Following on from my previous blog, and in the context of "the rest of us", I want to look at two books. McMafia: Crime without frontiers, by the veteran broadcaster and journalist Misha Glenny, and, Between The Monster And The Saint: Reflections On The Human Condition, by Richard Holloway. The first, because it focuses our attention on the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, and the extent to which the world may have changed as a consequence. While the second, (written from a Christian perspective, but using the word Saint in a broader context than is usual), compliments McMafia, in that it seeks to understand and explain the human condition so starkly evidenced by Glenny. And in doing so, it offers hope, in that it challenges us in the light of experience, to reflect on the nature of our role in the world, and to discard some old and cherished ideas, in favour of some new ones. But before I do, let me explain why.
For me, Solzhenitsyn's writings are a part of that collective consciousness from which we all draw. Sometimes for insight and understanding, and at times too, for reassurance. But for that to happen we have to be interested in the world around us, and informed. And being informed, in effect means, taking responsibility, not just for ourselves and those around us, but for those who will come after. How we do it, or the price that we might have to pay for doing it, we will only discover as we go along. But the core message, for me, that comes from Solzhenitsyn, is the uncomfortable truth, that nothing good that has been achieved in the world - is guaranteed.
McMafia is a dense narrative and the more I read the more I was in awe of the energy and resourcefulness of the writer, who, it seemed, must have put himself at greater risk in researching it, than he was prepared to admit. And what helps to make the narrative shocking beyond itself, is the inescapable conclusion: that this global mafia so starkly portrayed, is right here where I walk my dog.
Glenny's journey began in Woking in Surrey, in southern England, on a quiet housing estate with the doorstep murder of Karen Reed. Having a glass of wine with a friend, she answered the door to what she though was a man mistakenly delivering a pizza, only to be shot through the head, after which, the killer drove away. At first it seemed that this was a case of mistaken identity, in what was probably a local feud. But the truth as it emerged, was altogether more sinister, and the crime, one that went well beyond either the experience or the resources of the local police: It was a killing Glenny tells us, "probably" instigated by Djokar Dudayev, President of the Republic of Chechnya. And that the intended target was not Karen Reed, but her sister, Alison Ponting.
Some eighteen months earlier, Raslan and Nazarbeg Utsiev had arrived in London as envoys for President Dudayev. Officially they were here to oversee the printing of passports and banknotes for the emerging Chechnyn state. And needing a skilled interpreter, Raslan, remembering that he had been interviewed by Alison Ponting, (a producer for the BBC), went to her for advice. Seeing it as an opportunity for gainful employment for her less than industrious Armenian husband, Alison recommended him as an interpreter. At first the three men got on well together, but in time there were disputes. And when Ter-Oganisyan, (Alison's husband), discovered that the Utsiev brothers were intent on purchasing 2,000 ground to air Stinger missiles, that in all probability would be used against his own country, he drew the brothers activities to the Attention of the Armenian KGB. Hit men were brought in from America, and the brothers gruesomely murdered. Raslan's body, dismembered, Glenny tells us, was only discovered when it fell from a packing case on route to the north-London suburb of Harrow. Found guilty of their murders, Tar-Oganisyan was give a life sentence, while a co-defendant, an officer of the Armenian KGB, hanged himself in prison while awaiting trial.
This whole tragic episode, is what lay behind the failed attempt to kill Allison Ponting, who, having appeared as a witness at the trial, is now living with an assumed identity. And Misha Glenny's interest in the story, and subsequent exhaustive investigation, was given a particular impetus, when he realised that David Ponting, Alison's father, (also now living with an assumed identity), had been one of his tutors while an undergraduate at Bristol University.
From Woking, Misha Glenny travelled through every continent bar Australia. And what he uncovered was incontrovertible evidence of sophisticated and global networks of organised crime, that in many instances, were more sophisticated and vastly more profitable than many well known multinational corporations. And beginning his journey in Eastern Europe he soon discovered, what in effect, was a free for all:
"People were discovering all over Eastern Europe that when the country goes into freefall, the law is the first thing that is crushed under the rubble of transformation. Capitalism had not existed until 1989 and so the hopelessly weak states that emerged throughout the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had simply no capacity to define what was "legal" and what was "illegal". They had neither the money nor the experience to police the novelty of commercial exchanges. Those who positioned themselves well in the first three years after the end of communism were often in a position to make up the rules of their brave new world as they went along".
