The Cartography of Death

Certainly...get him hanged! Why not? Anything--anything can be done in this country. --Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

So here we are, barely into the next century, and the indications couldn't be better. Peace and prosperity rule. Forget World Wars I and II, the Nazi death camps, the gulag, Hiroshima, even Vietnam. Forget that whole last benighted century of ours, that charnel house of darkness in the heart of the West, or the Free World as we called it, until, ever so recently, the whole world was freed. That's old news. It was old even before the "short Twentieth Century," which began amid nationalist cheers in August 1914, ended early as that wall in Berlin came down. It's hard to believe now that in 1945, after Europe's second Thirty Years' War, the civilization that had experienced a proud peace, while dominating two-thirds of the planet, lay in ruins; that it had become a site of genocide, its cities reduced to rubble, its fields laid waste, its lands littered with civilian dead, its streets flooded by refugees: a description that today would be recognizable only of a place like Kosovo, Chechnya or Sierra Leone.

What a relief, when you think about it; more so if you don't: Mass death, massacre (every acre of it), the cleansing of civilian populations, the whole bloody business has finally been handed back to the savages in countries nobody who counts really gives a damn about anyway. After all these years, we face a world in which genocide happens in Rwanda or East Timor, slaughter and mass rape in the cesspool of the Balkans, which hardly qualifies as Europe anyway, or in African countries like Congo--and most important of all, they're doing it to one another. Even when it comes to nuclear matters, the MAD policies of the two superpowers have been deposited in the ever-fuller dustbin of history (though most of the weapons linger by the thousands in the same hands), and the second team, the subs, have been called in. Now, Indians and Pakistanis have an equal-opportunity chance to Hiroshimate each other without (at least initially) involving us at all.

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