Why do these sort of things happen? It boggles the mind that people are capable of such organized savagery.
Bucharest Massacre
Quote:
"TO THE ABATTOIR: Under the pretext of acting against a movement of a political nature, the Legionnaires committed mass murder at the city slaughterhouse, at Baneasa. More than a hundred people were butchered. Some were found with their bellies deeply cut open by the despicable assassins, who used butcher knives for this purpose. As masters in the art of torture, they had taken the intestines they had torn out of their victims' bodies and tied them like neckties around their necks. While this carnage took place inside the slaughterhouse, outside a large number of Legionnaires were singing and making a mockery of Jewish psalms and prayers. The German military attache in Bucharest was collecting casualty reports.
In one of his memoranda he wrote 'In the Bucharest morgue one can see hundreds of corpses, but they are mostly Jews'. Reports from Jewish sources state that the victims had not merely been killed, but they had been butchered. They could no longer be identified as human bodies. In the municipal slaughterhouse, parts of bodies were hanging on hooks like carcasses of cattle. One witness saw a girl of about five hanging by her feet like a calf, her entire body was drenched in blood"
"The noise was like the sound when a board is struck. On the frozen fields at Ping Fang, in north-east China, chained prisoners were led out with bare arms, and subjected to a current of air to accelerate the freezing process. Then came the noise. With a short stick, the arms of the prisoners would be struck to make sure their limbs had indeed frozen.
In the gruesome world of Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army, experiments with frostbite on human subjects became a favourite in a macabre litany of cruelty. Throughout the 1930s and '40s, until the end of World War II, the secret unit used Manchuria as a killing field. It was a case of science gone truly mad for the greater glory of the divine Emperor and Japan.
Apart from the frostbite experiments, prisoners were infected with diseases including anthrax, cholera and the bubonic plague. To gather data, human vivisections were performed. Whole villages and towns were infected with the plague and cholera."
Because despite the protestations of many, there is in fact, SIN in the world.
Or call it evil, it does exist.
As a result, man's inhumanity to his fellow man will test the depths of depravity.
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Violet Lake
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Mon 14 Apr, 2003 07:55 pm
Evil and sin are good words to describe it because there aren't many words with that kind of authority, but I wonder if those labels end up mystifying the subject instead of enlightening it.
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Dek
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Tue 15 Apr, 2003 05:08 pm
evil yes but sin no, sin implies that they have religion and have sinned against it, how can people like this have religion?
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Violet Lake
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Tue 15 Apr, 2003 05:15 pm
To think that the Bucharest Massacre was perpetrated by a group that called themselves the Legion of the Archangel Michael...
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Heliotrope
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Wed 11 Jun, 2003 08:44 am
Apparently the people involved in committing such atrocities have allowed themselves to be controlled by the mob.
Where thay no longer feel personally responsible for the actions they perform. Naturally this does not absolve them in the eyes of everyone else.
However I think it's the ability of the human mind to believe that "this is happening to someone else" and "I am not responsible for this" that are the overriding factors.
The people involved seem to believe that as long as they are protected by their 'superiors' and that their superiors are responsible then they are committing no wrong or doing what "has to be done".
Later on of course when they have been removed from the influence and are fully human again they have varying degrees of remorse for their actions. At the time of the events they have surrendered their human responsibilities for the 'good' of the group they are with.
As far as I can tell 'good' and 'evil' have nothing to do with it. As for the concept of sin, that depends on where you stand.
D
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cicerone imposter
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Wed 11 Jun, 2003 08:54 am
Heliotrope, WELCOME to A2K. ** Interesting subject; but as animals, humans has the capacity to do harm to other humans that may seem cruel and 'inhuman,' but it's natural. Yes, natural. We talk of civility, but that's a man-made concept that requires some form of government control. Killing is part of human existence; it's happened in the past, and will continue into the future. Although westerners like to think we are more 'civil' than our brothers in, say, the Congo, that's only a matter of perspective. Our aggressive acts against the Iraqi's with smart bombs is not more civil than the people of the Congo killing thousands every day. The end result is that they are all dead at the hands of other humans. c.i.
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Frank Apisa
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Wed 11 Jun, 2003 09:02 am
There is no doubt that humans can be incredibly cruel to one another.
I would imagine a group of psychologists could give a rather long list of reasons for why this is so, but it probably is enough to simply acknowledge that it is so, because we have had so much evidence of it over the years.
I honestly think (guess, estimate, suppose, conjecture) that we are growing up. I think much of the cruelty that was "tolerated" as unavoidable, has now become a taboo. I suspect we will see more people brought before tribunals because of their inhumanity. and perhaps, once day soo -- one day before we all blow outselves to pieces -- we will learn how to avoid such atrocities.
In my opinion, we defintiely are making progress.
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cicerone imposter
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Wed 11 Jun, 2003 09:48 am
Frank, I wish that were so, but that idea about progress is really subejct to question. Did you know that this administration wants to develop underground nukes? Compare that to the idea of avoiding atrocities, and I think the nukes win - hands down. c.i.
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Frank Apisa
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Wed 11 Jun, 2003 09:54 am
ci
I did not say we've got this "inhumanity" problem licked. People like Bush and his handlers are among the most dangerous people ever to inhabit this planet. But I think on average, we've made progress.
Maybe I'm a Pollyanna. Don't disillusion me.
