| The Twin Towers or Hiroshima? by Diego Goldberg | |
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The
Twin Towers or Hiroshima ? Oaklahoma or the AMIA ? Sabra and Shatila
or the Munich Olympic Games ? My Lai or Lockerbie ? The Holocaust
? The Ku Klux Klan or the Taliban ? Tutsis against Hutus or Protestants against Catholics ? Hezbollah or the ETA ? Turks against Armenians or Serbs against Bosnians ? The Holy Inquisition or the Islamic Jihad ? The Spanish Conquest of America or the scorched land of Gengis Kahn ? Stalin, the Communist or Hitler, the Nazi ? Sharon, the Jewish general or Arafat the Moslem leader ? Videla, Occidental and Christian or Bin Laden, Islamic fundamentalist ? There is talk, these days, of an attack against the Civilized World, a zone in the planet that goes from the left of the Urals to the right of Alaska and from the Mediterranean Sea to the Scandinavian Peninsula. What lies behind these borders are the territories of the irrational, where the Apocalypse Horsemen ride. Horror doesn't recognize parallels or meridians. The lines of barbarism do not go through geographies or beliefs, they traverse the human soul, and the worst iniquities are perpetrated in the name of immaculate principles. Civilization dresses in all colors of skin and beauty can sprout from every corner of the earth. The creative genius of women and men is expressed everywhere, even in the toilings of daily life. And it's upon us to stop the expansion of barbarism. The Alhambra and Versailles. The Taj Mahal and the Parthenon. Machu Picchu and Venice. The Divine Comedy and the One Thousand and One Nights. Walt Whitman and Omar Kayam. Martin Luther King and Gandhi. Michael Graves and Zaha Hadid. Leonard Bernstein and Zubin Metha. Naguib Mahfouz and Samuel Beckett. Akira Kurosawa and Federico Fellini. Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges... Hiroshima, mon amour. The Twin Towers, I love New York. |
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