(Life and Fate), , 1959

Coleridge once defined Imagination as the power to disimprison the soul of fact.
The hide was being flayed off the still living body of the Revolution so that a new age could slip
into it; as for the red, bloody meat, the steaming innards they were being thrown onto the
scrapheap. The new age needed only the hide of the Revolution and this was being flayed off
people who were still alive. Those who then slipped into it spoke the language of the Revolution
and mimicked its gestures, but their brains, lungs, livers and eyes were utterly different.
This strange clarity, which arose at a moment when it was impossible to tell whether a man
three yards away was a friend or an enemy, was linked to an equally clear and inexplicable
sense of the general course of the fighting, the sense that allows a soldier to judge the true
correlation of forces in a battle and to predict its outcome.
Abarchuk knew and he despised himself for it that it wasnt just a matter of wanting
something to eat. He was aware of one of those vile, petty desires born of the camps, the desire
to hobnob with the strong, to chat with someone whom thousands of people lived in awe of.
Sofya now understood the difference between life and existence: her life had come to an end,
but her existence could drag on indefinitely. And however wretched and miserable this
existence was, the thought of violent death still filled her with horror.
No one has the right to lead other people like sheep. Thats something even Lenin failed to
understand. The purpose of a revolution is to free people. But Lenin just said: In the past you
were led badly, Im going to lead you well.
Our Russian humanism has always been cruel, intolerant, sectarian. From Avvakum to Lenin our
conception of humanity and freedom has always been partisan and fanatical. It has always
mercilessly sacrificed the individual to some abstract idea of humanity.
But there is another, unexpected side to the steppe. It is also a noble, ancient world; a world
where there are no screaming colours or harsh lines, but only a sober grey-blue melancholy that
can rival the colours of a Russian forest in autumn; a world whose soft undulating hills capture
the heart more surely than the peaks of the Caucasus; a world whose small, dark, ancient lakes
seem to express the very essence of water more truly than seas or oceans. (...) The steppe has
one other unchanging characteristic: day and night, summer and winter, in foul weather or fine
weather, it speaks of freedom. If someone has lost his freedom, the steppe will remind him of
it . . .
He remembered that evening when he finally left Russia. He remembered it as he lay in hospital
after the operation to remove his eye. He remembered it as he walked through the cool, dark
entrance to the bank where he worked. The poet Khodasevich, who had also left Russia for
Paris, had written about just this:
A pilgrim walks away in the mist:
Its you who comes into my mind.
On a fume-filled street a car drives past:
Its you who comes into my mind.
I see the lamps come on at six,
But have only you in my mind.
I travel west your image picks its endless way through my mind.
In the words of Heinrich Heine, were all of us naked beneath our clothes.
Sometimes he had wondered whether this ignorance of theirs was in fact their greatest
strength, whether his own correct speech and interest in books was really a weakness.
Anti-Semitism is always a means rather than an end; it is a measure of the contradictions yet to
be resolved. It is a mirror for the failings of individuals, social structures and State systems. Tell
me what you accuse the Jews of Ill tell you what youre guilty of. (...) Anti-Semitism is also an
expression of a lack of talent, an inability to win a contest on equal terms in science or in
commerce, in craftsmanship or in painting. States look to the imaginary intrigues of World Jewry
for explanations of their own failure.
And he was dimly aware that if you wish to remain a human being under Fascism, there is an
easier option than survival death.
People in camps, people in prisons, people who have escaped from prison, people going to their
death, know the extraordinary power of music. No one else can experience music in quite the