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JLNobody
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Wed 11 Jun, 2003 06:00 pm
cruelty
I agree with Frank that there has been progress, even though this notion does seem quaint in these "post-modern times." But I'm hesitant to generalize to the entire world. Many cultures seem to produce people capable of more and others of less cruelty than is our capacity. But I'm confident that in our culture, and that of Western Europe, there is progress. Legal and penal systems are far from desireable now but far from what they were centuries past. No more burning at stakes, head lopping, official torture, etc. We try to make our executions less painful (to assuage our guilt, I hope), and even the Utah consideration of a firing squad for one condemned man throughs most people into a state of deep ethical concern.
C.I., notes that "civility" is a man-made notions, forgetting for the moment that ALL CONCEPTS are man-made. Sin applies only where there is a God or some kind of supernatural being whose laws have been violated; crime is violation of man's laws. Evil is very problematical. It is very difficult to state that the term, "evil," is a man-made notions after reading the accounts of atrocities above. I think it is an artifact of human culture, but a very useful and powerful one. Reality, that which existed before humans came to name it is beyond "good" and "evil." But our lives are based on such notions. The trick is to realize the man-made nature of our world, rather than to impose upon it fictions of absoluteness while at the same time honoring it AS IF it were absolute (so much for nihilism).
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cicerone imposter
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Wed 11 Jun, 2003 06:00 pm
JLN, They did such a experiment at Stanford University (about ten years ago) to see if 'normal' students would engage in inhuman treatment of others. That experiment proved that most people would engage in such acts. c.i.
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cicerone imposter
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Wed 11 Jun, 2003 06:00 pm
Frank, Not here to disillusion anybody. Just trying to show this issue from another perspective. In some cultures, we have shown some progress, but in some others, they're still living the culture of the jungle. Have you kept up with the news on the Congo? They are still practicing cannibalism.
We are still trying to produce war machines that kill by the thousands - including our government. Trying to equate legal rights for one person, but ignoring the thousands of innocents that are killed in war, I'm not so sure we have progressed all that much. c.i.
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JLNobody
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Wed 11 Jun, 2003 06:00 pm
cruelty
By the way, I appreciate Heliotrope's humane stand. Being inhumane towards people who commit inhumane atrocities is itself inhumane. I don't think I can condemn people who commit monstrous acts so long as I do not know if I would be able to refrain from such acts were I in their situation. What we must do is passionately and actively condemn the acts and the kinds of situations that give rise to them. I admire a conscientious objector who said that he fled to Canada in good part because he did not want to be put in a situation where he feared he would kill soldiers, women and children, situations where his humanity would be eclipsed by dehumanizing fear. His was a humble, honest and humane position.
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JLNobody
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Wed 11 Jun, 2003 06:00 pm
cruelty
Yes, C.I., there have been other such experiments as well. Perhaps we should not describe such atrocities as INhumane. It does seem that ONLY humans have the capacity to torture others. The lion's brutal killing of hyenas has to do not with hatred in the human sense (although there seems to be something like it) when they go to great lenghts to kill them but not eat them; it appears that the violence has to do with territorial imperatives driven by instinct. But humans can take pleasure in the systematic torture of others (no "I and Thou", only "I and it" orientation there). So perhaps we should refer to such atrocities as HUMANE acts, thus doing violence to linguistic convention.
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cicerone imposter
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Wed 11 Jun, 2003 06:00 pm
I can 'buy' that, but many will be totally confused! c.i.
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akaMechsmith
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Thu 12 Jun, 2003 07:52 pm
The lopping off of heads is probably the least painful way of eliminating dangers to society.
However the heads rolling around aparently offended some of our less rational members. They seem to prefer hanging, sometimes strangulation. The "Chair" also seems less than enjoyable for its inhabitants. And nobody likes shots! Starvation and slaughter is so much nicer.
The slavers, by relieving population pressures in sub Saharan Africa probably benefited the remaining population considerably.
By removing slavery and infanticide, and introducing medicines and vaccines to this region (not to mention guns and politics)western man has set the stage for the cruelties which we are now witnessing.
God, should one exist, certainly has a warped sense of humor.
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JLNobody
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Thu 12 Jun, 2003 07:57 pm
truth
Akamechsmith, welcome to A2K. I'm confident you'll be a source of witty, ironic, subtle and complex posts.
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cicerone imposter
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Thu 12 Jun, 2003 10:04 pm
akaMech, WELCOME to A2K. Sense of humor, indeed! c.i.
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babsatamelia
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Thu 12 Jun, 2003 10:48 pm
The oddest thing about the word SIN, is that it is from
an ancient archery word meaning to miss the bullseye.
Kind of like Jesus words to the woman who barely escaped
being stoned to death, his advice, simply to go and don't
do it anymore. BUT- These kinds of inhumane degenerate
things that humans are capable of doing to one another is
nowhere in the slightest vicinity of sin. It is something far
far worse than that. I think that it's a possibility of/in
human nature AND I think that this is always in GROUPS.
That a "group process" somehow gets started and then
feeds off of its self, accelerating more & more as it goes on.
Take the story of Rosewood, in Florida where suddenly an
entire town went berserk; and began killing every single
black person they could get their hands on - and all of it
actually happened - all because of a LIE that one woman
told her husband trying to cover up the fact that she had
been sleeping with another man. Without the addition of
alcohol and the group entity - I would think that these kinds
of occurrences would be very rare.
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