‘They grabbed our land, snatched our rice, our potatoes, our fish,” snarls a fisherman to his mates over a drink. “To take a rock in my hand and crush a soldier’s head with it, to warm my cold hands with his blood! Just to know there’s one less cockroach wandering our land. That would give me pure joy!”
His friends look worried. Such careless talk costs lives. It’s Korea in 1915, but it could be anywhere oppressed peoples have chafed against imperial rule – Dublin 1916, Amritsar 1919, Nanking 1937, Mariupol 2022.
