The Language of Slaughter

...We were blind and unbelieving and slow, and that we can never be again...

...The dangers of writing either melodramatically or reductively about the slaughter and terror at the center of these new killing fields are all too real...

...I cannot sleep for what I have seen...

...My model (or, if you prefer, my style) was that of the weekly report commonly used in factories," Levi observed...

...I saw dozDISSENT / Winter 2002 n 27 INTRODUCTION ens of other walking skeletons of that sort," Peter Maass writes in Love They Neighbor of the men he visited at the Serbian prison camp at Trnopolje...

...In Edmund Blunden's Un24 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 dertones of War it is a place "cancerous with bodies...

...In the mid-1890s the Baptist missionary Edward Wilhelm Sjoblom began sending back personal accounts that were published in Sweden and England...

...All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz," Conrad tells us after noting that Kurtz's mother was half-English and his father was half-French...

...In this concern for being believed, Levi was again far from alone...

...When describing the tragic world of Auschwitz, I have deliberately assumed the calm, sober language of the witness, neither the lamenting tones of the victim nor the irate voice of someone who seeks revenge," Levi insisted...

...Her minimalist prose was designed to describe how the concentration camps had stripped the men and women in them of recognizable life...

...The twelve-year period between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the fall of the World Trade Center in 2001, the era of the new killing fields we write about, has already yielded to a time in which the developed nations of the world see themselves as vulnerable to terrorism in a way they never did...

...With the emergence of smart bombs and computerized battlefields, the most militarily sophisticated countries will be increasingly reluctant to put their own troops in harm's way unless their own safety is at stake...

...avoid political judgment by writing him off as simply pathological...

...Marlow has no illusions about why this brutality is tolerated...

...And like King Leopold II, who described his Belgian agents as "all-powerful protectors" and "benevolent teachers" engaged in "the work of material and moral regeneration," Kurtz sees himself as a defender of "higher principles...

...The only analogy that Hemingway will allow his narrator to use is one that reduces the sacrifice of war to slaughter in the Chicago stockyards and suggests that the soldiers are being treated as if they were cattle...

...In England this new generation of writers was made up of classically educated men who quickly found that nothing they had read about war as an occasion for heroism and sacrifice applied...

...Because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts," he writes...

...In 1896 Sir Charles Dilke, an ex-British government cabinet secretary and a member of the Aborigines Protection Society who had read Sjoblom's accounts, published a critical piece in the new magazine Cosmopolis attacking the "flogging and shooting that are going on in the heart of Africa...

...I fancy every farm and cottage thereabouts would get empty very soon," he writes, "if a lot of mysterious niggers armed with all kinds of fearful weapons suddenly took to traveling on the road between Deal and Gravesend, catching the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads for them...

...they do not make it less necessary to deny them a future...

...In their writing the butchery of war crowds out all else...

...26 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 How they bore witness took a very definite literary form...

...When they wrote about a "queue of human skeletons" or the humiliation of being tattooed with an identification number, there was no distance in their language...

...As Holocaust survivors, Wiesel and Levi were in a parallel position in relation to their readers...

...Looking back on that day fifty years later, Gellhorn remembered, "Years of war had taught me a great deal, but war was nothing like Dachau...

...Nobody today is talking about converting the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and East Timor into historical tourist spots, but what remains an issue is the ease with which the atrocities that occurred in these countries over the last decade can be turned, if a writer INTRODUCTION is not careful, into highbrow entertainment for the "concerned intellectual...

...Even when the media were kicked out of a country in which mass killing was going on, they were never gone for long...

...they all look alike and like nothing you will see if you are lucky" It is an insight Gellhorn is embarrassed to witness from the perspective of someone personally undamaged by the war, and later on in her article, she goes on to explain, "Aside from the terrible anger you feel, you are ashamed...

...They carried with them passports, money, and credit cards...

...In a world in which they were expected to die—and take to the grave the victim's experience of Nazi genocide— they triumphed by living and in turn felt enormous pressure to make sure future generations learned of their experiences...

...It was these men and women who for the second time in the twentieth century extended the language of slaughter so that it could reach a new audience...

...In addition to Conrad, Thomas Hardy and Henry James were both alive at the start of World War I, but their generation of novelists would not be the ones to bring the language of slaughter into the twentieth century...