But in these circumstances hopelessness would be altogether the wrong word to use, for as Ivan Krastev, a leading Bulgarian political scientist explained, there was a rich tradition to fall back on:
"Smuggling is our cultural heritage. ... Our territory has always nestled between huge ideologies, between Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, between Islam and Christianity, between Capital and communism. Empires riddled with hostility and suspicion for one another, but home nonetheless, to many people who want to trade across the prohibited boundaries. In the Balkans we know how to make these boundaries disappear. We can cross the roughest sea and traverse the most forbidding mountains. We know every secret pass, and failing that, the price of every border guard."
So what emerged from this new "dog eat dog" world, was illegal trading in commodities: oil, weapons, drugs, stolen cars, cigarettes, fake designer clothes and people; and in particular women as prostitutes. For a woman duped into prostitution, and held captive, could earn £6,000 a month, not for herself, but for her trafficker. It was the era of the unemployed security policeman, the muscleman, (the traditionally esteemed wrestler), the corrupt official, and the oligarch, and the money launderer. And a world in which state security systems, masqueraded as bona fide businesses.
Now in all of the illegal activities uncovered by Glenny that make for "crime without frontiers", the motive was the same: the drive for money, power, influence, and legitimacy. But the scale and the detail of his findings are simply too vast to do more here, than scratch the surface of some of it. So I won't be telling you of Operation Moonlight: an international drugs bust to the value of £300 million. Of how powdered mashed potato imported into Europe, was found to have been impregnated with three tonnes of cocaine. Nor will I be recounting the story of the new Russia and the rise of the oligarchs, though Glenny regards the collapse of the Soviet Union as: "the single most important cause of the exponential growth in organised crime that we have seen around the world in the last two decades". And the pilfering of its assets as, larceny on a scale that is without historical precedent. And I will pass over those chapters entitled: Xanadu 1 and Xanadu II, that recall the bombing of the Bombay Stock Exchange and other areas within the city in 1993, and in which, he details the rivalries of the respective Indian mafia families, and discusses Dubai: the ideal place from which to launder money. Nor will I be telling you about "Buddies". The story of Dan Wheeler and his associates who, it seems unhindered, from BC, and against the backdrop of unemployment in the lumber industry, transported weed across the Canadian border. The farther south they travelled, the more it was worth. A venture that only stopped when their American associates no longer wanted to pay them in dollars, but in pure cocaine. Nor will I be telling you of the drugs cartels in South America who between them divided up the cocaine market in America and had 700 aircraft with which to fly the stuff in. But I will tell you of how they got around the problem of importing the chemicals necessary to process cocoa. They went legitimate, and set up the largest drug store chain in Colombia: Rehaja. And we will bypass Japan, and the banks there, that used the mafia to force people from their homes so that they could acquire land as an investment. But I do want to tell you three stories, one from from Europe another from South America, and finally a story from China. So lets begin with The Yugoslav Wars.
With the break up of Yugoslavia, in 1991, (when Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, set themselves up as independent nation states), the struggle initially was between Croatia and Serbia. But when Bosnia-Herzegovina, with its Muslim dominated government, found itself squeezed between the Christian armies of Serbia and Croatia, it appealed to Muslim countries to defy the United Nations arms embargo (Resolution 713), and provide it with the means to defend itself. As a consequence, and over a three year period, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Brunei, Pakistan, Sudan and Malaysia, contributed $350 million to the account of a Muslim charitable organization in Vienna and the money was used to purchase arms. And as Glenny puts it:
"The arms embargo played a key role in establishing the smuggling channels to Croatia and Bosnia, and soon drugs were accompanying the guns along the same routes."
