A building so unspeakably evil, it should never have even been allowed to stand.

[Tommy Carcetti]

Last edited Thu Jan 27, 2022, 03:54 PM - Edit history (1)

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Buildings, in general, typically serve a positive purpose in life. They protect us from the elements. They give us shelter, afford us some sense of privacy, and sometimes even help shape our identity depending on its purpose. Houses in particular become "homes" when one gains a sense of familial and emotional attachment by virtue of living in it.

True, they are just brick and mortar (and various other materials), and some are far more utilitarian than others, but overall a building is at worst just a building and there is nothing intrinsically wrong with its own existence.

Whenever I've read or researched about the Holocaust, I'm always struck in particular by the pictures of the gas chambers and crematoriums at Auschwitz and some of the other death camps.

Just the buildings themselves, nothing more.

From first glance, they look--like a lot of things associated with the Nazi regime--extremely banal and unordinary. Brick buildings with a tall chimney. Nothing screaming evil. Without context, one might confuse it for a home, or a warehouse, or some other regular sort of building.

And yet, in context the evil these mere buildings invoke is palpable and utterly horrifying.

The fact that they were even there. The fact that they were built--built with the same ordinary building materials as any other building would use. But built with a sole purpose that was so unspeakably evil it defies words.

The fact that human beings built these wretched--yet from the outside seemingly unextraordinary--buildings. Human beings built these buildings to facilitate the mass murder of other human beings, all because of a perverse ideology run completely amok. People built these buildings so that other people would die.

It just seems so unnatural and bizarre that these buildings actually stood, if even for a day. If even for a second. The ground should have swallowed it up whole and sent it back to the fiery hell from whence it came. Buildings that evil should never have been built by human hands.

But they did. And we are forced to remember that they did, in the hopes that human hands will never, ever build them again.

**NOTE: My purpose in writing this is not to say that these buildings shouldn't be kept as memorials to the atrocities that were committed there. Rather, it's a mere reflection on the fact that some how, some way they were ever built in the very first place.

[MissMillie]

1. Thank you for a thoughtful post (n/t)

.

[KS Toronado]

2. They will never get torn down on purpose

History demands they stay up as a history lesson for future generations to learn from so they don't make the same mistakes.

[First Speaker]

4. I remember a Twilight Zone episode called "Death's Head Revisited"...

...in which Oscar Beregi played a commandant at Dachau who visits the camp fifteen years after the War, and is driven mad by his memories. At the end, Rod Serling delivered the following message: "They must remain standing, the Dachaus, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes. They must remain standing, for they represent a time when a group of men decided to turn the earth into a graveyard. And if we ever forget this, then we become the gravediggers." I've never forgotten that...

[sarisataka]

6. That episode

Is one of my favorites. It is extremely poignant on its own, but consider the context and time it aired. The first war/post war generation was reaching adulthood. They had no first hand memories of the war. Serling was speaking to them.

Today, several generations farther removed we can see what he was warning of. Horrors will be downplayed, filtered for being too traumatic and eventually forgotten be the majority of people.

[ChazII]

13. +1

Your final sentence sums up why it needs to stand. Thank you for your eloquent words.

[DENVERPOPS]

44. YES NC

[llashram]

21. what trump and

his 'inner circle', bannon, miller et al. and all RW idiots who support him are trying to do. "Turn the earth into a graveyard". With help from Putin of course.

[A HERETIC I AM]

53. That first aired a mere 16 years after the war.

I was 2 years old in November of 61.

Just about every man in my parents circle of friends and associates were veterans of WWII. It was still fresh, alright.

These days we have at least 3 generations with absolutely no understanding of what those years were like.

[Skittles]

54. my mum survived bombing as a child in England during WWII

agreed, it is very far removed from newer generations

[COL Mustard]

19. They should never be torn down. Ever.

I've seen some, and yes, they look like just ordinary buildings...until you realize what they were used for.

Every J6er who wears a 6MWE shirt or spouts that philosophy ought to be compelled to visit the camps.

[lostnfound]

62. But existence of the buildings there are having no effect on the minds of the Nazi groups rising

In fact, it would not surprise me if the teaching of the Holocaust gets banned in some US schools on basis of new anti-CRT laws.

We need far more powerful weapons to combat this sick sick mindset. I don’t know what, but decent people are failing to stop it.

