If the history of hierarchical mass societies is studied even superficially, it becomes clear that crimes against humanity perpetrated by the powerful against the rest of humanity who remain relatively powerless, are not a temporary abberation. They are a socially constructed built in attribute of the hierarchical system format itself. Even the incomplete recorded histories and sparse archeological findings of the ancient so-called ‘civilised’ world of the middle east testify to the fact, that murder, torture and genocide were rife from the beginnings of such societies. If the reader doubts this, take for example, the following extract. An elite individual ‘Ashurnacirpal’ during the early period of the ancient Babylon, Assyria and the Greek hierarchical mass societies, from which modern political treachery and brutality eventually drew its inspiration, recorded the following inscription in 860 BCE;
“I drew near to the city of Tela. The city was very strong, three walls surrounded it. The inhabitants trusted to their strong walls and numerous soldiers; they did not come down or embrace my feet. With battle and slaughter I assaulted and took the city. Three thousand warriors I slew in battle. Their booty and possessions, cattle, sheep I carried away; many captives I burned with fire. Many of their soldiers I took alive; of some I cut off their hands and limbs; of others the noses, ears and arms; of many soldiers I put out the eyes. I reared a column of the living and a column of heads. I hung up on high their heads on trees in the vicinity of their city. Their boys and girls I burned up in the flames. I devastated the city, dug it up ; in fire burned it; I annihilated it” (Tablet inscription. Quoted in ‘A History of Babylonian and Assyrians’. By GS Godspeed. Section 168)
The crime of burning people alive, of course, was revived in the 21st century by the exceptionally dehumanised individuals who made up the dehumanised radical Islamic cult of ISIS. This continuation and resurrection of such crimes indicates the longevity of the social dehumanisation of members of the human species. Multiple forms of socialisation occur during the immersive upbringing of human beings in hiearchical mass societies. The level of devastation and brutality boasted about in the above quote can now be achieved in the 21st century by a single high explosive bomb, constructed in an air conditioned factory, delivered from a high altitude, in a temperature controlled bomber, with a crew of well paid and well respected airmen. The modern perpetrators, who unlike the ancient trained killers and arms suppliers get no blood directly on their hands, feet and faces from the severed limbs and incinerated bodies caused by high intensity thermal explosions. However, one characteristic continues. Killing men women and children, both requires and displayes, the same level of callous indifference and dehumanised attitudes in the modern world as it did in the ancient world.
The reader just needs to think about the 21st century bombing of Gaza and Iran, by Israeli and USA elites, and also the Iranian elites destruction by missiles of US military bases and the torture of their own disobedient citizens, to get a general picture and to realise that the symptom is not typical to a gender, religion or ethnicity but to a specific social system – the hierarchical mass society system. To obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the link between de-humanised crimes against humanity, it is only necessary to think about (or research) how many such scenes of wilful crimes against humanity carnage, individual and collective, have occurred over the millennia since the begining of the hierarchical mass society form of human aggregation in the ancient near and middle-east.
INDIVIDUAL CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY.
In 2026, Maricarmen Abascal, a Madrid pensioner, could no longer afford the rent on her flat and so Aged 87, she did not die at home, as she had wished. Instead, she died in a hospital to which she was beaurocratically taken following her forced eviction from her flat. She had lived in the flat for 70 years and managed to pay rent previosly but those seven decades of citizenship participation and payments had not been enough to save her from eviction when the rent had finally been increased beyond her means to pay. This image of a frail member of our human species being evicted by other members of our own species, illustrates on a smaller scale the extent and depth of the dehumanisation taking place within all hierarchical mass society systems, both ancient and modern. The final solution for the rentier class’s dehumanised indifference to its renters is eviction. This incident illustrates that the example of what Hannah Arendt classified as the ‘banality of evil’, was not restricted to nation states in periods of war and economic depression, such as Germany in the 20th century but also to individuals in periods of peace.
And we should not forget that such singular instances of dehumanised behaviour are multiplied and multiplying exponentially as people are rendered homeless by impoverishment, climate implicated fire, floods, earthquake disasters, along with economic slumps in employment, or city or region regeneration programs. The numbers of human beings lacking the means to adequately house, feed and clothe themselves has expanded exponentially since the end of the Second World War in 1945, but has been part of a continuum over millennia and continued during it and after. This phenomenon epitomised by slavery, serfdom, and now wage slavery, was unknown prior to settled hierarchical mass societies in the ancient world. Indeed, these societies created a class of directly and indirectly employed armed bodies of men and through these ‘forces’ began to monopolise and restrict – on an ever expanding scale – unimpeded access to the natural resources needed by all the multiple species formerly having access to them. By any social measure of general humanity the hierarchical mass society system has no socially acquired ‘right’ other than that imposed by elite controlled ‘might’ to exist.
