What's the difference between atrocity and brutality?

Atrocity


Definition:

  • (n.) Enormous wickedness; extreme heinousness or cruelty.
  • (n.) An atrocious or extremely cruel deed.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Their brutality seems to have been fairly even-handed, or if it wasn't, the men surely suffered enough not to be presented as the winners of the atrocity.
  • (2) Senior figures in the Lockerbie case – including Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed in the attack, and Professor Robert Black, a lawyer and architect of the trial of two Libyans accused of the atrocity – have said they believe Koussa might have significant information about Libya's role.
  • (3) While it is unlikely that Zardari's government had any direct link to the Mumbai attacks, there is every reason to believe that its failure effectively to crack down on the country's jihadi network, and its equivocation with figures such as Hafiz Muhammad Syed, means that atrocities of the kind we saw last week are likely to continue.
  • (4) A Liberal Democrat MP who likened the atrocities against Palestinians by "the Jews" to the Holocaust has made a public apology in the face of widespread anger.
  • (5) German atrocities in the first phase of the war, in France, and the last phase, in the east, were real enough, but you can't generalise from these to say this is how the Germans would have treated the whole of the rest of Europe had they won.
  • (6) It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else.
  • (7) Killings by Palestinians are routinely described as "atrocities" and "murders", while Palestinians deliberately shot by Israeli soldiers have been reported as "caught in the crossfire".
  • (8) The former Bosnian Serb leader was sentenced on Thursday at the international criminal tribunal to 40 years in prison for his role in the atrocities committed during the 1992-95 Balkans war .
  • (9) They have to balance the clear military advice from Kabul, and the data the generals use to support it, against the anger of the Afghan people over recent atrocities, and public demand in Britain and the US for the west to cut its losses and get out sooner rather than later.
  • (10) Speaking after a day of high-level intelligence briefings with British officials in London, Abbott described the unfolding atrocity in northern Iraq as a "humanitarian catastrophe" and said Australia would provide humanitarian aid to Yazidi refugees besieged by Islamic State (Isis) forces on Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq.
  • (11) Ministers have insisted that Saudis are conducting inquiries into any errors in their bombing campaign and point out that the military there is operating with the support of the UN in a complex and bloody civil war in which both sides have been accused of atrocities.
  • (12) But these are only the latest of the clashes and atrocities that have engulfed Libya since Nato's "liberation": including bombings, assassinations, the kidnapping of the prime minister, the seizure of oil terminals by warlords, the explusion of 40,000 mainly black Libyans from their homes, and the killing of 46 protesters on the streets of Tripoli in one incident — ignored by the states that supposedly went to war to protect civilians.
  • (13) And I was devastated because I knew the atrocities that were going to occur in Iraq which we knew had occurred in El Salvador."
  • (14) Cinematically, RED SORGHUM achieved a fantastically rich colour palette in its politically less-than-correct depiction of Chinese peasant life – blood and earth predominate – and trod a careful political line by focusing on atrocities by the invading Japanese rather than internal repression.
  • (15) Some analysts interpreted the Kenyan atrocity as a sign of weakness, the thrashings of a dying animal.
  • (16) The atrocities in Paris and Brussels are largely the work of people born and raised in France and Belgium, often from families repulsed by the ideologies of their sons.
  • (17) Wednesday’s atrocities will be set against the backdrop of the anticipated collapse of Isis’s self-declared caliphate, as Iranian-backed Iraqi and Syrian army forces, plus US and British-backed Kurdish militias, close in on its Mosul and Raqqa strongholds.
  • (18) Such an atrocity, had it been committed by any Arab or Iranian, or indeed a Muslim of any persuasion, would have brought down instant punishment, or even war.
  • (19) Donald Trump’s campaign chairman took a “mercenary” approach to lobbying the US government on behalf of international clients accused of killings, rapes and other atrocities, according to one of his former colleagues.
  • (20) Cameron used his strongest language to criticise Sri Lanka's human rights record after watching a Channel 4 documentary about atrocities allegedly committed by state forces in the last months of the war.

Brutality


Definition:

  • (n.) The quality of being brutal; inhumanity; savageness; pitilessness.
  • (n.) An inhuman act.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The arrest of the Washington Post’s Tehran correspondent Jason Rezaian and his journalist wife, Yeganeh Salehi, as well as a photographer and her partner, is a brutal reminder of the distance between President Hassan Rouhani’s reforming promises and his willingness to act.
  • (2) The analysis of the causes of hunger current in the 1970's can be summarized somewhat brutally as follows.
  • (3) Their brutality seems to have been fairly even-handed, or if it wasn't, the men surely suffered enough not to be presented as the winners of the atrocity.
  • (4) It hasn't been so exposed to the brutal learning culture Scotland Yard has been through with cases like Stephen Lawrence and Victoria Climbié.
  • (5) My whole world was turned upside down by the brutality of it.
  • (6) The Florida senator said: “This simplistic notion that ‘leave Assad there because he’s a brutal killer, but he’s not as bad as what’s going to follow him’ is a fundamental and simplistic and dangerous misunderstanding of the reality of the region.” It’s unclear though how much the actual debate about policy between the two senators stood out from the political carnival surrounding them.
  • (7) "They have a retaliatory doctrine," Salah argued of the police, whose brutality was a major cause of Egypt's 2011 uprising , but who have become more popular after backing Morsi's overthrow.
  • (8) Comic writing can be a brutal, unforgiving business, yet it can produce great and multi-layered prose, combining comedy, pathos and satire.
  • (9) "It's horrible and brutal to be that far back and searching for those gears and they're not there," O'Hare admitted.
  • (10) The Shah's secret police – Savak – became increasingly brutal, ultimately detaining without trial and torturing tens of thousands of Iranian citizens.
  • (11) These are the first western depictions of our animals, and what they represent are the inception of the specific cultural politics which your nation forced on my continent, its land and its people with unhesitating colonial brutality.
  • (12) Coming shortly after the regime's successful third nuclear weapons test, Rodman's public declaration that he was Kim's "friend for life ", and the young premier's ability to parade his western visitors on state media, angered critics who argued that the country's ghastly poverty and brutal human rights violations were inadequately reflected.
  • (13) The pro-free-market newspaper soon fell victim to brutal market forces.
  • (14) Zhang Gaoping, 47, told state media that he and his nephew were subject to seven days of brutal interrogation before trial – sleep deprivation, starvation, cigarette burns.
  • (15) Onset is generally brutal, as in acute enteritis or an extradigestive infection (ENT...) but persists, or else, more often, the syndrome appears insidiously over several days.
  • (16) As the brutality of the crackdown increased, there were reports of some small-scale defections within the Syrian army.
  • (17) Police said the brutal injuries to the boy clearly caused his death and investigators were not looking for anyone else.
  • (18) If so, they will be more jihadist, sectarian, brutal and anti-western when they take Damascus.
  • (19) Concentrate on the way he constructs the space of an interior or orchestrates a sensual camera movement that he invented himself - the camera gliding on unseen tracks in one direction while uncannily panning in another direction - and you perceive how each Dreyer film almost brutally reconstructs the universe rather than accepting it as a familiar given.
  • (20) Everything that was, is more: brutality, injustice, poverty, anger; but also clarity, knowledge, understanding and, possibly, determination.