same way. What music resurrects in the soul of a man about to die is neither hope nor thought,
but simply the blind, heart-breaking miracle of life itself.
A Party member from Leningrad had told Krymov in a whisper how he had once shared a cell
with three ex-secretaries of the same Leningrad raykom; each had unmasked his predecessor
as a terrorist and enemy of the people. They had lain side by side, apparently without the least
ill-feeling.
But an invisible force was crushing him. He could feel its weight, its hypnotic power; it was
forcing him to think as it wanted, to write as it dictated. This force was inside him; it could
dissolve his will and cause his heart to stop beating; it came between him and his family; it
insinuated itself into his past, into his childhood memories. He began to feel that he really was
untalented and boring, someone who wore out the people around him with dull chatter. Even his
work seemed to have grown dull, to be covered with a layer of dust; the thought of it no longer
filled him with light and joy. Only people who have never felt such a force themselves can be
surprised that others submit to it. Those who have felt it, on the other hand, feel astonished
that a man can rebel against it even for a moment with one sudden word of anger, one timid
gesture of protest.
His work was more to him than just a psychological prop: he worked simply because he was
unable not to.
Even now, he had no desire to occasion these people harm, to get his revenge. But he did take
great joy in remembering their acts of dishonesty, cowardice and cruelty. The worse someone
had behaved, the sweeter it was to think of him now.
A certain Greek once said, All things flow; we say, All people inform.
Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness. The difference is simply that a bad man
will be proud all his life of one good deed while an honest man is hardly aware of his good
acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end.
Every hour, every day, year in, year out, he must struggle to be a man, struggle for his right to
be pure and kind. He must do this with humility. And if it came to it, he mustnt be afraid even
of death; even then he must remain a man.
Sve do 19. veka socijalizam je bio utopija, mesto mu je bilo u budunosti. Danas je socijalizam
smeten u prolost, kao totalitarna iluzija. T. Kulji
M. Horkhajmer je naelo kritike teorije iskazao reima: Ko nee da govori o kapitalizmu,
trebalo bi da uti o faizmu. T. Kulji

Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben (Time to Live and Time to Die), Erich Maria
Remarque, 1954
-

They wouldn't be allowed to destroy anything more if we surrender. He squinted his eyes and
suddenly became a sly farmer. Then our country will be undamaged and theirs will be
smashed. Sometime or other they'll have to get out of Germany again and so in spite of
everything we'll still practically win the war.
For the worms of Europe, Asia and Africa we have been the Golden Age. We have turned over to
them armies of corpses. Not only soldiers' fleshwomen's flesh, too, and children's flesh and
the soft bomb-torn flesh of the aged. Plenty of all. In the sagas of the worms we will be for
generations the kindly gods of superfluity.
It had grown colder and the stars hung big in the sky. Everyone hated them; they meant good
visibility for the fliers. For a long time now nature had had no significance in itself; it was simply
good or bad in relation to the war. As protection or as danger.
But what needed less nourishment than hope? And from what incomprehensible roots it could
draw it!
A kind man, he thought. But had Alfons been kind to Burmeister, their mathematics teacher,
whom he had sent to the concentration camp? Probably everyone was a kind person for
somebody. And, for somebody else, the opposite.

"Does something always have to be true?" "Probably not. Why?" "I don't know. But perhaps we'd
have fewer wars if everyone wasn't so eager to convince someone else of his own particular
truth."
Graeber looked at the satisfied, harmless face and, with sudden shock, he realized the eternal
hopelessness to which justice and sympathy are condemned: always to suffer shipwreck on
egoism and indifference and fear
To ask someone else always means an attempt to evade a decision. Besides I didn't really
expect an answer from you. I was really only questioning myself. Sometimes you can't do that
except by putting the question to someone else.
As long as one was full of questions one was incapable of perceiving much else. Only when one
no longer expected anything was one open to everything and without dread.
Things to eat, he thought. In wartime one's ideas of happiness were inseparably bound up with
eating.
He was passing the City Hospital and stopped. Mutzig popped into his mind. He had promised to
visit him. For a moment he hesitated, but then went in. He suddenly had the superstitious
feeling again that he could bribe fate by doing a good deed.
He shot an unfriendly glance at Graeber. "If all the slackers were out there we wouldn't have to
keep withdrawing all the time!" Graeber did not reply. You could not quarrel with amputees;
anyone who had lost a limb was always in the right. You could quarrel with someone who had
been shot through the lungs or had a shell splinter in his stomach and might be in even worse
shape; but it was strangenot with an amputee.
She went to sleep, breathing slowly and regularly. Graeber continued to lie awake for a while.
He was thinking that sometimes in the field when the men had been talking about impossible
wishes this had been one of themto have a roof, a bed, a woman and a quiet night.
One oughtn't to talk too much. And one oughtn't to reflect. Not yet. It weakens you. So does
remembering. It's too early for all that. In time of danger you should think only about how to
save yourself.
If you make no demands, everything is a gift.