So with Serbia needing Oil and the opportunity to export goods to pay for it; and Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina needing arms, the circumstances were rife for the warlords and their respective mafias to make vast personal fortunes. To that end, and while prosecuting what were supposedly nationalistic wars, the protagonists, on the basis of friendship and mutual self-interest, cooperated with one another. On the one hand, Serbia allowed the transportation of arms from Bulgaria and Romania, through Serbia to Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, while they, together with Albania, and in defiance of UN Resolution 787, transported Oil to Serbia. And Serbia with Russia, in what was a bartering arrangement, exchanged grain for additional supplies of oil. And while I have no figures for the profits that were made from the transporting of arms, something of the scale of profiteering in sanctions busting, is surely reflected in the fact that in 1993-94 Albania alone, was estimated to be making $1 million dollars a day from the sale of oil. While the value of oil bartered for grain, was valued between $100-250 million a year. And the dividing of the huge sums of money between the protagonists and their respective states, was roughly fifty-fifty, with the money that went to the state reinvested, in yet more weapons and oil so as to prolong the wars. And there was more.
With the setting up of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, in 1992, all that was left of Yugoslavia as it used to be, were the states of Serbia and Montenegro, both of which, were subject to wide ranging economic sanctions, (Resolution 757), imposed by the UN. But not withstanding this, (Montenegro had a population of just 600,000), and the fact that its territory was bombed by NATO, Montenegro proved to be a thorn in Slobodan Milosevic's side. For its president, Milo Djukanovic, not only supported the West, but during the Kosovo war offered sanctuary to Milosevic's opponents in Serbia. With the flow of funds from Serbia to Montenegro cut off in retaliation, Montenegro had to rely more than ever on its own resources:
"Throughout most of the 1990s Djukanovic's country Montenegro...was the focal point of a multi billion dollar criminal industry, that generated income from America, through the Middle East, Central Asia, the Maghreb, the Balkans and Western Europe...Week after week, several tonnes of illegal cigarette shipments would land at the country's two main airports, before being swiftly transferred to the port of Bar...Each carton of smokes was subject to what Milo Djukanovic styled a "transit tax". Milosevic, in Belgrade had throttled the flow of federal funds to Montenegro to a trickle and so, Djukanovic argued, the "transit tax" was the only way to keep his little state on its feet and free from Serbian pressure.
Everybody in the Balkans knew their region was a centre of the illicit trade in cigarettes. Soon after the outbreak of war in the former Yugoslavia in 1991, little boys as young as six would sneak in and out of restaurants in Zagreb, Belgrade and Sarajevo, wooden trays hanging from around their necks neatly stacked with best-quality Western cigarettes. On the sidewalks, old men with craggy features born of a lifetime of committed puffing, were positioned every twenty-five yards offering Winston and Marlboro in cartons of ten packs. In London these would cost $75, in New York maybe $40. but all over the Balkans they cost ten bucks a time. That price differential made smoking an entirely affordable bad habit in the harsh conditions of war. More than half of the people in the Balkans smoked-this was a rich market."
Djukanovic valued this illegal trade at £20 million annually. And an eight years investigation by the European Union, put the loss of tax revenue, mainly to Italy and the UK at £4.6 billion annually. They also filed a lawsuit in 2002 citing two US cigarette manufacturers of complicity in the trade. "Philip Morris" we are told, "struck a deal with the EU releasing the company from any liability," and, "agreed to work with the EU against Mafia penetration of the tobacco trade." R.J Reynolds, on the other hand, "denies any complicity." As for the reference to the mafia, this was because the EU report asserted that this illegal trade in cigarettes was linked to the money-laundering of Colombian drug money.
_____
Now we are in Brazil and it is Operation Pegasus: a huge police swoop that put an end to a cyber crime that in the space of several months, netted around $33 million for those involved. What they had done was raid bank accounts in Brazil, Venezuela, the United States and the United Kingdom. And it wasn't difficult. Using "shells", email addresses "harvested" from servers, they contacted the owners in batches of 50,000, but disguised, so that the service providers would not know that they had come from a single source. There were two types of scam: one local and the other international. The first were e-mails that looked official, as though they had come from Brazilian banks or the Revenue department, and that asked for personal information. While the second, sent abroad, was "a someone loves you letter." As soon as these e-mails were clicked on, the recipients computers were infected with a keylogger programme. And all that it took to steal $33 million, was for 200 people in every batch of 50,000 to be caught out.