[KS Toronado]

63. To combat the brainwashing RW "news" organizations put out there

If there is a way to legally do it, we should not allow them to use the word "news" anywhere in their programming,
plus they have to display "opinion/entertainment" on their screens the whole time they are broadcasting.
Would be a steep hill to climb, but worth it if we could do it. Truth in broadcasting law?

[lostnfound]

64. I like your plan

its more subtle than a caption that reads “You’re a moron if you think anything we are saying is true”

[KS Toronado]

65. LOL, that's what they should flash across their screens

FQX (and others I'm sure) are currently registered with the FCC as opinion/entertainment with most if not all
of their evening lineup where they have their largest audience of the day. They masquerade as news when
they're anything but.

[Alexander Of Assyria]

3. Should be torn down...agree entirely with the author.

A building is not evil, but the builders were…a memorial park in place perhaps would seem to accommodate the destruction of the evil symbol… and preserve remembrance of the evil men, not the building the evil men built.

[Tommy Carcetti]

17. I'm not saying they should be torn down now.

Rather, they need to be preserved as a remembrance of the atrocities that were committed.

I'm saying it is almost unbelievable they even stood in the first place, and speaks to the insanity of the situation.

[Alexander Of Assyria]

28. Entirely in agreement. 👏

[sarisataka]

5. The evilness is the reason

They should continue to stand.

Humans have short memories and if these buildings were bulldozed into the earth someone, somewhere, sometime would build one again.

They never should have been built. But because they were, they must stand.

[Tommy Carcetti]

7. Exactly.

And that's with any sort of evil or malice.

It should never have manifested itself in the first place. But after it showed itself to the world, we can't just pretend it was never there.

One of the reasons I never agree with the "Let's not publish the name or motives of the perpetrator" arguments whenever there is a mass shooting.

It's already too late. We can either pretend it never happened, or force ourselves to learn from it in the hopes it won't happen again.

[AllaN01Bear]

8. my late dad who fought in the pacific as a pby (airplane ) navigator and radioman,

belived that this never happened . also felt schindlers list was an attempt to change history. however , there are people in ny and other places or their descendats feel that something happend .

[ripcord]

10. Luckily Eisenhower knew some people wouldn't want to believe

That is why he had everything so thoroughly documented in print, photo and motion picture,

[wnylib]

36. Some things are so horrible that

people deny that they happened because they can't wrap their heads around it. It is too much for them, so they refuse to believe it happened.

But it did and there is documentation. The buildings that still stand are evidence, besides the films made by soldiers who liberated the camps and the medical records and sworn testimonies of survivors. Even the Nazi perpetrators admitted to what they did as they tried to justify it in their trials. Adolf Eichmann said, "But they were Jews," as if that explained and justified it.

[ripcord]

9. I visited Dachau in 1978

You could feel the evil pressing down on you, I had a headache for two days afterwards.

[COL Mustard]

20. That's the spookiest place I've ever been.

I was stationed near there in the early 1980s and had the chance to visit it several times. Every time I saw something I hadn't seen before.

[Tommymac]

27. Never been there but the 'cattle' train car in the Washington DC Holocaust Museum gives me chills

I can still smell the odor of Fear and Death in it - and I toured it 10 years ago or 60 years after the fact. The memory alone is frightening.

The odor, real or imagined, has stuck with me. And it is not a pleasant memory. I can not even think about what the actual camps must be like.

The good I got out of touring the museum ( Every Human alive should tour it) was the fact that

"What You Do Matters"

I now try to live live this truism every day of my life.

Plus I have the magnet on our fridge.

[displacedtexan]

30. I was there the year after you were.

It's so close to München. 30 minutes by train. They rebuilt the prisoners’ barracks because they were disease and pest infested, but they very wisely wanted all of the evidence to survive for the world to see. They also kept wooden shoes, eyeglasses, etc.
If that isn't sad enough, we saw a group of British punks with colorful Mohawk hairstyles posing inside the ovens. Laughing and having a great time on holiday.
Enough people need to see these things, in order not to let monsters do it again.

[alphafemale]

33. I got a similar feeling from Andersonville in GA

Where thousands of prisoners starved to death or died of disease from unsanitary conditions in the Civil War.

I don't believe in superstition at all but some places do seem soured.

