The collection is rounded out with sketches of bullfighting, using various spears and harpoons to slice up the bull’s neck muscles and wound his spine before he is killed.

I mention these works not just because they depict acts of needless cruelty, but because they’re nearly 200 years old. You’d think we’d have learned. Yet it seems no matter how brutal the method, no matter how grandiose the scale, we can find a justification for the most cruel human behavior.

Although the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were tragic, it is nothing new to the world. It is only new to the U.S., which has trained, armed, and equipped terrorist forces who massacre civilians. East Timor, invaded with the help of the Ford administration, suffered about 200,000 civilian casualties from Indonesia’s attack. The Contra in Nicaragua killed thousands with support from President Reagan to suppress a Democratic election. The list goes on.

Yet regional political interests somehow always manage to sidestep the genocide argument for amorphous long-term benefit, usually only to those in power. Millions have died as a result of efforts to press anti-U.S. factions, and are legitimized by officials simply as “worth it,” to quote former Secretary of State Madeline Albright. Worth, by the way, is generated by deception, recently illustrated by former Bush administration Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s tell-all book about the administration’s press tactics.

Killing animals has only gotten exponentially more gruesome since Goya’s work, with the industrial revolution leading to factory farming — intensive production facilities run with the principle of treating animals like objects.

This method, according to the Worldwatch Institute, produces 74 percent of the world’s poultry, 43 percent of beef, and 68 percent of eggs, with numbers likely much higher in the U.S., a prime culprit. About 59 billion animals are killed annually, after being taken from their families, cramped inside cages, and enduring many forms of physical and mental abuse: Amputation, confinement, chronic respiratory illness, depression and psychosis, to name a few. This suffering is an industry that provides unhealthy, ecologically-disastrous food. Eating animal corpses and animal byproducts are casually brushed off as excusable forms of genocide and tyranny since eating meat is associated with masculinity and American tradition.

Bullfighting, a blatant showcase of torture and death, is considered a cultural standard to be experienced, rather than ritualized sadism at the expense of an innocent conscious being.

Goya understood the inhumanity of humanity — without the usual smoke and mirrors perpetrated by the powerful and perpetuated by their subjects.

The reason for this violent cultural mindset is that violence is a profitable industry, lining the pockets of political players. Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on air-superiority fighters that were designed to fight the Soviet Union. A submarine program proposed by Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., would grant a multibillion-dollar contract to a company based in Lieberman’s home state. The livestock and dairy industries combined receive billions of dollars in annual subsidies to keep prices artificially low.

Only by thinking critically about our values with a standard of empathy and fairness can we push away the cultural and political justifications for our many acts of barbarism.

Oftentimes doing the right thing, even something as basic as condemning genocide, rocks the boat — something we should be eager to do, rather than become a caricature for the next Goya.

Drew Robert Winter is a State News columnist. Reach him at winterdr@msu.edu . He is also the president of Students Promoting Animal Rights, or SPAR.