Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Rictor on April 14, 2004, 12:45:55 pm
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Here's something which I came across, and wanted to share with everybody.
This is NOT the typical stuff you would expect from me. Read it with an open mind and I think you'll be very surprised at the end. Yes, it is a bit long and the first 1/3 is a bit "same old" but its well worth it, in that it displays some very rarely discussed ideas.
So, without further ado.
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A Rant
The Bridge
By STAN GOFF
original article: here (http://www.counterpunch.com/goff04132004.html)
WARNING: This commentary may cause anxiety.
The United States government has initiated a chain reaction that it can no longer control. The stalled vengeance assault on Fallujah is merely a symptom. So is the uprising triggered by the US closure of a Shia newspaper in Sadr City, Baghdad, followed by gunning down the demonstrators who protested (Ah, yes, we don’t even hear about that when they talk about the latest demon, Muqtada al-Sadr… Memory is so short.).
The chain reaction is far broader and deeper than the battlefield fiasco in Iraq right now. Once brown people start to pick up guns, other brown people follow suit. The myth of invincibility of the United States military -- called into question even before the **** Doctrine arrived at this particular Iraqi cul-de-sac -- is shattered. No one is shocked. No one is awed.
Nothing left now but plain grimy brutality. Apache helicopters are buzz-sawing through neighborhoods with chain guns and rockets. Bombs are being released onto mosques. The hospitals and morgues are receiving a rich harvest.
I remember a sign at the entrance of Camp Mackall in North Carolina, where I began Special Forces training. “Rule #1: There are no rules. Rule #2: Obey the first rule.”
The post 9/11 renewal of ground wars in Southwest Asia swept me up into a new role. A career soldier who is a leftist; a leftist who is a retired soldier. I became a trump card that antiwar activists could play against the patriot-baiting of the right, so I’ve been trotted out in front of one audience after another, from town halls to CNN, as a spokesperson against the **** Doctrine’s militarism.
But people transform their roles. They deviate from the scripts.
I’m a leftist who carried a gun, in a culture where what passes for the left is terrified of guns. So people pay attention to me. In audience after audience, I have noted that people pay attention to me. They are engaged before I even speak, because they know that I can kill, and that gives me an immediacy… not because I am different than them, but because I am so very much the same. I laugh at good jokes. I rock babies. I take an interest in the weather.
This is more than morbid fascination.
We are a culture insulated from our own basis. It is a condition of metropolitan modernity, more so even of post-modernity. In a consumer society, where general-purpose money has eaten away every bond of community, where alienation -- and even narcissism -- is defined as normalcy, where nature is seen as something apart from and below us, the very personhood of each of us is deracinated and left to drift through the retail landscape like a grieving banshee. Planned obsolescence applies even to our identities.
We really have no idea who pays for this privilege of superficiality, but those billions who are doing the paying -- far out of our reified view -- are getting a clearer idea all the time.
Of course, this culture is pure charade. We can pretend we are as disembedded as we like, but we are invariably physical -- diaphragms heaving incessantly, articulating gases in our guts, dissipating heat, concentrating urine, sloughing off dead cells, yawing and eating and scratching and sleeping and ****ing and finally, dying.
Inside-Outside.
Inside this whole charade, where money “grows” and media-stunned young women aspire to be models for Victoria’s Secret, resides liberal hypocrisy. Outside it resides imperial militarism -- the last refuge of capitalism as it devours its own social and material bases like a vampire stranded alone on a desert island.
Soldiers who were raised inside this cultural charade are now outside it, in Southwest Asia getting blood on their hands so we can have malls and road trips and household appliances and climate control. The personhood of soldiers (mostly male) has become a battleground, too, between masculinity and cognitive dissonance. Warfare is the practice and masculinity is achieved in the practice, but they are confronted now with other persons -- people who are first reduced in the media, then defined in training (The Enemy), then dehumanized in the word (Raghead!), then commanded by the occupier as subjected persons, then -- if obedience is not swift -- erased. This is where the soldier either recognizes or denies the hypocrisy, because the fuller reality of the system is right there before his eyes. Now he has a choice to make.
