There are always tragedies in the world. The children of Somalia with flies settling on their dying, emaciated faces make us turn away from the TV screen with grief and horror. Their misery, and so much other misery in the world, charges the heart with overwhelming pity. But what happened in the darkness in those poor village houses at the back of Lusignan last week reached depths of degradation in man’s inhumanity to man which, because at soul-level we are one family, shames us all. “Hands like these I see before me slaughtered the little ones without mercy.”

Contemplating such a slaughter, and hearing hints that somewhere at the bottom of it politics might be involved, one remembers the lament of the American historian Henry Adams, grandson of a President: “Politics is nothing but the systematic organization of hatreds.” In this case, if this was politics, it is politics taken to such depths of evil savagery as to be unthinkable. So unthinkable that I, for one, will not think it, will not accept that Guyana’s political divisions can possibly have led to this.

This must be some aberration, some hideous deviation, some deed utterly unhinged from humanity carried out by men demented by drugs or furious revenge. Even then we cannot believe that in Guyana human beings can have descended to the bottomless depths of hell to find their exemplars. All these helpless people living their ordinary lives, living in their ordinary small houses, woken in the night and given no mercy though they begged, never to see the sweet light of morning again. The children might have been the children of any of us. My wife and I wept to see the horrible images. Who did not cry with pity and despair! We feel our common humanity is Vernichten, a German word nearly meaning “turned into absolutely nothing.” I cannot bear to think too closely of those parents and their children in their last moments of horror at the hands of men who are proof that there must be an eternity, because how else will they be properly made to suffer in return?

At such a time it is easy to share the dark and baleful view of the poet/priest John Donne who saw man as sinful through and through even from the first moment of his birth: “There in the wombe,” he wrote in one of his sermons, “we are fitted for workes of darkness, all the while deprived of light. And there in the wombe we are taught cruelty, by being fed with blood