Sentience and its antithesis to that -"senseless", has and have taken hold, ironically paradigmed by the Rivers of Babylon, that Cradle of Civilization both mythical and actual that our nation's Owner class callously selected from which to re-make the current world into a unipolar, Cold War-founded and funded current madhouse.
These were actual choices made by the Owners of the (this) Nation. And in their determination to Own the rest of the world. It's an old ploy, it goes back to Manifest Destiny and where Teddy Roosevelt and his fellow white supremacists determined international brown people as both incapable and impediments to the larger cause of "white is right."
As if the 1965 US Civil Rights act ever made a dent in the above notion.
And then the cacophony of utter silence across the fruited plains of America when confronted with Abu Ghraib. But that's OK, we not only massacred hundreds of thousands in the Philippines, we waterboarded several thousand to ......Death. For Freedom!