Gậy Ông Đập Lưng Ông           

Leave None To Tell The Story
Đừng để sổng một người nào để kể lại câu chuyện.
She knew that story-telling matters.
Bà biết, kể ra được câu chuyện là tạo ra được ảnh hưởng.
On April 6th 1994, Mrs. Des Forges was at home in Buffalo. The presidents of Rwanda and Burundi were assassinated at 8.20pm that day, which was lunchtime in Buffalo. Twenty minutes later, a friend telephoned Mrs. Des Forges from Kigali, the Rwandan capital. "This is it. We're finished," said Monique Mujawamariya, a fellow human-rights monitor.
Mrs. Des Forges called her every half-hour, late into the night. She heard her describe steadily more alarming scenes militiamen going from house to house, pulling people out and killing them. Eventually, they came to Ms Mujawamariya's door. Mrs. Des Forges told her to pass the telephone to the killers. She would pretend to be from the White House, she said, and warn them off. "No, that won't work," said Ms Mujawamariya. Then she added:
"Please take care of my children. I don't want you to hear this." And she hung up.
Alison chứng nhân tội diệt chủng, mất ngày 12 Tháng Hai, thọ 66 tuổi.
Hai tai nạn máy bay tạo dấu ấn cuộc đời Alison Des Forges. Tai nạn thứ nhất, xẩy ra gần 15 năm trước đây, một chiếc máy bay chở hai vị tổng thống bị hỏa tiễn hạ trên nển trời Rwanda. Tai nạn thứ nhì, tuần vừa rồi, gần Buffalo, New York, làm 50 người chết, trong có bà, một người Mỹ nhỏ nhắn, tóc bạc. Tai nạn thứ nhất chỉ là một cái cớ cho một công cuộc diệt chủng mau lẹ nhất trong lịch sử. Tai nạn thứ nhì làm bặt tiếng một chứng nhân, một sử gia thì cũng được, người có tham vọng ghi chép đầy đủ đến từng chi tiết vụ diệt chủng nói trên.
Nguồn

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Feb 26th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Russia is the largest country in the world-a sixth of its land mass-with a record of upheaval, terror and bloodshed unparalleled in this century. First, the revolution of 1905, bloodily suppressed; then the revolution of 1917, bloodily won; then Stalinism, with millions killed in its forced migrations, exterminations and prison camps; and (concurrent with the last) invasion by Germany and a war in which upwards of twenty million Soviet citizens died. Finally, after decades of sacrifice which turn the Soviet Union into a military rival of the United States, acknowledgement that it has all been for nothing, that capitalism and liberal democracy have won; and with their victory comes the shredding of a state, an empire, a way of living and thinking-and pre-revolutionary levels of social inequity. To be a Russian old enough to have lived through most of this is to know extremes of hardship and disillusion that other people, at least in other industrialized nations (even Germany), can barely imagine. As Anatol Lieven writes in his new book on the recent Chechen war, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power: 'To most of its inhabitants the Soviet Union was more than just a civilization, or a warped version of modernity. It was indeed a world, the only one they knew, and-according to its founders and mentors-the greatest of all worlds, the summit of human history, knowledge and achievement.'
'Reform' is the word that the West has attached, optimistically, to Russia's new condition, in which taxes and wages go unpaid, gross domestic product and life-expectancy decline, the rouble crashes and inflation (in 1998) runs at 200 per cent; where fear of the state and its laws has been replaced by corruption, crime and ruthless self-interest-'bandit capitalism'. These are, as Lieven writes, not so much unfortunate by-products of 'reform' as the phenomena at the very heart of it. If the Russian people were not so soured, confused and exhausted by their experience of ideology, one might be tempted to say that, once again, they looked ripe for revolution.
In literature, Russia has a great, perhaps the greatest, tradition of realism, which seems to have come to a temporary halt. Perhaps because reality itself is j now so quicksilver and the truth about it no longer repressed, new Russian writers often favor satire and allegorical fantasy, forms which, when they lose their social context, can face a difficult crossing to other societies and languages. This issue of Granta contains an example that has made the crossing successfully: the piece by Victor Pelevin. It also includes, by contrast, a newly translated story by Andrei Platonov, who died in 1951 and most of whose work was banned until the last years of Soviet rule. Only in the past decade has he come to be recognized-but not widely enough-as one of the finest Russian writers of prose this century. His story, 'The River Potudan', is hypnotic in its quiet strength and sincerity; written of a time when it looked as though the future had been won. IJ [Ian Jack, Editor]