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Source image: Elements of Style

“As Americans learned about the deeply disturbing tactics of the CIA's post-9/11 torture program this week, the government in Brazil released a report filled with its own history of systemic abuses. The nearly-2,000-page report by Brazil's National Truth Commission detailed a pattern of killings and torture during a period of military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. […]
     The security forces' methods included killings, disappearances, sexual violence and other forms of torture, as The Washington Post notes. There were such horrific violations as 'the introduction of insects into victims' bodies,' according to Newsweek.
     The truth commission identified 377 perpetrators from all levels of the Brazilian state. Many of the accused had received training from the U.S. and U.K. in interrogation tactics that, according to The Guardian, violated human rights.
     Buzzfeed writes that a large part of that education occurred at the U.S. Army's School of the Americas. This facility, located in Panama until the mid-1980s, acted as a training ground for military members from many Latin American countries. It has since been renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation and is now run out of Fort Benning near Columbus, Georgia.”
— Nick Robins-Early, Huffington Post
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“[Gustave] Le Bon introduced his crowd psychology theory in his 1895 publication The Crowd: A study of the Popular Mind. The French psychologist characterized his posited effect of crowd mentality, whereby individual personalities become dominated by the collective mindset of the crowd. Le Bon viewed crowd behavior as ‘unanimous, emotional, and intellectually weak.’ He theorized that a loss of personal responsibility in crowds leads to an inclination to behave primitively and hedonistically by the entire group.”
— Wikipedia
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“About half of Americans believe that the CIA was justified in its harsh interrogation methods of “war on terror” detainees, a poll found Monday, days after a damning US report revealed harrowing details of torture.
     […] 51 percent of people in the United States believe the CIA’s methods were justified (29 percent said not) and 56 percent said the intelligence gathered from those methods prevented terrorist attacks, a Pew Research Center survey found.
     There was more doubt, however, about the decision to release the Senate report, with 42 percent saying it was the right move against 43 percent who said it was not. Fifteen percent did not know.”
— RAWSTORY
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Isis on the march (from: Nox & Friends

“Robert Gellately […] conducted a widely respected survey of the German media before and during the war, concluding that there was ‘substantial consent and active participation of large numbers of ordinary Germans’ in aspects of the Holocaust, and documenting that the sight of columns of slave labourers were common, and that the basics of the concentration camps, if not the extermination camps, were widely known. The German scholar, Peter Longerich, in a study looking at what Germans knew about the mass murders concluded that: ‘General information concerning the mass murder of Jews was widespread in the German population.’”
— Wikipedia
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