© Osman Orsal/Reuters A man holds a poster with a drawing depicting drowned Syrian toddlers during a demonstration for refugee rights in Istanbul, Turkey, September 3, 2015.
We've had it coming. And when it came, virtually the whole planet reacted with stunned silence. Sometimes it takes just a photograph to put a noxiously complex version of hell in perspective.
Little did Nilufer Demir, 29, the female photojournalist of the Turkish Dogan News agency know that the moment she saw little Aylan Kurdi, 3, washed ashore at the Ali Hoca Burnu beach near Bodrum, she would be making history.
Aylan is alone, as if suspended by the immense solitude of death, just as his family's dream of offering him a new life in a new continent away from death and destruction was about to be fulfilled.
It's as if his lone lifeless body at the shores of a NATO beach was also about to prefigure the death of Europe - or the death of a once pan-European dream of solidarity and compassion.Hannah Arendt once wrote movingly about the banality of evil, referring to the mechanism of fascism and Nazism. Aylan's lifeless body now illustrates the banality of an evil he was trying to flee: the
"arc of instability", a Pentagon self-fulfilling prophecy.
So to put hell in perspective we must retrace some steps of the arc.
Comment: These are voices of mutual good will, reason and sound planning. The West had best beware that antagonizing Russia to war may include China as a partner and ally, perhaps one of many.