ABSTRACT
The craze for war reports seems to me to derive from a series of psy chological and perhaps also moral exigencies. Nothing suits us better than the unique event, shot on the spot, at the very moment of its creation. Such a theater of operations, when compared with the other one, has the invaluable dramatic superiority of inventing the play as it spontaneously unfolds. It is a kind of commedia delParte in which the scenario itself is always being reworked. As far as the technical means are concerned, there is no need to insist on their unerring efficiency. I would simply like to underline the fact that these means reach a cosmic scale and that they need fear only earthquakes,2 volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, and the Apocalypse
itself. I say this without irony, because I think that the number one broad cast in the series News from Heaven will certainly be devoted to a lengthy report on the Last Judgment, compared to which the report on the Nuremberg trials will somehow look like the Lumieres’ Workers Leaving the Factory (1895). If I were pessimistic, I would add a slighdy Freudian psychological factor that I would call the “Nero complex” and define as the pleasure experienced at the sight of urban destruction. If I were opti mistic, I would allude to the aforementioned moral factor and say that the cruelty and violence of war have taught us to respect-almost to make a cult of-actual facts, in comparison with which any reconstitution, even made in good faith, seems dubious, indecent, and sacrilegious.
