Sublime

burning of the detritus of battle after the victory has been won

For half a century and more, America’s farmers had been asking for tariff reform, for railroad and bank regulation, for government loans, for silver remonetization—for help in fighting forces too big for them to fight—and for half a century, their government had turned to them a very deaf ear. Now, starving, they asked again—often in words that

War did not just level, it plowed the field, raising the muck and sinking the stubble.

“Our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life,”45 and sometimes the solution: we need a “Marshall Plan for the Earth.”

In terms of what Ari Folman called the outer circles of responsibility, American culpability for Israel’s invasion extends even further than Haig’s green light: the United States supplied the lethal weapons-systems that killed thousands of civilians and that were manifestly not used in keeping with the exclusively defensive purposes mandated by

Manila wasn’t short on symbols. The sixth-largest city in the United States—substantially larger than Boston or Washington, D.C.—had for a month of fighting been converted into an abattoir. South Manila, where Quirino lived, had been leveled. Bodies decomposed everywhere, many bearing the marks of torture or execution. The stench was unbearable.

Stalin accepted the drain on vital transport resources needed to remove—for instance—74,225 “Volga Germans” from their own little republic to remote Kazakhstan. Later, they would be followed by many more such outcasts, notably Chechens and Crimean Tatars.