Malhuman Acts

 Day after day, as I watch the news of Ukraine, tears roll down my cheeks.  I don’t invite them and I can’t stop them.  I feel a measure of guilt for having a comfortable world with an inability to render any aid.  (A few dollars? Even hundreds—but what is that in the face of such need?)  My tears come because I have learned empathy and compassion—it is what is required of us to be human.  It sensitizes us to feel others’ pain.

 

Those who lack those qualities commit malhuman acts.  Putin’s troops are trained to slaughter innocent people; children, women, old people as well as men in uniform.  He orders the bombing of hospitals, schools, living quarters, buildings marked ‘CHILDREN’.  In areas which they invade but cannot hold, they stealthily plant booby traps where people will walk and shoot captives with hands tied behind their backs.  They rape and torture women before killing them, and some when they don’t kill, wish they had.  It is total depravity, equal to the Nazi horrors of WWII.  Russia had no particular enmity against Ukrainian culture, Putin simply wanted the territory and moved in with his armies.  This man is evil!  It was blasphemy for him to be pictured blessing himself for the cameras in a church at Orthodox Easter.

 

I borrow a paragraph from my earlier blog of September 13, 2014 titled ‘Malhuman’. . . “we search for words with which to describe them and their deeds—all our strongest words seem inadequate”; they have transgressed the boundaries of civilization.  It is inaccurate to call their actions ‘beastly’ or ‘inhuman’.  Beasts instinctively kill for survival but don’t commit these horrors; humans act through conscious choice.  They can’t rightly be called inhuman (lacking human identity) or unhuman (not resembling or having qualities of human beings) for these are heinous actions consciously chosen by humans. . . choices arising out of pure evil.  

 

I’ve searched dictionaries for the word malhuman, and I get ‘no match found’.  I can’t understand why it is not in our lexicon.  I offer it as the word which best describes what we are witnessing.