Rise and Fall
I don’t remember the source of the joke about a guy who says to his friend, “I just came back from three months of isolation in a cabin, where I went to finish a book.” HIs friend says, “I didn’t know you were an author.” His reply, “No, not write a book.”
That could have been me in the early 1960s, when I picked up William L. Shirer’s 1,249-page The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. With all else that was going on in my late teenage life, the book took me a seeming forever to get through all those pages. I should have gone to a cabin in the woods.
All these years later, I don’t remember much of what Shirer wrote with the exception of what he conveyed about those perpetrating the evils of Hitler’s regime. I remember the book’s introducing me to human depravity, to cruelty in the absence of compunction, and to sadistic tendencies of people without compassion. Yes, those 1,249 pages left me with a wariness and questions I still ask: Don’t evil people know that they, too, will die? Why do the innocent have to suffer when all they want is the freedom to live their lives without the intrusion of evil? And, “Have people always been like this? Were we lofty in our humanity at some time, but somehow fell into the well of depravity as so many Germans did before and during WWII?
The book also awakened an outrage in me, though it was a fruitless outrage. I wanted the evildoers to be punished. But it was a useless outrage, of course. The perpetrators were dead for the most part, and those who had survived and escaped always had to look over their shoulders for the Nazi-hunters who sought to bring them to justice. I suppose the analog of fruitless outrage lies in those who want some unrequited justice when a mass shooter turns the gun on himself.
As I aged, I read of other incidents of depravity, most of them driven by warfare, but some, such as those of serial killers, emerged from a society with an overlying Victorian morality and an underlying savagery: Care-takers abusing children, gang members killing members from other gangs, neighbors shooting neighbors, jihadists serving as religious soldiers in theocratic groups, and cartels’ minions beheading people in Mexico, this last bringing me to current news on the HDN, that is, the Human Depravity Network.
Occisio causa Occisionis
You might want a recent report to be the untruest of the untrue, the fakest news of journalistic fakery, but it seems to have some credibility. A cartel in northern Mexico tried to set a record for killing. * Killing for the sake of killing. Like MGM’s “ars gratia artis,” or “art for the sake of art,” this motive is occisio causa occisionis, “killing for the sake of killing.” That’s the level of depravity to which we’ve fallen.
Do I mean “to which we have fallen” or “that surfaces throughout history and once again has surfaced in our midst”? Probably the latter because those Nazi atrocities weren’t isolated events. Even the Church’s Inquisition had its torture chambers. Depravity pervades human institutions as well as individual personalities.
The story of murder for murder’s sake comes from the Chihuahua Attorney General’s Office via El Diario de Juarez. The supposed plan of the Juarez cartels is to meet or surpass 100 murders in a single month. People be damned, the number seems to be all that counts, and the counting is among the most gruesome numbers one can imagine.
This headline about reaching a “goal of 100 murders” comes on top of the October 7 massacre in Israel and other places where depravity has also raised its ugly head. I mention these incidents because they reveal the difficulty we humans have in achieving and maintaining peace. They also reveal that compassion seems to be a learned behavior, one easily forgotten and one only partially taught.
The Depravity Is Nothing New
There seems to be no end to, but there are many proposed solutions to, the problem of continuing deadly violence. One solution lies in educating the very young who might fall under the influence of depraved adults. But every solution generates its own problem, and the problem with educating for peace instead of depravity is that we can’t reach into the recesses of the depravity’s enclaves. Right now, there are adults molding kids into machines of destruction and death, and those adults are insulated against outside pressure to reform. If it were otherwise, the good people of Mexico would stop the cycle of violence, most of it centered on the drug trade and its territorial imperatives.
And of course, there’s little help from those who profit from drugs and violence. Glenn Fry’s song “Smuggler’s Blues,” frames the reason for the complicity in these unnecessary deaths and the corruption of any moral fabric in a society through which drug trade. He sings, “It's the lure of easy money, it's got a very strong appeal.”
So, how do we counter that strong appeal and the lure?
The short answer is we can’t counter it in groups controlled by individuals who never suffer the consequences of their depravity. I think of those who sent and who still send suicide bombers into crowds of innocent people. Why, if they believe in their cause, do they not wear the suicide belts? How do they convince others to shorten their already finite lives while they remain behind to live, often in relative safety and sometimes even in luxury?
