Atrocity
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- "Massacre" redirects here. For other uses, see Atrocity (disambiguation)
An atrocity (from the Latin atrox, "atrocious", from Latin ater = "matte black" (as distinct from niger = "shiny black")) is a term used to describe crimes ranging from an act committed against a single person to one committed against a population or ethnic group.
In general use, an atrocity or massacre designates a politically or ethnically motivated killing of civilians. In international law, more precise terms are war crime and crime against humanity.
An atrocity can be a single specific event, or a series of events, or can refer to genocide. The defining characteristic of an atrocity is its brutal or systematic nature. It is an act of killing that is in violation of most traditional moral principles, although some societies do not condemn such behavior. Often, hostilities exceed the legitimate mandate of killing enemy combatants to include attacks upon unarmed people, upon combatants after their surrender, or upon otherwise non-combative peoples. Thus, nearly every culture has in its history acts of killing which are atrocities.
The historical record is clouded by a failure to determine if mutilated bodies represent torture before death, or mutilation of a dead body. In either case, the important effect is the propaganda value, and its effect on the morale of the enemy.
The word "massacre" is sometimes misused in commercial advertisements, e.g. such phrases as "price massacre".
Even massacre, mass killing, is imposed on civilian populations of no military significance, simply as a warning. For example Lidice. In other cases, they are targeted at military sub-groups, such as African-American summary execution in the field by the Conferderate Army during the Civil War. Small-scale atrocities may represent anything from disrespect, regional propaganda or both.
In modern settings not involving ethnic conflict, atrocities on individual leaders are rare, partially because they tend backfire or simply escalate, as in the case of Breaker Morant. In ethnic conflict, atrocity is often just an expression of pure revenge, with no notion of justice involved. Lincoln considered responding with executions in-kind for every Black Union solider murdered on the field, but he recognized that the problem was a difference in point of view between the two sides that would lead to a spiraling of escalation in the inevitable tit-for-tat that would follow. Again, the problem was that the North considered the black man fully human and the South did not. From a strict Constitutional constructionist point of view, the South was correct in that the black man only counted for three-fifths a full human being, and that dehumanizing factor is what allowed for what others considered to be atrocity. Recall that the whole three-fifths notion was simply the result of compromise hammered out a hundred years earlier to bring the South into the Union in the first place.
See also
- Collateral damage
- Genocide
- Great Purge
- Holocaust
- List of massacres
- Mass deaths and atrocities of the twentieth century
- Murder
- My Lai Massacre
- Native American massacres
- Armenian Genocide
- Rwandan Genocide
- September 11, 2001 attacks
- Serial killing
- Terrorist incidents
- Torture
- Unit 731
Disambiguation
For the german metal band, see Atrocity.
For the album by the US rapper 50 Cent, see The Massacre.de:Massaker
