Hello Cruel World

Thursday, October 10, 2002

While checking for a source for Slavenka Drakulic's beautiful/tragic/thoughtful piece about the destruction of the Bridge over the Neretva River at Mostar, originally in The Observer in 1997(?)
(quoted at users.tyenet.com/kozlich/workshop.htm), I found this interview, entitled The Normalcy of War Criminals
www.motherjones.com/web_exclusives/features/news/drakulic_qa.html
It deals with subjects my friends & I have been considering.
(I remember Clive James writing in one of his essays that he feared if he had been a German in the 1930s & 1940s, that he may have ended up being a camp guard. We nearly all have the capacity for extraordinary things, both good & bad.)

Meanwhile, another place to find some interesting discussions (apart from my favourite, Margot Kingston's Webdiary [NEW SITE webdiary.smh.com.au]) on the Sydney Morning Herald site)
is on the United Kingdom's "The Independent" newspaper site:
argument.independent.co.uk
which includes one of the people who know the Middle Eastern situation, Robert Fisk, e.g. his piece on the first Anniversary of the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks in the USA at One year on: A view from the Middle East - part of their general coverage of that anniversary, which is at Reflections on September 11.
Oddly, he doesn't seem to appear in their list of regular columnists or commentators, tho' if you use their "Search this site" box with his name, he obviously writes fairly regularly for them.

* A bunch of possible links:
www.un.org/ Pubs/ chronicle/ 2004/ issue3/ 0304p77.asp
www.haverford.edu/relg/ sells/ mostar/ mostar.html
A list of references to the story of the Mostar bridge
www.geocities.com/ Heartland/ 1935/ bridge.html
www.archaeology.org/ 9801/ abstracts/ bosnia.html
Against anthropocentrism: the destruction of the built environment as a distinct form of political violence (urbicide)
www.theage.com.au/ articles/ 2006/ 03/ 23/ 1143083899330.html

Labels: buildings, history, links, memory, mourning, society