Today, as I predictably record every year, is Hiroshima Day.
(Explanation, if required, for new readers here.)
(An additional poetic link, courtesy of Dr C last year.)
(And if you are masochistic enough to read a selection of previous expansions on the theme, click here instead.)
2 comments:
I find some consolation in having a friend call our attention to Hiroshima day.
The recent tragedy in Oak Creek, WI, and the carnage at a theater in Aurora, CO, and countless other atrocities repeated over and over again, remind us that we have met the enemy and it is us.
A quote from The Growlery, August 6, 2006, pins it:
"I have always argued that the bogeyman of Adolf Hitler, intended (quite rightly) to serve as a warning against evil, actually tends to obscure our view of that evil. We come to believe that such levels of evil only exist in a small number of monsters and, ultimately, only in that one monster. We compare genocides such as Rwanda and Bosnia to Germany's holocaust but, in the comparison, miss the fact that those genocides are a new, contemporary manifestation of the same thing. More important, we miss the fact that any genocide is only a large scale replication of the same thing, the evil which can appear in any one of us and which happens all the time."
Thank you, Felix.
Right you are, Pauline. I have been reading the Bernie Gunther series by Phillip Kerr. He has done an excellent job of giving a face to the players of that time in Germany. And, I suspect it is trivial to mention Hannah Arendt's banality of evil.
I have not been able to come to grips with it, no matter how hard I try. I just don't see how someone can do grievous harm to others, particularly children without out themselves imploding.
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