genocide
Charles Darwin’s contribution to Patagonia’s grim history
Characterising native tribes as ‘naked, painted, shivering, hideous savages’ proved no less calamitous for their survival as Argentina’s efforts to exterminate them, says Matthew Carr
Richard Flanagan rails against wrongs ‘too vast to have a name’
‘Why do we do what we do to each other?’ he asks, citing among many atrocities the dropping of the atom bomb and the genocide of aboriginal Tasmanians
Ireland’s most polite bank robber
There should really be a special word for it: that vicarious fragility you feel when hearing of a minor decision…
Putin is copying the propaganda playbook of Serbian war criminals
A year ago, Ukrainian soldiers discovered evidence of the Bucha massacre in which Russian forces slaughtered hundreds of Ukrainians in…
Where life is evil now
The idea of ‘pre-crime’ was popularised by Philip K. Dick’s story ‘The Minority Report’ and the 2002 Steven Spielberg film…
Wild life
Kenya Each time I sit in St Bride’s on Fleet Street during the memorial of another friend, I look around…
Truss fails her first big test
Can anything stop the irresistible rise of Liz Truss? The power-dressing insta lover reinvented herself at International Trade, becoming the…
Interpreting for a dictator
If this is a cautious and circumspect novel, it’s because it involves a cautious and circumspect job: that of interpreter.…
Black mischief
In the cloud-capped highlands of Rwanda, even the rain-makers sound like crashing snobs. When two teenage pupils from Our Lady…
The Mean One
We have all become Paul Kagame’s useful idiots, says Nicholas Shakespeare
Wild life
Africa ‘Ah, Africa,’ the French scientist sighed contentedly. This was 1995 and all around us was an Ebola epidemic…
A force for good: Samantha Power is driven by a deep sense of idealism
In the spring of 2008 I spent a fine day in the company of Samantha Power. She had come to…
The lessons I learned cycling across Rwanda
The backmarker of the peloton was Eric, a tall, stick-thin Rwandan. Under his cycling helmet he wore a baseball cap…
The great betrayal
They were at sea for more than two months in desperately cramped conditions. The battered ship, barely seaworthy, pitched violently…
Ratings war
Planning for the ‘war of the future’ is something generals and politicians have been doing for the past 150 years.…
The hunger
In 1933 my aunt Lenina Bibikova was eight years old. She lived in Kharkov, Ukraine. Every morning a polished black…
Don’t forget the Yazidis
As the floodwaters subsided, the Ark drifted across northern Iraq. Finally, with a crunching jolt, it hit dry land. Its…
The swastika was always in plain sight
Ordinary Germans under the Third Reich did have wills of their own, argues Dominic Green. Most actively embraced Nazi ideology, and were aware of the extermination of the Jews. As the war worsened for them, what did they think they were fighting for?
Licence to kill
One morning in March 1921 a large man in an overcoat left his house in Charlottenburg, Berlin, to take a…
Letters
Enemies within Sir: I thought Matthew Parris was typically incisive in his last column, but perhaps not quite as much…
The power of collective grievance
When last Sunday Pope Francis took the brave step of acknowledging the Armenian tragedy as the ‘first genocide of the…
Wild life
Kenya It’s a long time since I thought of Thaddee, our Kigali stringer when I was covering Rwanda for Reuters.…
Never say ‘never again’
Twenty years ago, I was a witness to the Rwandan genocide. Those who speak of lessons from it are deluded
The lesser evil
The argument that mankind’s innate violence can only be contained by force of arms may make for a neat paradox, but it fails to convince David Crane
