Listing the Dead
PARIS—“War happens to people, one by one. That is really all I have to say and it seems to me I have been saying it forever.” That’s Martha Gellhorn in The Face of War, a collection of her dispatches from war zones from the 1930s through the 1960s. I contemplated that line after getting lost in “The List,” a dark compendium of the names of 33,293 migrants, refugees and asylum seekers who have died in Europe or en route there since 1993.
And then” in the , a remarkable two-year investigation by Azmat Khan and into the civilians who have died in northern Iraq since August 2014, when the American-led war against the Islamic State began. What they found suggests the military has been killing civilians at a much higher rate than they admit to, despite claims that the coalition air campaign has been the most precise ever conducted. Never before has our access to information been so great.And our sense of powerlessness so deep, as the horrors of war rush into our screens and newspapers and consciousness.