...His books include The Crowd in American Literature, Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964, and The Triumph of Meanness: America's War Against Its Better Self...

...NICOLAUS MILLS is a member of the Dissent editorial board and chair of the department of literature at Sarah Lawrence College...

...Precisely kept ledgers of horrors...

...Still more important, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and East Timor were places in which the writers who went there did not on a day-in and day-out basis share the risks of those they described...

...Like Philip Gourevitch's description in We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with our Families of the "macheted skulls" he found in a Rwandan classroom or correspondent Cameron Barr's report in the Christian Science Monitor of Indonesian soldiers cutting off the ear of an East Timorese man they have just shot, what characterizes the most revealing accounts of the killing fields of the nineties is a prose that in its tautness and candor allows us to speak of the language of slaughter that has its roots in Conrad and Hemingway, continuing into the present...

...Their descriptions included themselves down to the last detail...

...IN THE MIDST of his speech at the 1993 dedication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel shocked President Bill Clinton and the audience by departing from his prepared remarks to observe, "Mr...

...As I spoke to one of them, I looked at his arm and realized that I could grab hold of it and snap it in two places like a brittle twig...

...Kraus told the story of an imaginary Swiss tourist agency that took the curious to the battlefield of Verdun, where from the comfort of their cars they might view "the quintessence of the horrors of modern warfare...

...He is the author of a report on "The Suppression of Savage Customs...

...But with the end of the Second World War and the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps by the Allies, there was a new set of realities to account for...

...Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway's third wife and a distinguished war correspondent in her own right, reflected this change in a story she wrote for Collier's in 1945 about her visit to the Dachau concentration camp on the day Germany surrendered...

...The real lack of feeling in this passage is that of those leaders, in and out of the military, who try to prettify battlefield slaughter...

...The fence posts around his house are ornamented with them...

...Conrad's Charlie Marlow saw the slaughter of the Congo from the vantage point of a skeptical European working there...

...Behind the barbed wires and electric fence, the skeletons sat in the sun and searched themselves for lice," she writes of the prisoners...

...It is the continuation of this story that is the subject of The New Killing Fields...

...The most important writing on the concentration camps of World War II came, however, not from those who reported on them after they were liberated, but from those who spent years in them before the rest of the world had a true picture of them...

...The result, as with Conrad, is that the reader is again invited to fill in the blanks, to go beyond the deliberately understated prose put before him...

...In Siegfried Sassoon's The Memoirs of George Sherston it is "slaughter" that leaves the dead "grotesque and undignified...

...We see a "middle-aged Negro with a bullet hole in his head" lying beside the road...

...Conrad will not, however, let Kurtz, who concludes his report with the postscript, "Exterminate all the brutes...

...He describes imperialism as DISSENT / Winter 2002 n 23 INTRODUCTION the conquest of "those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves," and he sneers at the "philanthropic pretense" that is used to justify it...

...Our hope is that the essays that make up this book can, if only in a small way, help to reverse this trend...

...It is the contrast between the horrors that Marlow describes and the neutral tone of his language that makes him believable, and it is this same contrast that invites the reader of Conrad's story to make the larger political and moral judgments Marlow will not volunteer...

...What has not stayed the same, however, is the way people now get their news...

...To deal with them, it was necessary for America and the West to act primarily on the basis of humanitarian concerns rather than those of political self-interest...

...Havel's remarks point up how difficult it has been to find signs of positive change or progress emerging from the new killing fields...

...As the late Terrence Des Pres pointed out in The Survivor, his study of the writing from the Nazi death camps, in the overwhelming number of Holocaust memoirs, the writers say "we" rather than "I" and offer what is in essence a group portrait...

...What worries us is that when the television camera are pulled out of places like the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and East Timor, the world quickly loses interest in them and acts as though they can heal themselves...

...But what dominates Marlow's language is a matter-of-factness that rarely calls attention to his inner feelings and avoids moralizing about how imperialism might be reformed...

...Even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive in order to tell the story, to bear witness...

...The nightmare these contemporary killing fields embody is one that, to paraphrase Wiesel, calls for action, not comparison...

