Atrocity Minute
The Sudanese government, using the Janjawid militias it supports, has overseen the massacres of thousands of Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa Muslim civilians, the raping of their women, the burning of their villages and mosques, and the destruction of their fields. More than 1,000,000 people have been displaced, and now live in wretched camps in southern Darfur, subject to continued predation by the Janjawid. This is the result of a continuing, bloody conflict between Arab and African Muslims that has killed two million people and displaced twice that number.
Fortunately for the continued moral advancement of the species, Sudan continues to hold a seat on the United Nations Human Rights Commission.
During the Liberian civil war, the rebel forces of the Revolutionary United Front and the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council indiscriminately raped thousands of women and girls of all ages, ethnic groups, and social standings. The violence included gang rape and rape with objects such as guns, firewood staves, and umbrellas. Women bled to death from massive injuries to their genitalia and internal organs, and babies were torn from the wombs of the pregnant so that soldiers could settle bets about the sex of the fetus. Sexual violence was also perpetrated by peacekeepers of the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone and the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group. In addition, ritual killings to obtain body parts for use in rites of sorcery and incidents of forced human cannibalism have been reported. After over a decade of nearly continuous civil war, 250,000 are dead, half of the population is displaced, and Liberia has effectively ceased to exist as a nation.
President Charles Taylor, the man who oversaw much of this process, is a self-appointed Christian preacher who enjoys ping-pong and badminton, and is currently being sheltered by the government of Nigeria.
In Angola, soldiers are brutally conducting public anal and vaginal body cavity searches of workers from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Angolan government maintains that it is "repatriating" Congolese workers who are illegally mining diamonds in the gem-rich border province of Lunda Norte, and are conducting the searches to confiscate ill-gotten stones. The repatriation process also includes beatings, rape, and arbitrary imprisonment.
The United States is the world's largest purchaser of diamonds, to the tune of nearly $4 billion a year. A portion of that money goes to support various militias in Liberia, Angola, and other war-torn African nations.
In Iraq's Abu Gharib prison, members of the US military forced prisoners to strip naked and pile atop one another in the presence of female soldiers. They were subjected to sleep deprivation, forced to simulate sex with one another, led around on dog leashes, and sodomized with chemical light sticks. Someone thought it would be a fine idea to document these and many other abuses, and the photographs have been released to the public.
Shortly after this release, a videotape of a group of masked men sawing the head off of American Nicholas Berg surfaced, echoing the videotaped decapitation of American reporter Daniel Pearl that was released last year, which was, in turn, as horrific as the footage recorded in the mid 90s of a young Russian soldier whose head was being held against the ground by a Chechnyan boot as it was hacked off with a large hunting knife.
And so on.
And so forth.
I'm not making any real causal or consequential connections between any of the preceding paragraphs. The fact that you may have a diamond on your finger that was forcibly removed from a Congolese anal cavity doesn't really place any moral burden upon you, and is about as relevant to your character as Charles Taylor's predilection for ping-pong is to his. Similarly, Nicholas Berg bore no responsibility for the actions of American troops in Abu Gharib, and the Muslims who cut off his head and that of the anonymous Russian soldier have little to do with the Muslims who ran the little cigarette-snack-soda store underneath my old apartment in Queens.
The wretchedness of human behavior has been on rampant display for the entirety of our recorded history, and before we started writing things down we were doubtless heading over to the next valley to smash in the heads of the tribe that lived there with rocks and rape their females with hooting enthusiasm. Civilization, by and large, has consisted of the gathering of enough resources to sustain enough people at the same time in the same place so that this savagery could be held at bay for as long as possible. This feat has never been global in nature, existing only in secured pockets of varying sizes: a fortified city, an empire, a nation-state. Even within these supposed oases of civility--wherein we might achieve the leisure required to more fully express the nobler aspects of our natures--cruelty, torture and murder has always been present, either at the hands of fellow citizens or at the whim of the state.
It's a simple point, really: people kill people. People are cruel to other people. People will always find reasons to explain why it is necessary that they kill people, and will find other reasons to explain away cruelty. As the newly popular Stanford Prison Experiment showed in 1971 (DVD now available!), it really doesn't take much for the brittle coating of civilized behavior to crack and fall away. This is because the various lacquers and varnishes that we use to create that shiny surface are new, and poorly developed. A mere one hundred generations separates us in the Judaeo-Grecco-Christian West from the era when a fearful King Saul of Israel demanded the foreskins of one hundred Philistines as dowry for his daughter. His would-be son-in-law David went out, killed twice that number, and returned with the requested penile scraps (1 Samuel 18:20-27). It is neither the violence of the bloody gift nor the potential truth of the story that should give us pause, but the fact that the culture which recorded the tale regarded David's success as a sign of God's favor.
Richard Feynman once wrote,
We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
He was referring to the responsibility of scientists to proclaim the value of progress which is the result of freedom of thought, and to teach that doubt is not to be feared, but welcomed as the seed of all fruitful inquiry. That essential doubt has as much relevance in matters of international politics and moral conduct as it does in scientific inquiry. Do you think that America is the avatar of freedom in the world? Question that. Do you believe that America is the nexus of a global conspiracy to oppress the world's poor and brown? Question that as well.
And so, when I read the voluminous outrage against the particular stupidities of some of the monkeys America has seen fit to put in uniform, I shake my head, if I'm feeling charitable, or smirk and scoff if I'm not. They thunder on with terrible certainty, as though the cosmic balance of good and evil is tipping hellward, pushed only by the vast and incalculable malice of America. It may make them feel much improved within their own minds and social circles to have such a keenly developed sense of morality. Their indignant rage adds another thin coat to their civilized finish. This protective sheen allows them, in good conscience, to point at America now and demand that it solve these problems that it has created, forgetting that they kept their hands quietly at their sides while thousands died in Abu Gharib long before America arrived.
But such problems are not America's. They are humanity's. And the sooner the publicly righteous doff their pristine garments and get down in the mud to help out the rest of us monkeys, the sooner we'll be able to improve our solutions.
