Читать книгу The Age of the Warrior: Selected Writings - Robert Fisk - Страница 4
ОглавлениеWar is a paradox for journalists. Millions around the world are fascinated by the mass violence of war – from Shakespeare to Hollywood – and are obsessed with its drama, the cruel, simple choice it offers of triumph or defeat. Our Western statesmen – not one of whom has witnessed or participated in a real conflict and whose only experience of war comes from movies or television – are inspired by war and thus often invoke religion, or ‘good and evil’, to justify its brutality. If Shakespeare understood that human conflict was an atrocity, the history of the last century in the Middle East – leading irrevocably to the attacks of 11 September and thus the assault on Afghanistan and the preparations for an even more ambitious subjugation of Iraq – suggests that our politicians and our journalists are able to overcome this scruple. The peoples of the Middle East – though not their leaders – often seem to have a surer grasp of reality than those who make history, a superb irony since ‘we’ usually blame ‘them’ for the violence with which we are now all supposedly threatened.