[Mary in S. Carolina]

46. I have been to Dachau twice and

it is very.....not sure how to explain it, I feel as though there are thousands of unsettled souls that do not want us there; the souls are still trying to come to grips with what happened. It makes you want to get on your knees and pray and then quickly leave.

Another eerie feeling is when you go down the road where the 1972 Summer Olympic Munich massacre occurred where masked men killed Olympic athletes and demanded Israel to release some prisoners. If you go to Olympic Village, it is as if time stood still - no one is there, kind of deserted. So, I peeked through the window where the gymnastic events were held and there was an old balance beam, made me wonder if that was the same balance beam that Olga Corbit won the gold.

[DURHAM D]

58. I visited Dachau in 1973.

I recall that they kept telling us that the gas chambers were never used.

Visited Auschwitz in summer of 1979. Very different experience. No Germans there and it was probably a good thing. Most of the tourists were from Russia (three buses) and one tour bus from Romania. There were just a few Polish tourists. We (three of us) were the only Americans. When some found out we were Americans they became extremely friendly/chatty. They could not believe that we had come in from the West by automobile through East Germany. Guess that does not happen often. Anyway, they were extremely vocal in their hatred of Germans and fully expected us to join them. They surrounded us and it got kind of stressful. They were excited to have an opportunity to talk with us. One of my traveling friends was fluent in Russian, Polish and German.

[llashram]

11. we

should never forget

[calimary]

14. Correct. We should NEVER forget.

We should never be ALLOWED TO forget.

[Evolve Dammit]

43. And never allowed to let it happen again. We have a fight on our hands right now.

[calimary]

48. Yeah, no kidding.

[colorado_ufo]

12. I feel some of this every time

that I see a parade of missiles, tanks, artillery; ships with giant canons; silos with missiles; millions of guns, knives, swords. People killing people, and celebrating that.

I know that defense is needed, but that we continue to resort to killing each other - for any purpose - is dismaying. The fact that we justify the killing with stupid reasons, such as "we are the superior race," "our religion says that we must, and our religion is the 'true' one," or "our leader says this is the right thing to do, and he/she is infallible," and others, is the height of insanity.

[XacerbatedDem]

61. Yes, I feel the same way. Sad, isn't it.

Can't we all just get along?

What happened to all the hope we had for building a better world?

How come it's only in sci-fy movies that we actually become what we all really are...earthlings? Inhabitants of this planet, above all else. That should be blatantly obvious... and inherently a unifying principle for all earth's inhabitants. We ignore that aspect of our existence at our own peril.

[Old Crank]

15. Sorry but....

People need it to remember and to keep showing the deniers.
I live within 20 miles of Dachau. It is glorified in any sense. School children get to go.

[Tommy Carcetti]

16. You misread me.

I'm not saying these sites should not be preserved now. They absolutely do.

I'm saying the fact that they were built in the first place and even stood was unfathomable.

[Ligyron]

50. If I'm not mistaken, the inmates build some of them.

Not the ovens I don’t think.

[calimary]

47. I think it should stay in place. As a reminder.

Because we forget. Sometimes forgetting can't be helped, but in other cases, it's a strategy to try to wriggle away from blame. NO ONE MUST BE ALLOWED TO FORGET WHAT HAPPENED. It needs to be a forever reminder of how monstrous we can become if we aren't always on guard, and always vigilant.

You can try to forget your sins. But God won't.

[JoeOtterbein]

18. ...just...

...tears.

[Red Pest]

22. I agree that these buildings must serve as reminders of what hate and indifference to that hate

will bring.

I visited Dachau in 1999 when I was in Munich for a conference on Lyme disease. It was extremely emotional for me. My father-in-law helped to liberate the camp. He showed me his photos which matched the ones put up in Dachau as part of the exhibit there. He donated his photos to the US Holocaust Museum. All the members of my grandparents families who did not leave Europe before 1939 were murdered. All the members of my wife's grandparents families who did not leave were also murdered.

