Don’t You Hear Them?
Allen September 30th, 2004
The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. ‘The horror! The horror!’
Ramin Parham examines our modern Heart of Darkness in an excellent NRO article.
We all watched the unwatchable: a man lay on a stretcher while another, bearded and looking like an official, read what seemed to be a court sentence. Then a man dressed in white comes in — presumably a physician — bends over the lying man and applies the sentence.
There is only one word to describe the horror of what I saw: horror. There is other word for the act of tearing out a living man’s eyes; there is no adjective to describe it. The whole assembly was plunged into a macabre silence. In the next scene, another man, lying alive and awake on a stretcher, watched his physician-torturer cut his fingers with a hand-mower. Next, a third man, or woman — there is no way of distinguishing the gender of someone wrapped up like a mummy — is buried, alive and awake, up to his chest, before being stoned to death. It barely takes a minute or two before the chest and head of the living mummy start circling around in a dance of death. What magnifies to near-infinite the evil of these scenes of barbarity is the unbearable accompanying cry, “Allah Akbar!” — “God is Great!”
Ivory in Africa. Oil in the Middle East.
These are our hearts of darkness.
[Via Allah]
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