What broke in a man when he could bring himself to kill another?

I find this news story, about the nasty little fuckers who kicked and stamped a goth girl to death when she begged them to stop attacking her boyfriend, immeasurably depressing. A similar thing happened to a couple I know, who wear black and have strange hair and lots of piercings and are also immensely sweet, gentle people, and who were badly beaten in broad daylight in a shopping street in front of their small children by a gang of worthless cowardly scum.

My heart is with the weird kids and always will be, so it makes me glad that the judge was able to look beyond the piercings, and described the goth community as "perfectly peaceful law-abiding people who pose no threat to anybody". Like he said, "this was a hate crime against these completely harmless people targeted because their appearance was different to yours".

With this in mind I suppose I should not judge the five teenagers in this story on their photographs but rather on their crimes, but seriously - click on the link - I have never seen such a load of terrifyingly dead-eyed, identikit, unprepossessing chavs. Honestly, I feel safer in Mexico City than I would anywhere with people like that around.

These are the people who make me ashamed to be British. When people find out where I'm from, many of them say "ah, hooligans!" - this seems to be one word of English everyone knows, w00t. But, there is also an abiding image of the British (particularly in places not many of them go) as polite, chivalrous, honourable, fair, well-educated, perhaps rather serious-minded. I am hardly Victorian in my values, but these seem like good things - a damn sight better than ignorance, violence, sociopathy, mindless hatred, and not giving a shit. Where did they go?

At the weekend I was having a conversation with my brother - who is sixteen and suddenly hugely funny and interesting and politically misguided - in which we reflected that as a small, overpopulated island Britain's only real resource is human capital. Which makes these cultural and educational failings all the more frightening, no?

Whilst a story like this does make me ashamed of Britain, of course pointless violence happens everywhere. I was fascinated to read about emos being attacked by other urban tribes in Mexico, including punks, goths, and so on. Whatever happened to the weird kids sticking together? I have a strong impression that kids in Mexico are less likely to run feral and brutish than in Britain, because they are brought up in a culture which places a much higher value on both family and community - but, like everywhere, traditional values are breaking down.

Meanwhile, Mexicans face much greater problems of poverty, lawlessness and lack of access to justice, lack of opportunities, powerlessness, and drugs n guns. I am currently reading "True Tales From Another Mexico" by Sam Quinones - which very much portrays one particular side of Mexico, but is nonetheless fascinating - and have just finished the section on lynchings. His example case is traumatic - he gives one detail (I won't repeat it) which I think is permanently engraved on my brain and makes me flinch every time I think about it - but it is clear that these things happen because people are poor, ignorant, powerless, and have no faith in chronically corrupt criminal justice systems.

Its seems to me that there is a line between the quick act of violence - the blow, the kick - that I think we are all quite capable of when angry - and keeping on kicking, beating or torturing someone to death. I know that group violence can become self-fuelling, but I don't understand how each individual is not stayed by shame or pity or horror.

I just finished reading "The Painter of Battles" by Arturo Pérez Reverte*, which I found compelling even though the characters were ultimately not entirely satisfying. It is full of fascinating reflections and horrifying anecdotes about war. One of the worst was a mention, in the context of the former Yugoslavia I think, of forcing two brothers to torture each other so that one might be allowed to live. The psychological cruelty of that stays with me.

The protagonist of this book believes that such cruelty and violence are the natural behaviour, the natural state of human beings. And the author has seen a lot of wars... But... we are such an impossibly exceptional mixture of flesh and blood and instincts and hormones and emotions and ideas and ideals and ethics. Though people machete each other to death every day, gang-rape and murder mothers in front of their children, all of that... human civilisations, both "primitive" and "civilised" consistently create themselves as something more complicated and more extraordinary than the lowest state that human beings may "naturally" descend to.

Once again, I'm with the judge: "your behaviour on that night degrades humanity itself".

* I googled the title of this book in order to check the author, and I came up with this review in the Times. The act described in this anecdote, trivial though it may be in the scheme of things, is one of the most wantonly cruel and wicked things I have ever heard - and motivated by being too slipshod and lazy to take some genuine photographs:
"DURING THE WAR IN Yugoslavia I was working with a celebrated press photographer, covering refugees arriving by ferry. As mothers with fraught, lined faces carried toddlers down the gangplank, he performed an act of kind-hearted humanity: he shoved bags of sweeties into their tiny hands.
"Then he snatched them away again. As the children opened their mouths to bawl in disappointed misery, he began snapping. Let me give you the photographer's logic: these children had their lives already ruined — it had just momentarily slipped their minds. He was restoring the image of reality, not distorting it."