More than once I have quoted what the great historian Edward Gibbon wrote in his Decline And Fall of the Roman Empire: history, he wrote, is “little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.”
The latest crimes are as bad as ever. The wars in Syria and Yemen are unrelenting horror stories with millions of human beings displaced and hundreds of thousands killed and no end in sight. The unbelievably brutal removal of the Rohingya Muslims from their homeland in Myanmar is the latest atrocity – and one, moreover, presided over by the previously sainted – but now, surely utterly despised Aung San Sui Kyi. How could men inflict on their fellow human beings such agonizing fates – especially when a large number of these are children and even babes-in-arms? How is this explainable unless it is that an inherent evil dwells in all of us waiting to be let out?