"Kim Stanley Robinson - A History Of The Twentieth Century2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

but were never deliberately targeted. This was how European wars had been fought for centuries:
diplomacy by other means. In 1939, this changed. Perhaps it changed only because the capability for
total war had emerged from the technological base, in the form of mass long-range aerial bombardment.
Perhaps on the other hand it was a matter of learning the lessons of the Great War, digesting its
implications. Stalin's murder of the kulaks, for instance: five million Ukrainian peasants, killed because
Stalin wanted to collectivize agriculture. Food was deliberately shipped out of that breadbasket region,
emergency supplies withheld, hidden stockpiles destroyed; and several thousand villages disappeared as
all their occupants starved. This was total war.
Every morning Frank leafed around in the big catalogue volumes, as if he might find some other twentieth
century. He filled out his slips, picked up the books requested the previous day, took them back to his
carrel. He spent more time reading than writing. The days were cloudy, and it was dim under the great
dome. His notes were getting scrambled. He had stopped working in chronological order, and kept
returning compulsively to the Great War, even though the front wave of his reading was well into World
War Two. Twenty million had died in the first war, fifty million in the second. Civilian deaths made the
bulk of the difference. Near the end of the war, thousands of bombs were dropped on cities in the hope
of starting firestorms, in which the atmosphere itself was in effect ignited, as in Dresden, Berlin, Tokyo.
Civilians were the target now, and strategic bombing made them easy to hit. Hiroshima and Nagasaki
were in that sense a kind of exclamation point, at the end of a sentence which the war had been saying all
along: we will kill your families at home. War is war, as Sherman said; if you want peace, surrender. And
they did. After two bombs. Nagasaki was bombed three days after Hiroshima, before the Japanese had
time to understand the damage and respond. Dropping the bomb on Hiroshima was endlessly debated in
the literature, but Frank found few who even attempted a defense of Nagasaki. Truman and his advisors
did it, people said, to a) show Stalin they had more than one bomb, and b) show Stalin that they would
use the bomb even as a threat or warning only, as Nagasaki demonstrated. A Vietnam Memorial's worth
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of civilians in an instantaneous flash, just so Stalin would take Truman seriously. Which he did. When the
crew of the Enola Gay landed, they celebrated with a barbeque.
In the evenings Frank sat in the Dowland flat in silence. He did not read, but watched the evening
summer light leak out of the sky to the north. The days were getting shorter. He needed the therapy, he
could feel it. More light! Someone had said that on their deathbed - Newton, Galileo, Spinoza, someone
like that. No doubt they had been depressed at the time. He missed Charles and Rya. He would feel
better, he was sure, if he had them there to talk with. That was the thing about friends, after all: they
lasted and you could talk. That was the definition of friendship. But Charles and Rya were in Florida.
And in the dusk he saw that the walls of books in the flat functioned like lead lining in a radioactive
environment, all those recorded thoughts forming a kind of shield against poisonous reality. The best
shield available, perhaps. But now it was failing, at least for him; the books appeared to be nothing more
than their spines. And then one evening in a premature blue sunset it seemed that the whole flat had gone
transparent, and that he was sitting in an armchair, suspended over a vast and shadowy city.
The Holocaust, like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had precedents. Russians with Ukrainians, Turks with
Armenians, white settlers with native Americans. But the mechanized efficiency of the Germans' murder
of the Jews was something new and horrible. There was a book in his stack on the designers of the death
camps, the architects, engineers, builders. Were these functionaries less or more obscene than the mad
doctors, the sadistic guards? He couldn't decide. And then there was the sheer number of them, the six
million. It was hard to comprehend it. He read that there was a library in Jerusalem where they had taken
on the task of recording all they could find about every one of the six million. Walking up Charing Cross
Road that afternoon he thought of that and stopped short. All those names in one library, another