Tuesday, March 04, 2003

The moral test of a government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life — the children; the twilight of life — the elderly; and the shadows of life — the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
- Hubert Humphrey

The Great Terror Our biggest enemy in relation to Hitlers of this cruel world has been a lack of resources; the nemesis of all underfunded individuals. This is not too much of a problem anymore.

Somehow even Gary Farber of Amygdala Fame succeeds in getting people to buy Robert Conquest's classic history of Soviet Communism, The Great Terror, after they read this limerick of Conquest's in Farber's posting:

There was a great Marxist called Lenin
Who did two or three million men in
That's a lot to have done in
But where he did one in,
that grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.

... and this one in Farber links to:

When his history of Stalin's purges, The Great Terror, was republished after the fall of communism, his American publisher asked him to suggest a new title. He came up with: I told you so, you fucking fools.

Now she compares her present-day life to the fascist captivity

Galina Petrovna Afanasyeva, a resident of the settlement of Kildinstroy, is a former juvenile prisoner of the fascist concentration camp in Munich. American soldiers, who released Soviet children from the camp in 1945, called them children of heaven. Americans believed that children managed to stay alive
on account of a divine miracle. Until recently, Galina Afanasyeva believed that she had already had her share of yearning. She had to survive hell, when she was a captive of a Nazi camp. Could she eve imagine that she would have to go through unbelievable tortures in Russia at her elderly age? Those tortures could only be comparable to the brutality of a fascist concentration camp.

· Catch22 [Pravda]