“Their murderousness is neither greater nor less than that of the invaders with their napalm, machine-guns and high explosives.”
“While atrocities were indeed committed by Japan in the course of its occupation of neighbouring countries, they are almost benign in comparison to the fratricidal murderousness which followed.”
“Auden understood, with a clarity enforced by distance — he saw the shapes the blood was making, where up close one saw only the spill — that Europe's murderousness took a logical form.”