As Maass recounts the cruelties these people inflicted on their neighbors, co-workers, even family members, the reader is benumbed by the horrors.
How could people who socialized with each other, went to school with each other, worked cordially side by side with each other, suddenly turn on them en masse, torturing, raping, and murdering them?
Then we turn on the evening news and watch stupefied as the reporters recount the terrors the Russian forces are deliberately visiting upon civilians in Ukraine, bombing a theater, for instance, in which hundreds of children were taking shelter, crushing some 300 of them under the rubble.
We thought that the cruelties of al Qaeda and ISIS were horrific, that the brutalities of Africans against their fellow Africans are appalling, but the Arabs and the Africans were savages from whom such behavior was to be expected. Yet their crimes were and are no less odious than the crimes wreaked by Europeans upon each other. ISIS and Boko Haram are no more savage than were the Germans in the early 40s, the Serbs in the early 90s or the Russians today.
I mention this because there's a conceit among many of our secular friends that man is basically good and if only he could be placed in an Edenic environment of equity and equality there'd be no crime, no inhumanity, no injustice.
This belief goes back to the French thinker Rousseau, and it's one superstition that moderns hold that is massively contradicted by the empirical evidence.
Much of our own experience tells us that human beings are certainly not inherently good, we are in fact just the opposite. As the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah wrote some 2600 years ago, "The heart of man is desperately wicked. Who can understand it?"
The Jewish journalist Dennis Prager takes issue with the rosy, Roussean view of human nature. He writes:
In the 20th century alone, more than a hundred million people — civilians, not soldiers — were murdered by vile regimes and their vile followers.If experience teaches us anything about human nature it is that we are, as a race, inherently hateful and vicious. Despite the claims of some that humanity is "every day in every way getting better and better" we're not much better now than we were a thousand or two thousand years ago.
These include the approximately 20 million killed in the Gulag Archipelago; the slaughter of the Tutsis in Rwanda; the genocidal murder of Armenians; the deliberate starvation of about 60 million Chinese; the Japanese mass rape of Korean “comfort women” and hideous medical experiments on Chinese civilians; and the torture and murder of approximately one out of four Cambodians.
And that is only a partial list.
Virtually every serious thinker in history knew people were not basically good. They knew about the universality of slavery and the tortures and rapes that accompanied slavery. They knew how men behaved in wartime.
Were all the people who engaged in these evils aberrations? In fact, most were quite normal. The aberrations in history have been the truly good individuals.
To cite the Holocaust, the Germans, French, Poles, Hungarians, Lithuanians and others who aided the Holocaust, let alone those who did nothing, were normal people. The handful who aided Jews were the aberrations.
And what about childhood bullying? Are fat, or slow, or unattractive boys and girls generally treated with kindness and empathy? The question is rhetorical.
And what about child sexual abuse? The WHO in 2002 estimated that 73 million boys and 150 million girls under the age of 18 years had experienced various forms of sexual violence.
Quite remarkable for a world of basically good people.
Our civilization is just a thin veneer over the heart of a brute, and all one need do to verify this claim is to read history and today's newspapers.