__________
There was great excitement and a sense of achievement in January 2004, when the German companies, Siemens and ThyssenKrupp, watched the inaugural journey of their Maglev train. Its electromagnetic technology allowed it to travel at a top speed of 270 miles an hour; and on this occasion, to made the twenty-mile journey from Shanghai's Long Yang Station to Pudong airport in just under eight minutes. But when the Chinese were quoted $6 billion for an 85 mile extension of the line to Hangzhou, they had an idea, and it was caught on CCTV. In December 2004 the cameras that were monitoring the maintenance depot of the "Transrapid" in Shanghai, recorded the unscheduled arrival of Chinese engineers, who, "began measuring, weighing and testing the entire train." And when a year later, China announced that it would be building its own Maglev train, the project was elevated to one of international concern. But as Siemens and ThyssenKrupp were bidding for other projects in China, and Shanghai was the only showcase for the Transrapid train, a compromise was reached. "90 per cent of the new trains would be manufactured in China under German supervision". Still, as Glenny puts it, "a huge loss to the consortium".
It was stories such as this, and the existence of factories in caves in remote regions of China that are mass producing counterfeit cigarettes, that enabled Glenny to paint this picture of China, with confidence. Though I must preface the quote below by saying, that throughout the book, where a sympathetic case can be made for the region he is writing about, in the context of the realities of everyday life, or the failure of political systems to take account of those realities, such as the UN the EU and the IMF, he makes it:
"There is nothing the Chinese will not copy. Whether it is Swedish bathroom fittings; spare parts for aircraft; furniture; non-toxic paints (the fakes, made of course, with highly toxic materials); foodstuffs; clothes; or even an entirely new set of adventures of Harry Potter, such as Harry Potter and the Crystal Turtle - anything that is produced is fair game for the Chinese counterfeiters."
To which he adds that:
"The European Union Commission estimates that fake goods around the world are wroth between $250 and $500 billion a year. Of these, about 60 per cent originate in the People's Republic of China - 20-25 per cent of exports from China are counterfeits, while, [my italics], 85-90 per cent of products sold in the domestic Chinese market are fake."
_____
Unlike Misha Glenny, I can't see that Richard Holloway would have put himself at risk in writing, Between The Monster And The Saint: Reflections On The Human condition. But without doubt as a former Bishop of Edinburgh and Primate of the Scottish Episcopal Church, he is battle scarred. And certainly he is interested in, and is taking responsibility for the world in which he lives. But though he writes from a Christian perspective, in some instances, he draws on the beliefs and practices of other faiths. And he is quite open in acknowledging that the role of the Christian Church, (however exemplary), is not without its dark side. And in the context of the human condition: our propensity towards violence and the use of force, he is uncompromising. If we are truly to understand and do something about our baser nature, then owning to the truth of our condition is a necessary first step.
Richard Holloway is not a Creationist: he does not accept that the creation story as told in Genesis is a factual and accurate historical record of how the world came to be. But rather, in broad terms, he sees the Bible as Art, as an account of man's (girls allowed), attempt to arrive at an understanding of the reason for his existence; and in this context, he draws attention to contemporary writers, who, as it were, think outside the box. In particular, Jenny Diski who caused him to think differently about the story of Abraham, who, responding to the voice of God, was willing to slay his son Isaac. Familiar with this Bible story and how it has been interpreted down the ages as evidence of Abraham's faith; it had never occurred to him, until he read After These Things, to see it in all its horror, form Isaac's point of view.
