Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

512 | HOW THE MIND WORKSwith the edge of the sword: But the women, and the little ones, and thecattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou takeunto thyself. (Deuteronomy 20)When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the LORD thyGod hath delivered them into thine hands, and thou hast taken themcaptive, And seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and hast adesire unto her, that thou wouldest have her to thy wife; Then thou shaltbring her home to thine house; and she shall shave her head, and pareher nails; And she shall put the raiment of her captivity from off her, andshall remain in thine house, and bewail her father and her mother a fullmonth; and after that thou shalt go in unto her, and be her husband, andshe shall be thy wife. (Deuteronomy 21)According to the Iliad, the Trojan War began with the abduction ofHelen of Troy. During the First Crusade, Christian soldiers raped theirway across Europe to Constantinople. Shakespeare has Henry V threateninga French village during the Hundred Years War that if they do notsurrender, it will be their fault that their "pure maidens fall into the handof hot and forcing violation":If not, why, in a moment look to seeThe blind and bloody soldier with foul handDefile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;Your fathers taken by the silver beards,And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls,Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confusedDo break the clouds, as did the wives of JewryAt Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen.The feminist writer Susan Brownmiller has documented that rape wassystematically practiced by the English in the Scottish Highlands, theGermans invading Belgium in World War I and eastern Europe in WorldWar II, the Japanese in China, the Pakistanis in Bangladesh, the Cossacksduring the pogroms, the Turks persecuting the Armenians, the KuKlux Klan in the American South, and, to a lesser extent, Russian soldiersmarching toward Berlin and American soldiers in Vietnam.Recently the Serbs in Bosnia and the Hutus in Rwanda have addedthemselves to this list. Prostitution, which in wartime is often hard to