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Introduction: towards a theory

The people need poetry that will be their own secret

To keep then awake forever

And bathe them in the bright-haired wave of its breathing. ¹

Osip Mandelshtam

Mankind cannot live by logic alone but also needs poetry. ²

Mahatma Gandhi

In commentators’ evaluations of social and foreign policies, cruelty as an intended, or as an unanticipated consequence of policies, has received little attention. In policy appraisals, the notion ‘cruelty’ seldom appears, not even in an index, and has not been acknowledged to be a purpose of policies even if the cruel consequences have been obvious. It was as though an alleged rational process should be cleansed of any consideration of irrational actions such as causing serious harm to citizens or to animals.

The absence of regular commentary on the business of inflicting cruelty prompts this book’s aim, to show cruelty in the play of politics, in the design and implementation of state policies and in non-state responses. If truths about worldwide cruelties become evident, the elimination of such practices should become a key consideration in any future crafting of policies and in the advocacy of values which influence political cultures. Advocacy of humanitarian alternatives to cruelty would depend on the spirit of universal human rights, challenges to oppressive uses of power and the promotion of policies to address social and economic inequalities.

The behaviour of nation-states, their governments, institutions and the cohorts of politicians, public servants and media acolytes who contribute to cruelty needs to be exposed. Identifying the cruelties of citizens who act as individuals, or as loyal members of well-organized groups, prompts questions: do they look in a mirror, do they pretend all is well, nothing unusual has happened?

Cruelty refers to a wanton and unnecessary infliction of suffering on body and mind. The adjective ‘wanton’ describes conduct without regard to what is right, just or humane. That could include discrimination, torture or murder by individuals or by a state, as in the mass famine in China from 1956 to 1976 (the Great Leap Forward) which killed tens of millions of people.

In Western parlance, cruelty also warrants definitions according to specific contexts. In marriage relationships, cruelty includes mental and physical harm occurring over a period of time. Cruelty to children encompasses physical and mental battering and abuse. Regarding responsibilities for animals, it includes the infliction of physical and mental pain or death.

Distinctions need to be made. One cruelty should be distinguished from another. An act of torture would be particularly conscious. With abiding poverty, it may be unconscious. Subsequent analysis in Chapter 4 addresses this continuum, from direct to indirect, and from conscious to possibly unconscious acts. Along that continuum persist cruel policies which may be deliberate, or conducted by enabling the acts of others. Cruel policies may be carried out by deception, or could involve collusion with cruel allies.

Cruel acts and policies are worldwide, though the United Nations has set prohibitions on cruelty which represent global standards. Article 5 of the 1948 UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights says, ‘No-one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.’

Article 3 of the 1953 European Convention on Human Rights prohibits ‘inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’. The European Court of Human Rights holds that this provision forbids the extradition of a person to a foreign state if they are likely to be subjected to torture, which has been interpreted as referring to the death penalty.

In the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 1966, Article Seven says, ‘No-one shall be subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. In particular, no-one shall be subjected without his free consent to medical or scientific experimentation.’ Article Eight says, ‘No-one shall be held in slavery; slavery and the slave trade in all their forms shall be prohibited.’

The UN’s Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment was passed by the General Assembly in December 1984 and came into force in June 1987.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child was ratified by the UN General Assembly on 20 November 1989. Article Three of that Convention states, ‘In all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law or legislative bodies, the best interest of the child shall be a primary consideration.’ Article Six says, ‘States Parties recognize that every child has the inherent right to life.’

These charters, covenants and conventions have provided standards of human decency to which most of the world’s nations said they would adhere. Through the machinations of politics, by badly crafted, thoughtless policies, or in atrocities committed by those who oppose states and their institutions, these significant UN aspirations and rules are being derided, or ignored. Like a malignant disease, cruelties persist, even though anyone with a belief in the importance of human rights and the rule of law could recognize and oppose them.

I scanned records of familiar cruelties, of discriminatory and brutal responses to Indigenous people, asylum seekers and refugees. I felt confronted by the inhumanities, swamped by records of human rights abuses from several continents, by news of the latest ethnic cleansing, of torture and killings so routinely explained and so automatically justified.