I’m talking to you, soldier, and not judging you. This is an invitation to take back your personhood. This is an invitation to confront every fear, breach every obstacle, take every risk; to leap over your old self and enter into a deeper struggle.
Capitalism has to build bridges from its metropolitan hypocrisy to the scenes of its imperial crimes, and that bridge is made with the backs of soldiers. We have to build a bridge from the scene of the crime to clarity.
To do that, we can’t back away from this gun-question, this whole issue of violence.
When the guerrilla picks up the gun, the imperial soldier must pay attention. When an alienated teenager in Columbine picks up a gun, we metropolitans pay attention. We should.
People with guns should be taken seriously. People who have lived with guns should be taken seriously, and they are. Some of us are not going to be bothered with Victoria’s Secret or any of that other bull****. We are looking right through those mirages, right through to our animal actuality, right through to the horror vacui of a world where people can and do erase other people, and no deity descends to make things right. There are no decrees from on high, and you are still responsible.
Many of my associates in the antiwar movement talk about “reaching out” to the military. They want to convert them. They want to transform them from robotic killing machines into Ghandians. These are the liberals.
Soldiers don’t listen to liberals, and neither do the majority of people. They intuit the detachment of them, their other-worldly abstraction, their desire to have their cake and eat it too. When people are frightened or angry, they may be confused about the source of their fear and anger, but they know they want to be with someone who will fight. Liberals have never learned this.
A young woman I met recently was surprised by her own first encounter with several soldiers. She is not a Nation Magazine “leftist,” but a revolutionary young woman who recognizes that social transformation is neither painless nor bloodless, and she has no illusions about that. What astonished her about these young soldiers was her own recognition that they were, like her, willing to take tremendous risks -- up to and including the loss of their own lives -- to fight for what they thought was right. It was the very quality that she had been seeking from her own political allies.
She wondered aloud whether it is easier to turn a person with intellectual clarity into a courageous person, or whether it was easier to help a courageous person to achieve greater clarity.
“Should we be trying to make smart people into fighters, or fighters into smart people?”
Damn good question. May have the elements of a false dichotomy, but it’s still a good question. She is a hell of a lot closer to the mark than those who see the military as brainwashed aneroids in need of a religious epiphany. She knows that soldiers are not robots, and she doesn’t want to empty them of their belligerence, which is an appropriate attitude for our Umwelt. She wants to free them from the bonds of their illusions. The cruelty to which these soldiers have been inured has the potential to be turned against hypocrisy, then against the system. Clarity is often cruel; cruelty is often clear.
The imperial soldier is constrained by the superstitions of patriotism, and the soldier becomes a danger to power when he recognizes the speciousness of patriotism. For now, he mimics the confident acceptance of the official narratives, but he experiences the contradiction like a recurrent rash. A friend of mine said that soldiers are political scientists. They are embryonic political scientists at least, waiting for midwives... the right questions, perhaps, or the right nightmares.
I think soldiers need to reach out to the left as well. Maybe we soldiers have a contribution to make to your clarity. Academic leftists can talk to you until they are blue in the face about reification -- be it the reification that confuses the transient with the eternal, or that substitutes the abstract for the specific. But every military leader, beginning with a 19-year-old corporal, knows that before every task there must be an assessment of the situation -- one that takes account of the mission, the enemy, the population, the terrain and weather, one’s own capacity in technology and personnel… and the time available… as a unified and changing whole. Dialectics, anyone?
While metropolitan leftists will extol the virtues of the Vietnamese NLF -- rightly so -- some of us saw them dying for their struggle. Their corpses were us. We have seen ourselves as corpses. Politics doesn’t happen in clean, well-lighted places. It happens in the sand and mud. It happens in the rivulets of blood coursing into the edges of an Iraqi hospital floor. It’s happening in the head of some unnamed Marine or Green Beret or tank gunner, who is looking out over the truth of the imperial landscape in Sadr City or Fallujah or Kut and recognizing that he has been thrust into this drama anonymously and that he now shares a more intimate space with his “enemy” than he ever will with the oil companies and military contractors and politicians who sent him here.