...In the near future it is going to be harder than ever for any politician to call for humanitarian intervention and be taken seriously...

...THE MODERN foundations for this language of slaughter, in which the focus is invariably on the individual as victim of forces he cannot cope with by himself, were laid by Joseph Conrad in 1899, with the publication of Heart of Darkness in Blackwood's Magazine...

...Conrad's revulsion at the slaughter he saw in the Congo was no greater than that of men like Dilke and Glave...

...The Polish-born Conrad went to the Congo in 1890 with the expectation of working as a captain on a river steamship...

...We see emaciated black prisoners, each with an iron collar around his neck, being marched to work...

...They were able to write personally about events that the newsreels and still photography of the 1940s never showed while they were happening...

...What are the tactical and moral criteria for humanitarian intervention, especially for nations that were once colonial powers...

...But time and again those countries and institutions most able to help have found reasons for ignoring the new killing fields, failing to act when the chances for saving life were greatest or taking refuge in meaningless distinctions, as the Clinton State Department did in 1994, when it insisted that what was going on in Rwanda were "acts of genocide" rather than genocide...

...The danger is that in America and Europe governments, as well as individual citizens, will be paralyzed into inaction by the knowledge that nothing they do in the future can ever make up for the enormity of suffering they have witnessed from the comfort of their living rooms...

...But we would also not need to write as we do if these were areas in which a peaceful future was assured...

...Its perpetrators have contented themselves with using murder and intimidation to revenge themselves or drive their enemies from the land they want...

...In the vast majority of Holocaust memoirs, the brutal repetitiveness of daily life in the camps sets the tone, and it is this brutal repetitiveness the memoirists seek to capture...

...FIFTY YEARS LATER many of these same beliefs may be seen in the language of slaughter that has focused our attention on the killing fields of the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and East Timor...

...When do human rights supersede those of sovereignty, and how do we move from generalized compassion for the victims of mass slaughter and terror to concrete action that saves lives...

...It is a tall order, and in the coming years it will depend on America and the West, which have, to a degree that nobody else does, the resources for dealing with the new killing fields, believing their own struggles with terrorism are helped, not hindered, by battling the forces that over the nineties brought so much chaos to the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and East Timor...

...I could do the same with his legs...

...or East Timor, where, according to a United Nations assessment, a quarter of the country fled or was pushed across the border into refugee camps in West Timor and twelve hundred more victims were added to a death list that totaled two hundred thousand since Indonesian occupation began in 1975—is that they are lands in which life was made intolerable through deliberate campaigns of murder and terror...

...In Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That the battlefield is "the continual experience of death...

...James Agee's plea in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, "In INTRODUCTION God's name don't think of it as art," echoes throughout their work in their desire to have their readers remain unconcerned with the problems of literary construction...

...Accounts told with childlike artlessness," Elie Wiesel observed years later in One Generation After, and in a 1986 conversation with novelist Philip Roth, Levi went even further in discussing the economy of style he strove for...

...What they offered their readers was carnage, not drama...

...The figure who is the greatest single source of violence in Heart of Darkness is the chief of the Inner Station, a man known only as Kurtz...

...Hemingway's Lieutenant Frederic Henry saw the slaughter of World War I from the perspective of someone who was wounded...

...The same appalled sensibility was part of Gellhorn's 1945 reportage on Dachau...

...In disdaining words such as sacred and glorious, Lieutenant Henry immediately dismisses the language that from Homer to Napoleon was used to describe war at its most heroic...

...To those of us whose essays make up The New Killing Fields, this question will not go away...

...AQUARTER CENTURY later, with the outbreak of World War I and the initiation of modern warfare—which at battles such as Ypres and the Somme left, on the British side alone, more than three hundred thousand dead and wounded—the language of slaughter was again called into play...

...In this same spirit the Holocaust writers also tended to adopt what Levi called in The Drowned and the Saved the "humility of the good chronicler...

...But it is also, we realize, a question that requires us to go beyond finger pointing and ask, how should the international community act when governments massacre their own people...

...They appear as living corpses in Gellhorn's eyes...

...As such, the Holocaust survivors brought a unique ethic with them...

...But for Levi and the other Holocaust writers, bearing witness was only the beginning...

...We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards of Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it...

