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The Romans fancied this when, in the fourth century BC, they substituted constitutional government for class war. After that, Roman political life was unstained by bloodshed for nearly a quarter of a millennium. But the spell was broken when, in the fateful year 133 BC, Tiberius Gracchus was lynched - by senators, of all people. The Romans were horrified at what they had done. They had violated a taboo against violence that had come to seem to be quite securely established, but their horror did not bring the Romans to their senses. During the next 100 years, violence in the Roman world went from bad to worse; violence committed by right against left; by masters against slaves; by citizens against subjects. At last, society was saved, when it was on the brink of dissolution, at the price of submitting to a despotic world government. In our day, the Western world has given itself a similar disillusioning shock. In Britain, for instance, we believed down to 1914, that, for us, 1688 had been an epoch-making date. We had recently put the controversial King Charles I to death. In 1688 we took pains to let his son James II get away, unharmed, into exile. We came to believe that, since then, we and all our fellow Westerners had left behind us, once and for all, the era of political death sentences and religious persecutions. In Britain, in this year 1970, we have not yet lynched a Gracchus; yet in our generation, we have seen nature return, with a vengeance, in the world around us and, to an alarming degree, in Britain, too. The domestic shock, for us in Britain, has been the discovery that we are subject to the same irrational feelings of racial animosity as our fellow whites in south Africa and Rhodesia and in the old South of the United States. In Britain, as in other Western countries and in the world as a whole, our civilization is proving to have been only skin-deep. Today, from all quarters of the globe, we are receiving well-authenticated reports of cold-blood torture. We had tried to explain away the Nazis' cold-blooded atrocities as an aberration. The Nazis had been put down by the Allies; they had been repudiated by the German people and we had persuaded ourselves that the temporarily arrested march of civilization was being resumed. Yet torture was soon used by the French army in its attempt to suppress the Algerian resistance movement, and now, a quarter of a century after the suppression of the Nazis at the end of World War II, there come reports of Nazi-like atrocities in Greece, Brazil, Israel and Vietnam - to name only four particularly conspicuous cases. We realize now that Hitlerism was not just an isolated aberration. It was an ominous sign of the times. It portended the present resurgence of the savage human nature that is breaking out, through the veneer of civilization all over the world today. Our savagery has commandeered our technology to serve its atrocious purposes. We have learned how to fly and how to split the atom, and how have we used these technological achievements? The answer is given by the names of five cities: Guernica, Coventry, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. The torture that is being perpetrated by an increasing number of the world's present 140 local sovereign governments is a particularly repulsive recrudescence of barbarism, because this is the barbarism practiced in cold blood. But our atrocities committed in hot blood are no less horrifying and we have lived to see these being committed by American troops against Vietnamese civilians, by the Vietnamese against each other, and by both sides in the current war in the Middle East and in the recent civil war in Nigeria. Ever more disquieting is the increasing brutality of domestic strife. In the United States and in France, the riot police - and, in the United States, the National Guard as well - have been repressing the student's demonstrations and disorders with a ferocity that indicates positive hatred. People now still alive, who were born and brought up in the West before 1914, have lived to see the world turn a different color from what they had expected. By the time they were born, civilization had been gaining ground against barbarism for two centuries. Our forefathers had abolished the slave trade and then slavery itself. They had banned the baiting of lunatics, bulls and bears. They had abrogated capital punishment for minor offenses. They had tried to reduce war to a contest between uniformed soldiers, and they had gone far towards succeeding in exempting civilians from being robbed and being killed or being evicted from their homes. They had established the International Red Cross. On the strength of these partial victories for civilization, we had come to believe that barbarism was fighting its last rear guard action and that it was now doomed to be driven off the field. We expected that parliamentary representative constitutional government and the rule of law were going to spread from the Western countries that had first achieved them to all the rest of the world. Today we are wondering whether these achievements of our civilization are going to survive even on their own native ground. What is the lesson of our unforeseen and disillusioning experience? It has taught us that, though progress may be cumulative in the fields of science and technology, there is no such thing as cumulative progress towards an ever-greater humanity in our treatment of each other. In the social and spiritual fields, the battle for humanity against the innate savagery of human nature has to be fought by every human being in his own soul, from his awakening to consciousness until he is overtaken by death or by senility. Self-mastery, love and forgiveness are the first and last demands that man is called upon to make on his sinful nature. This is the unanimous teaching of all the historic religions and philosophies. When Coventry Cathedral was bombed in World War II, the provost of the cathedral responded promptly to the challenge of the disaster. He improvised a cross out of two pieces of charred timber and, behind this cross, on the burned-out building's ruined wall, he engraved the two words: "Father forgive." These two words were enough, because forgiveness is needed by us all. All human beings are responsible for man's inhumanity to man and we all need forgiveness because we know that we are sinning against the light. Arnold Toynbee, author of many books including the 12 volume "A Study of History," was Research Professor Emeritus of International History at the University of London. This article first appeared in the London Observer. Reprinted in the L.A. Times, Sunday, September 6, 1970. ###
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