The Liberator, Alex Kershaw, 2012

-

The Italians never lose a war, he had once complained. No matter what happens, they always
end up on the winning side.
Thankfully, the locals welcomed him and his fellow Thunderbirds as liberators, even though Italy
was still at war with the United States. After enduring millennia of invasion, Sicilians clearly
knew when to resist and when to shower well-fed and well-supplied young Americans with
flowers.
Patton was being driven in a jeep. Just days before, the silver-haired Seventh Army commander
had admitted to a fellow general that the two things he loved most in life were fucking and
fighting.
He loved being a rifle company commander. He had a keen memory and quickly learned the
name of every soldier in his company, all 192.
He now had three rifle platoons of forty men each under his command, most of them battletested, plus a heavy-weapons platoon that contained two machine-gun squads and three 60mm
mortar squads that could fire shells three times the weight of hand grenades more than a mile.
He knew that in combat he would have to deploy the machine guns in pairs so their fields of fire
covered as much of his front as possible. Two rifle platoons would be engaged at any one time,
while the third rotated in reserve, hence the term two up and one back used to describe a
companys basic triangle organization and that of battalions, regiments, divisions, and corps.
Crucially, Allied artillery was massed in critical areas, with gun crews firing as many as ten
rounds per minute from hundreds of 105mm howitzers, timing the fire so that shells landed
every couple of seconds where the Germans tried hardest to break through. This fire on time
coordination proved devastatingly effective, so much so that Kesselring himself wondered
whether the Americans had devised a repeat-loading artillery piece that fired shell after shell
like a giant machine gun.

But one of the many things he had learned from Colonel Ankcorn in Sicily was that he should
always appear calm and collected. Indeed, good leaders were often good actors, able to
convince their men if not themselves that they would somehow prevail.
Not far from one temple stood the charred hulk of a German tank that had received a direct hit
and then brewed up as the British put it, exploding into flames. The Germans had been
trapped inside, and a puddle of their fat, coated in brightly colored flies, spread slowly beneath
the tracks.
Also a gifted musician, Stigliani had quickly learned to dig his hands into the earth whenever he
came under fire, terrified he might never play an instrument again.
Astonishingly, less than 4 percent of men admitted to field hospitals during the war died.
Buddhist Boot Camp, Timber Hawkeye, 2012

Dont try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist; use it to be a better whateveryou-already-are.
I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on, I go into another room
and read a good book. Groucho Marx
All the happiness in the world stems from wanting others to be happy, and all the suffering in
the world stems from wanting the self to be happy. Shantideva
Things turn out best for those who make the best of the way things turn out. Art Linkletter
Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it. Confucius
May we all close the gap between what we believe and how we act in the world.
If you really want to do something, you will find a way. If you dont, you will find an excuse. E.
James Rohn
No matter how certain we are of our version of the truth, we must humbly accept the possibility
that someone who believes the exact opposite could also be right (according to their time,
place and circumstance).
Some people are so poor, all they have is money. Anonymous
An ounce of practice is worth more than a ton of preaching. Gandhi
Apologizing doesn't always mean that you're wrong and the other person is right. It just means
that you value your relationship more than your ego. Anonymous
Remember the Freudian advice, "Pain does not decompose when you bury it."
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. Eleanor Roosevelt
How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours. Wayne Dyer
You never make the same mistake twice. The second time you make it, it's no longer a mistake,
it's a choice. What we essentially are is a series of bad choices. If knowing alone made us wise,
then every senior citizen would be a Zen Master. That is why Bodhidharma said, "All know the
Way, but few actually walk it."
Man sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his
health. And then he is so anxious about the future, that he does not enjoy the present moment.
As a result, he does not live in the present or the future, he lives as if he is never going to die,
and then he dies having never truly lived. The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprises him
the most
Everyone is a genius, but if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its entire life
believing it is stupid. Albert Einstein
She didn't realize that NOT making any decisions is a pretty big decision in itself. There is a gap
between needing to make a decision and actually making it, and that gap is almost always filled
with fear.
We fear change and the unknown, so we cling to a past that's already gone, and attempt to
avoid a future that is inevitable.
Never discourage anyone who continually makes progress, no matter how slow. Aristotle
Let go of what's killing you, even if it's killing you to let go!
A stranger is simply a friend you haven't met yet.
If we always do what weve always done, we will always be who weve always been.
Anonymous
Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life. Confucius
The difference between who you are and who you want to be is what you do. Anonymous

Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army (1939-1945), Catherine Merridale, 2007
-

