I was planning another blog post today about New York, but with the world the way it is, I cannot bring myself to write it.
- In Democratic Republic of the Congo, a new French word is born: reviolé. Rebel forces plunder all they can from the villages they attack (with an insinuation of the word
plunder
more evil than most people can fathom). Government soldiers, defeated, extract everything they can from the people they are paid to protect as they retreat. Atrocity rates are so unfathomably massive thatwomen who have been raped in several, unrelated incidents
is becoming a nonzero demographic. The Congolese government looks in the other direction while its own employees commit atrocities; the UN peacekeepers (the largest UN peacekeeping force in the world) cower in impotence, other international bodies are powerless to interfere, ordinary Congolese men are brushed aside, and Congolese women have no recourse: they must suffer, repeatedly, disgusting humiliation I can scarcely imagine. - Not to be outdone, a 13-year-old rape victim in Somalia is stoned to death on adultery charges by one of the many groups hoping to become a government, in a stadium packed with a thousand murderous men.
My heart goes out to the victims of this most base, evil, vulgar, and despicable crime: especially those women honest and well-meaning enough to shed their dignity and publicize their suffering. I am sickened by the existence of masses of men in the world who are so unmoved as to lower themselves to rape and murder... and by the fact that I have something in common with them.
I wish I could chop theirs off.
HUGOMORE42