Some Stomach-churning Examples
In Eyewitness to History, ** a compilation of excerpts from different authors and different times, editor John Carey includes stories of human depravity. Here are some of them.
August 1191. According to Bahāʾ al-Dīn Abū al-Maḥāsin Yūsuf ibn Rāfiʿ ibn Tamīm, Saladin’s biographer, forces of Richard I, after taking Acre massacred 3,000 prisoners who were bound together with ropes. ** The massacre appears to have been the intention of Richard even when he was negotiating with the Sultan over the release of Christian prisoners and the return of the “true cross” to the Christian King. The Sultan, realizing that if he relinquished his prisoners, he would yield any bargaining power, delayed fulfilling Richard’s demands. Richard then turned his soldiers on the prisoners who were defenseless. (35-37) [Any analog here with regard to the hostages held by Hamas during the current war?]
June 1381. Skip 190 years to Richard II’s reign. According to Sir John Froissart, writing about “The Peasants’ Revolt” in England, revolt leaders John Ball, Jack Straw, and Was Tyler…marched through London, attended by more than 20,000, to the palace of the Savoy…here they immediately killed the porters…[set the building on fire and] not content with this outrage, they went to the house of the Knight-hospitalers of Rhodes…which they burned…After this they paraded the streets, and killed every Fleming they could find, whether in house, church, or hospital…they murdered a rich citizen…to whom Wat Tyler had formerly been servant in France, but having once beaten him, the varlet had never forgotten it, and when he had carried his men to his house, he ordered his head to be cut off, placed upon a pike, and carried through the streets of London. Thus did these wicked people act, and on this Thursday, they did much damage to the city of London.” (59) [Any analog here with regard to Hamas’s October 7 attack?]
November 1576. George Gascoigne was an eyewitness to the sack of Antwerp by a Spanish Army. “In this conflict there were slain 600 Spaniards or thereabouts. And on the Thursday next following (Nov. 8) a view of the dead bodies in the town being taken, it was esteemed at 17,000 men, women, and children. A pitiful massacre though God gave victory to the Spaniards…The Rich was soiled because he had; and the Poor were hanged because they had nothing,,,And this was not only done when the chase was hot; but, as I erst said, when the blood was cold…I refrain to rehearse the heaps of dead carcasses which lay at every trench …the thickness whereof did in many places exceed the height of a man.” (116-121) [Any analog to the genocide in Rwanda, Germany in WWII, and other actual and proposed genocidal acts?]
You get the idea, don’t you? The examples are too numerous to mention. In fact, they are so numerous that they seem to be the only repeated tales to tell about our species.
Molded Depravity
We are easily molded in our youth. Look, for example, at the “Manson family.” One person, some “Hitler” molds a group of hangers-on, lost souls eager to idolize and please, some taking their cues from the leader and carrying out those atrocities to win approval, others just going along with a program in which they are mere pawns serving the whims and perversions of their idols.
If neurologists are correct in telling us that the human brain doesn’t reach maturity until we enter our twenties, then the grey-matter clay is easy to shape by those with an agenda of self-aggrandizement through control. When a propagandized belief settles into immature minds, self-control never matures as the molded brain serves the wishes of others.
Compassion is more lost cause than achievement. As those devoted to the elevation of the human spirit work in isolated pockets of society, others instill depravity. And in a world of weapons, from drugs, to poisons, to knives and guns, those trained in depravity can wreak more havoc than those trained in compassion can prevent.
There’s little consolation for the surviving victims in the conversions and deaths of the depraved because every generation produces its share of those who live and act without compunction, without compassion. Peace and harmony seem to be less a human trait than depravity because individual acts, such as those I read about all those years ago when I read Shirer’s book, indicate that neither peace nor harmony provides a permanent compassionate fail-safe system of human behavior. Both require constant renewal.
Who is currently renewing peace and harmony? Who is currently renewing compassion? Am I writing to that person here?
