Long live humanity!

Whenever someone recalls, describes, or comments on the horrific and brutal acts of which human beings are capable, invariably someone else rushes to point out that humanity has also produced Leonardo, Shakespeare, Newton, and other figures of comparable stature.

I think of the women who, in wartime, were first raped, then disemboweled with bayonets, and finally had their tongues cut out (just to give the job a sense of completion), and imagine they must have found great consolation in considering that mankind has also produced the sublime art of Bach and Raphael. Long live humanity!