Brutality

It still shocks and terrifies me to read or hear about the extent of human brutality in this world. In "The man with two heads" by Elena Lappin, she writes an investigative essay about Binjamin Wilkormirski, who wrote the factually contested book "Fragments", in which he describes his childhood experiences living in Nazi concentration camps. The horrific extent of this can best be summed up in the following passage, I think.
"Binjamin's memories of Majdanek camp are a series of terrifying tableaux. Rats crawl from the corpses of dead women, lice run over his face in "racing, ticklish streams", tiny, starving babies chew their own fingers down to the bone. Binjamin is kicked in the back of his head by a guard's black boot, and thrown head-first against a wall by another guard. He hears "the unmistakable sound of breaking skulls" when babies are killed. At the consequent "red mess" his stomach heaves with "horror and disgust"".
Think about that for a moment.
Binjamin was around 3 or 4 at the time. He survived Majdanek and was transferred to what he thinks was Auschwitz, where again he made it through until the end of the war.
I then read and looked at a photo essay by Jillian Eddlestein, called "The truth commission", which documented proceedings at The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa between 1996 and 1998. This commission, headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, was set up to try and understand what had happened during the dark days of Apartheid, and through understanding, to try and forge a new identity for the country for the future. Encouraged by the possibility of amnesty more than 7,000 perpetrators came forward to confess their crimes, and, hoping for justice and reparation, around 20,000 victims made statements to the commissioners over the two year period. A description of one of the incidents follows.
"On 8 May 1985, Qwaqwahuli Godolozi, Sipho Hashe and Champion Galela, leaders of the Port Elizabeth Black Civic Organization (Pebco), went to meet a British diplomat at the airport. They were never seen again. Although it was suspected that the police had been involved in their disappearance, for fifteen years their widows, Monica Godolozi, Elizabeth Hashe and Nomali Galela, did not know what had happened to them. In1996, Joe Mamasela, a security policeman at Vlakpaas, the training ground for the counter-insurgency movement outside Pretoria, told the Truth Commission that the three men had been led into an "animal shed" at Post Chalmers where they had been interrogated. He said: "It was brutal. They were tortured severely. They were brutalized. I strangled them. They were beaten with iron pipes on their heads, kicked and punched. They were killed, they died one by one. I have never seen anything like it in my life. It was blazing hell on earth."
And that is just one example of the thousands of atrocities that took place under that regime.
You would think that we would learn something from such occurrences. That we'd resolve never to repeat such moments of "blazing hell on earth", and yet it continues to happen. You look at events in Sudan, where rape was used as a tool of war, or of the many reports of torture of prisoners in China and North Korea, the appalling treatment of supposed terrorists at Guantanamo Bay and just the constant white noise of smaller incidents of horrific murders that are reported daily from around the world, and you wonder -
Who are we?
What can drive people to commit such moments of fury?
How can anyone ever reconcile their actions, whatever the circumstances?