*https://www.breitbart.com/border/2023/11/03/report-juarez-drug-gangs-planned-halloween-day-killing-spree/
**Carey, John. ED. 1987. Eyewitness to History. New York. Avon Books.
I don’t remember the source of the joke about a guy who says to his friend, “I just came back from three months of isolation in a cabin, where I went to finish a book.” HIs friend says, “I didn’t know you were an author.” His reply, “No, not write a book.”
That could have been me in the early 1960s, when I picked up William L. Shirer’s 1,249-page The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. With all else that was going on in my late teenage life, the book took me a seeming forever to get through all those pages. I should have gone to a cabin in the woods.
All these years later, I don’t remember much of what Shirer wrote with the exception of what he conveyed about those perpetrating the evils of Hitler’s regime. I remember the book’s introducing me to human depravity, to cruelty in the absence of compunction, and to sadistic tendencies of people without compassion. Yes, those 1,249 pages left me with a wariness and questions I still ask: Don’t evil people know that they, too, will die? Why do the innocent have to suffer when all they want is the freedom to live their lives without the intrusion of evil? And, “Have people always been like this? Were we lofty in our humanity at some time, but somehow fell into the well of depravity as so many Germans did before and during WWII?
The book also awakened an outrage in me, though it was a fruitless outrage. I wanted the evildoers to be punished. But it was a useless outrage, of course. The perpetrators were dead for the most part, and those who had survived and escaped always had to look over their shoulders for the Nazi-hunters who sought to bring them to justice. I suppose the analog of fruitless outrage lies in those who want some unrequited justice when a mass shooter turns the gun on himself.
As I aged, I read of other incidents of depravity, most of them driven by warfare, but some, such as those of serial killers, emerged from a society with an overlying Victorian morality and an underlying savagery: Care-takers abusing children, gang members killing members from other gangs, neighbors shooting neighbors, jihadists serving as religious soldiers in theocratic groups, and cartels’ minions beheading people in Mexico, this last bringing me to current news on the HDN, that is, the Human Depravity Network.
Occisio causa Occisionis
You might want a recent report to be the untruest of the untrue, the fakest news of journalistic fakery, but it seems to have some credibility. A cartel in northern Mexico tried to set a record for killing. * Killing for the sake of killing. Like MGM’s “ars gratia artis,” or “art for the sake of art,” this motive is occisio causa occisionis, “killing for the sake of killing.” That’s the level of depravity to which we’ve fallen.
Do I mean “to which we have fallen” or “that surfaces throughout history and once again has surfaced in our midst”? Probably the latter because those Nazi atrocities weren’t isolated events. Even the Church’s Inquisition had its torture chambers. Depravity pervades human institutions as well as individual personalities.
The story of murder for murder’s sake comes from the Chihuahua Attorney General’s Office via El Diario de Juarez. The supposed plan of the Juarez cartels is to meet or surpass 100 murders in a single month. People be damned, the number seems to be all that counts, and the counting is among the most gruesome numbers one can imagine.
This headline about reaching a “goal of 100 murders” comes on top of the October 7 massacre in Israel and other places where depravity has also raised its ugly head. I mention these incidents because they reveal the difficulty we humans have in achieving and maintaining peace. They also reveal that compassion seems to be a learned behavior, one easily forgotten and one only partially taught.
The Depravity Is Nothing New
There seems to be no end to, but there are many proposed solutions to, the problem of continuing deadly violence. One solution lies in educating the very young who might fall under the influence of depraved adults. But every solution generates its own problem, and the problem with educating for peace instead of depravity is that we can’t reach into the recesses of the depravity’s enclaves. Right now, there are adults molding kids into machines of destruction and death, and those adults are insulated against outside pressure to reform. If it were otherwise, the good people of Mexico would stop the cycle of violence, most of it centered on the drug trade and its territorial imperatives.
And of course, there’s little help from those who profit from drugs and violence. Glenn Fry’s song “Smuggler’s Blues,” frames the reason for the complicity in these unnecessary deaths and the corruption of any moral fabric in a society through which drug trade. He sings, “It's the lure of easy money, it's got a very strong appeal.”
So, how do we counter that strong appeal and the lure?
The short answer is we can’t counter it in groups controlled by individuals who never suffer the consequences of their depravity. I think of those who sent and who still send suicide bombers into crowds of innocent people. Why, if they believe in their cause, do they not wear the suicide belts? How do they convince others to shorten their already finite lives while they remain behind to live, often in relative safety and sometimes even in luxury?
