Marie Benoît concludes that maybe it is a mondo cane as portrayed in De Sica's classic film but perhaps it is destined to remain so

I was a teenager when I saw De Sica’s film Mondo Cane. It had made an impact on me even if I did not really understand its full meaning then. It was a film full of irony and paradoxes, just like life. It was an artist’s reflection of the world.

If I had an opportunity to see it today I am certain I would appreciate it much more, knowing what I know now and being able to better understand ‘the inside of things.’

On the whole it is indeed mondo cane. The news which arrives in our living rooms via TV or radio and on the newspapers is often horrendous and dispiriting. It is a harsh world and we cannot but be fascinated by the evil, wickedness and self-distructive capacity of man. A world in which appalling cruelties are practiced without a second thought.

The first thing I do in the morning before I leap out of bed and into the kitchen to make a mug of coffee, is to put my hand out to switch on the radio and the BBC News. Most of it is usually dispiriting. Bombs in Iraq with more soldiers and civilians killed, more of the same in Afghanistan. It seems to be a repetition, more or less, of the horrific news of the previous day.

Miseries assail us and have us by the throat. Confusion reigns. Most of the time I cannot even protest: “Where is God in this?” for God (if he is there) has absolutely nothing to do with man’s inhumanity to man.

In Further Along The Road Less Travelled the late M. Scott Peck, its author writes: “Virtually all of the evil in this world is committed by people who are absolutely certain they know what they’re doing. It is not committed by people who think of themselves as confused. It is not committed by the poor in spirit.”

I am presently reading Joan Didion’s memoir, the best-selling The Year of Magical Thinking. It is about grieving for her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne. The couple had been married since 1964. In it she writes: “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” Dunne died of a heart attack at the end of 2003. His death came suddenly, just as the couple was sitting down to dinner after visiting their daughter in the hospital, who had fallen into a coma after being treated for pneumonia and septic shock.

In her memoir, Didion contemplates how the rituals of daily life are fundamentally altered when her life’s companion is taken from her. The year referred to in the title would take its toll on Didion in another way, as well: Despite showing signs of recovery, Didion’s daughter died in August of this year, several weeks after Didion submitted her final manuscript of The Year of Magical Thinking.

There are many of us reading her words, who sympathise with those sentiments. All over the world there are people whose life is changing ‘in the instant’ not because of disease, which we cannot control but because of the seemingly mad actions of others. Or plain old human error.

Look at the Valencia train disaster last Monday with 41 people killed and numerous ones injured maybe with a leg here, an arm there gone forever. Two carriages left the rails and smashed into the walls of a tunnel near Jesus station.

There is the usual ‘the King and Queen and Prime Minister Zapatero went to visit’ and ‘the Pope, from the Vatican, prayed for them’ sort of nonsense which is not going to change anything for the bereaved or the maimed.

Was it a question of overspeeding, a wheel collapsing? No one is yet sure. The driver is dead and five specialist investigation officers are going to try and find out what happened. But no matter the reason, the dead are dead and for the bereaved, life has irrevocably changed, ‘in the instant.’

Then there is the incredible Armenian massacre which has come back to haunt Turkey all these years later. You may know that in April 1915 the Ottoman government embarked upon the systematic decimation of its civilian Armenian population. The persecutions continued with varying intensity until 1923 when the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist and was replaced by the Republic of Turkey. The Armenian population of the Ottoman state was reported at about two million in 1915. An estimated one million had perished by 1918, while hundreds of thousands had become homeless and stateless refugees. By 1923 virtually the entire Armenian population of Anatolian Turkey had disappeared.

Turkey today has a self-destructive obsession with denying the Armenian genocide. To start off with it is offended by the use of the word ‘genocide.’ Last year a Turkish court banned a conference of academics and intellectuals on the massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915. The conference was expected to challenge the official version of events surrounding the mass killings of Armenians for whom life changed ‘in the instant’. It is the second time the conference has had to be called off because of legal intervention. The ruling reflects a growing dispute within Turkey between liberals, who see their country as part of Europe, and an alliance of nationalists and religious traditionalists who believe Turkey should forge its own way. The conference should have been a landmark in Turkey’s growing readiness to address the contentious issues of its past. Instead the ruling has again raised doubts that Turkey’s democratic credentials meet the standards required of a candidate for EU membership. Analysts say the issue has played a major role in the waning of popular support for EU membership among Turks.

Each time the Turks lash out, new questions arise about Turkey’s claims to a place in the European Union, and the Armenian diaspora becomes even more adamant in demanding a public reckoning over what happened.

The preponderance of serious scholarship outside Turkey accepts that more than a million Armenians perished between 1914 and 1923 in a state-sponsored campaign. Turkey’s continued refusal to countenance even a discussion of the issue stands as a major obstacle to restoring relations with neighbouring Armenia and to claiming Turkey’s rightful place in Europe and the West. It is time for the Turks to realize that the greater danger to them is denying history.

Turkey’s most celebrated writer, Orhan Pamuk, was facing the possibility of a three-month jail sentence just for raising the subject of the the massacre in 1915. The charges were dropped after an international outcry. The Turkish Prime Minster condemned the ruling, which came just 10 days before Turkey was due to begin accession talks for membership in the European Union. There is justice in the very fact that a massacre which took place almost a century ago should be written into the history books.

Also this week a string of powerful bombs ripped through a vital spine of Mumbai’s commuter train system during the evening rush hour on Tuesday, killing at least 190 people and the number of wounded exceeding 600, bringing India’s financial capital to a standstill and resurrecting memories of bloodbaths past.

The attacks were as cold-blooded as they were well-coordinated, intended to inflict maximum carnage.

The bombs struck at least seven trains along the western railway line of the city’s north-south commuter train system between 6 and 7 p.m., virtually within minutes of one another. Every day, more than six million people ride the trains in Mumbai, formerly Bombay, making it among the busiest public transportation systems in the world. This bombing bears obvious resemblance to the terrorist attacks on the London public transportation system last July and the Madrid train bombings in March 2004. In the Indian Prime Minister’s words: “We will work to defeat the evil designs of terrorists and will not allow them to succeed.” We’ve heard it all before. Bush send the usual message that he “stands with the people and the government of India and condemns in the strongest terms these atrocities, which were committed against innocent people as they went about their daily lives.” More meaningless words. But all those innocent peolple involved have had their lives changed ‘in the instant.’

Confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames. “He was on his way home from work – happy, successful, healthy – and then, gone.” This is in the account of a nurse whose husband was killed by a drunken driver.

“It was just a beautiful September day,” people still say when asked to describe the morning in New York when the two planes deliberately crashed into the Trade towers.

And on the Thursday morning I am writing this, the BBC News was no more cheerful. Israel is again fighting in Lebanon and bombing the Palestinians, for whatever reason and of course the morgues are full of innocent people. For them and their loved ones life changed ‘in the instant.’

But sometimes I think that perhaps the Israelis would persecute the Arabs even if the Arabs stopped persecuting them; perhaps no ceasefire in the Middle East will end the Arab vendetta against the Israelis. Perhaps racism arises from more than ignorance. Maybe the savageries in other lands will never end.

Are you surprised at the slow death of our optimisn and political idealism when confronted by the great ocean of human misery and stupidity? We get up every morning hoping it will all go away, but it seems to be getting worse instead.

“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” And the sad thing about it all is that very often we are to blame.