My research addressed questions, how to gain insight into cruelties, how to portray human dimensions without departing from the formal responsibility to marshal and record diverse sources of information. Overwhelming evidence of atrocities to human beings, to animals, plus disregard for a precious environment, posed the conundrum: how to handle feelings of dismay and disbelief?

In response to that last question, poetry provides ideas and insights. Extracts from poems illuminate those insights which can remain elusive in prose. The English poet Shelley said that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. He implied that lessons could be learned from poetry which unmasked the past, undressed the present and forecast a more socially just future. Images and messages in poetry contribute vision and understanding. Without the insights, irony and softness of poetry, accounts of cruelty could seem relentlessly macabre.

With the help of poets, this book appeals for truths to be told about governments’ oppressive ways to implement domestic and foreign policies, and extremist groups’ ways to wreak vengeance on people they deride or hate.

The cruelty as policy question began with random examples of cruelty practised by any state, any group or individual. Learning came with exploration which revealed ideas about the motives for cruelty, the political, cultural and psychological forces which influenced those motives. As that delving came to an end, though such head-scratching reflections never really end, clarity emerged, but with a caution: don’t expect a psychological treatise. The psychological dimension exists, but is wrapped in the contexts of other forces. Addressing the causes question coincided with clues as to the ways in which foreign and domestic policies have been formed and fuelled by cruelty. Advocating humanitarian alternatives is a work in progress for every writer and reader, for every social scientist and journalist, every student, bureaucrat and politician. That part of this book was the easiest to write because it was moved by an educational, political and moral imperative: without humanitarian alternatives, we are all lost.

The value of theory

Understanding cruelty can be made easier by theory about patterns which persist irrespective of differences between countries and cultures. Such theorizing confronts possible criticism of detail, ‘There are so many examples, we can’t distinguish one from another’, or, more specifically, ‘How is one individual incident of cruelty linked to extreme events such as state torture, murderous wars and genocide?’

A brief theoretical guide addresses those questions and begins by highlighting two concepts. The first concerns a state, its actions, responsibility and accountability. State includes government, whether democracy or dictatorship, elected coalition or one-party rule. It includes state organizations: religious agencies, educational institutions, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), corporations subsidized by governments, militant groups which claim official authority, even individuals who wear uniforms, such as security personnel, or who may operate in plain clothes.

Reference to culture gives the second clue. An assembly of beliefs, rules about male/female conduct, plus time-honoured means of discrimination contribute to cultures. Beneath the visible, tourist-popular features of cultures lie values about order, normality, rewards, punishments and the exercise of power.

As insightful observers on the effects of cultures on life chances, poets have warned of harmful effects. Irish poet Louis MacNeice pleaded, ‘I am not yet born, O fill me with strength against those who would freeze my humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton’.³ The national poet of Palestine, Mahmoud Darwish, wrote, ‘We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere. As if travelling is the way of the clouds’.⁴ The English poet Housman protested the persecution of anyone who might be considered abnormal, ‘The laws of God, the laws of man, He may keep that will and can, Not I: let God and man decree Laws for themselves and not for me’.⁵

A first step in theorizing concerns the common ground between degrees of cruelty. A continuum stretches from modest cruelty (if that’s not an oxymoron) to what might be termed middle-range offensive acts, to easily recognized extreme cruelty. In spite of apparent differences, each act derives from values operating within a state. Here is the thin-end-of-the-wedge argument. Bullying by individuals at home, in a playground or workplace has ripple effects and reappears in national policies and in the conduct of international relations. In every context, cruel acts are influenced by a concern with order and control, with disparagement and punishment.

Another pattern emerges. Slides of cruelty examined through a microscope show signs of superiority and inferiority. A need to maintain the superiority of one group at the expense of another looks like the catalyst for cruelty. Embedded in state rules and cultural beliefs, assumptions about superiority give an entitlement to act against the supposed inferior beings, human or animal. The functionaries who represent states and cultures can assume permission to be cruel. The Myanmar military expel and murder the Rohingya. In response to a powerless woman’s alleged blasphemy, Pakistani mobs howl for blood. Indigenous people in the Americas and in Australia can be eliminated by supposed superior races.

