leitura recomendada
quinta-feira, agosto 18, 2005

To see Germany's descent into madness as an incomprehensible anomaly outside the bounds of humanity is to forget the evils of which the rest of us remain capable. "We learn nothing by blaming them," I.F. Stone wrote in 1961 as Adolf Eichmann went to trial. "We all marched with Eichmann ... whether it was the human incinerator or the H-bomb, we built it." The ensuing half-century of human brutality has illustrated this all too well, and those fateful place names that have joined Auschwitz in our atlas of evil -- Phnom Penh, Cambodia; Halabja, Iraq; Srebrenica, Bosnia; Kigali, Rwanda -- are a painful reminder that "never again" was a wish and not a binding vow on mankind. It has taken that half-century to allow the recognition that, in Germany as elsewhere, among perpetrators there are also victims; "A Woman in Berlin" reminds us that the exclusivity of these categories is little more than a fable.

The Rape of Berlin

Publicado por Manuel 18:30:00    

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