‘Bang, you’re dead!’ we said. ‘I got you!’ we said. When we played, it was always war. A bunch of us together, one-on-one, or in solitary fantasies – always war, always death.
‘Don’t play like that,’ our parents said, ‘you could grow up that way.’ Some threat – there was no way we would rather be.
Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (2001)
There are books I’ve needed to read only once, so deeply did they change me. When they entered my mind, they stayed: for good. Scientists can identify climate events in tree rings. If reading left visible traces on people, you’d find in me those made by A History of Bombing. And today, as another war marks another anniversary, I think of all the people sheltering from remote and random violence, and of power’s inevitable, corrosive darkness.
‘If everyone plays war,’ said my mother, ‘there will be war.’ And she was quite right – there was.
Image: Hugo Simberg, The Garden of Death (1896)
François Matarasso 