ABSTRACT
Since Cain slew Abel, the killing of man by man has never ceased. No beginning, no end, ceaselessly. And for so many reasons. To satisfy such a variety of purposes. To eat the victim's flesh, to sacrifice him to the gods, for amusement, for the thrill of combat, in the rage of the amok, to take his land, his possessions, his women, to defend his possessions, his land, his women, to terrorize in order to enslave, in order to exploit, in order to break the power to resist, the killing in war, the killing in revolution, the killing in repression, the killing in vengeance; there is nothing new about killing. And yet, in our time there has been a return to a particular kind of killing; or perhaps it is a killing particular to our time. A slaughter of the innocents, wherein a society massively and systematically devours its own, a functionless slaughter of those who are not the enemies of the society, nor in order to enslave or exploit them. Such were the great Stalinist purges of the 1930s. Such was the Nazi Holocaust of the 1940s. Such was the bloodbath visited upon the people of Cambodia by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, Such was China's Cultural Revolution. All of these are to be accounted for, I think, by the re-entry of the demon into our century.
