Page 6 - David Rieff News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Every culture wants to memorialize its dead. Every family needs the missing to be identified to reach closure. Perhaps that is why a wartime mass grave offends something so deep in the human conscience. Little can be said with certainty about the hundreds of bodies discovered last week at Izium, in a pine forest in northeastern Ukraine, other than that they are the beginning of a long story. Restoring human dignity to the most dehumanising of scenes; heaped anonymous corpses, the reduction of lives to nothing, and the stench of abandonment is a painstaking forensic endeavour.

Last week's attack has reignited debates over free speech, censorship and offensiveness that were already heated back in 1989, when an op-ed by a former president called Rushdie's book an "insult."

Last week's attack has reignited debates over free speech, censorship and offensiveness that were already heated back in 1989, when an op-ed by a former president called Rushdie's book an "insult."

After the attack, writers and world leaders hailed Rushdie as a symbol of free expression. But the battle lines around his novel “The Satanic Verses” were never cleanly drawn.

It is all very well to talk in welcoming tones about the new age of multipolarity, but that age seems more likely to usher in a period of anarchy and war than stability, balancing, and peace.