Ani DiFranco says, “Those who call the shots are never in the line of fire.”
Non-violence can be an effective tactic, but so can violence. It’s only liberal hypocrisy that denies the latter. For Iraq, it is the only tactic. And the armed resistance in Iraq -- regardless of its methods or ideologies -- is doing more to halt the runaway train that is global capitalism than anything else in the world right now. (You want white hats and heroes, go by a cinema ticket.)
We cannot imagine the sheer joy of rediscovery being felt throughout the region right now as people see these fighters striking back at the source of their long humiliation -- imperialism, and by extension against imperialism’s local attack dog, Zionism.
Ghandi and King were important people, courageous people, people who embraced non-violence as a core principle, yet that non-violence as a tactic is what worked for them. It worked in a specific time and context. The notion that this tactic is a generalized principle, that it can work now, fails to account for that context. Without the Soviet Union, warts and all, there would have been no Ghandi, and there would have been no King. Had the struggle for credibility in the global periphery not been engaged by the US and the USSR, non-violence would have been suicidal. Even that struggle was based -- at the contextual end of the road -- on the military power of the Soviet Union that stood eye-to-eye with imperialism until it collapsed from the effort.
There is a difference between imperial thuggery and armed resistance to imperialism, and in this era of exterminist imperialism, armed resistance has become for more and more people the synonym of self-defense. The occupying soldier fragments his personality with the gun. The resistance reclaims its humanity with it.
It was Sartre, in his introduction to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, who said, “The native cures himself of colonial neurosis by thrusting out the settler through force of arms. When his rage boils over, he rediscovers his lost innocence and he comes to know himself in that he himself creates his self. Far removed from his war, we [the privileged white metropolitans -SG] consider it as a triumph of barbarism; but of its own volition it achieves, slowly but surely, the emancipation of the rebel, for bit by bit it destroys in him and around him the colonial gloom. Once begun, it is a war that gives no quarter. You may fear or be feared; that is to say, abandon yourself to the disassociations of a sham existence or conquer your birthright of unity. When the peasant takes a gun in his hands, the old myths grow dim and the prohibitions are one by one forgotten. The rebel’s weapon is the proof of his humanity.”
As a solider, I needed this history to understand my own, and to come to terms with my own, and to transform my own into this project. And as a soldier, Sartre’s words, and Fanon’s, have special meaning for me precisely because there is nothing abstract about them. I was part of that history -- it doesn’t matter on what side; that was a pure accident.
And so I started helping build this bridge.
Soldier, I am saying, here is the cause, here is the side of history your grandchildren will want to see you were on. Soldier, study this history and this movement, so your courage and your blood aren’t sent into space like those idiotic capsules full of snapshots and mementos for some alien life form to discover.
And to my comrades now, I have grim news from those places where soldiers go.
You will not win with non-profits. You will not win with non-violence. You will not win with non-committal. To win you must become effective, and when you do, you will be attacked. Then you will fight or you will be exterminated. You may even fight and still be exterminated. No guarantees. We are responsible.
You will never make a revolution behind the bourgeoisie’s back, because the bourgeoisie has eyes in the back of its panopticon head. You will never make a revolution while the ruling class sleeps, because it never sleeps. You will not sneak up on necessity, and no one can evade it.
Soldiers have seen it.
That’s why they don’t listen to liberal platitudes about morality in the abstract. They know about the power from the barrel of the gun. It ends debates. It forces people to pay attention.
People listen to me, and I see them peering at me, trying to imagine what I am the way people sometimes try to imagine others having sex. I am arguing against imperialism, and I can talk about commodity fetishism with the best of them -- because I applied myself to it with the same rigor and intensity that I did to trauma protocols as a Special Forces medic or marksmanship fundamentals as a sniper. Yet these audiences can hear about imperialism from a host of others.
But there in front of them is someone who has been willing to take life or to give it away. And they are paying attention.
Only it’s not me. I’m not arrogant enough to believe that. I’m just a circumstance. What they are really paying attention to is themselves, to the questions they haven’t confronted, to the doubts that plague them about their politics, to the incessant whisper of mortality.
