Human conscience was brutally bruised when Caine killed his brother, Abel. The conscience is maimed since then. To resurrect humaneness, Abel went into serious “regret”. He committed himself to reform. Since this event, mankind has oscillated between extreme behaviour of loss of conscience to the other end of the spectrum, where as testimony stands, the glory of human goodness.

‘Killing fields’ is an idiomatic coinage that emerged from the ruthless killing of over 3 million people by the government of Cambodia ( Kampuchea) between 1976-1978, when the inhuman Marxist dictator Pol Pot proudly displayed a hill of human skulls heaped upon each other, reaching a height of over 8-10 feet. The systematic genocide of the innocent got bracketed as ‘killing fields’. Even in that era, that is pre-9/11, the hatred for Muslims was on the rise— 70-80% Cambodian Muslims were exterminated. The genocide by Israel is a locus of Cambodian violence. Gaza today is a scene of mass murder.

History is replete with chaos, anarchy, wars, battles and all forms of confrontation between people. Encapsulated on the pages of blood soaked history of human behaviour is the tyranny unleashed by one human upon the other. The adage ‘one man’s hero is another man’s tyrant’ is at play all through. In equal measure is the miracle of humanity at its best behaviour of kindness, empathy, love and affection.

Historians spin cobwebs of imagination to make bad actions look good. However no individual can justify the ordering of a tower to be built upon live men, who were stacked and cemented together with bricks. Queen Mary, who reinstalled Catholicism in Britain, following her marriage to Phillip II of Spain, put hundreds of Protestants on the pyre, from which she earned the infamous title of “Bloody Mary”. She showed no sympathy; this characteristic was absent in her.

Again gleaning from the folders of history we learn about the atrocities committed by the likes of Attila the Hun, Ghengis Khan, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, etc. The new additions to this infamously famous list are Narendra Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu; between the two is a keen contest of who takes the first position.

Both are cruel, heartless, merciless and pitiless. They are instigators of blood-thirsty political philosophy. Their attitude is barbaric and callous. They are........

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