So vegetables are politics now!” The line is pronounced by a character in Alain Tanner’s 1976 film Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, a film that bids farewell to the political hopes of 1968 but somehow manages to be upbeat. John Berger, the English art critic, novelist, and universal man of letters who cowrote the film with Tanner, also managed to sustain an almost magical political buoyancy in the grim and uncertain years that followed the ’60s—and, like the character in Tanner’s film, he seems to have done so in part through vegetables, as well as animals, relocating so as to live in proximity to both.
Showing posts with label Bruce Robbins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bruce Robbins. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 13, 2024
Monday, August 12, 2024
Their Atrocities—and Ours: Thinking About the Wrong Side of History
Their Atrocities—and Ours: Thinking About the Wrong Side of History
Can a cause still be just, even if atrocities have been committed on its behalf?
This article appears in the August 2024 issue, with the headline “After Atrocity.”
There is a set of images to which Americans do not have much access. It consists of photos of German cities after the American bombing raids of World War II: photos of Germans pulling the bodies of children out of their bombed-out homes, stacking corpses on carts, sifting through the rubble for what might remain of their possessions. Why are these images missing from the collective memory? Is it because the United States had no photojournalists in enemy territory? Or are they unremembered because, unlike so many of the bombing campaigns that followed, this one belonged to what we think of as a good war? Most US readers probably have little desire to contemplate the collateral damage, measured in German civilian lives, of a victory over fascism that everyone agrees was noble and necessary.
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