Inhumanity !

When the second world war finally came to a close the victorious Allies were quick to seize officers responsible for atrocities and put them on trial.  The Nuremberg trials held the attention of the world when the survivors of the Nazi death camps were paraded on film.  From a practical point of view only the most senior commanders were tried and sent for execution.   Thousands who played a lesser role simply melted into the crowd of demobilized soldiers and settled into civilian life.

The civilized world was aghast because for the first time the movie camera and journalists embedded with the troops brought the true horrors of war to newsreel screens and to emerging television.  The world shuddered and promised - "Never Again " !

Inhumanity persevered - right before their eyes.  Communism rolled across " liberated " countries and refused to retreat. Hundreds of thousands of refugees escaped to the west and many more endured the embrace of barbed wire frontiers, the Berlin wall, the Stazi - and the midnight knock on the door by the secret police.

There was an air of hope when the Soviet Union collapsed.  Mikhael Gorbachov offered the chance of a friendly Russia and the west relaxed, but unfortunately dictators still ruled in many countries and the world was never free of war.  Anarchy prevailed in many parts of Africa and South America was mostly ruled by despots.

The world has seen new atrocities go virtually unpunished.   In many parts of the world invading armies forcibly recruit child soldiers and Europe has seen an era of  " ethnic cleansing "  when innocent people have been driven from their homes - and in some instances - summarily executed for the sin of having a different ethnic origin.

The hot spot at the moment is Syria.   The " Arab Spring " brought hope of a peaceful, secular Middle East, but it was not to be.  The religious divide and the tribal nature of the various lands brought civil war and once again inhumanity emerged as a prime weapon of war.

Once again, hundreds of thousands have fled in the face of death, torture and the forced change of religion.  The flow of asylum seekers to Europe is causing death on the high seas and causing European countries to fortify their frontiers with barbed wire to keep them out.  It is quite possible that the fear of foreigners may change the politics of Europe.    The spectre of the rise of the far right is a new possibility.

What the world is seeing on recent news broadcasts is a repeat of the inhumanity visited on Warsaw when Poland was invaded in 1939 and in the worst of the Communist rule in the countries they occupied at wars end.

Syria's city of Aleppo is partly held by Bassar Assad's troops and partly held by the various militias fighting to end his rule.   Caught in the middle are civilian men, women and children who are now the victims of a policy of extermination.

Russian war planes have joined the Syrian airforce in deliberately targeting civilians by dropping barrel bombs on civilian neighbourhoods and deliberately destroying every hospital in what they term " rebel held areas ".   At the same time, they are refusing to allow safe entrance for United Nations food convoys and the policy seems to be to force the surrender of the defenders by exterminating all civilians caught in this trap.

War in this twenty-first century is front and centre in the nightly news.   We deplore the carnage that we are seeing but we lack the will to go to war to make it cease.   No doubt it will eventually come to an end when one side or the other is victorious, and then a few token offenders will be dragged before an International court and punished.

It seems that modern humans have toned down their horror of inhumanity delivered in far away places.   Their consciences are spared when they drop a donation to one of the many appeals that promise to deliver relief.