At its core, these half dozen meditations are asking the question how is it, in the context of "Force", that we can become so diminished that we see people as "things". And the word "we" is significant. Because while he reflects on authors such as Gitta Sereny and Gobodo Madikiaela, who respectively studied the lives of Franz Stangl and Eugene de Kock, and reflected on the question of "nature or nurture", he reminds us, that people with no obvious dysfunction in their background, are capable of using Force and exploiting violence as a means to their ends. But it is not inevitable, he tells us, that we become the victims of Force. And though he does not mention him, he cites people such as Solzhenitsyn, who found the capacity to overcome fear and challenge the status quo. And as a Christian, he cites Christ as the supreme example in this regard.
As he is not a Creationist Richard Holloway takes us back to the beginning of tine, back 14 billion years and reflects on man's desire to know where he came from. And in recognising the violence that was a part of that evolutionary process, a process in which the first gene appeared about three and a half billion years ago, he makes the point, that that evolutionary force, (that in itself has no regard for us as humans), is actually a part of who we are; and that what makes for "Civilization" is man's willingness to curtail those forces within himself. And what makes for the "monster": men in the twentieth century, such as Hitler, Stalin and Mao, who, exercising absolute power, reduced people to things, was their refusal to recognise as "evil", their capacity to turn humanity against itself.
But of course, "civilization" given our propensity to violence, is not only, not guaranteed, but, as Holloway reminds us, that violence is inherently a part of those religious institutions that we have established to protect ourselves from it. Religion, which he characterises in its various forms, as: "strong" and "weak". The strong, that in effect is an expression of weakness; and the weakness, that paradoxically is strength.
In the context of strong religion and using the analogy of the radio signal, Holloway represents strong religion as a social system that has a clear and perfect signal from the divine, so that it is insulated from "the eroding tide of history". To its adherents, they are in possession of the final and unalterable lifestyle manual, dictated by God during the original broadcast." Claims, that inevitably put it on a collision course with humanity's experience of history. The most glaring examples of which, are reflected in the "dissonance between the Creationist account of the formation of the earth and its animal population and the received scientific account that is broadly accepted by educated secular opinion today." And their "views of the Bible, including its astronomy", that "are held to override all subsequent discoveries and the thinking that flows from them. If the Bible says God created the world and its inhabitants in six days, then that's that." A fundamentalist approach, that carries over to entrenched views about the status of women, and those who are gay.
The chief characteristic of weak religion, he tells us, is "theological modesty" and here's why:
"...humans can never be sure of the meaning behind the signals of transcendence they receive because they themselves are faulty equipment that has to interpret them, and history shows how fatally inadequate they have been at the game. Much blood has been spilt over rival interpretations of these elusive signals, and much human unhappiness has been engendered by the violent disagreements they have provoked."
So "weak religion" despised by the strong, allows itself to be influenced and modified by the culture in which it exists, because it sees itself "as an integral part of the community of the present as well as the past." And likening it to modern "psychotherapeutic practice", also despised by "strong religion", and many non religious people besides, he defines their role thus:
What he is encouraging in his writing is a greater humility and a more holistic approach to life. And he is reminding us, amid all our certainties, of how selective and misguided we can be in our understanding of how God works in the world, and consequently in our judgment of others. Job being the cause célèbre. Job was a man who was just (good) before God; and when misfortune was heaped upon him, his friends, (those in the religious know), were sure, because they know how God worked: that he rewarded the righteous and punished the wicked. So it was obvious, Job was a sinner and he was being punished. But nothing, as the story unfolded was further from the truth. And moving on to the New Testament, and again in the context of how prone we are to know and misjudge, Holloway reminds us of Christ's response to the Apostle Peter, who, had promised everything, and in the end, failed to deliver. Having denied him three times, Christ gave three opportunities to Peter to make amends: to declare his love. What is interesting here, is, that Richard Holloway is seeing weakness as strength. As the catalyst for doing good. God knows, as exemplified in the Apostle Peter, how unreliable we are, and yet, he still has a role for us. In this context he cites two contemporary individuals. The American civil rights leader Martin Luther King and the Roman Catholic Archbishop Pius Ncube: an effective and implacable opponent of Robert Mugabe. Ncube was reduced to silence when his sexual behaviour was exposed on the basis of evidence almost certainly gathered on behalf of the Zimbabwe government. These men are for Holloway saints by his definition, and symbolic of the idea of the broken priest, against whom the charge could be levelled, as it was against Christ: "he saves others, but he cannot save himself." In Kings case, his extra-marital sexual activity went against the teaching of his church. A failing that the FBI were poised to exploit. But Martin Luther King didn't allow his personal failings to be an excuse for abandoning his commitment to the black civil rights movement. And though he is sympathetic to Archbishop Ncube who was publicly committed to a life of celibacy, Holloway regrets the absence of his voice that should still be heard: because his personal failings, do not render invalid, his criticisms of Robert Mugabe.
