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Re: war sux

On Wed, 12 Sep 2001, Kelvin Bailey wrote:
> I grew up probably a good 10 years before most folks on this list and
> remember the cold war well.  I remember being filled with terror, afraid
> they would attack my little town and make us all walk across a cross or
> deny Jesus or we would be shot.  (Come to think of it, I think most of
> the terror was perpetuated by Sunday School teachers instead of the
> communists themselves.)  But the image that I learned to fear and hate
> was the old men in uniforms, tanks and grenades, not innocent people.

In my case, my impressions of the Communist world were mostly influenced
by the fact that most of my mother's family, except for her father,
managed to escape from Communist Russia at the end of World War II (my
great-grandmother was imprisoned during the Ukrainian artificial famine of
the early 1930s, for gathering too much food; eventually she was drugged
to death), plus I lived in Poland for a year at the age of six, in the
late 1970s, when my dad worked on an engineering project there.

I remember frequently wondering if people were spying on us through the
windows.  The ridiculous lengths they went to inspect our car when we
drove from East Germany to West Germany made an impression.  As for
"innocent people", the guilt often belongs to a whole lot more people than
the ones who wear uniforms and carry guns.  My great-grandmother was
essentially turned in to the government by one of her fellow villagers.

--- Peter T. Chattaway --------------------------- peter at chattaway_com ---
 "I detected one misprint, but to torture you I will not tell you where."
      Winston Churchill to T.E. Lawrence, re Seven Pillars of Wisdom

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