Word: brutalize
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...controlled diamond fields that could finance a long-term insurgency, and when ECOMOG withdrew recently, complaining that the mission was too costly, the RUF became emboldened. The peace deal was supposed to mean giving up their control over the diamond fields, but that wasn't something an exceedingly brutal army - which had adopted systematic dismembering of the civilian population as a tactic of war - was willing...
Things become truly troubling when human beings facing the same difficult circumstances start making equally brutal choices. Anthropologists report that during a three-year period of social upheaval in Bolivia in the 1930s, nearly every mother in an Ayoreo Indian village committed infanticide at least once. In India and China, selective infanticide of baby girls is still commonly, if quietly, practiced. And while there may be less of a history of such killing in the U.S., periodic cases of high-schoolers secretly giving birth and then murdering their infant are proof that such practices know no cultural boundaries...
...Damascus, the guerrilla movement found itself at liberty to step up attacks to reinforce its claim to the mantle of Lebanon's liberators. In the unilateral withdrawal scenario, Israel's only defense against rocket attacks on its northern population centers is the promise that retaliation would be swift and brutal. But Thursday's air strikes, designed to disable Lebanon's infrastructure, didn't deter Hezbollah from hitting back Friday, underlining the impression that without the Syrians imposing order, unilateral withdrawal may not end the conflict on Israel's northern border...
...have argued in the past that the death penalty was justified, in certain brutal cases, on the basis of the social contract. That is: Some hideous crimes demand the ultimate punishment in order to satisfy the essentially civilizing deal that we make with one another as citizens. We forgo individual revenge, deferring to the law, but depend upon a certainty that the law will give us a justice that must include appropriate harshness. I favored the Texas folk wisdom: "He needs killing." If the law fails in that task, I said, and people see that evil is fecklessly tolerated, then...
Students at colleges and universities across North America have built a movement to respond to the rapaciousness of the apparel industry--the main beneficiaries of the present brutal system. With dogged determination, they have challenged hundreds of administrators across the country to take responsibility for the production practices behind shirts and baseball caps being sold in college bookstores. Earlier this month there was a significant breakthrough. Students and administrators representing nearly 50 institutions of higher learning gathered in New York's historic Judson Memorial Church at the founding conference of the Workers Rights Consortium...