PART I

Twenty-nine years later: the cottage

“Is it sensible for ‘atrocitologists’ to think about the decline in violence purely as a question of percentages? After all, each life ended is a life, whether it is a tiny or not-so-tiny percentage of a given population: there is the bloodshed, the pain of dying, and the grieving family… No manipulation of percentages is going to diminish that grief and suffering.”

—Jeremy Waldron