And I’m paying attention to them. I study Rosa Luxemburg, Alf Hornborg, Robert Connell, Joy James, Robin D. G. Kelley, Mao Zedong… and I study the academic research and the social theory and science and philosophy. Because simply understanding the final argument of the gun is not enough. We soldiers need to understand before and after the gun, and we need to understand -- as much as we can -- where our personhood is rooted in social constructions and where society is rooted in the biosphere and how there is no clear line of demarcation between biology and symbols. We need the context.
So as a leftist I build this bridge toward my brothers and sisters under arms. I don’t judge… I can’t.
The ultimate liberal hypocrisy is the one that shuns the soldier as if the soldier lives in a parallel system, not recognizing that militarism doesn’t float over history any more than the make and model of your automobile. If you turn on your lights with a wall switch and drink clean water from your tap, if you walk in the park, if you wear a stitch of manufactured clothing, if you’ve shopped on a vacation overseas, if you so much as breathe in the United States of America, you are as much a part of the body of actually-existing imperialism as any nervous, trigger-happy Marine killing a family at a Baghdad roadblock.
Different rooms, same house.
Deforested Haiti cooks on charcoal so you can cook with electricity. A child in Botswana dies of AIDS so I can work on this computer. And personal ethics will not transform this.
It’s a system, an expression of an immensely complex and dynamic web of relationships and realities, and it will default to its basic program -- capital accumulation -- again and again and again, until it is destroyed.
And it will go down like a raving beast, if the reader will forgive this metaphorical shift.
We need this bridge between the left and the military, because when the time comes, when the hypocrisy fails at last and confronts us with the painful reality of transformation, when the gun is all that is left and the choice is to seize or diminish our humanity, the soldier will need to become a revolutionary, and the revolutionary will have to become a soldier.
The time will come when we are all participants. Most of the world already is.
Soldier, leftist… “abandon yourself to the disassociations of a sham existence or conquer your birthright of unity.”
Fallujah lives!
Stan Goff is the author of Hideous Dream and Full-Spectrum Disorder. He can be reached at: [email protected]
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unless you've taken the 5 minutes to read the article, please don't comment on the random sentence you happened to read here and there. Thanks.
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That's far too long. I'm going to watch porn and eat biscuits instead
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Just make sure you do it the right way round, biscuits are boring to watch ;)
It's an interesting point of view, though somewhat defeatist in a topsy turvy sort of way, but my response would be almost as long as the first post, and it would only be the start of the first chapter, I'm sure ;) All I can say is I agree that we must come to terms with what we are. It's defining 'what we are' that is a far harder thing to do.
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Interesting. Very interesting. Not sure what he's trying to say with parts of that, but interesting nonetheless.
I'd have to agree with Flipside's point about realising what we are. The only way things will change is if people can accept what they are, and what they are a part of, and then decide that that is not what they want to be and be part of. Then things can start to change.
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WTF? The bin Laden truce thread get more pages than this thread has replies.
Hmm.. :ick: :ick:
No comments from righties, or military people at thatl? Guess it just too long a read, wouldn't want to tax your minds...
Ah well, at least a few people took the time. Good on you. There is a saying that goes something like : small minds discuss people, medium minds discuss events and great minds discuss ideas. :yes: :yes:
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I read it but I wasn't sure what I thought of it, better to remain quiet in that situation.
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That was impressive. Can we replace Kerry with him?
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Usually if you want responses to something you post its wise to post something people can understand. No good preaching to the masses if they need a dictionary to understand you.
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That or we (I) havn't seen it or don't want to comment for various reasons. THough mostly because I'll be called a bigot, stupid, and other things along those lines.
Very interesting indeed. He (the writer) seems to be talking from two points of view at the beginning.
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Originally posted by Grey Wolf 2009
That was impressive. Can we replace Kerry with him?
