I may write a much longer piece on the subject at a later date (for those who are interested), but this one line in a Nation piece on how Germans are learning to view what the Allies did to them in the Second World War sums it up nicely:
Individual suffering, not a simple tallying of perpetrators and victims, is beginning to emerge in striking historical detail and complexity.
Men are not animals, Kierkegaard said, adding that 1,000 men is not worth more than one, it is worth less. What matters, and all that matters, is the individual. Nothing else has a moral existence. One man can repent, can love, feel joy, pain, fear and hate. 1,000 men cannot “feel” anything, and they certainly cannot repent. Or love.
4:03 pm on October 5, 2005
