He went on, even more astonishingly: "One can properly understand these tears only against the backcloth of great tragic events: the immense
hecatomb brought about by the war; the extermination of the sons and daughters of Israel; the threat to Europe coming from atheistic communism.
In Latin America, a number of nation-states meet two or more of these criteria with regard to indigenous peoples, with the combinations suggesting in several cases the potential for geostrategic
hecatomb.
But one absolute that seems to have escaped the
hecatomb of sacred cows is that at graduations, as at other times of separation--"marriage, and birth, and death, and thoughts of these;' as Larkin says--even the excellent Mr.
W Collard and M Ross in their Architectural and Picturesque Views in Newcastle (1841), were also delighted by the fountains "Entering by one of the archways on Grainger Street we pass through street after street of Butchers' Shops in which are displayed
hecatombs of fresh killed meat.
But projections that there would be
hecatombs of dead in Benghazi without military intervention suggests that rebels/civilians would have remained in place offering their bodies to bayonets.
into the ears of the maligned Black Sea, promised
hecatombs.
Despite the genuine richness and brilliance of the secular European culture at the beginning of the twentieth century, nothing has stopped the military and political production of
hecatombs, ranging from the Turkish nationalist genocide against the Armenians on through the gulag experiments and the horrors of the Shoah.
Like a master, at once distinguished and barbarous, it drags with it into its grave the corpses of its slaves, whole
hecatombs of workers, who perish in the crises.
66 Achilles states that gods enjoy the fragrant smoke of
hecatombs.
Drawing on his own intimate experience with broad swaths of the camp's life, together with the testimonies of other inmates, Langbein magisterially conveys what is often obscured by the macabre gas chambers and vast
hecatombs of the victims--that Auschwitz was run by human beings making choices and that its every victim had an individual face and name.