COLLECTIVE CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY.
A collective ‘final solution’ to severe economic crisis was a ‘crime’ which in 1938 had been ordered and implemented by the leadership of National Socialist Party of Germany, (abbreviated in the West to the term Nazis), which was organised and implemented by ordinary citizens of Germany who carried out military orders and/or loyally fulfilled civil employment duties. The term genocide and holocaust was applied to this modern form of enthnic cleansing and was eventually declared in the mid 20th century, a crime against humanity. In fact, as noted previously, it was a particular resurrection of a general symptom pioneered by ancient elites in Egypt, Babylon, Greece, Rome and elsewhere. The point I am making and challenging is that this particular form of ‘final solution’ has been incorrectly and repeatedly viewed as a temporary aberration, caused by a symptom religiously defined as an outbreak of evil.
Before and during the period of the Second World War, the solution to unemployment and falling profits had been increased dispossesion of resources from individuals and communities and had taken the form of organised and perpetrated forced dispossesion and removals of those citizens identified as Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, Jehovah Witnesses, socialists and commumists from their homes to the gas chambers and/or transported to the starvation and torture regimes administrating the specially created concentration camps. No individual or group had felt convinced or compelled to or able to stop this process; no one in the law enforcement or military refused to carry out their orders, and eventually no one in state and civil employment had refused to take part in those daily crimes of indiference, cruelty and dispossesion targetted against humanity.
It is important to note that this kind of final solution to economic problems was not restricted to the elites controlling societies implementing the capitalist mode of production, but was also used by so-called 20th century socialist elites against reluctant peasants, anarchists and anyone who criticised the policies and programmes of communist party elites. One only need to recall the implementation of Gulags and mass purges of individuals and groups created and conducted by the Bolshevik and Communist elites in the Soviet Union, China and the eastern bloc countries against those who acted or spoke out against those policies, programmes and actions – to grasp its universality. Furthermore, that 20th century demonstration of dehumanised banality, indifference and collusion with authoritarian elites policies and processes, has been repeated – again at scale – in Gaza and the West Bank in the 21st century.
The fact that such estrangement and inhumanity is not just a phenomenon involving masses but also is demonstrated in individual acts of inhumanity stretching from indifference to assault, rape, torture and murder operating within all classes of hierarchical mass society and within many families and human relationships. These frequent acts are usually perpetrated by those with physical, economic or institutional power over those who have become their victims. As noted elsewhere these symptoms of the dehumanisation of the ‘other’ have also been repeated by the Epstein elite oligarchal elites against their victims and also in the single case of 87 year old Maricarmen Abascal in Spain. Think about the implications of these constantly recurring symptoms; not just in the past but now and on into the future! No one in these systems are completely safe from becoming a victim and even those close to us can become perpetrators of indiference, disrespect and dehumanised actions.
The historically recorded fact is that hardly anyone in these hierarchical mass society systems have refused to carry out their own miniscule particular part in these protracted sequence of sociological and politically-led dehumanised ‘events’ whether as organisers, facilitators, perpetrators, or bystanders. No one in Madrid was able or willing to prevent this single act of inhumanity to an 87 year old frail member of our human species; this individualised crime against another human being is not the most extreme example but it is an example of how it permeates us all to a greater or lesser degree. But does it really represent a ‘banality of evil’? I suggest it does not! Evil is a religious or poetical abstraction which is used by those commentators unable or unwilling to identify the real source of this phenomenon! We now have access to more detailed evidence which allows us to now do much better at understanding the sociological processes, which prompt, persuade or pressure ordinary people into denying their own and other peoples humanity. How we become part of a socio-economic system which can eventually perpetrate the most outrageous crimes against our own citizens and citizens of other such societies is down to socialisation not evil.
The recent documentary NAZA has thrown a modern light on the most extreme example of this estrangement and dehumanisation that frequently takes place within hierarchical mass societies whether large-scale nation states, non-state institutions, religious and political sects as well as within individual families. NAZA is an acronym used by the Israeli military personnel who utilising AI computer programmes to locate where military targets can be most readily located and easily assassinated. This usually in their family home. By monitoring the mobile phones of children, partners, parents and grand parents, the Israeli military by an operation entitled ‘where is daddy ‘ can gain information on where and when a suspect or target for elimination will be. Thus a time and place of a family gathering can be programmed for a drone, missile or bomb to explode and kill the intended target. But that’s not all. The implications of this situational form of targetting is that all those in the same house, flat, compound or hospital, will also be eliminated as calculated ‘collateral damage’. Incidentally, there were numerous examples of this military policy during the occupation of the US in Afghanistan.