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Why is this a brilliant article? To me it's just a rather shaky point laced with so many metaphors and buzzwords as to make it nearly incomprehensible. And what is his point exactly? As I understood it (perhaps incorrectly) all he's saying is capitalism is bad and socially self-destructive, that soldiers are inherently addicted to the right because of its history in colonialism and warfare, and that the left embracing the military instead of pooh-poohing it is necessary to someday bring about this crazy revolution he's talking about. No amount of long-winded intellectual pretense on his part can obfuscate that.
And if this revolution he infers were to happen, what would take the place of capitalism? People who hate the concept can never provide any mystical utopian alternative to what is, I consider, hardwired human nature.
Originally posted by Grey Wolf 2009
That was impressive. Can we replace Kerry with him?
Well, as much as a no-hope dork Kerry is, he's certainly got more chance of winning votes than this guy because he's so much clearer about what he wants to see happen.
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1) He is generalizing. A LOT.
2) His point is concealed so well that I am uncertain if such point even exists.
3) He does not seem to make up his mind about anything.
4) The very first chapters seemed to contain some pretty huge assumptions and maybe even lies. He tells how the US troops are gunning down civilians and bombing mosques, then proceeds to bash vague "liberal" group for sprouting out exactly the same thing.
The rhetorics are great, but they fail their purpose, which is essentially to enstrenght and clear the basis of the essay.
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*smiles and nodds unconvinced*
A few intresting points, but the general message is still confusing me a bit...
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1. Well, you got me, there is no such thing as objectively "brilliant". Personally, I think Picasso was a good-for-nothing hack, but hey- that just me. Similarly, I thought this was a fresh take on the subject and would be maybe helpful in maybe understanding "the other side" (if indeed you are on a side) a little better. You may, and many of you appraently do, disagree. The reason I put "brilliant" in the title is cause, well, it sounds better than "here's an article of uncertain importance, which you may or may not find to be to your liking and which, furthermore, you may not believe is worthy of your time. I would advise you to read it, however you are free not to do so because it may simply turn out to be a waste of your time ".
Gotta sell the product baby. Well, that, and I did indeed think it was brilliant, so I thought it was a fair though quite subjective thing to say.
edit: yeah, the language is really messed up. Thats part of the reason why I liked it, cause it sounds like a writen rather than a journalist. For the most part, I could make out what the author was trying to say. In a few instances, either he really heaps it on or I'm just not literate enough.
What I said to me (and this is the writing/journalism analogy, journalism leaves nothing open to interpretation) was basically how you have two very different sides of the spectrum, the left and the military, who each are lacking either the will or the way to bring about change. And as they abandon their preset roles in favour of, well, something new, they come closer together than either side would like to believe. Maybe it just me, cause the article had a few views thats I've held for a while but never found anywhere else.
Imagine if the Army (read: military) was leftist, or if the Left was an army. Hard to imagine, cause it is such an alien concept. But if that were the case, how quickly would a great many things change. The Right is more or less by definiton defending the status quo. They resist change, hence the name conservatives. Well, for someone who does not believe that that the present world is as good as it could be, progress is a fundamental principal. The things which are worth conserving are outweighed by the things which require change in order to bring about a better world. In any case, it is not the things that I would consider worthy of conservation which are under attack, so to speak, by the "progressive" movement.
The military does not want change, though they are capable of brining it about. And the Left wants change, but they are incapable of bringing it about. I agree with the author on a number of issues, one of which is that the Left is in many ways a ****ing joke. Quite hard to accomplish anything with every military in the world guarding aganst it eh? Capitalism is by definiton an agressive system. That is to say that it is a system in which being bigger, better, stronger, in which being able to beat the opposition is what brings rewards. It is also a system in which greed and a lack of morals are rewarded. Essentially, it is an ideology of competition rather than cooperation. And as an aggressive system, it is bound to consume all, equally. How you most often come to look at the world around you in a different light, is that you experience a contradiction smoewhere. You look at one part of the system, or of your own idealogy, and you look at another part of the system, and it doesn't match. For certain people, they find that contradiction in literature and in the classroom. For others, they see it on the battlefield. For most, this contradiction comes from their own lives and experience, because most of the world is being made to face the consequences of the current system. I've never gona hungry in my life, so I found these contradictions in books, in movies and so forth. Not to say that I have not seen them in my life, I have, but these complaints are very petty compared to those of most of the people in the world. I don't have a TV, or an XBox, or an MP3 player. Boo hoo. But I've got $40 jeans on right now, I'm sitting at a computer in an apartment with running water, electrcity and a fully stomach. But where you find this, where it clicks in your head that "hey, something is not quite right here", thats relatively unimportant. And the soldiers in Bahgdad, I think, must be getting a bit of that as well. Just look at how many Vietnam veterans returned home and joined the anti-war movement. And this awareness is essential to the "progressive movement", because it believes in peace, so an armed conflict to "take power" is out of the question. The Left isn't going to raise an army to get what it wants. It relies on something more powerful, which is a change in consciousness of society. If the component parts, including soldiers, slowly come to realise they want something, they're going to get it.
