It’s 2014. And this week that part of the world that could bear to look at such a thing watched on video as 18 men were decapitated by 18 others, using only small knives. I have read descriptions of the mass execution outside the Syrian town of Dabiq, but as I won’t watch I can only imagine the last seconds of the victims as I can the mental states of their murderers.
Such intimate barbarity towards other human beings is beyond the comprehension of most of us. So all I want to do is to note that it showed a level of cruelty that would be remarkable in the most hardened sadist or the most disconnected sociopath. Yet the men who committed it were probably