...Why were these concerns not enough to cause the West and the rest of the world to act in ways that would have minimized and, where possible, prevented the bloodshed of the new killing fields...

...Like the fabled Captain Rom, Kurtz has a fondness for shrunken heads...

...We believe that any serious discussion of the new killing fields must acknowledge how rapidly the world has changed since the end of the cold war...

...Detail, not hearsay or guesswork, is crucial in this regard, and it is for this reason that so many of the writers who appear in this book are men and women who went to the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and East Timor as reporters...

...Three years after the end of World War I, the Austrian writer Karl Kraus described the worst of these dangers in a satire he called "Promotional Trips to Hell...

...In describing the world they knew firsthand, Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway were in a position to write about events for which the visual record was crude and incomplete...

...When they put themselves at risk, it was in most cases because they wanted to get closer to the story they were working on...

...These differences do not, however, make the forces behind the new killing fields less worthy of condemnation...

...Since the Berlin Conference of 1884, the Congo had been the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium, and throughout the 1890s reports of the atrocities committed there had been filtering back to Europe...

...There is an unbridgeable gap between the rhetorical simplicity of Hemingway's prose and the flowery language President Woodrow Wilson used in 1917 when, in a speech that blended the idea of banking and Christian sacrifice, he declared war on Germany by announcing, "The day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace she has treasured...

...Kurtz is an imperial everyman...

...Behind Wiesel's remarks was not only a call for action but an equally far-reaching assertion: fifty years later we were not applying the lessons of the Holocaust to the mass killing going on in Europe close to where the Nazi death camps had been...

...28 n DISSENT / Winter 2002...

...Imagine, talking to skeletons...

...Equally significant from a policy perspective, the writers who over the last decade have made the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and East Timor their focus have not allowed themselves to become political agnostics...

...Lieutenant Henry's seeming unfeelingness, his refusal to speak of war as if its sacrifices will make transcendence possible, is by contrast the response that makes most sense in this context...

...There was still room for irony and understatement, but in the years after the war, it was nausea, stemming from a numbing horror, that gave the new language of slaughter its most characteristic quality...

...But what is equally striking about the Hemingway passage is how the already stripped-down language Conrad used to describe slaughter has been pared even further...

...That task would fall to a new generation of writers who believed the war was, as James wrote, "a nightmare from which there is no waking save by sleep," but who, in contrast to James, experienced combat firsthand...

...FOR THE survivor-writers of the Holocaust, the result was a world in which living in order to write gave them purpose...

...At the heart of this special issue, The New Killing Fields, is an attempt to come to terms with the moral and political issues raised by the widespread mass killing and "ethnic cleansing" that have occurred since the start of the 1990s...

...He bears witness through these words of mine," Levi wrote of an Auschwitz friend, and for survivor after survivor, this tie with those who died is one they feel shaping their prose...

...In an era of twenty-four-hour television coverage of the world, it has not been possible to say of the new killing fields, "We did not know...

...Even more important, Kurtz's excesses are portrayed as the natural extension of a system of extracting ivory at any cost...

...rOR THE BETTER part of three decades, Hemingway's barebones style remained the gold standard for writers seeking to describe the slaughter that the modern state was capable of unleashing...

...In writing about them, Conrad was not raising issues that were new to his European readers, as Sven Lindquist pointed out in his 1996 book Exterminate All the Brutes: One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide...

...As a result one characteristic of the first wave of writing on the killing fields of the nineties is a pronounced self-consciousness on the part of those who first reported on them...

...What follows from these agonized discussions of how to write about the killing fields of the nineties are not, however, accounts of death and terror that deconstruct themselves but accounts that transcend their authors' fears that they might not be able to find the right words for their subject...

...They are never so naïve as to argue that in the conflicts they describe only one side has been guilty of atrocities...

...Such language had become deceptive for Hemingway, and so, too, had the process of talking abstractly about war or constantly using metaphors to describe it...

...What the Opposite: Bosnian soldiers at the funeral of a slain comrade...

...President, I cannot not tell you something...

...This is not to say that the writers who covered the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and East Timor did not act bravely and encounter unforeseen dangers that put their lives in jeopardy, but as professional observers rather than participants, they could always opt to leave...

