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I'm sorry to hear about your PTSD, that is an incredible burden. I will not get explicit with the following, because I don't want to wish on you more bad images, but I do want to point out why I said 'no' to your question about a common root.
Probably because this sort of thing -- dreadful though it is -- is hardly new. Ever read Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will. There is a chapter there about torture and war.Ever read Alice Miller?
No, and No. I went to both of their sites after you posted this. Alice Miller's characterization of the underlying cause motivations of torturers do not correspond well with facts, see Darius Rejali (actually maybe just trust me on him, please). I have no confidence that Against Our Will correctly talks about the situation in the Congolese war, because your first statement isn't true. "This sort of thing -- dreadful though it is -- is hardly new," is unfortunately and quite horribly, not a true statement.
What happened specifically to women in the Congo is, in fact, new and newly brutal, as if humankind needed a more brutal form of war than we currently have. The only comparisons being made to it are the current, and much smaller, crisis in Darfur. It forms the basis of the new efforts to declare acts like what happened to women in the Congo to be in a category worse than ordinary crimes, worse than war crimes, worse than crimes against humanity -- that is to say, there is an effort to equate them with genocide, the worst crime known to the human race. That isn't a misplaced effort at all. And what it means is that even systematic torture pales in comparison. I have images burned into my brain too, and some of them have to do with what Pol Pot did. It is hard for me to think there is now something worse, but that is the consensus about the Congo.
In a world where we build holocaust museums, and vow, "Never Forget," and, "Never Again," the world managed to have this happen with only, "Never heard about it."
