Terrorism

One thing in which I did not share the emotions of other people who posted on the Russian school massacre is surprise. A lot of people seemed bewildered, as though this represented something new in their lives. I have every sympathy for this reaction, but I cannot share it. Growing up in the seventies in Italy made you familiar with the worst kind of political violence. On August 2, 1980, Fascist terrorists murdered some eighty people in the main railway station in Bologna, as they were going on their holiday. That was only the worst of a long, long series of acts of violence from Fascist, Communist and Mafia terrorists. Those who remember those days are not surprised by any depth of abjection in political violence. And, incidentally, anyone who is idiotic enough to be nostalgic about the seventies (and seventies nostalgia is a growing industry) was obviously never there.

Irreplaceable loss

In the aftermath of the horrors in Beslan, the disastrous fire in Weimar may pass unnoticed; it may even be that someone will blame me for feeling it almost as intensely. But the loss of a great historic library, of unique and irreplaceable manuscripts, is a catastrophe whose effects will stretch far into the future. Each of those books was a precious resource from which successive generations could have learned, and now will not. And while it does not break the heart in the same way as the horrendously abused and murdered children of North Ossetia, it is in its way - which, granted, is a different way - the height of disaster. One, after all, would want learning to grow, never to diminish. But as of last night, the world's learning is poorer by thousands of volumes.
( Read more... )