Studs Terkel and Paul Tibbets

 

General Culture

One of the most fascinating aspects of evil is that most evil people are also amazingly normal. Allow me to use the word “evil” here. I know it’s a word which is too simple for almost all cases - especially when being used by a president. But I’ll have to use a word here and I chose “evil”. Anyway, there is a series of documentaries made by a German historian about all those first- and second-rank people who helped Hitler. It turns out that almost all of them are pretty normal people. Well, maybe ordinary would be a better word. It doesn’t matter. The thing is that what I called evil more often than not lurks underneath the surfaces of normal people. Today, I found a conversation between Studs Terkel and Paul Tibbets who flew the Enola Gay over Hiroshima. It is delusional to call dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima anything else but genocide and a serious war crime and it is fascinating and sad to see what Mr Tibbets has to say about it.