Word: conscienceless
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...Balkans have become a sort of Bermuda Triangle into which human decencies vanish without a trace. In the post-cold war era, it is unsettling to think that conscienceless tribal ferocity may catch on around the world. Rape, of course, has been an apparently inevitable part of war since men first threw rocks at each other -- or anyway since Rome was founded upon the rape of the Sabines. Joseph Stalin expressed a prevailing (male victor's) view of rape in war. When Yugoslav Milovan Djilas complained about the rapes that Russians had committed in Yugoslavia, Stalin replied...
...display of the Vukovar photographs now hangs in the Museum of Applied Art in Belgrade. Applied art indeed. They depict slaughters of amazing awfulness, performed with a conscienceless ingenuity that makes a man want to resign from the human race. Here, for example, we see an instrument that looks like a tuning fork, but with the prongs more widely spaced, about 3 1/2 inches apart. A local trademark is to gouge out both eyes. Hence this handy device. Studies in the Balkan Department of Comparative Atrocity...
...tribal rioting that men in groups on dangerous excursions sometimes use as a form of bonding -- solidarities of atrocity on the late shift. The truck-driver video looked like ritual sacrifice, the helicopter circling overhead, the rioters circling the trucker's flung body. Both videos recorded naked power dances, conscienceless, brainless, evil, pain inflicting: I have your life under my boot. To look at them last week was to see Americans of both races going backward at the speed of light...
...cities two-thirds of felony defendants have been arrested before, and about half of them had at least one prior conviction. Drug gangs are often armed with automatic weapons more lethal than the handguns the police carry. A career of confronting the vicious, conscienceless criminal-enemy frays the nerves. It drives police officers deeper into the solidarities of their professional tribe. There they find the support and understanding that they feel they rarely get elsewhere. The public, they think, prefers its innocence, does not really want to know the violent lengths to which cops sometimes go when trying to enforce...
...know that in his blood-drenched career, Saddam has acted truly, not metaphorically, satanic. It is reported, credibly, that in the evening, before bed, he has been in the habit of watching a video of an execution that he ordered, preferably one carried out that day. He is apparently conscienceless, a murderer of Caligulan whimsy. In August 1979, during a purge of his Baath Party, Saddam arranged this scene, reported by a former Iraqi Cabinet member: "The party officials were handed machine guns. One by one the guards brought in the accused, their mouths taped shut, and their hands bound...