Some Stomach-churning Examples
In Eyewitness to History, ** a compilation of excerpts from different authors and different times, editor John Carey includes stories of human depravity. Here are some of them.
August 1191. According to Bahāʾ al-Dīn Abū al-Maḥāsin Yūsuf ibn Rāfiʿ ibn Tamīm, Saladin’s biographer, forces of Richard I, after taking Acre massacred 3,000 prisoners who were bound together with ropes. ** The massacre appears to have been the intention of Richard even when he was negotiating with the Sultan over the release of Christian prisoners and the return of the “true cross” to the Christian King. The Sultan, realizing that if he relinquished his prisoners, he would yield any bargaining power, delayed fulfilling Richard’s demands. Richard then turned his soldiers on the prisoners who were defenseless. (35-37) [Any analog here with regard to the hostages held by Hamas during the current war?]
June 1381. Skip 190 years to Richard II’s reign. According to Sir John Froissart, writing about “The Peasants’ Revolt” in England, revolt leaders John Ball, Jack Straw, and Was Tyler…marched through London, attended by more than 20,000, to the palace of the Savoy…here they immediately killed the porters…[set the building on fire and] not content with this outrage, they went to the house of the Knight-hospitalers of Rhodes…which they burned…After this they paraded the streets, and killed every Fleming they could find, whether in house, church, or hospital…they murdered a rich citizen…to whom Wat Tyler had formerly been servant in France, but having once beaten him, the varlet had never forgotten it, and when he had carried his men to his house, he ordered his head to be cut off, placed upon a pike, and carried through the streets of London. Thus did these wicked people act, and on this Thursday, they did much damage to the city of London.” (59) [Any analog here with regard to Hamas’s October 7 attack?]
November 1576. George Gascoigne was an eyewitness to the sack of Antwerp by a Spanish Army. “In this conflict there were slain 600 Spaniards or thereabouts. And on the Thursday next following (Nov. 8) a view of the dead bodies in the town being taken, it was esteemed at 17,000 men, women, and children. A pitiful massacre though God gave victory to the Spaniards…The Rich was soiled because he had; and the Poor were hanged because they had nothing,,,And this was not only done when the chase was hot; but, as I erst said, when the blood was cold…I refrain to rehearse the heaps of dead carcasses which lay at every trench …the thickness whereof did in many places exceed the height of a man.” (116-121) [Any analog to the genocide in Rwanda, Germany in WWII, and other actual and proposed genocidal acts?]
You get the idea, don’t you? The examples are too numerous to mention. In fact, they are so numerous that they seem to be the only repeated tales to tell about our species.
Molded Depravity
We are easily molded in our youth. Look, for example, at the “Manson family.” One person, some “Hitler” molds a group of hangers-on, lost souls eager to idolize and please, some taking their cues from the leader and carrying out those atrocities to win approval, others just going along with a program in which they are mere pawns serving the whims and perversions of their idols.
If neurologists are correct in telling us that the human brain doesn’t reach maturity until we enter our twenties, then the grey-matter clay is easy to shape by those with an agenda of self-aggrandizement through control. When a propagandized belief settles into immature minds, self-control never matures as the molded brain serves the wishes of others.
Compassion is more lost cause than achievement. As those devoted to the elevation of the human spirit work in isolated pockets of society, others instill depravity. And in a world of weapons, from drugs, to poisons, to knives and guns, those trained in depravity can wreak more havoc than those trained in compassion can prevent.
There’s little consolation for the surviving victims in the conversions and deaths of the depraved because every generation produces its share of those who live and act without compunction, without compassion. Peace and harmony seem to be less a human trait than depravity because individual acts, such as those I read about all those years ago when I read Shirer’s book, indicate that neither peace nor harmony provides a permanent compassionate fail-safe system of human behavior. Both require constant renewal.
Who is currently renewing peace and harmony? Who is currently renewing compassion? Am I writing to that person here?
*https://www.breitbart.com/border/2023/11/03/report-juarez-drug-gangs-planned-halloween-day-killing-spree/
**Carey, John. ED. 1987. Eyewitness to History. New York. Avon Books.
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