Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

Quixote.
    BORGES: Yes, yet I suppose he must have killed many in his life, as a soldier. But that’s different, no? Because if a soldier kills a man, he kills him impersonally, no? Don’t you think so? I mean if you kill a man as a soldier you don’t really kill him. You’re merely a tool. Or somebody else kills him through you or, well, you don’t have to accept any responsibility. I don’t think a soldier feels guilty about the people he’s killed, no? Except the men who threw the bomb on Hiroshima.
    BURGIN: Well, some of them have gone insane, some of those people who were involved with the bomb.
    BORGES: Yes, but somehow, now I suppose you are—I shouldn’t say this to you, I’ll be blurting it out.
    BURGIN: Well, say it.
    BORGES: I can’t think of Hiroshima as being worse than any battle.
    BURGIN: What do you mean?
    BORGES: It ended the war in a day. And the fact that many people are killed is the same fact that one man is killed. Because every man dies his own death and he would have died it anyhow. Then, well, of course, one hardly knows all the people who were killed in Hiroshima. After all, Japan was in favour of violence, of empire, of fighting, of being very cruel; they were not early Christians or anything of the kind. In fact, had they had the bomb, they would have done the same thing to America.
    Hold it, I know that I shouldn’t be saying these things because they make me seem very callous. But somehow I have never been able to feel that way about Hiroshima. Perhaps something new is happening to mankind, but I think that if you accept war, well, I should say this, if you accept war, you have to accept cruelty. And you have to accept slaughter and bloodshed and that kind of thing. And after all, to be killed by a rifle, or to be killed by a stone thrown at you, or by somebody thrusting a knife into you, is essentially the same. Hiroshima stands out, because many innocent people were involved and because the whole thing was packed into a single moment. But you know, after all, I don’t see the difference between being in Hiroshima and a battle or—maybe I’m saying this for the sake of argument—or between Hiroshima and human life. I mean in Hiroshima the whole tragedy, the whole horror, is packed very close and you can see it very vividly. But the mere fact of man growing, and falling sick, and dying is Hiroshima spread out.
    You understand what I mean? For example, there’s a part in Cervantes and in Quevedo where they speak against firearms, no? Because they say that, after all, a man may be a good marksman and another may not be. No, but what I think is this: I think that really all arms are horrible, no? Are awful. We’ve grown more or less accustomed, our sensibilities have been blunted, by ages and ages and so we accept a sword. Or we accept a bayonet or a spear, and we accept firearms, but whenever a new arm is about, it seems peculiarly atrocious, though after all, if you are going to be killed, it hardly matters to you whether you are killed by a bomb, or by being knocked on the head, or by being knifed.
    Of course, it might be said that war is essentially awful or rather that killing is essentially awful or perhaps that dying is essentially awful. But we have our sensibilities blunted, and when a new weapon appears, we think of it as being especially devilish—you remember that Milton makes the Devil invent gunpowder and artillery, no? Because in those days artillery was sufficiently new to be specially awful. And perhaps a day will come when people will accept the atomic bomb when we shrink from some keener invention.
    BURGIN: Then it’s a certain idea that you find awful. The idea of a man being killed.
    BORGES: Yes, but if you accept that, and war accepts that, or else there would be no war … the idea of a man fighting a duel is the same idea, essentially.
    BURGIN: Well, the soldier may accept it while he’s fighting under orders, but I, as an individual, don’t have to accept it. And the soldier may not be a person who thinks in terms of accepting something or not; he may just do something because he’s told to by his government. He doesn’t necessarily question it. Do you think that each soldier debates with himself whether a given war is right or not, or examines the reasons and debates whether it’s worth taking another human life?
    BORGES: I don’t think he has to. I don’t think he could do it, no? Yet I remember my great-grandfather, Colonel Suárez, who