But Red Army losses deaths exceeded 8 million of the gruesome total. This figure easily
exceeds the number of military deaths on all sides, Allied and German, in the First World War
and stands in stark contrast to the losses among the British and American armed forces
between 1939 and 1945, which in each case amounted to fewer than a quarter of a million. The
Red Army, as one recruit put it, was a meat-grinder. They called us, they trained us, they
killed us, another man recalled.
The famine that came in its wake was also terrible by any standards, but a decade later, in
19323, when starvation claimed more than 7 million lives, the great hunger of 1921 would
come to seem, as one witness put it, like childs play.
The people were special, the old soldiers say. I heard this view expressed dozens of times in
Russia, and the implication was that torment, like a cleansing fire, created an exceptional
generation.
Things had been so bad for so long, after all, that almost anything looked like progress. Here
was a paradox. This was a state that proclaimed its altruism, commanding its citizens to forsake
private property. One of its most potent selling points, however, was the material prosperity it
promised, an abundance that was measured, even in the censored newspapers, in terms of
wristwatches and bicycles, not merely public goods.
When someone asked him if the next war would be an imperialist one, a politruk elsewhere
simply gave up. Theres no point, he answered, in counting imperialist wars When the wars
over, a [party] congress will convene, and theyll tell us what type of war it was.
By October, too, nearly 90 million people, 45 per cent of the pre-war population, found
themselves trapped in territory that the enemy controlled.
Roughly two thirds of pre-war manufacturing had taken place in territories that the Germans
seized in 1941. Anything that could be moved in time had been evacuated beyond the Volga to
the Urals, but serious losses could not be avoided.
Not many guns were made in August and September 1941. Four fifths of Soviet war production
was on wheels. Moscows defenders soon ran out of shells that autumn. They ran out of
cartridges. They even ran out of the guns with which to fire them.
In December 1941, an entire reserve army, the 10th, arrived for service without heavy artillery
or a single tank.
The dearest hope of these peasants was for an end to Soviet power, but in September 1941,
they learned that the Germans had ordered that the collective farms should stay. Like the prewar Soviet authorities, the conquerors cared only for the ease with which the peasants grain
could be collected and shipped off. It was an irreversible mistake.
Death was probably a better fate if it were swift than capture for Red Army troops. Our
treatment of prisoners of war, a German intelligence officer observed in February 1942, cannot
continue without consequences. It is no longer because of lectures from the politruks, but out of
his own personal convictions that the Soviet soldier has come to expect an agonizing life or
death if he falls captive. The knowledge made Soviet troops fight bitterly and fuelled deeper
hate. If the Germans treated our prisoners well, a colonel told Werth in 1942, it would soon be
known. Its a horrible thing to say, but by ill-treating and starving our prisoners to death, the
Germans are helping us.
Once again, the Germans own atrocities were all that held the Soviets in place. At present, a
partisan leader stated, the situation is this: we in the forest believe that communism (which 70
or 80 per cent of us hate) will at least let us live, but the Germans, with their National Socialism,
will either shoot us or starve us to death.
In addition to nearly 3 million captured men, the Red Army had lost 2,663,000 killed in action by
February 1942. For every German who was killed, twenty Soviet soldiers had died.
Mekhlis believed that trenches sapped the spirit of aggression. None was ever dug. This was
particularly unfortunate, for beyond the port itself, the landscape of the Kerch peninsula is
gently rolling steppe, treeless and sometimes marshy, offering no shelter to men fighting for
their lives.

