"Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate," Dante Alighieri wrote on the entrance to Hell in the Inferno section of his allegorical masterpiece The Divine Comedy. The English translation usually goes something like “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” When the soldiers featured in the gruesomely repugnant story “The Kill Team” in a recent issue of Rolling Stone settled on a motto to place on the entrance to their quarters, they mangled Dante’s words into “Abandon all hope he who enter” (shown above). “The Kill Team” not only killed innocent Afghan people for sport, thus mangling the honor of our military, but documented their actions in photographs that celebrate the murders. Looking at these photographs (which are not for the faint of heart) and facing the prospect of a third theater of war in Libya, it’s hard not to abandon hope for our military and our proposed mission to bring peace to the world. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Abandon All Hope."
