Cruelty or Humanity. Rees, Stuart
influenced and reinforced by cultural norms are not confined to Saudi Arabia. That country’s close ally, the ‘make America great again’ Trump White House, had US culture in mind when the President boasted about sovereignty, protecting borders and showing zero tolerance to the unwanted and vulnerable. In the Mexican border controversy, many of the victims were toddlers, small children and teenagers.
In relation to the two incidents of cruelty by individuals, cultures which encouraged stigmatizing had sent a message: the stage is set, if you have a grievance against those you don’t like or even hate, now’s your chance, play your roles, act out your script. A Sydney radio station had fed listeners a diet of derision, yet still obtained popular ratings. In response to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, the international community had refused to oppose decades of serious human rights abuses.
Twentieth-century genocides and mass murders
A reminder about the mass murders of the 20th century, several of which are counted as genocides, illustrates precedents to current cruelties. Despite the ‘never again’ motives of those who crafted the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the small print of the Geneva Conventions, those genocides gave momentum to cruelty which has not been easy to stop.
Between the Northern spring of 1915 and the autumn of 1916, with a view to solidifying Muslim dominance, Ottoman-Turkish authorities, including military forces and civilians, engaged in mass shootings and mass deportations of ethnic Christian Armenians. Survivors of the shootings, elderly men, women and children, were marched in convoys to holding camps, but on the way hundreds of thousands died as a result of dehydration, exposure, disease and attacks from local officials, nomadic and criminal gangs. The violence included robbery, rape, abduction of young women and girls, extortion, torture and murder. As many as 1.2 million people died.8 The US Ambassador, Henry Morgenthau Snr, wrote in his memoirs, ‘When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race, they understood this well.’9
Between 1932 and 1933, Russian dictator Joseph Stalin’s forced famines are calculated to have killed over seven million Ukrainians. In the late 1930s, during the time of The Terror, Stalin ordered the mass execution of millions of his own citizens whom he considered ‘socially harmful elements’ and ‘enemies of the people’.
In relation to that terror, in her poem Requiem, crafted over three decades, 1935–61, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova wrote,
No, it wasn’t under a foreign heaven,
It wasn’t under the wing of a foreign power, –
I was there among my countrymen
I was where my people, unfortunately, were. 10
In the years immediately preceding the Second World War and despite a 1925 Geneva protocol banning ‘bacteriological methods of warfare’, the US and Japan generously funded the scientific investigation of the possibilities of biological warfare. Such investigations soon realized not just a potential weapon but a lethal form of cruelty. Michael Pembroke reports that by the end of the Korean war, in one secret biological warfare site the US employed over 3,800 personnel. Another classified site was nicknamed ‘Fort Doom’.11 But it was Japanese enthusiasm for biological weapons that showed sadism without limits, a promotion of evils which probably surpassed in cruelty even Joseph Mengele’s experiments in Auschwitz. In Manchuria, a Japanese unit called 731 developed macabre trials to expose human beings, mostly Chinese prisoners, to lethal bacteria. Pembroke’s analysis merits rereading and repeating. In one of his most disturbing passages he writes, ‘The process was unfathomable – a phantasmagorical nightmare in which Japanese medical scientists infected helpless prisoners with anthrax, plague, cholera, typhus, dysentery, botulism, brucellosis, tularaemia, meningitis and smallpox while monitoring and meticulously recording the effects on their vital organs as they slowly expired.’12 In these experiments, over 10,000 prisoners are estimated to have died.
In the Holocaust, 1941–45, Nazi Germany murdered six million European Jews, as many as 20 million victims in total, including Romanies, people with disabilities, ethnic Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals and individuals labelled communist or socialist. Based on racist beliefs that Germans were superior people and that others, in particular Jews, were racially, biologically and socially unfit, extermination of the inferior by gassing in concentration camps became the brutal ‘final solution’.13
The administration of extermination needed cruel leaders in a society conditioned to accept that state bureaucracies should operate in the service of a politics of militarism and racial purification. With the wisdom of hindsight, that fascist culture gives clues about the persistence of cruelty: a banality of evil, faceless compliance in bureaucracies and the sadistic character of those who gave and carried out orders.
Almost in anticipation of the Holocaust, in 1939 the English poet W.H. Auden wrote Epitaph on a Tyrant.
Perfection of a kind was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly impressed in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter
And when he cried the little children died in the streets. 14
While the Holocaust was under way in Europe over three million Bengalis were starving to death, a result not just of a poor rice harvest but because British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had ordered the diversion of food from starving Indians to the already well-supplied British soldiers and stockpiles in Britain, in Europe, including Greece and Yugoslavia.
Shashi Tharoor reveals how Australian ships laden with wheat were docking in Calcutta but were instructed not to unload their cargo but to sail on to Europe.15 In a forensic analysis of the Bengali famine, in what she titles Churchill’s Secret War, Madhusree Mukerjee documents the racism inherent in classifying some people as worthy and others of no consequence. Bread rationing in wartime Britain was regarded as an intolerable deprivation, but famine in India could be tolerated. Regarding those policies, Lord Wavell, the Viceroy of India, commented that the British government treated Indians with neglect, even sometimes with hostility and contempt. Mukerjee quotes Churchill, ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.’16
The greatest mass murderer in history is considered to have been Mao Zedong, founder of the People’s Republic of China. From 1958 to 1962, during a policy named The Great Leap Forward, designed as an effort to catch up with Western economies, 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death.17 That period of mass killings had been preceded, in the 1940s and 1950s, by the elimination of landlords, peasants and anyone who dared to challenge the social and economic transformation ordered by Mao.
There’s an irony in these killings. Records were carefully kept by China’s Public Security Bureau, but were secret. Keeping the records of cruelty secret enabled subsequent denials that such action occurred. That’s a process we’ll see again and again.
British 1950s governments’ administration of their disappearing colonial empires, as in their response to the Mau Mau rebellions in Kenya, included officially sanctioned cruelties, ‘a tale of systematic cruelties and high-level cover ups’, as in the use of concentration camps comparable to those used by Nazi Germany and in Stalin’s gulags.18 The Mau Mau who rebelled against British settlers and colonial rule are estimated to have murdered as many as 50 settlers, but thousands of their own Kikuyu people. In response the British are reported to have crammed up to one million people into heavily guarded camps, killed unknown numbers by beatings, starvation and torture and hanged up to 800, a majority for offences other than murder. At the height