Now we see the rise in antisemitism in Europe and the US, again. We see the rise of hate against all those who are strangers in a strange land. We see a rise in hate against those who try to enlighten us with reason, knowledge, science, and the acceptance of others. We see a rejection by these haters of the idea that one should refrain from doing what is hurtful to others. We see a rejection of history by these people. We must stand together to oppose them and to educate them so they will realize what they espouse is wrong.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

23. You are wrong. Those buildings should be allowed to stand.

Forever if possible. It's the best way to keep us remembering what happened there. Tear them down? Replace them with what, a park? Then the site where such unspeakable horror happened would become pretty and pleasant, as if nothing bad had occurred there.

[Tommy Carcetti]

25. Again, I'm not saying they should be torn down.

I'm saying that it boggles the mind that they were ever built in the first place. That humans were willing to go so far as to build them.

They should absolutely preserve them to memorialize the atrocities that took place there.

But the fact that they existed is unfathomable.

Buildings should not be evil. But these were.

[wnylib]

37. I understood what you said in the OP.

I don't see how people are misunderstanding it. It is an excellent OP. Thank you for posting it.

[justhanginon]

45. I agree. I think it is a excellent and thoughtful post.

[GreenEyedLefty]

24. Think about what is inside of the buildings... it's so much worse

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/topf-and-sons-an-ordinary-company

[NQAS]

26. And it's because of buildings like this, and remembrance days. . .

that makes the current "divisive concepts" issue so fantastically repulsive here in the US.

American history - indeed, world history - is replete with horrifying events. Just in the past century or so we've had the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the Cambodian killing fields, North Korea, China's Cultural Revolution and Great Famine, the aftermath of slavery and Reconstruction and the civil rights battles in the US, genocide and discrimination of indigenous populations all over. Although it has been said that those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat, let's face it, these events always happen again. And again. And again..

But that doesn't lessen the need to learn and remember. It's not about Christian vs Jew, Black vs White, LGBTQ+ vs straight, etc. It's about history. It's about humanity. It's about human decency and humanization. The millions who have died in the events noted above and so many others are not statistics.

I just checked, and it was William Faulkner who wrote, The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." I'm not much of a scholar and I'm not even that particularly interested in the literary context. But think about this. if you're an American in his mid-sixties or older, your parents lived through WWII. In high school I went on a date with a girl whose parents survived the concentration camps. My grandparents suffered the pogroms in 19th century Russia before emigrating to the US in the early 20th century. Sure, it's history, and it's in the past, but it is current in my memory. And any given population will have comparable experiences. It's not White, Black, Asian, Latinx, LGBTQ, etc., it's people. And if we fail to teach these histories, we as a society become less human, less decent.

[Lonestarblue]

29. Here in Austin, heavily Jewish neighborhoods are being flooded with antisemitic flyers.

The neighborhoods are near Jewish synagogues. The hate just never seems to end with these right-wing nuts.

[FakeNoose]

31. There were several concentration camps in and around Germany, even before the war started

Only a few of them had actual gas chambers for killing the victims, and gassing only started when Nazi leaders realized they were losing the war. Probably late 1942 or maybe early '43 was when the gassing started. Some camps shot their victims dead until the shortage of ammunition and weapons became acute.

Originally the concentration camps were created in the 1930's for forced labor (slave labor) and also to remove the unwanted minorities from German communities. Jews were persecuted, deprived of their rights, then rounded up, and later some were killed. But the Nazis didn't stop with Jews, they also removed unwanted gypsies and homeless people, eastern European immigrants who were suspected communists, and any political protesters of Hitler's Nazi regime. Especially communist sympathizers were rounded up and thrown into the camps. The concentration camps were the catch-all basins for all of those unwanted victims of Nazi hatred.

Most of this activity was done in secret by a small group of Nazis. The general public never knew what was going on at the camps, but at the same time they were too trusting of Hitler. Nobody tried to stop it because they just assumed that Hitler knew what he was doing, and he already had the power to do it.

At the end of WWII when the Allies came in and freed the camps and told about what the Nazis did, it sent profound shockwaves throughout Germany and the rest of the world. Many Germans tried to deny that it happened because they couldn't believe it. But after the Nuremberg trials it was no longer possible to deny the Holocaust and what the Nazis did. The final horror wasn't that the Nazis started a war, it was that they persecuted and killed so many of their own people. Most of the Jews who died in the Holocaust had been loyal Germans or Eastern Germans (Poles).

[wnylib]

41. I agree that there was a handful of

people who were in charge of extermination. But they had relatives and friends who knew. Some camp commanders even had their families with them in large, luxurious homes. Word got around.

