“One death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic.” Coinage of the world’s most heartless quotation is disputed. But most agree that Joseph Stalin was sufficiently indifferent to human misery on an industrial scale to make him the likeliest author.
As a journalist I recognise the hideous paradox coiled-up within that quote. Important stories are not always stories the public find arresting. For days there are headlines which would not look out of place announcing The Second Coming, describing an event of the middling sort that will never trouble a historian’s pen. Meanwhile, other news – news that ought to stop right-thinking people in their tracks – disappears into a sludge of quotidian apathy.