...THE AIM OF The New Killing Fields is to try, as much as possible, to answer these questions by looking closely at what has happened over recent years in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and East Timor...

...In any number of ways, this combination of mass killing and ethnic cleansing does not equal the genocide of the Nazi era...

...Indeed, unlike Saddam Hussein and Iraq, these new killers and their followers did not even threaten American and European oil interests...

...As a Jew, I am saying that we must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country...

...We see a black worker "screeching horribly" from a beating he is given for accidentally causing a fire...

...In extending this invitation, Hemingway offers far more guidance than Conrad, a figure he came to admire in the twenties at a time when Conrad was falling out of literary favor...

...But concentration camp survivors saw the slaughter of the Holocaust from the perspective of those who were supposed to die in it...

...Yet for the West, and particularly for America, confronting this new mass killing and its cleansing of civilian populations unable and unequipped to defend themselves has consistently been a matter of doing too little too late...

...I was blown up while eating cheese," he sardonically observes when he learns that he may be in line for a medal...

...In this present period, when the slaughter that in the nineties reached such a frenzy in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and East Timor has stopped, we have a chance to do there what was not possible earlier: to see if a permanent stability can be achieved so that a new cycle of killing and ethnic cleansing does not start up again...

...It must be precise, concise, and written in a style comprehensible to everybody" For Levi and the Holocaust writers, the idea of allowing an elaborate prose, let alone a prose that was hard to follow by virtue of its shifting perspectives, to divert attention from the events they wanted to record was anathema...

...Today, thanks to the electronic media and twenty-four-hour news cycle, writers do not have such leeway...

...I have been in the former Yugoslavia...

...It has been anything but a model of high tech efficiency and planning...

...All remember the role that luck and friendship played in their survival and know they might just as easily have been killed as survived...

...But they are not so overwhelmed by what they have seen that they cannot distinguish the worst perpetrators of violence, cannot give proper weight to the slaughter that at its most extreme was done by Serbs to Bosnians, by the Hutu majority to the Tutsi minority, by Indonesian Army and paramilitary units to the people of East Timor...

...It is the voice of Charlie Marlow, who, like Conrad, came to the Congo to captain a riverboat, that dominates Heart of Darkness, and what Marlow captures with his painstakingly detailed narrative is a panorama of brutality...

...The key for Gellhorn is to capture a world that she and the troops with her fear others will never believe existed, and she closes her Collier's story by turning away from the Nazis to talk about America and the Allies...

...Early in his first memoir, Survival in Auschwitz, Levi makes the link between surviving and writing...

...Rwanda, where in a hundred days eight hundred thousand Tutsis met the same fate, butchered largely by machete...

...The classic Hemingway passage—and arguably the single piece of writing that best describes modern warfare as slaughter rather than glorious combat—occurs in the middle of his 1929 novel, A Farewell to Arms, when the narrator, Lieutenant Frederic Henry, an American serving as an ambulance driver in the Italian Army, observes of the work he is engaged in, "I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain...

...But Henry, who eventually deserts the Italian army and flees to Switzerland, refuses to dwell on his own wounding or to portray it as anything more than the result of random violence...

...Terse documents...

...They wished to remain believable at all costs...

...Photograph by Ron HavivNII killing fields of the nineties have in common— whether we are talking about the former Yugoslavia, where two hundred thousand Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered while troops from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization stood by...

...In 1897 the Century Magazine published the diary of the missionary E. J. Glave, in which he described the beatings he had observed as part of a "fiendish policy" that was depopulating the Congo in order to extract rubber from it, and in 1898 the Saturday Review, Conrad's favorite paper, published the story of Captain Leon Rom, "who ornamented his flower beds with heads of twenty-one natives killed in a punitive expedition...

...Given these pressures, any serious discussion of the new killing fields of the nineties must be rooted in an abiding sense of the toll they took in human life and suffering...

...They had to defy the kind of cynicism that famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal records in The Murderers Are Among Us when he tells the story of an SS officer boasting, "Even if some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed: they will say they are the exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us...

...As David Rieff observed in Slaughterhouse, his account of diplomacy and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, "Two hundred thousand Muslims died, in full view of the world's television cameras, and more than two million other people were forcibly displaced...