How could people in nearby villages miss the stench of burning flesh, the smoke and ash? They didn't. By that time, they were powerless to do anything.

But that goes back to the main lesson from all of this. Do not support hate-mongering politicians and leaders. What you see them doing in public with some restraints is nothing compared to what they will do in private with no restrsints.

[Mary in S. Carolina]

55. Dachua is a town near Munich in Germany

When the allies freed the Jewish people from the Dachau concentration camps, the citizens of Dachau were forced to pick up and bury the dead Jews. There are videos of the town people, in their finest dress, crying hysterically at the scene; I have often wonder if their hysterics were from what they witnessed or from being forced to carry and bury dead Jewish people.

[wnylib]

57. Sounds like karma to me.

I would guess that they felt sorry for themselves for having to do that kind of work and face up to what their votes and support of fascism had done.

But that's only a guess. I can't know what they actually felt.

When my husband and I rented an apartment in a Cleveland suburb, we had a landlord who was a German immigrant. I did not think much about that since my g-grandparents had been German immigrants who brought their children, including my grandmother, to America. But that was before the first World War.

The landlord knew that my grandmother was born in Germany from a general conversation we had about his dog's German name. One day, assuming that we would be sympathetic, he told us how awful it had been during the last months of WWII. He talked about the bombings of his city by Allies, the lack of food, the constant air raids. All I could think of while he talked was, "OMG! What about the bombings of London? What about the starvation of concentration camp prisoners?" I felt no sympathy at all. I was appalled to realize that he was a more recent immigrant and had probably been a Nazi in Germany. He was old enough to have been an adult then.

My husband and I went silent. Our silence conveyed disapproval. We moved after that.

[Mary in S. Carolina]

67. This is so interesting wnylib,

I befriended an elderly man and his wife, he lived in Croatia and his family owned a beautiful hotel on the water that the allied forces seized. Needless to say, they moved to the US and fell in love with democracy and American, but they remained bitter. The US later paid him and his family for the hotel that was seized.

When I was 21ish, I made my first trip to Germany and will never forget this beautiful blond middle-aged woman at the local pub - she had a number tattooed on her arm. It was hard not to notice so, my father made a comment and she mentioned that she was just a young girl in the concentration camp and that her entire family had parishad. We talked with her for about an hour and bought her drinks - I did not think much of it at the time because I was still a kid (think about my boyfriend at home), but my father told me to never forget this conversation as it is a history that should never be repeated.

[kacekwl]

32. Mankind is inherently evil as history shows. The

Colosseum was built for mans desire to witness others death and suffering. So many "sports" involve watching other humans inflict pain on other humans. If man was built in gods image then god has a lot of explaining to do.

[Richard D]

34. I was there several years ago.

We almost didn't make it. Neither of us wanted to go. But at the last minute, the car was on the off-ramp. It was late in the day, so we got a hotel room and rested from a long drive.

In the morning, we went to Auschwitz. Seeing, live, what had previously only been seen in photos was dramatic. Walking down the streets, seeing the barbed wire, going into the various exhibits, is something every person should do.

In the afternoon we went to Birkenau. Auschwitz was a concentration/work camp. Birkenau was an extermination center. Walking through the gates and seeing it, how vast it is, how real, was a punch to the heart over and over.

It was so emotional and intense that I knew we had to come back the next day. To feel, to pray, to witness,

Should it be destroyed? Maybe at some point when we no longer need to remember, which is very far away. But remember and see and witness and feel we must, for on this day especially we must remember and commit to Never Again. And yet we are still too close to again.

[Caliman73]

35. Human history is filled with horrific violence...

Granted, the Holocaust and the goals of the Nazi regime had a unique character with their calculated, systematic methods for torture and murder.

Trying to "other" or separate those actions from the repertoire of human behavior however, doesn't do anyone any good.

It is another human trait to try to make "extreme" acts appear to be aberrations of human propensities. They aren't millions of Germans fought for, and supported the war effort, either turning a blind eye, or actually supporting the intentions of Hitler and his regime. Not 40 years later we had Pol Pot in Cambodia, kill between 2 and 4 million of his people. We had the genocide of the Hutus by the Tutsi in Rwanda not 30 years ago. Between half a million and 800,000 people were shot and hacked to death while the world tried to figure out whether to call it a genocide.

