Silent_Water
Tribune
By knowing many terrible stories from history, I am afraid that the historical truth of (in)human behaviour is not only based on the society in which one is living. There is a book about the Vietnam war by the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci which I bought in those days not only because of its German title which was interesting enough for me: "Wir, Engel und Bestien" (= translated in English it would sound more correct as "We, Angels and Devils"). This book is not only a subjective description of her life as a journalist in Vietnam but also a reflection of inhuman behaviour in history because one of her fellow French journalists liked to recite quotations of Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and philosopher (1623-1663), who is quoted by sentences like "So, the king tells his soldiers to kill those people over there on the other side of the river and his soldiers do that. But why? Only because they speak another language and they want to read the bible in their own one or simply better because they do not want our king to be their king, too? Then the king could also tell his soldiers to kill them simply because they are living on the wrong side of the river. ... Human beings are crazy in finding reasons to kill other human beings and you need to be crazy in your own way in order not to become as crazy and devilish as most of the others. ... So, it is good and necessary for human beings to know that they can be angels and devils at the same time and by their own will, they can turn their world in heaven or hell for others and in the end for themselves because only this knowledge of both extremes - of the possibility of being culprit-offender and victim in one's same life could prevent all human beings from becoming devils in their own hell for ever."
Well, I do not really know if Blaise Pascal knew of the story of the Dutch ship Batavia, which happened in 1629, ...
... but that story is a proof of the pessimistic saying "a civilizated society is only a thin layer on human beings who can be turned back into beasts of prey without this layer at any time". Not only a society can tell you that it is OK to kill this or that one, also the absence or sudden disappearence of a society can turn human life into hell and I do not know what might be more terrible for a single person and I dare not to decide that. In this discussion here, I mentioned the earthquake of Lisbon in 1755 with the temporary breakdown of the society with all imaginable atrocities from crimes to cannibalism and the history of the ship Batavia is the story of a criminal who turned a shipwrecking accident into his own reign of terror by finding enough other men ready to follow him in his orders of crime and rape during the absence of a civilized society with law and order.
Well, I do not really know if Blaise Pascal knew of the story of the Dutch ship Batavia, which happened in 1629, ...
Batavia - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org