The enemy that is us …

… Even Worse Than We Thought by Julian Barnes | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

At Jedwabne, the death toll is impossible to estimate accurately. It could be as high as 1,500; or it could, as the prosecutor appointed by the Institute of National Remembrance in 2000 conservatively concluded, be “not fewer than 340.” Taking the (extremely cautious) lower figure, the massacre at Jedwabne would be comparable to the crash of a jumbo jet. Except that the parallel is only partial. Even if we imagine the captain deliberately crashing the plane, so that it is murder, not an accident, there is this difference. Imagine that airplane crash, but with a fair number of passengers escaping death. As they wander traumatized from the wreckage, staff from the airline beat them to death with clubs and poles and crowbars, chase them into marshes where they drown, and throw them down wells. That’s more what it would be like.

Never forget.