We ALL need to think about and try to figure out HOW WE GET TO THE POINT OF BUILDING OVENS or hacking people to death. We are experiencing the very language that precipitates mass violence right here in our very own country. People like Greene, Tucker Carlson, Hannity, Trump, etc... calling their opponents dehumanizing names. Idiots like Cawthorn advocating violence at every opportunity under the guise of free speech.

We counter with names like Repugnicants, Rethuglicans, etc... I have said harsh things about Republicans too. I still stand by my desire to eradicate Conservative philosophy. Not people, but the ideas espoused by conservatism. I don't mean "small government", "fiscal responsibility" and all that other bullshit that they use as talking points. I mean the idea that hierarchies in government of "betters" are natural and ordained by god or whatever higher power they espouse. Hitler and the Nazis had beliefs like that. They talked about the mythical Aryan race that was superior to all and should rule in a 1000 year Reich.

These are recurring patterns of human thought and behavior. We need to study them and do what we can to minimize them so as the author said, buildings like Auschwitz are not built again.

[Cha]

38. TY

[murielm99]

39. Not long ago, I read a book called, "Lightning Down."

It is the story of an American WWII fighter pilot. His plane, in which he flew bombing raids over Germany, was a P-38 Lightning.
He was shot down after 44 flights.

Instead of being sent to a POW camp, he and some of his fellow pilots were sent to Buchenwald. He survived, and came home.

His story is horrifying. One of his remembrances is of the smell of the crematorium. He could never stand the smell of frying bacon after he came back from the war.

I would recommend this book, if you can take it. We must never forget.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

40. The buildings offend us, make us feel miserable.

As they should. "Holocaust" was a word I learned in school, just another fact of his, tory to remember. It sunk in during a visit to Dachau, where the exhibits of photos and words accompanied the reality of the barracks, the ovens, the rail tracks. Keeping the buildings will help keep the impact alive.

They're a good monument to the ability of humans to become victims. Or monsters.

Never again.

[Farmer-Rick]

42. I remember first finding out about the Holocaust as a kid

I think I was 8. I didn't believe it. I thought my teacher must be mistaken. But then she showed us some of the more tame footage Hitler ensured was recorded. It was like Hitler was all so proud of being a horrifying human that he had to record every little disgusting thing he did.

I think that my first instinct, to not believe people were so horrible, is a childish, immature response. And some people never grow up and face reality.

[Blue Owl]

49. Looks like a MagaMansion

[MerryHolidays]

51. Perhaps consider changing the title of your post?

to "A building so unspeakably evil, it should never have even been allowed to be built."

That might help folks understand exactly what you mean, which they should if they read your OP.

[Loki]

52. Almost 3 years ago

my husband and I went on a trip to the Czech Republic. One of the tours offered for a day was to Theresienstadt the ghetto established by the Nazi's for Jews in Czechoslovakia. There was a silence there that was oppressive. Even after the war when the small town was repatriated, only 3,000 people came back to live there. On that sunny day in August, no birds, no butterflies, no sound except our hushed voices and footsteps on the cobble walkway. I will always remember that day. Over 144,000 Jewish adults and 15,000 children were eventually sent on to Auschwitz and only 19,000 people survived until the end of the war.

[AZLD4Candidate]

56. Why do we keep them standing? Let Rod Serling explain

[DFW]

59. A late friend of mine had a number on his wrist, tattooed there in Auschwitz as a teenager

He was from the Hague, and returned there after the war. Rather successful in business, he never once moved from the very modest house he lived in. Some eccentric, he married a gentile woman from Austria, who spoke Dutch with a thick Viennese accent.

He was a soccer fanatic, and often traveled with the Dutch national team when they played matches abroad. one time, when they were playing Poland, he traveled with them, and told me afterward that he had made a side trip to Auschwitz. I asked him why in the world he would ever want to return to a place like that after what had been done to him there. He said he wanted to stand there and silently mock the place, saying, "I'm still here, and you're nothing more than a relic."

[BigmanPigman]

60. Are humans the only species that kills its own

when not in need of food? I don't think humans are very advanced.

[Behind the Aegis]

66. No, other animals will kill for reasons other than food.

But, I agree, humans aren't as advanced as we would like to think we are.