Of humanity and beastliness

The line of difference between humans and animals is wafer thin. This is the truth which has passed down to man since the early civilisation. As man became civilised over time, this difference has started overlapping each other. On occasions, awestruck people couldn't tell a human from a beast. During cold-blooded killing of a group of people by another, long-planned murder of a person by his or her adversary, and mindless sack of cities, man has kept its human virtues aside. From a reverse view, dumb animals at times were found to have shown veritably divine human attributes.
Pages of history are filled with marauders, sadistic killers, assassins and persecutors. Like kindness and forgiveness, extreme forms of brutality also define man. The list is long, and continues to be longer. Animals act on impulse. They react to hostile adversaries on being dictated by their stimuli or reflex. Animals do not conspire or take added pleasure after crushing their aggressors. They are not blood-thirsty. But humans really are. That's how man has evolved from its primitive stage into the later phase of enlightenment. Shakespeare has called man the 'noblest of creatures'. No doubt about it. Yet at times, the world turns speechless seeing the savageries committed by humans. They occur at individual, community and ethnic levels.
Calling the torture by four men, and the later death, of a teenage boy in Sylhet on July 11 just brutal is a brazen understatement. The extent of inhumanity seen in the incident makes it one of the most sordid in recent times. Suspecting people for being thieves and manhandling them is a common sight in this country. The severity of punishment also causes deaths to the suspects. In most of these cases, the tragedies turn out to be 'manslaughter', i.e. an unintentional murder. When a group of people beats a helpless victim for hours, inflicts horrific tortures on him that leads to his death, the act assumes the proportion of a cold-blooded crime. This is not beastliness. Extreme forms of brutality have long made inroads into human societies. Undeveloped communities in today's world find the practice to be normal. In innumerable cases, the persons involved in crimes downplay the enormity of their offences. They also use their influence to escape the dragnet of law.
Popular outrage at the agonising death of the poor boy in Sylhet might have led to the nabbing and eventual comeuppance of all the persons involved in the crime. So would the brutality of the person in Chittagong who shot a deer dead, slit its throat and then videoed the whole act to release on a social media site. The fiendish pleasure the person has drawn from the 'heroic deed' stunned the nation.
The incidents have attracted wide focus, thanks to the perpetrators' nauseating exhibitionism. But hundreds of such criminal savageries remain out of public view. Ranging from molestation of minor girls and their murder, burning people alive due to enmity to vengeful slaughtering of all the members of a family continue unabated. Social scientists and psychologists can perhaps come up with their thoughtful interpretations of such maladies. But, finally, it is the state machinery, on which lies the onus of battling the scourge of brutality.

shihabskr@ymail.com