Atrocity
Atrocities are acts of mass murder, often, but not necessarily to the degree of genocide. An atrocity can be a single specific event, or a series of events, or can refer to genocide. In general use, an atrocity is the moralist's term for a politically or ethnically motivated mass-killing of civilians.
A defining characteristic of an atrocity is its brutal or systematic nature. It is an act of killing that is in violation of all moral principles, and can only be justified by social systems that are deviantly altered from long established morality. Killing and war has been happenning since before the historical record. Often hostilities exceed the legitimate mandate of killing enemy combatants to include attacks upon unarmed or otherwise non-combative peoples. Thus every culture has in its history acts of killing which are atrocities.
Informally, people may refer to individual or a limited number of deaths of a cruel nature as an atrocity, as people may do so to characterise such an act as immoral, rather than to say the death was comparable to larger mass killings.
'Atrocity' in political use
The word 'atrocity' in use, is often political. One state may refer to the acts of killing of another as atrocities or murder while its own killing is not so regarded, and justified in context.
In the context of a war, civilians are always killed. The degree to which a military is designed to consider the lives of civilians is often given a relative value between combatants, the more considerate of the two being the more 'righteous' even though both sides may commit grave acts of mass killing, such acts are often not referred to as 'atrocities.'
- We here use the term mass killing to refer to all of these atrocities in a non-politicized way. Regardless of the political nature of, or the justifications for them, all such acts of killing peoples en masse are mass killing. incidents.
- Deliberate systematic acts intended to destroy a defined group; these often, but not always, involve mass killing of large numbers of civilians.
- Deliberate individual acts of mass killing, without a systematic or orchestrated intent of genocide.
- The brutal use of lethal force against a large, but limited, number of people.
- Specific, usually small, incidents of mass killing which target a civilian population, or use civilian deaths as legitimate military targets.
Or Casualties of war: The lines between casualty and 'atrocity' also become blurred as 'accidental' deaths occur when deliberate attacks are made despite knowledge of a civilian presence, disregarding civilian lives in favor of a military objective.
- Individuals who as part of a psychosis, commit repeated acts of murder over a time.
- Individual or multiple deliberate acts of killing, not in direct or indirect self defense. Murder is typically treated as a crime.