How did it all start? Everything started when Tikhonov nailed his fourteen theses to the doors of the Eliseykovo village soviet. Actually, he didn't nail them to the doors, but rather wrote them on the fence in chalk, and they were actually more like words than theses--they were clear and lapidary words, not theses--and there were more like two of them, not fourteen--but at any rate, that's where it all began. In two columns, with battle-standards in hand, we set out, one column to Eliseykovo, the other to Tartino. And we marched until sunset without encountering any resistance: there were none killed on either side, there were no wounded either, and the only prisoner was the former chairman of the Larionovo village soviet, who had been discharged in his old age for binge-drinking and congenital feeblemindedness. Eliseykovo was toppled. Cherkasovo lay at our feet, Neugodnovo and Peksha begged us for mercy. All the life-centers of Petushki County, from the grocery store in Poloshi to the agricultural warehouse in Andreevo, were occupied by the rebel armies...posted by nasreddin at 9:51 PM on January 30, 2009
And after sunset--the village of Cherkasovo was declared the capital, the prisoner was conveyed there, and a Congress of Victors was improvised on the spot. Every presenter was drunk as a skunk, and they all jabbered about the same thing: Maximilien Robespierre, Oliver Cromwell, Sonya Perovskaya, Vera Zasulich, punitive squads from Petushki, war with Norway, then Sonya Perovskaya and Vera Zasulich again...
Someone from the audience yelled: "Where the hell is that--Norway?" "Aw, who the hell knows," someone else replied, "Somewhere over the rainbow." "Well, wherever it might be," I tried to calm the noise, "we can't do without an intervention. In order to reconstruct our war-ravaged economy, we have to ravage it first, and we need a civil or at least some kind of war for that, we need at least twelve fronts..." "We need the armies of White Poland!" yelled Tikhonov, who was totally sloshed. "O, you idiot," I interrupted, "you're always mouthing off! You're a brilliant theoretician, Vadim, your theses are inscribed in our hearts, but when things come to action, you're a piece of shit! Why do we need White Poland, you dumbass?" "Hey, I'm not sayin' nothing," Tikhonov surrendered, "As if I needed them any more than you do! Norway it is..."
"In a century of unrelenting, bloody warfare and religious persecution throughout Europe, Cromwell was, in many ways, a product of his times. As commander-in-chief of the army in Ireland, however, the responsibilities for the excesses of the military must be laid firmly at his door, while the harsh nature of the post-war settlement also bears his personal imprint. Cromwell was no monster, but he did commit monstrous acts. A warrior of Christ, somewhat like the crusaders of medieval Europe, he acted as God's executioner, convinced throughout the horrors of the legitimacy of his cause, and striving to build a better world for the chosen few. He remains, therefore, a remarkably modern figure, somebody to be closely studied and understood, rather than simply revered or reviled."I am definitely putting that on my (always long) list of books to read. I would also be interested in the article you referred to - did you mean to put a link?
"As an obscure MP in 1642, Cromwell served on a committee to organise relief for Protestant victims of the rising of Irish Catholics that began the previous year. Those victims were real: about 5,000 Protestant colonists died in massacres or from hunger, exposure and disease. But in the official version that shaped Cromwell's attitudes, the number of dead was exaggerated to 150,000 (and later to 200,000), a figure far higher than the entire settler population. Lurid propaganda combined with his own religious zeal to give Cromwell, as he declared on arrival in Dublin, his 'great work against the barbarous and bloodthirsty Irish'.Yes, I would very much like to read this book, thanks.
It is not just this role of propaganda and religious self-righteousness that gives his subsequent campaign a queasily contemporary ring. It is also a refusal to distinguish between civilians and combatants and a resort to ethnic cleansing. In his first engagement, at Drogheda, he personally supervised the slaughter of about 2,500 soldiers and an indeterminate number of civilians. The arguments of apologists that this was within the laws of war at the time are contradicted by the evidence in Cromwell's own account that he himself understood the scale of the massacre to be exceptional. It would, he admitted, have prompted 'remorse and regret' were it not intended to have exemplary effect as both collective punishment and a warning for the future. Contemporaries fully understood the atrocity, and its repetition at Wexford a month later, to be shocking, terrible events."
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posted by spicynuts at 4:51 PM on January 30, 2009