For many people, Goya's etchings even provide a pioneering example of tough, first-hand war reportage: plate 44 of the series, for instance, is entitled "I saw it".
But it is absurd to identify the world with those zones in the well-off countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people's pain... consumers of news, who know nothing at first hand about war and massive injustice and terror.
But it is absurd to identify "the world" with those zones in the rich countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people's pain, just as it is absurd to generalize about the ability to respond to the sufferings of others on the basis of the mind-set of those consumers of news who know nothing at first hand about war and terror.
Keneally draws on scholarship and archives, and also witnessed at first hand the civil war and famine in Ethiopia and Eritrea in the 1980s, when he travelled with the rebels and saw the destruction inflicted by the then military ruler of Ethiopia, Mengistu Haile Mariam, who persistently sought to starve the civilian population of the rebel-held areas into submission.
The son of a Philadelphia salesman, he grew up reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and developing a love for history, which he would experience first hand during World War II.
It's important to understand that such leaders have personal memories of the horrors of war: Helmut Kohl was born in 1930, and saw war first hand.
The question, posed sharply as centenary events marking the 1914-18 conflicthatat is still called "the Great War" begin, is, what happens when there's nobody left alive who remembers first hand: when is a war history?
Realising this and having witnessed the impact of the war first hand, Charles Bean, who was instrumental in editing and writing the official history of Australia's involvement in the war, advocated the need for a national memorial and was one of the main architects in establishing the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
To our knowledge, this is the first study to make a direct comparison of levels of somatic and mental health distress and subjective well-being between war-related widowed lone mothers and married mothers, all of whom had experienced the war first hand.
Over baklava and sweet mint tea at a café outside a mosque, friends of mine from Iran and Algeria, who knew at first hand the agonies of war, warmly expressed sympathy and asked me for news of my family in Manhattan.
But strikingly, if anybody has expressed reservations about the complete melding of political, spiritual and military values, it has often been people who know at first hand the realities of war.
