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

transparent room, another memorial. For a second he caught a glimpse of how many people that was, a
whole London's worth. Then it faded and he was left on a street corner, looking both ways to make sure
he didn't get run over. As he continued walking he tried to calculate how many Vietnam Memorials it
would take to list the six million. Roughly two per hundred thousand; thus twenty per million. So, one
hundred and twenty. Count them one by one, step by step.
He took to hanging out through the evenings in pubs. The Wellington was as good as any, and was
frequented occasionally by some acquaintances he had met through Charles and Rya. He sat with them
and listened to them talk, but often he found himself distracted by his day's reading. So the conversations
tumbled along without him, and the Brits, slightly more tolerant than Americans of eccentricity, did not
make him feel unwelcome. The pubs were noisy and filled with light. Scores of people moved about in
them, talking, smoking, drinking. A different kind of lead-lined room. He didn't drink beer, and so at first
remained sober; but then he discovered the hard cider that pubs carried. He liked it and drank it like the
others drank their beer, and got quite drunk. After that he sometimes became very talkative, telling the
rest things about the twentieth century that they already knew, and they would nod and contribute some
other bit of information, to be polite, then change the subject back to whatever they had been discussing
before, gently and without snubbing him. But most of the time when he drank he only got more remote
from their talk, which jumped about faster than he could follow. And each morning after, he would wake
late and slow, head pounding, the day already there and a lot of the morning light missed in sleep.
Depressives were not supposed to drink at all. So finally he quit going to the Wellington, and instead ate
at the pubs closest to the Dowlands'. One was called The Halfway House, the other World's End, a poor
choice as far as names were concerned, but he ate at World's End anyway, and afterwards would sit at a
corner table and nurse a whisky and stare at page after page of notes, chewing the end of a pen to plastic
shrapnel.
The Fighting Never Stopped, as one book's title put it. But the atomic bomb meant that the second half
of the century looked different than the first. Some, Americans for the most part, called it the Pax
Americana. But most called it the Cold War, 1945-1989. And not that cold, either. Under the umbrella
of the superpower stalemate local conflicts flared everywhere, wars which compared to the two big ones
looked small; but there had been over a hundred of them all told, killing about 350,000 people a year, for
a total of around fifteen million, some said twenty; it was hard to count. Most occurred in the big ten: the
two Vietnam wars, the two Indo-Pakistan wars, the Korean war, the Algerian war, the civil war in
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Sudan, the massacres in Indonesia in 1965, the Biafran war, and the Iran-Iraq war. Then another ten
million civilians had been starved by deliberate military action; so that the total for the period was about
the equal of the Great War itself. Though it had taken ten times as long to compile. Improvement of a
sort. And thus perhaps the rise of atrocity war, as if the horror of individualized murders could
compensate for the lack of sheer number. And maybe it could; because now his research consisted of a
succession of accounts and color photos of rape, dismemberment, torture - bodies of individual people,
in their own clothes, scattered on the ground in pools of blood. Vietnamese villages, erupting in napalm.
Cambodia, Uganda, Tibet - Tibet was genocide again, paced to escape the world's notice, a few villages
destroyed every year in a process called thamzing or reeducation: the villages seized by the Chinese and
the villagers killed by a variety of methods, "burying alive, hanging, beheading, disemboweling, scalding,
crucifixion, quartering, stoning, small children forced to shoot their parents; pregnant women given forced
abortions, the fetuses piled in mounds on the village squares."
Meanwhile power on the planet continued to shift into fewer hands. The Second World War had been
the only thing to successfully end the Depression, a fact leaders remembered; so the economic
consolidation begun in the First War continued through the Second War and the Cold War, yoking the