Freedom Fighters Then, "Freedom Fighters" Now

From Lilek's Bleat a few days ago:

Let’s talk oppression. Let’s talk occupation. Let’s talk genocide, as Arafat likes to call any Israeli action. In college I fell in with a group of Ukes, and learned a good deal about the Soviet horrors visited on their nation. Churches: razed. Language: forbidden. Menfolk: off to the camps. Land: collectivized. Population: starved to death by the millions. You’d talk to the old men, the partisans who made it to America after the war, and their hatred of the Soviets was white-hot forty years later. Ukraine at the time was still under Soviet control, remember. And let’s pause a moment to remember all the campus protests over Russia’s illegal, genocidal occupation.

Didn’t take long, did it.

We housed a dissident who’d been kicked out of the USSR after spending a few years in a “psychiatric” hospital, where they’d done all sorts of horrible things to him and broken his health for good. Sixty years of occupation, oppression and mass extermination, and not one of these men would have taken the war to girls on a bus bound for a Moscow high school. Not one. If a Uke had burst into a home of a Russian official and shot his little girl in her bed, they would have been deeply ashamed that their cause had been corrupted thus — the Metropolitan of the church would have condemned it, the activists abroad would have denounced it, the children kept from the news lest they think that opposition to the Soviet occupiers justified splitting open a baby’s head in her mother’s lap.

(Thanks Susanna.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 06/20/02 03:02:23 PM
Categorized as Classic.