바카라Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel?
Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion,
masking from ourselves the single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast,
a lump of meat? To be degraded, slaughtered바카라is this the essential of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?바카라
바카라Han Kang, Human Acts
In the pages of this book, you wander across the provincial office and the municipal gymnasium along with Dong-ho, a young boy, who helps identify and tag the corpses of murdered protestors. Kang, the first South Korean woman to win the Nobel Prize for her poetic prose, documents the trauma of war in her country and stresses the universality of violence. Her novel, Human Acts, is based in Gwangju, where Kang hails from. Fiction is never without truth.
바카라The Cambodian government바카라s killed another 2 million of theirs. There바카라s nothing stopping us from doing the same,바카라 a character says in Human Acts.
Violence is our past, present and future.
바카라It happened in Gwangju just as it did on Jeju Island, in Kwantung and Nanjing, in Bosnia, and all across the American continent when it was still known as the New World, with such a uniform brutality it바카라s as though it is imprinted in our genetic code,바카라 Kang writes in the same novel that is about the 1980 Gwangju Uprising and the death of the young boy Kang Dong-ho.
Perhaps it is true that it is in our genetic code. This isn바카라t an easy book to read.
Every day, we encounter images of people dying, starving, fleeing home and losing hope.
Every day, we see children looking for the dead. Or children바카라s dead bodies strewn across hospitals and cities.
Every day, we hear sirens on television and phone screens. They have disclaimers saying, 바카라sensitive content,바카라 and we hear and see and scroll on.
Every day, we forget that there are endless wars.
This relentless conflict has been barbaric and seems to only prolong and never really end.
Israel has declared it a zero-sum game when it comes to Palestine and in the ruins of places bombed, you can see the destruction that war brings. Ukraine continues to be bombed.
Modern warfare is a complicated affair with many interests intersecting.
Africa seems to be forever in a state of war.
How do wars begin and how do they end? How do we define the ending? What happens in the aftermath?
Why do we live in a prolonged state of war? What does that living account for, as an audience, a participant and a perpetrator? What happens to those who suffer? How do we tell their stories? Do their stories even matter? How does one return to a besieged place? How long can one flee their homeland?
What does it do to us? Does numbness begin with it?
These are questions that we who write and read often grapple with.
Many conflicts have now become 바카라frozen conflicts바카라 that might erupt again. Many are dealing with the aftermath.
The inertia in wars is also because of economic interests and stronger countries can extend the duration of war in order to make the other party come to the point of defeat. They can starve a place. They can even stop soap from reaching people. It has all happened. We move on. That바카라s what we are taught. Self-care is the new name for apathy.
All wars generate hierarchy.
War isn바카라t an abstraction. It is about layered histories and the lives of people despite the fact that now there is a call to make wars more humane. But how can any war be humane?
바카라War is never elsewhere,바카라 we wrote in the issue.
I stuck a poem on my wall. That바카라s how we began. By moving through time zones and places. This is that poem:
Corpse
바카라By Bosnian poet and journalist Semezdin Mehmedinović in Sarajevo Blues
바카라We slowed down at the bridge
to watch dogs by the Miljacka
tearing apart a human corpse
then we went on
nothing in me has changed
I listened to the snow bursting under the tires
like teeth crunching an apple
and I felt a wild desire to laugh
at you
because you call this place hell
and you flee from here convinced
that death beyond Sarajevo does not exist.바카라
