Massacre: The Tragedy at Bangla Desh and the Phenomenon of Mass Slaughter Throughout History
Robert Payne
Macmillan Company
Massacre – a charged word. It implies innocent deaths on a scale of terrible proportions. Do not underestimate, cautions Payne, man’s inability to empathize with man. In Bangladesh — the subject of this reportorial moral — deposed President Yahya Khan managed to kill millions until his Nixon-Mao support collapsed under the pressure of the Indian Army, world condemnation, and East Pakistani resistance: “We come at last to the realization,” writes Payne in the finale to this account of a bloodbath, “that the military no longer has any place in a world worth living in.” Full of noble, idealistic sentiments which relate the Bangladesh orgy of murder to the larger world scene — “Should one prepare each day a list of the civilian dead and wounded and those who have suffered? But the list would be endless, and who would read it?” – Payne’s impassioned outcry strikes at legal evil as the easiest and most culpable crime of all, but the book fails to convince by the fact that its anger derives from the same emotional pool as its assurances. Payne is a justifiably outraged observer but has squandered his powers like the man with one talent.