In principle this targeting of individuals and even groups by intelligence gathering is nothing new and has been done throughout the ages by elites within hiearchical mass societies. For example the most notable ancient targetted assassination was carried out by a large group of elite assassins against Julius Caesar in Rome. The group had established the fact that he would be at a certain place (The Theatre of Pompey) on a certain day (15th March) at the time of the opening of the Senate Meeting and so gathered in waiting for him to arrive. When he did the large group, crowded around him and it is recorded that the Emperor was stabbed 23 times and consequently died. There are undoubtedly many, many more such examples during the millennia which lie between 44 BCE and Gaza in 2026 and many differences concerning the intelligence gathering and the partucular weapons of choice to deliver the decisive blow. The documentary film NAZA interviews the military intelligence officers who use AI computers and wireless equipment to fine tune the timing and to calculate the power of the explosives to be used.
The term NAZA is used to quantify how many other non-targetted people, family, friends, neighbours are likely to die with a bomb or missile powerful enough to ensure the death of the target. A number is affixed to the term. 6 NAZA would kill six others. Such as children, wife and grandparents. A NAZA of 500 would probably kill every one in the entire high-rise flat complex or village hall So again this development within the Israeli military is nothing new historically or geographically! Indeed, such calculations probably took place during Trumps military operation of bombing Iran and Putins bombing of Ukraine and no doubt these collateral damage calculations took place formally or informally prior to every other such military operation either clandestinely or openly conducted. It is important to pause and reflect upon the fact that these collatoral damage calculations are not conducted only by sadists or those few deranged individuals who enjoy killing women, children and non-combatants males. Not at all. The bulk of these calculations of how many will die to fulfil the mission statistics will be made by those average and above average trained citizens who are otherwise considered as ‘normal’ and undoubtedly express love for their own parents, partners, children and country.
This is because the general dehumanisation occuring within hierarchical mass societies is routinely and primarily directed against those human beings designated as targets by their own superior officers or politicians, by being described as enemies or under the influence of enemy elites. This has been the socio-economic pattern supported and exported by elites in every so-called advanced hierarchical mass society from ancient times, throughout the middle-ages and onto modernity. It is a social conditioning process which is not a product of the biological evolution of the human species or any other biological species. There is no archeological, anthropological, theological, or ethnological evidence that systematic dehumanisation of other human beings became an institutionalised characteristics of human individuals and their societies – until the formation of hierarchical mass society aggregations. Undoubtedly there were short lived individual skirmishes, like other animals over mating or some other temporary issue, but no evidence of wholesale, inter-species sustained warfare or actions which could be described as crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing or genocide.
In conclusion it is worth pointing out that in 2026 the global humanitarian backlash against the many decades of Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank, finally designated as genocide and crimes against humanity by the the International Court of Justice. For the first time in a generation the Human Rights of the Palestinian people has now been given a mainstream priority that has been missing since the 1948 declaration of the state of Israel. The quasi-military seizure of control of much of Palestine by assorted armed Jewish groups at the time and the eventual declaration of the Jewish State of Israel came shortly after something of a catastrophe for the indigenous people of Palestine. Described as the NAKBA, it involved the forced clearances and seizures of many Palestinian, Towns, Cities and Villages of their indigenous human inhabitants, was a condensed version of the European wave of colonial control of much of the territory and resources of North and South Ameria, Asia, Africa and Oceana. Jewish Israeli might had also established Jewish Israeli rights, in 1948, but this was never agreed to by either the Palestinians or by International Law established by the United Nations.
The spectrum of estrangement and dehumanisation of the other resulting from the class based hierarchical mass society socialisation process stretches from physical torture and the physical elimination of the other in crimes against humanity at one end, to the distortion of language and meaning at the other. The supremacist arrogance of many of those individuals who benefit from the current hierarchical mass society system appears to have no moral bounds. A recent interview conducted by a high level pro-Zionist BBC presenter displayed not only how pathetically crude the intellectual defence of Isreali elite genocide against the people of Palestine has become, but also how low some human beings are prepared to stoop to ‘serve’ their paymasters. In the context of the continuing day by day genocide against the Palestinian people, Nick Robinson of the BBC prefaced his remarks by describing the treatment of Jews as the ‘worst act of racism ever’. His clumsy and incompetent sophistry in defence of the indefensible, revealed far more than he intended.
