The cruel word

Walt Disney fooled us again. Cruella de Vil is not really cruel: she is just contemporary, she wants to show that she has the coolest coats at any cost, and the price is killing Dalmatians. Being cruel is not that: Cruella would be if she cared less about her shelter than she searches for and captures her, the massacre of spotted puppies.

The word may be cruel, but the word cruel It may not be: pure description. Cruel is, according to the dictionary, someone who “delights in making others suffer or takes pleasure in the sufferings of others.” Cruelty is a higher state of violence: violence exercised or contemplated with pleasure. Lately that form of violence had lost its prestige. But before, for millennia, it was a widely used resource.

Anyone can be cruel, but there is nothing like the cruelty of those who claim the monopoly of violence: the States. Cruelty was always the way to give the violence of powers its exemplary role: the Inquisition would not have been what it was if it had not reveled in the details of its racks and its hot irons and its bonfires for the doubtful. The spectacle of violence had two main purposes: to scare potential transgressors and to show that power had that power. And one that was not secondary: allowing multitudes to enjoy the suffering of others, to fully exercise their cruelty.

They did it, for example, many thousands on March 28, 1757 in the Place de Grève, when France wanted to punish a failed regicide, Robert Damiens, a short, disturbed, pockmarked man who scratched Louis XV with a razor. The punishment tried to be exemplary: for 10 hours the executioner Samson tore flesh from him with red-hot tongs, burned his criminal hand with sulfur, poured wax, lead and boiling oil into his wounds and, finally, tied his limbs to four horses to dismember it. And the next day they razed his house, whose role in the crime was not clear, and expelled his entire family from the kingdom.

Cruelty was that: giving free rein to the imagination, inventing harm and more harm, making violence a spectacle and a lesson—and it was, for millennia, the way in which “justice” was exercised. Executions were, until the beginning of the last century, highly desired spectacles: pleasure in seeing suffering. But then the cruelty started to look bad. It was, I suspect, after the greatest violence known to humanity: the Second World War, its 60 million deaths.

Since then the threat of the States was exercised without fuss. They continued torturing but in secret, dark basements and loud music. Cruelty was frowned upon and was supposed to serve not as a deterrent to its victims but as a shame to its executioners. Violence was hidden or justified in the name of necessity; It did not become cruelty. It is the right-humanist era in which many of us continue, modestly. Examples abound: few state acts are more violent than letting a crowded boat get lost at sea and its migrants die of thirst, sun, hunger. It happens all the time and the States that could solve it don’t solve it, but they don’t brag. They refrain from saying out loud—even if they do it silently—that “look how the fools who embark on the journey end up, don’t do it because they could end up the same way.”

But now it seems that cruelty—the display of violence—is back. In the current war Hamas did not fail to show it; Israel, more in the previous line, exercises it in spades but tries not to take charge. On the other hand, in Latin America the spectacle of violence has returned in full. The triumph of cruelty are those photos that Salvadoran Bukele made fashionable—semi-naked prisoners crowded together—and that his colleagues in Ecuador and Argentina have already copied. Or the actions of a Milei that leaves thousands of workers on the streets or millions of poor people without food. And, above all, the applause that these gestures receive from satisfied crowds.

So many, now, “take pleasure in the sufferings of others” under the pretext that these others cause suffering and therefore do not deserve any consideration. There was an idea: that we were so just and so powerful that we could stop applying an eye for an eye, condemn cruelty and pour the balm of democratic rights on everyone, even the worst. Now it seems that fear took over her. They convinced us of the danger, we became terrified, and we are no longer powerful or just; We are only cruel, which is a form of weakness—and we ask, to disguise it, for more violence.

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