...In focusing on these three countries, we do not mean to minimize the terrible brutality that went on elsewhere during the nineties...

...DISSENT / Winter 2002 n 25 INTRODUCTION What distinguished these writers was their vulnerability to the events they described...

...Given the longstanding preoccupation in America and Europe with enemies who could be labeled communists, it is not surprising that the men responsible over the course of the nineties for the terror and mass murder in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and East Timor did DISSENT / Winter 2002 n ZI INTRODUCTION not draw the attention they would have if the cold war had still been going on and they had been viewed as surrogates for Moscow...

...Nobody, no matter how brave he or she was, feels qualified to write as a "we" rather than an "I," and in book after book, there are lengthy discussions of prose that misleads...

...Lieutenant Henry has, in the course of the INTRODUCTION war, been wounded, as was Hemingway, who served as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross in Italy, and so unlike Conrad's Marlow, Henry is as much a victim as a firsthand observer of the carnage around him...

...It was a purpose that virtually all Holocaust writers talked about, but none more eloquently than Primo Levi, whose Holocaust writings from 1947 until his suicide forty years later in 1987, were crucial in making the Holocaust accessible to a worldwide audience...

...It took us twelve years to open the gates of Dachau," she writes...

...I thought that my account would be all the more credible and useful the more it appeared objective and the less it sounded overly emotional...

...We would not be able to write as we do about what has happened in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and East Timor if the groundwork for understanding them had not already been laid...

...It was, however, an American writer, Ernest Hemingway, whose formal education stopped with the end of high school and whose literary values were initially shaped by working as a reporter for the Kansas City Star, who, with more depth than any other writer of his generation, extended the language of slaughter that Conrad had developed...

...They made sure their narratives did not get sidetracked with flights of fancy or unneeded moralizing...

...Fortunately, there is an alternative, and it is reflected in the path taken since the end of the nineteenth century by a small but distinct group of writers, linked primarily by their willingness to bear witness, to develop a language of slaughter that in its descriptive simplicity, its freedom from easy moralizing, portrays the mass suffering it describes unblinkingly while simultaneously making the point: governments and individuals have the power—if they will only use it—to stop this suffering...

...In an address he delivered to the Canadian House and Senate in 1999, Czech president Vaclav Havel observed that one of the few bright spots in the West's intervention in the former Yugoslavia was that it dealt a severe blow to the notion that what a government did to the people within its borders was not 22 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 grounds for action by the international community...

...They have no age and no faces...

...Their ideal reader, a figure Levi refers to as "the judge," will, they conclude, have the best chance of understanding the slaughterhouse world the Nazis created if he or she is given concrete information in the order it happened with only minimal hindsightto soften the shock of it...

...Their pictorial competition was minimal, as was their fear of being thought redundant...

...He even asks his readers to imagine what would happen to the English countryside if it were suddenly subjected to African imperialism...

...Our point is rather that the lessons that can be drawn from the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and East Timor—so different from each other in history and geography—reach far beyond their borders and allow us to talk about the killing fields of the post–cold war world without making this book simply a catalog of horrors...

...Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments, and the dates...

...But the command he was promised never materialized, and appalled by what he saw—"Everything here is repellant to me," he wrote—Conrad returned to Europe six months later...

...There is a sense on their parts that they not only went through a collective experience in the camps, but that they are speaking for the dead as well as the living...

...Just as Vietnam was turned into a living-room war by the television networks, so the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and East Timor were turned into living-room killing fields that television watchers could view any hour of the day or night...

...His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune...

...But Gellhorn will not let her shame silence her...

...His genius was in giving the source of the slaughter a human face and allowing his readers to grasp the numbing regularity with which the slaughter was carried out...

...The Nazis' desire to annihilate every Jew on the planet does not have a parallel in the nineties...

...What he could not shed, however, were the sights in Africa that had sickened him...

...Compared to Dachau, war was clean...

...The writers are particularly tough on themselves, especially when they fear they may be turning out the kind of "war porn" that makes the slaughter they describe seem fascinating rather than horrifying...

...By his literalism—by employing a language that focuses on the names of villages and the numbers of regiments—Henry turns his back on euphemism and allows the details of the carnage he has experienced to define its significance...