People are dying. This.
Putin, Zelensky, Biden, Gerasimov, Zalutzny, Netanyahu, Haniya, Ben Gvir, Mheisen, the list is endless... (anti)heroes, villains, conspirators, tyrants, saviors or whatever, always by some and/or by others . They lead in the direction of death in the name of nation, religion, justice, freedom, security. History is full of evidence, literature with words, museums with objects and narratives, parks with statues, souls with hatred, fears and emotions, minds with twisted logics and obvious absurdities, and all these are full of war, glory(? ) and death. Brecht was right: the kings, Philipps, young Alexanders, Caesars and Frederick the Great of history were not their monks (unfortunately), but they had (and have) with them builders, slaves, cooks, civilians and others who pay with their lives the expenses of every great man (and woman), and indeed much more often than every ten years. Scratch your pennies, historians! Open your doors, museums! Another century of death, the 21sto after Christ and 15o Hegiras, the born-inexperienced, may he be the last, but I don't see it (neither do you).
And what is left? Memory is indestructible even if it is robbed! Pages upon pages, museums upon museums, monuments of glory (?) and honor (?) and death, evidence of memory, obviously selective, to be interpreted, highlighted, exploited, propagated. It is also this new medium (which has revived but we will call it new, which has dominated even more thanks to the confinement of the pandemic), this digital and online technology that makes everything faster. We immediately learn what is happening and immediately forget what has happened. Update without updating, short memories with high expectations, death decisions that no one (should) support.
"Lots and lots of stories." More and more every minute and every second, friend Bertolt, much more than the "how many and how many questions" that we don't have time to think about, since the next and the next story is already coming. How many and how many died today in Gaza, in Jerusalem, in the Middle East, in Ukraine, but also elsewhere? How many and how many left yesterday? Tomorrow; The day after tomorrow; And where else will death go? Until when?
Probably by the time the story is there but no one is left to read it… And by the time the museums are there but no one is left to interpret them…
In this way?
People are dying. This.
(*) For references to Brecht, see poem B. Brecht, Questions of a reading worker (from the inspired rendering of M. Ploritis by Korantzis publications)
*Cover photo: From Orandour, France, where the Nazis in 1944 left only the memory (photo: G. Papaioannou)