Not just by murder and mayhem, dominant people have been desperate to assert their superiority. Aboriginal children removed from their parents, the babies of unmarried mothers transferred to adoptive parents, asylum seekers detained indefinitely irrespective of the rules of international law, fences and walls built and guards employed to maintain border controls and keep inferior people out.

Policies which maintain inequality appear as a corollary of assumptions about superiority. Unequal opportunities are bolstered by state powers and by beliefs nourished by ethnic traditions and by carefully maintained religious customs. Machiavelli taught that inequality helped to sustain order, that cruelty to someone regarded as an equal never happened. Victims of cruelty are the unequals, Dalits victimized by upper castes, Afro-Americans by white superiors, Roma people by powerful states, people living with disabilities by those considered ‘normal’, refugees of every colour and creed by operatives who do not want them. Such inequalities are sustained by a top-down exercise of power which is often violent and from the perspectives of victims, almost always cruel.

Inequalities may continue without evidence of cruelty. Experience of inequality is not a cruelty in itself. It is the persistent experience of social, economic and other status-bound inequalities which creates vulnerability to cruelty, directly and indirectly.

In policy circles, efforts to maintain inequalities are clouded in claims about efficiency. It is inefficient to reward people who do not work hard, even if job opportunities do not exist. It hardly matters if the victims of such policies are hungry, poor or homeless. An efficient system has to be maintained and cruelty never acknowledged.

The economist J.K. Galbraith argued that free-market economic policies could be explained more by morality than economy. Efforts to achieve efficient productivity and vigorous economic growth were state priorities and should be pursued irrespective of cruel consequences. As part of their ideology, ‘you deserve what you get and get what you deserve’, political elites, such as members of the Republican Party in the US, punish the poor by denying them resources yet also claim that such polices would save people by motivating them to work harder. Inequality begets further inequality. Conspicuously wealthy people urge the character-building value of abolishing public services and instead claim that policies of deregulation and privatization will help the poor. Galbraith judged that one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy was the search for superior moral justification for selfishness.

Governments’ and state institutions’ concern to be efficient derives partly from ‘economic’ concerns, as in charges about cost-effectiveness, about not wasting taxpayers’ money, protecting individual and corporate interests. Advocacy of efficiency is also evident in moralizing by religious powers which want vicious punishments for alleged abnormal sexual behaviour. In personal relations and in international affairs a status quo is protected, and to defeat supposed enemies, efficient yet horrendous military goals are permitted, as in the obliteration of Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and, more recently, the Iraqi city of Fallujah.⁶ Efficiency becomes taken for granted, uses violence whatever the human cost and not just in military operations.

Geological strata of cruelties reveal prominent layers, superiority, inequality and efficiency. Fear also appears. A commander takes the Machiavelli cues that engendering fear, not seeking love, is the way to rule, a lesson followed by African and South American dictators, President Duterte in the Philippines, Hun Sen in Cambodia and by Prince Mohammad Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. Fear is also experienced by inferiors who expect admonishment or punishment if they do not comply with the orders of a perceived superior, a theme explored so significantly by Stanley Milgram.⁷ In both instances, concern with morality has been jettisoned and the fear inherent in experiences of authoritarianism usually ensures compliance.

Another layer appears to be present in each of the others. It is difficult to see. Called concealment, it refers to lying and denial that a cruel act occurred, or if it did it was someone else’s responsibility. Bureaucratic formalities, supposedly conducted for public interest, are invisible, the decision makers unknown and the rationale for their decisions seldom tested.

From victims’ perspectives, the concealment of cruelties may be exposed only when a Truth Commission investigates or when state leaders offer official apologies, albeit decades after the hurtful actions had occurred.

