#the-cold-war — Public Fediverse posts

.> I don’t mean to equate a Vietnamese villager to Vaclav Havel. For one thing, I doubt that the former would have had the supreme hypocrisy and audacity to clothe his praise for the defenders of freedom with gushing about responsibility for the human race. It’s also unnecessary to point out to the half a dozen or so sane people who remain that in comparison to the conditions imposed by US tyranny and violence, East Europe under Russian rule was practically a paradise. Furthermore, one can easily understand why an oppressed Third World victim would have little access to any information (or would care little about anything) beyond the narrow struggle for survival against a terrorist superpower and its clients. And the Pravda hack, unlike his US clones, would have faced a harsh response if he told the obvious truths. So by every conceivable standard, the performance of Havel, Congress, the media, and (we may safely predict, without what will soon appear) the Western intellectual community at large are on a moral and intellectual level that is vastly below that of Third World peasants and Stalinist hacks — not an unusual discovery.

When Subterfuge Is Done

a beautiful day

sunshine sprinkling the

sky with brilliance

a dewy fragrance wafted about

by a gently blowing breeze

shattered!

shattered

dawn to dusk

day to night

light to dust

dirty musty stinking

dust

in a flash!

a bright red flash

all creation

bright beautiful creation

is dead

terminated

gone forever

one sudden moment!

a swift movement

a button is pressed

gathering dust for many years

the dust rises and scatters

as does the world

man-made destroys

God-made

and the president

(he’s protected)

talks over the radio

about the new life after

the bomb

but it doesn’t matter

corpses cannot hear

September 1984, age 17