It is not the number of victims or the degree of cruelty that is distinctive; it is the fact that the acts committed and the acts that nobody protests are split from the consciousness of men in an uncanny, even a schizophrenic manner. The atrocities of our time are done by men as “functions” of social machinery—men possessed by an abstracted view that hides from them the human [and non-human] beings who are their victims and, as well, their own humanity. They are inhuman acts because they are impersonal. They are not sadistic but merely businesslike; they are not aggressive but merely efficient; they are not emotional at all but technically clean-cut.
C. Wright Mills (via
cultureofresistance)
(Source: socialuprooting, via revolutionnow)
archive