Now as most of us, in one way or another are broken, this is a good point at which to return to the world as portrayed by Alexandra Solzhenitsyn and Misha Glenny. A world where people were, and are, reduced to things. And where the powerful, as in China and the Transrapid train, think it is ok to operate in a moral vacuum.
Quoting the French philosopher Simone Weil, (who herself was commenting on Homer's Iliad, a work that she regarded as The Poem Of Force), Holloway reminds us of the consequences if we embrace Force as a way of life, or if we are subjected to it:
Which is why man, though he has a propensity to use force, fears it, and as Holloway suggests, finds it at its most terrifying in sex and war. But why this link which many resent, between sex and violence? Because to make it, is to recognise that both "are erotically charged, packed with the possibility of giving pleasure to participant and onlooker." What the poet Auden described as "the concupiscence of the oppressor." And quoting the psychologist Frederick Nietzsche, Holloway reminds us of the uncomfortable truth, that for those who inflict it on others, suffering is a "festival":
"...To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle...Without cruelty there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches - and in punishment there is so much that is festive."
The fourth of Richard Holloway's meditations is on Suffering. Something that we know, in the context of belief in a loving God, is incomprehensible to the non believer. While many go farther, holding to the view that religion has been the cause of most of the suffering in the world. For his part, Holloway accepts the disputatious nature of religion. And it is in this context that he deals with the previously covered topics of "strong" and "weak" religion - and suffering as it applied to Job. And just as scientists explaining the Big Bang fill the gaps in their understanding with what in physics is known as a singularity, in a sense, God, for Holloway, is a "philosophical singularity". Our way of filling the inevitable gaps, because while "humans may possess some knowledge, God possesses all knowledge. Humans may possess some power, but God possess all power. Humans may possess some goodness but God possess all goodness. The logic in all of this is clear enough. Humans have what philosophers call a contingent existence. God not themselves is the source of their being; so their attributes and capacities depend on their source or creator."
And looking in particular at the twentieth century, at the suffering and deaths of countless millions, caused by the despotism of Hitler, Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung, Holloway, pointing the finger at strong religion, suggests that even if we excuse God and blame "human agency" that "attempt to limit God's responsibility for suffering to natural disasters still leaves him with a pretty long charge sheet." So he returns to the spirit of "weak religion" that has:
"...modified the traditional image of God moving away from the model of absolute power to one of responsive, suffering love...It moves the argument away from theory about God towards a mystical identification with those who suffer leading to practical actions: the problem of suffering is now no longer about explaining it, but about responding to it. Talk ceases. Work starts. Wounds are bound. Bruised feed are bathed. Believers find god among the suffering. They live with the dying street people of Calcutta, They join the rejected of the earth in the villas miseria and favelos of Latin America, in the ghettos of North America and in places of despair and haplessness throughout the world. God's long awaited answer to Job turns out not to be a clinching argument that solves the problem of suffering: It is to become job."
And the ultimate expression of that compassion, and the ultimate alternative response to the use of force, is to be found in Christ crucified.
_____
Now before I go I want to tell you three stories. The first from Solzhenitsyn, because it is compelling and profound, and I like it. And the second, from Glenny, because I have not focused here on the suffering of specific individuals. And the third, from Richard Holloway, because it brings us full circle. It is the work of a non Christian "saint", someone who paid the ultimate price. And it is a reminder of the many Solzhenitsyn's past and present whose stories have not been told.
From Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
Having in The Gulag Archipelago described the many different forms of torture that were applied to prisoners to extract confessions, Solzhenitsyn tells this story of a woman who was interrogated on suspicion of sheltering a Bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church:
"N. Stolyarova recalls an old woman who was her neighbour on the Butyrik banks in 1937. They kept on interrogating her every night. Two years earlier a former Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church, who had escaped from exile, had spent a night at her home on his way through Moscow. "But he wasn't the former Metropolitan, he was the Metropolitan! Truly, I was worthy of receiving him." "All right then. To whom did he go when he left Moscow?" "I know, but I won't tell you!" (The Metropolitan had escaped to Finland via an underground railroad of believers.) At first the interrogators took turns, and then they went after her in groups. They shook their fists in the little old woman's face, and she replied: "There is nothing you can do with me even if you cut me into pieces. After all, you are afraid of your bosses, and you are afraid of each other, and you are even afraid of killing me." (They would loose contact with the underground railroad.) "But I am not afraid of anything. I would be glad to be judged by God right this minute."
From Misha Glenny:
Having explained how young women were groomed and duped into prostitution Glenny tells Ludmilla's story. How she responded to a phone call from her friend who was working in Israel. She was earning great money as a waitress and wanted Ludmilla to join her. But what Ludmilla didn't know was that her friend had a gun pointed at her head while she was talking. And Ludmilla was pleased at the help that she was getting to arrange her documentation in Transnistria, not realising that the woman who was helping her was a "recruiter": part of the same set up. By the time she and the other women with her arrived in Israel, "she had passed through the hands of Moldovan, Ukrainian, Egyptian, Bedouin, Russian Jewish, and indigenous Israeli hands, half of whom had threatened her with violence," And the truth was: "that her nightmare was only beginning." And she told the story of the young woman, who, when she knew what was really happening tried to escape from her Bedouin captors:
"Just before they were due to leave for the next leg of their journey, one of these terrified women made a break for it. "The Bedouins captured her, and then, in front of us, they shot her in the knees." As victims of knee-capping in Northern Ireland well know, being shot in the knees is one of the most painful punishments that can be inflicted. But this young Moldovan woman's fate was even worse. "They just left her there in the desert to die.""
From Richard Holloway:
This poem about Stalin by Osip Mandelstan, a Russian Jew, cost him his life. Arrested in 1934 he died in the camps:
We live, deaf to the land beneath us,
Ten steps away no one hears our speeches.
All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,
The murderer and peasant-slayer.
His fingers are fat as grubs
And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,
His cockroach whiskers leer
And his boot tops gleam.
Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders -
fawning half-men for him to play with.
They whinny, purr or whine
As he prates and points a finger,
One by one forging his laws, to be flung
Like horseshoes at the head, to the eye or the groin.
And every killing is a treat
For the broad-chested Ossette. *
_____
© Cormac McCloskey
Note: This blog, "Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the rest of us - Part 2" was first published on Windows Live Spaces, by me, on 20th November 2008
* A reference to the rumour that Stalin came from Iranian stock in Northern Georgia.
Sources and additional information:
The Internet: Serbia Sanctions Case (UN sanctions references)
www.american.edu/ted/serbsanc.html
McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers.
Author: Misha Glenny
Publisher: The Ridley Head 2008.
www.randomhouse.co.uk
ISBN-13: 9780224075039
(HB) ISBN-13: 978184792007 (TPB)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misha_Glenny
Between The Monster And The Saint:
Reflections On The Human Condition.
Author: Richard Holloway.
Publisher: Canongrate 2008.
www.canongate.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Holloway
The Bible: Genesis: The first book of the Old Testament
Franz Stangl: SS officer and commandant of Sobibór and Treblinks extermination camps.
Eugene de Kock: Commander of the Viakplass, a unit of the South African police
counter insurgency group involved in the execution of dozens of members of the
anti-apartheid movement.
The Book of Job: The Bible: The Old Testamant: The first of the books of Wisdom.
Peter's denial of Christ & Christ's response:
The Gospel of Matthew, Ch. 26: 69-75 and
The Gospel of John Ch. 21: 15-18
No comments:
Post a Comment