Despicable Man

Image: Life hope & truth

The evolution of man to what we are today has taken place over numerous civilizations and eras. And when one considers how far we’ve come in today’s technologically advanced world, there’s a sense of achievement or even pride at some of the things that are possible today that were unthinkable just  decades before. And the development continues at an astonishing rate as technology often pioneered by the developed nations spreads to the other parts of the globe.

Man also advances socially, this is evident in the eradication of a number of horrific social ills that were perpetrated at different times in our history. Slave trade, the holocaust, ethnic cleansing by different regimes as well as numerous unspeakable exploitative and oppressive acts that have sometimes been brazenly carried out in some quarters while the rest of the world watched.

Usually such events are relegated to the dark history of the human race, or so I thought.  Sadly the reality is that when it comes to basic liberty and human rights, we may have achieved a lot over time, however for millions maybe even billions of people around the world, freedom remains a dream which is exceedingly out of reach.  

Joseph Stalin famously noted that ‘The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic’, I guess this underlies how the world can go on as usual as hundreds of thousands of Rohinjya Muslims have fled Myanmar in the wake of gross despicable acts of inhumanity and wickedness meted out against them by the military in Myanmar. The accounts relived by some of the survivors are nothing short of horror stories. A story on this issue that I followed on Aljazeera saw a woman and her relative recount how they escaped being burnt alive by the skin of their teeth; their men were butchered in cold blood like animals, the women were raped and left for dead after their babies had been tossed into a fire right before their very eyes and yet the leader of this nation, a Nobel peace prize winner, won’t even admit nor address the tragedy frontally.

These migrants who have had to flee such a hellish existence and found their way to Bangladesh, languish in squalid conditions in makeshift camps they have set up in uninhabitable locations there. And just as we were still recoiling in shock at such inhuman treatment in this day and age, the news of the slavery industry going on in Libya further jarred our consciousness.

Human beings being treated and sold off as commodities, their organs being harvested for the booming black market organ trade and kept in conditions reminiscent of the dark period of the slave trade in Africa. Scenes which ought to have been confined to the history books and reenactments in historical dramas, play out right before our very eyes in 2017, with Africa still the epicenter of such malevolence.

These two instances which by no means represent the entirety of atrocities being committed on a large scale by man against man have received widespread global news coverage and condemnation from many quarters but yet it feels like we are reacting with the outrage of an ant instead of that of an angry blue whale. Committees and inquiries are set up, while lives, hopes and dreams continue to be mangled.  

Edmund Burke puts it rather succinctly when he says ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing’.