"We hear of the stark sentimentalist, who talks as if there were no problem at all: as if physical kindness would cure everything...."

"... as if one need only pat Nero and stroke Ivan the Terrible. This mere belief in bodily humanitarianism is not sentimental; it is simply snobbish. For if comfort gives men virtue, the comfortable classes ought to be virtuous — which is absurd. Then, again, we do hear of the yet weaker and more watery type of sentimentalists: I mean the sentimentalist who says, with a sort of splutter, 'Flog the brutes!' or who tells you with innocent obscenity 'what he would do' with a certain man — always supposing the man's hands were tied. This is the more effeminate type of the two; but both are weak and unbalanced. And it is only these two types, the sentimental humanitarian and the sentimental brutalitarian, whom one hears in the modern babel."

Wrote G.K. Chesterton,  in "Tremendous Trifles," something I ran across looking up the word "brutalitarian" in the OED, which has only 4 quotes, 2 of which are from Chesterton. The other is "And in this the brutalitarians hate [George Bernard Shaw] not because he is soft, but..because he is not to be softened by conventional excuses." Those quotes are from 1909 and 1910. The oldest iteration of "brutalitarian" (from 1904) is the title of a journal: "The Brutalitarian, a journal for the sane and strong." The word — used as a noun or adjective — is patterned on "humanitarian" (not on "totalitarian," which is a word that doesn't get started until 1926, and which migrates into English from Italian ("totalitario").

You might think: Brutalitarian! What a great word! Why don't we hear it more? A Google search turns up only 26,000 hits, and the first couple of pages are mostly dictionary definitions. A search of the NYT archive turns up only 5 articles, and the only 2 in the last 50 years were in letters to the editor. The New Yorker has only used the word 3 times, and 2 of those were in the mid 1930s. The recent one, from 2008, seems to be a malapropism: "F.B.I. headquarters in Washington is still housed in a brutalitarian structure known as the J. Edgar Hoover Building." I think the author (Hendrik Hertzberg) intended the architectural term "brutalist."

Why was I looking for "brutalitarian"? The previous post quotes the famous line from the Army-McCarthy hearings — "Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" — and links to the transcript. If you keep reading the transcript, you'll see that Senator Joseph McCarthy has plenty to say, including:

... I think we must remember is that this is a war which a brutalitarian force has won to a greater extent than any brutalitarian force has won a war in the history of the world before. For example, Christianity, which has been in existence for 2,000 years, has not converted, convinced nearly as many people as this Communist brutalitarianism has enslaved in 106 years, and they are not going to stop. I know that many of my good friends seem to feel that this is a sort of a game you can play, that you can talk about communism as though it is something 10,000 miles away.... let me say it is right here with us now....