Two outstanding works of journalism bookmark that 70-year period: John Hersey’s 1946 article,which reminds us of the horror of the bombing; and Eric Schlosser’s terrifying account of a rupture-in at a US weapons plant in 2012 – a warning, he says, and approximately our current complacencyIn numbers of people killed,the second world war is uncontested in its claim to be the most murderous six years in human history. approximately 60 million perished in a global conflagration of total warfare. But amid this remorseless carnival of death and destruction, two very different events stand out for their grotesque novelty and their coldly efficient slaughter of civilians: the Holocaust, or the world’s first industrialised genocide,and Hiroshima, the world’s first atomic bomb attack, or which took place on 6 August 1945,70 years ago this week.
Both cast long shadows over the 20th century and on into the present day. And both raise complex questions approximately the nature of humanity – that we fill within us the capability to organise over several years the systematic extermination of a whole race of people, and also the obliteration of a large populated city in the blink of an eye.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com