This is because out of the astronomic numbers of ethnically diverse native peoples eliminated from the continents of North and South America, the whole of Africa, much of Asia and large parts of Oceana, by the elite-led countries of Europe, the horrors perpetrated against the Jews have been given a disproportional higher importance than the rest of the world’s non-Jewish ethnicities who also suffered ethnic cleansing and genocide by billions when added together. During the very period of the NAZA film revelations, Robinson the media huxter (huxter: a mean and tricky sales person) had the gall to press Zack Polenski to openly defend the right of Israel to exist whilst distorting the historical reality at a level only a first grade student might fashion. He claimed that the State of Israel had been created by the United Nations, which was the equivalent of a downright lie. The declaration of the state of Israel was exclusively pronounced by the Jewish representatives of the amalgamated Jewish military forces who took control of Palestine in the wake of the clearances of the Palestinians from their homeland. That declaration of a state could only be made after the widespread ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, from their, towns, villages, cities and fields. Without a resource rich territory a state is only an idea as was recognised by Theodor Herzl in his pamphlet ‘The Jewish State’.
Indeed the United Nations have repeatedly passed resolutions condemning the actions of Israeli government and settlers for decades. There in the above noted interview is displayed the dehumanised elite attitudes typical among the Epstein class that can fail to adequately research and condemn the wholesale slaughter of non-combatants, men, women, children, and reporters in 21st century Palestine and yet find the time to incompetently condemn and inhumanly punish those who draw attention to the atrocities conducted by the Jewish military and West Bank settlers in Israel. Predictably, on a more sophisticated level the question of what constitutes ‘rights’ was avoided by the anthropocentric narcisist global defenders of the state of Israel in it’s current form, including the obnoxious intellectually challenged BBC reporter mentioned above. His crafty ‘intelligence’ was used to misrepresent and omit well documented facts. For example he failed to disclose, that the first prime minister of Israel, Ben Gurion, had warned Jewish settlers to expect resistance to Jewish occupation and openly declared that; “we have come here and stolen their country”. And not a word by the crude huxter (NR) or the BBC on the rights of the Palestinians not to be subjected to crimes against humanity or genocide.
It is also revealing that again there were no mentions by pro-Zionist hucksters of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, in which Article 3 asserts a “right to life, liberty and freedom“; Article 7 a right not to be ‘discriminated against’; Article 9 ‘being presumed guilty without evidence’; and Article 25, which states that;
“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and wellbeing of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services…etc. (Article 25)
‘Rights’ unless adequately defined are a useless abstraction representing nothing more than words on paper or some other medium. Rights need to be further refined by statements outlining a standard on which they are based andnwith some concrete examples. Furthermore, Rights also need to be fitting, proper, appropriate, desirable or at least those which conform to that which is generaĺy considered to be morally good. Can Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the West bank be justified in terms of ‘fitting’, ‘proper’ or morally good or even proportional for Palestinian forms of resistance? Do the words and actions of the elites and governments who support Israel’s genocide fall into any of those types of criteria, when they arrest peaceful demonstrators? Elites in general may have historically obtained the legal right to do whatever they see fit whether their citizens agree with that or not, but do they have the moral ‘right’ to do what is inhumane or ecologically destructive or not? That is the question which is now gaining ground globally with respect to not only human affairs, but also to the issues of climate change, weather patterns, air, water and soil pollutions and the industrialised systems production processes causing biological collatoral damage in the form of large-scale species extinctions.
Direct crimes against humanity are peripheral to biology in general but when examined closely many of them are simultaneously crimes against the foundations of the human species – crimes against a species rich biosphere which is the foundation of everything living. In the 20th century, the decline and fall of the hierarchical mass society system was epitomised by the two World Wars of that century but that dcline rhas now entered an accelerating stage of cracks and fissures opening up as the infrastructure of human societies and their surrounding environments once again decay and decompose due to excessive extraction, excessive production, excessive consumption and excessive pollution. The inadequacies and inhumanity of its Epstein and non-Epstein elites has become ever more pronounced and exposed. That is further sociological evidence of elite degeneration and culpability.
Further evidence lies in the rampant sophistry (i.e. plausible but fallacious reasoning) by elites. Whether it is intentionally or incompetently constructed, it is as old as the Greek polis, which spawned the ancient philosophic Sophists, from which the term derives. The fact that such crude sophistry now has Artificial, Automated-Machine Intelligence at its disposal, does not alter the fact that such sophistry remains the last resort of dehumanised scoundrels in politics, media, academia and government institutions. Incidentally, I also suggest that the proliferation of Data centres feeding the resource needs of AI equipment and feeding the greed for profits of AI investors, whilst further degrading and despoiling previous ways of making a living and the general environment, are also part of the decline and fall of this hierarchical mass society form of collective human living.
Roy Ratcliffe (October 2026)
(NB. For those who would like to consider the history of life on earth and hierarchical mass societies, in more detail from a revolutionary-humanist and Giaia-centric perspective, I would like to recommend my (non AI assisted) recent book ‘Life on Earth’ (Past, Present and Future). It exists in either paperback or E- book form, priced from £12.99 or £2.49 respectively from Amazon, Browns Books and many other book retailers. R.R.)
