Poor thing

[Belacqua]

The saddest, most haunting scene you will see
This monster is half human.

I think that issues of empathy are absolutely crucial to both art and religion. A number of religious writers see the lack of empathy -- what they call the Selfhood -- as the source of all evil, and the thing that their spirituality works to overcome. 

Here is something on William Blake, an antinomian Christian:

[For Blake] Satan is the lower boundary below which no one’s perceptual state may fall. To Satan, the world is literally opaque—his vision stops at the surfaces of things, so that he may not see their infinite connection to God, the universe, and all other things. It’s this extreme lack of vision which makes him satanic. He is not necessarily morally evil (a concept that antinomians don’t recognize) but because without vision of the interconnectedness of all things, he is selfish. In Jerusalem, Blake declares that Satan “is the Great Selfhood” (E 175). He is the state we are in when we think of ourselves as separate, as islands. Though the state of Satan-hood is unredeemable, people who are in it may be resurrected into more perceptive levels. 

Empathy is the ability to see/feel outside of our own boundaries. Without this, any evil is possible.

This radical cause of separation, hence of evil, Boehme called Selbheit [Selfhood], Winstanley the “selfish” aspect of fallen and fragmented man, and Schelling the finite Ichheit which is “the point of the extremest alienation from God.” “Evil generally,” Hegel said, when it is expressed as concept rather than in the image-thinking of religion, is “the self-centered being- for-itself [das insichseiende Fürsichsein] and good is selfless simplicity [das selbstlose Einfache].”

All these thinkers describe God as immanent within people, and thought that when our perceptions are fully open we are, essentially, seeing as God sees. For them there is no separation between God and people, except that which we impose through our illusion of separation. Empathy is the power which reconnects us -- or more properly, allows us to see the connection that has always existed. 

I think that a great deal of modern culture works against empathy. Mass media, particularly, helps us to forget that other people are people. Traditionally one of the ways that we expand and strengthen our understanding of others is through fiction. We see more of Julien Sorel, for example, or Hans Castorp, then we do of most other people, simply because the author tells us more about them than a non-omniscient narrator can know. The greatest writers, it may be safe to say, are those which reduce their selfhoods the most, and allow us to break down the typical boundaries we build up. This is contrasted to most pop culture, which flatters the viewer and looks for little more of a reaction than "Hey Cool." It makes us worse people. 

And you're right that the American military has been among the very worst forces of harm in the modern world. The anti-empathy messages of pop culture help enable their evil.