Somewhat ironically, an understanding of humanity derives from observing cruelty, and provides the rationale for ‘humanitarian alternatives’, the second half of this book. The philosopher of the French Renaissance, Michel de Montaigne, said ‘The horror of cruelty impels me more to clemency than any model of clemency could draw me on’, and when opposing state and religious justification of cruelty he insisted there were no naturally inferior or superior people.⁸ He might have said that goals of justice and humanity derive from the realization of the interdependence of peoples and of all living things. That thesis ranges from a 16th-century English poet who envisioned that no man is an island to current environmentalists advocating the importance of preserving a unique and precious planet.

That brief theorizing is introduced to help navigate the evidence in the following chapters.

Outline and themes

Chapter 1, ‘Perpetrators and victims’, lists individual cases of cruelty which illustrate the character of perpetrators, whether governments, state institutions or individuals, and the awfulness experienced by the victims. Speculation whether one form of cruelty is worse than another, whether state-sanctioned brutalities should be taken more seriously than violence perpetrated by the representatives of institutions or by extremist religious and political groups, is avoided.

Chapter 2, ‘Values, attitudes and behaviour’, identifies the social, religious, political, economic and cultural forces which facilitate cruelties. In those accounts, the platitude ‘it’s part of human nature’ is not helpful. Even where notorious killers and torturers could be identified, the moral and cultural contexts of their acts require an examination, which includes cruelty to animals and violence to the environment. The evils of violent cultures, such as the security politics of Israel, Iran’s authoritarian theocracy, America’s love of imprisonment and entrenched discrimination in the Indian caste system, will also be discussed.

Chapter 3, ‘Explaining cruelty’, addresses causes. It covers a continuum of explanations from the banality of evil to automaton-like behaviour in bureaucracies, from pleasures derived from sadism to the cruelties fostered by selfishness. There’s also a postscript about cruelty driven by managerial demands for efficiency, a powerfully addictive notion which is not value neutral.

Chapter 4, ‘Cruelty as policy’, moves from cruelty as a deliberate motive to situations where it looks as though the architects of policies enabled cruelties to take place but did not direct them. Then come the denials and deception: who could possibly think that countries such as the US, Russia, Israel, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Iran or Myanmar would indulge in human rights abuses such as collective punishments, ethnic cleansing, floggings, torture, arbitrary imprisonment, targeted killings and executions? Finally, there’s collusion. Alliances are made with countries which commit cruelties but their allies behave as though this is nothing to do with them. When the US ignores Israeli cruelty to Palestinian children, that’s collusion. The European Union (EU) and the UN may also collude by silence which encourages perpetrators.

An impression may have been given that the story of cruelty concerns only direct violence, as in torture, bombings, executions and other acts of war. That would be a wrong conclusion. Cruelty is also promoted by policies which promote inequality and maintain poverty.

Chapter 5, ‘Humanitarian alternatives’, explores the opposite to cruelties, as in diverse forms of advocacy for a common humanity through literacy about non-violence and for the health-promoting values of creative, non-destructive uses of power. In commentary about the vision required to build an economy not based on inequalities and injustices, the place of technology, whether it is help or hindrance, is also assessed.

Chapter 6, ‘Cruel or compassionate world?’ highlights the responsibilities of corporations and the cruelty involved in the threat and possible use of nuclear weapons. A final drumroll for humanity returns to the need to recover respect for human rights, for humanitarian law and for the ideals written into the UN Charter.

Chapter 7, ‘Humanity on a bonfire’, argues that in analyses of cruelty, if the rules and niceties of social commentary and academic rigour are removed, the chequered picture of subtle and not-so-subtle differences in cruelty is lost. Instead there emerges a stark, almost universal picture of human rights being derided and any respect for a common humanity thrown on a bonfire, literally in some cases. That trend shows the danger of not paying serious attention to cruelty as policy.

Chapter 8, ‘A language for humanity’, carries a final message. Seizing the opportunities to remove cruelties depends on enthusiasm for a revived democratic politics, plus facility in language to reinterpret human rights, advocate UN peace-keeping responsibilities and promote the principles of humane governance.