity, is so immense one does not know where to begin. The best one can do is to pour out a few drops of water and say, ‘These come from the ocean. Go and look at it for yourself.’ The following are a mere handful of such drops.

            The single most horrific picture I know shows an SS officer hanging two children in Russia. The girl, who is blond and beautiful, aged about twelve, is already dangling from the rope, eyes closed. She looks almost peaceful. The boy, who can be no more than nine or ten, has the noose round his neck and is about to be left to strangle very slowly, because he is so light. He is wearing a man’s cap, set jauntily over one eye – and he is smiling. The SS man is also smiling, as though they were sharing some appalling joke. I have a feeling the girl, so serenely choking to death, is the boy’s elder sister. Sometimes I dream of this event and wake up sweating and trembling, in the presence of evil.

Such scenes were common in England in the eighteenth century. Jane Austen could have witnessed them, had she been so inclined, a fact which should give pause to those who sight, nostalgically, over the pastoral tranquillity depicted in her novels.

After the Gordon riots (1780), many children were hanged at Tyburn, some as young as eight. An aristocratic, contemporary observer, who attended the hangings for amusement, said he “had never seen boys cry so much”. One hopes that their tears did not detract from his refined enjoyment. The youngest child hanged in England at that time was a girl, aged five.

I am often deeply ashamed to be part of the human race.

Afghanistan:

            In 1978, Afghans captured thirty Russian advisers to the Afghan Marxist government and flayed them alive. This incident enabled the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan on Christmas day the following year with the full support of the Russian populace, who recalled that the Nazis had inflicted the same atrocity on the Russian partisans. Cruelty is requited by cruelty, in an endless cycle.

            In March, 1979, the entire male population of Kerala, Afghanistan, 1700 adults and children, was assembled in the town square and machine-gunned by the Afghan communists. Dead and dying were then buried in pits by bulldozers. Later that month, the Communists massacred around 25,000 people in Herat, one in eight of the town’s population. This rated barely a mention in the Wester press.

            Sayed Abdullah, director of the notorious Pol-e-Charki prison in Kabul, used to say that since only one million Afghans were needed to build socialism, the rest would have to be slaughtered. His prison executioners alone killed over twelve thousand people, drowning hundreds of them alive in the camp’s latrine pits.

Insert 30 or so examples here.

            I have decided not to continue with this section. It would take up the rest of the book and still only scratch the surface of the topic. Swift’s verdict on the human race shall stand here instead: “The most odious race of little vermin that ever crawled between heaven and earth”. For sheer saeva indignatio, nothing has bettered this.

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM