Quotes About Atrocity

The hardest - the part that's hard is to kill, but once you kill, that becomes easier, to kill the next person and the next one and the next one." -Varnado Simpson, Charlie Company of My Lai

Anything that binds people together into a moral matrix that glorifies the in-group while at the same time demonizing another group can lead to moralistic killing, and many religions are well suited for that task. Religion is therefore often an accessory to atrocity, rather than the driving force of the atrocity.

So what's the most atrocious thing you've seen?" He waved his hand: "Man, of course!

execution of civilians, collective rape of women. The Israeli general staff, moreover, used the Hebrew word tihur, meaning 'cleaning' or 'purification', more than 40 years before the concept of 'ethnic cleansing' was coined at the time of the wars in the former Yugoslavia.14

heard in communist circles that numbers of Jews were being gassed."45.

Gassed. They were killed, and soap was made from the bones. The people were nothing more than that. Wasn't it especially dangerous to talk about that? It wasn't dangerous.

On the brutality of the Nazis after the war, "The public reeled at the very evilness of evil.

Nacismus je nelidský a sobecký. Je založen na nenávisti a zlu a jeho vrcholem je Osv?tim.

There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was the most evil crime ever committed.

Srebrenica was a horrendous war crime and it had to be uncovered.

The more civilized we become, the more horrendous our entertainments.

If I'd been living in Berlin in 1933-34, could I possibly have foreseen the Holocaust and all the corollary horrors of World War II? And if I had, would I have done anything about it? I also started to wonder: how does a culture slip its moorings?

The Holocaust is as real a historical event as World War II itself and not to be challenged.

Guilt is what happens when there isn't a group to shame you. Regret, horror, atrocity—if the group doesn't care, we simply invent a God who does. A God who might be swayed by the subsequent good acts, or at least efforts, of an erstwhile wrongdoer.

Tiresias of these two worlds that the distinction is less important than people would have you believe. Guilt is what happens when there isn't a group to shame you. Regret, horror, atrocity—if the group doesn't care, we simply invent a God who does. A God who might be swayed by the subsequent good acts, or at least efforts, of an erstwhile wrongdoer.

Blome developed aerosol delivery systems for nerve gas, to be tested on inmates at the Auschwitz concentration camp; bred infected mosquitoes and lice, to be tested on inmates at the Dachau and Buchenwald camps; and produced gas for use in killing thirty-five thousand prisoners at camps in Poland where patients with tuberculosis were being held.

An estimated 14,000 Muslims were slaughtered, many of them machine-gunned; the city was looted, then burned.

The shocking truth is that until recently most people didn't think there was anything particularly wrong with genocide, as long as it didn't happen to them.

Apart from numbers and methods, genocides sear the moral imagination by the gratuitous sadism indulged in by the perpetrators.

Of all the varieties of violence of which our sorry species is capable, genocide stands apart, not only as the most heinous but as the hardest to comprehend.

When you scale by population size, only one of the 20th century's atrocities even makes the top ten. The worst atrocity of all time was the An Lushan Revolt and Civil War, an eight-year rebellion during China's Tang Dynasty that, according to censuses, resulted in the loss of two-thirds of the empire's population, a sixth of the world's population at the time.13

The New York Herald reported that a German soldier had been seen carrying a bagful of ears. Another newspaper accused Germany of melting down the enemy dead to manufacture soap.

It's necessary to exterminate these Jews like rats, once and for all. In Germany, thank God, we've already taken care of that. I hope that the world will follow this example.