You tell the story of horror and atrocity one too many times and then you realize nothing is changing and that the world goes on getting its minerals, supporting its luxuries and the death, massacres rapes and tortures of millions do not matter.
Without the condemnation of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, he might not have composed many of those remarkable symphonies and chamber works that bear witness to the agony and atrocity of one of the most hideous periods in human history.
Both constitute atrocities on one scale or another".
The sexual exploitation of children and youth is one of the most destructive atrocities in the world and one of the worst human rights violations.
What's going on in them is wildly different in scale and in kind, for one thing — accident, outrage, atrocity — and even picturing them alongside one another is a kind of devastation, a collapse of meaning.
But the initiative was stillborn, not least because it coincided with the Palestinian intifada and one especially terrible atrocity in which a Hamas suicide-bomber blew himself up in a hotel, killing 30 Israelis at Passover.
My ear detects no atrocities, and what strikes one very strongly on rereading "The Naked and the Dead" is how little intimidated Mailer was — how brave he was in ignoring the conventional pieties concerning a war that almost everyone in the country felt good about.
His story of how he uncovered the My Lai atrocity is one of old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism and doggedness.
An abortion or sterilisation performed on a woman against her will is an atrocity that, one might assume, could only happen during temporary periods of social psychosis or war.
Terror that this one will be the egregious misjudged atrocity, the one about which the critics say, "I frankly marvel that the author of X could have written so many pages of vapid drivelling nonsense," or, more pithily: "there isn't a single convincing moment in the entire story".
