2026-01-10
38 分钟The Economist.
Back in May of last year, we had a Weekend Intelligence episode titled They Had Names.
It was about a migrant ship that sank ten years ago, lifted from the seabed,
and the gargantuan task of identifying the remains of more than a thousand people inside it.
For me, it ended up being less CSI and more of a meditation on how we value human remains.
Whatever your religious or philosophical bent, a body is, in its way, sacred.
To identify it, to deliver it to wherever home was,
to give it a proper burial or cremation or an anointing with oils or whatever,
is a kind of moral duty to the dead.
Obviously, all that gets a lot more complicated in times of war.
When we hear about the incomprehensible numbers of dead in Ukraine, for example,
it’s sort of intuitively clear that not all fallen soldiers will get their funeral rights.
Yet people will try, in war zones and former war zones all over the world,
at great cost and with tremendous effort, and maybe over many years.
And that actually says a lot about the nations trying to honor their dead.
I’m Jason Palmer and this is The Weekend Intelligence.
My colleague Tamara Gilkes Bor has been thinking a lot about these kinds of efforts.
It is at once obvious and curious.
In the heart, yes, of course the dead deserve their due.
In the head, the question: how much struggle over how long does it still make sense?