"Defeated But Not Yet Exterminated"

"In one hut there would be something like a war. Everyone would keep close watch over everyone else. People would take crumbs from each other. The wife turned against her husband and the husband against his wife. The mother hated the children. And in some other hut love would be inviolable to the very last. I knew one woman with four children. She would tell them fairy stories and legends so that they would forget their hunger. Her own tongue could hardly move, but she would take them into her arms even though she had hardly the strength to lift her arms when they were empty. Love lived on within her. And people noticed that where there was hate people died off more swiftly. Yet love, for that matter, saved no one. The whole village perished, one and all. No life remained in it."

The number of Ukrainian dead in the famine of 1932–33 has generally been given as five million. According to Conquest, other peasant catastrophes from 1930 through 1937, including enormous numbers of deportations of alleged "kulaks," bring the grand total of deaths to a mind-numbing 14.5 million. And yet if even one percent of my students in a given year have even heard of these events, it is a small miracle.

The "Evil" Message of The Passion

"It is frightening that so evil a message could receive so welcome a reception.

"When charges of anti-Semitism, denied by the producers, surrounded the film before its opening, there was outrage from many circles. But when the principals behind the film tell us openly that its message is that not only Jews but all men are implicated in the death of Jesus, the voices of moral outrage fall silent...

"If the anti-Semitic view of the Jewish race as inherently corrupt is irrational and evil, how much more irrational and evil is this view of the human race?

"Will The Passion itself play a major role in spreading this conception of man's nature? Of course not. But the audiences and acclaim the film is enjoying speak to just how prevalent this conception has already become. If there is an idea behind the film worth opposing, it is this, its intended message. Teach man to regard himself as a loathsome, despicable being, and he becomes ripe for any mystical dictator, who will wield the whip that is supposed to make man atone for his 'transgressions.' Deprive man of self-esteem, teach him to spit in his face, and one paves the way for another Dark Ages." -- Onkar Ghate, Ph.D., resident fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute.

The Navigator

Who your father was might not be so important. But how you remember your father, indeed how you choose to remember your father, may be very important indeed. I was delighted to find this on Kinky Friedman's site:

Tom's war is long over. Indeed, the whole era seems gone like the crews who never came home, lost forever among the saltshaker stars. And yet, when the future may look its darkest, there sometimes occurs an oddly comforting moment when, with awkward grace, the shadow of a silver plane flies inexplicably close to my heart. One more mission for the navigator.

Was that worth the click, or am I just a silly old sentimentalist with half a shot of Jura single malt too much in my skin? (Cause half a shot is all I could see this side of the toaster.)