Thinking against humanity

From its enlightened past, the modern world inherited the moral imperative to reduce human suffering anywhere in the world, with violence and cruelty when necessary.2 To understand how compassion and violence, benevolence and cruelty could be intimately intertwined, one may study practices of European colonizing missions which enfolded the native violently, with an idealist benevolence to better her lot in the eyes of God or of History, understood, of course, progressively.