Alright, thats more or elss my rant, after 2 edits.
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The impossibility of armed left is very American thing.
The rest of the western (or northern depending on what terminology or power setup you view it from) has a very different opinion.
I'm a Hungarian and my country was more or less under Soviet opression for 50 years - A not too apropiate statement for the whole state appatus was taking an active role.
No armed left? Hell, I wonder what those "kiskatona"-s (little soldiers, the name you soviet recruits from Russia were dubbed) did here.
Never the less I know this statement is completly out of context, and has little to do with the state of Left in the USA. Still I just wanted to shed some light on the "other version" - of which Eastern Europe had more than their fare share of exposure.
I didn't find his text that hard to understand - and it's not pointless showoff of his lexical knowledge. This could be accounted for my Communist heritage.
You need to read more sources, actual books and essays made by key figures he mentioned - I guess key people of the American Left.
I have, but a small knowledge of the Hungarian/Soviet "Communist political / politological" literature.
I'm not writting about the brainwashing mass propaganda you were shown in school. It's the work of the intelligentsia.
Did any one read the Communist Manifest?...or the Capital (I wonder if it's the apropiate title or I mis-retranslated it)?
I don't mind if you counter by listing books and essays that are cornerstones of the Rigt - I would even be interested in what you think are such titles.
But for heavens sake try to take it more seriously than simply downrating an essay written by a hardcore leftist. That way you take him out of contest and account his style for "writter-bravado".
I agree with a lot of things with what he mentions:
1, there is no greater truth than the 2 ends of a gunbarrel, everything else is hypocrisy
2, imperialism is consuming its own children
Though IMHO his interpretation is somwhat outdated, its longer a classical burgoise exploitation.
It's a self consuming yet unnamed social structure that lack the elitist separation of the leader class, therefore exposing its very leaders to the brainwash meant to pacify the masses.
Perhaps Self Consuming Society?
3, any movement lacking the said truth will never achieve anything significant
But its not the same as using this truth! Today information is the mental bullet that can shatter goverments, and a camera an awsome gun - provided it hits both the target and the audiance.
I have to agree with Rictor on this one.
4, a change is necessary
...but I don't give jack**** about revolution. I don't think a communist/leftist revolution could ever solve the situation.
Rebels and revolitionaries are nothing but pocket-aristocrats, soon after the take over they estabiligh their own domain.
Sharing the power and dreaming of true citizan representation is a daydream, our societies simply lack the integrity Hellas possesed - and even that ended up with a benevolent dictator.
I don't know what kind of change or wheter its a truely democartic change that will take place....but sooner or later we will run out of countries where we can "export our democracy" and the relief brought on by an exploitable colony will cease - and our social structure can crumble....it's up to us what comes next.
I have no idea however what we can bring about, and what would deal justice...
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I wish I could write an article of that size! :eek:
Originally posted by Flaser
No armed left? Hell, I wonder what those "kiskatona"-s (little soldiers, the name you soviet recruits from Russia were dubbed) did here.
They were keeping us safe, at least they thought that. :mad2: Fortunatly, those times are over, and Hungary becomes a full-value member of the EU on 1st May!
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On the right vs. left thing, I believe Frank Herbert had a good point in the quote in my sig.