A hundred and seventy-six thousand men were slaughtered at Kerch in just twelve days.
Eleven million decorations were awarded to members of the Soviet military between 1941 and
1945. By contrast, the United States awarded only 1,400,409.43 The US army often took as long
as six months to process individual awards. In Stalins army the equivalent was frequently three
days.
By the late summer of 1942, a man who had been in the field for six months was an old hand, a
real veteran. Large numbers returned to the front after sustaining wounds. On average, just
under three quarters of injured men were patched up and sent back to fight during the war. But
this was still the era of defence to the death.
That summer, the military expressed itself keen to recruit healthy young girls. To some extent
the idea was to shame the men to greater effort. The other goal was to make civilian women
more effective, to shame them, too, into forced labour in armaments plants or long hours
working on the farms. Either way, some 800,000 women would serve at the front during the
war.
At least I can say that I saw a lot of heroic things, an officer wrote later to his wife, but I also
saw a lot of things that the Red Army ought to be ashamed of. I never thought that Id be
capable of the kind of ruthlessness that really borders on cruelty. I thought I was a good-hearted
person, but it seems that a human being can hide within himself for a long time the qualities
that surface only at a time like this.
Chuikov, who was no sentimentalist, described the death of a marine called Pankaiko in just this
way. As the doomed man prepared to lob a petrol-filled bottle at a line of German tanks, a bullet
ignited the fuel, turning him into a pillar of flame. But the marine was still alive, and somehow,
with some last reserve of rage, or maybe from some grim reflex, he managed to reach for a
second missile. Everyone saw a man in flames leap out of the trench, Chuikov later wrote, run
right up to the German tank, and smash the bottle against the grille of the engine hatch. A
second later an enormous sheet of flame and smoke engulfed both the tank and the hero who
had destroyed it.
Those who still panicked at the sight of eyeless, sinister machines were trained out of their fear
by an exercise (called ironing) that forced them to lie in a trench while Soviet tanks were
driven over their heads.
In the spring of 1943, when a soldier who was assigned to Nemanovs unit from the Volkhov
Front near Leningrad tried to describe the siege to his new comrades, he disappeared, arrested.
He had mentioned starvation, Nemanov remembered. That wasnt something we were
supposed to hear about.
Everyone knew that songs were vital for morale. You cant have a war without songs, a former
partisan remembered. Its easier to die or go hungry if you have a song.
Poetry was just as vital to morale as song, and the two often overlapped. Verse came naturally
to Russian speakers, even peasants, for whom it recalled the oral culture of the recent past, and
they listened eagerly to recitations of their favourite ballads. Verse was easy to learn, pleasant
to recite and valuable because it compressed emotion to an intensity that seemed normal in
war.
Krupyanskaya, the famous wartime ethnographer, told one of her colleagues that the censors
had forbidden her to record erotic, satirical, subversive or criminal lyrics. She was not permitted
to write down words that denigrated national minorities, including Jews, and the songs she
collected would not be published if they lacked a patriotic theme. This strict political correctness
guaranteed that she would overlook a large part of reality. The songs and aphorisms that have
made their way into Soviet textbooks about soldiers lore are prim, polite and Stalinist.
Pushkarev had also been collecting jokes. The NKVD seized his notebooks of these at the outset,
and he was forbidden to collect any more. Humour, which sustained so many people and which
reflected their authentic, spontaneous voice, was deemed to be too dangerous for record.
If the military police got hold of you, the men knew all too well, the charges would be absurd
and the procedures byzantine. You have to prove, the wags explained, that you are not a
camel.
One evening, an officer is telling a joke to his men. They are all laughing except for one, whose
glum expression does not change. The officer calls the politruk over to find out if the man is all
right. Have you had bad news from home? the politruk asks. The man has not. No one in his
unit has died recently, either, and he is not feeling frightened or unwell. So why arent you

laughing? the politruk enquires. Im from another regiment, the glum man says. Thats not
my commanding officer.
Red Army friendships might not last long, but they certainly were fierce. At this stage in the war,
an infantryman was unlikely to serve with his friends for more than three months before a
wound, death or even a promotion removed him from the group.
Meanwhile, around Kursk itself, and for over 100 miles behind the front, militia groups and
soldiers were set to shifting dirt. By July, when the bombardment finally began, a total of 3,000
miles of trenches had been prepared behind the front, criss-crossing in an angular geometry.
The rich black earth was also sown with metal in unnumbered tons. On average, by July, there
were just over 5,000 anti-tank or anti-personnel mines for every mile of fortification.
However, the soldiers had new orders by then. With the help of NKVD troops, they arrested the
most active members of the resistance. They also shot some of the others in the legs, a
measure which soon terrified the crowd. But it was not good for military public relations. The
regions leaders, working with the generals themselves, now faced the task of restoring local
peoples faith in their defenders. The NKVD would be used for evacuating citizens in future; the
Red Army itself would not be sent to confront Russian peasants.
The citizenship that she assigned to herself, and that she still honours, was Soviet. It was the
label that made greatest sense in the political universe in which she lived, the name that
conjured dreams of brotherhood, equality and proletarian justice for all.
When we come to a minefield, Zhukov would tell Eisenhower later in the war, our infantry
attacks exactly as if it were not there. The losses we get from personnel mines we consider
equal to those we would have gotten from machine guns and artillery if the Germans had
chosen to defend that particular area with strong bodies of troops instead of with minefields.
Of the 403,272 tank men (including a small number of tank women) who were trained by the
Red Army in the war, 310,000 would die.
The conscripts knew that many of their Russian comrades regarded their mere survival of Nazi
rule as evidence of guilt, a dark stain to be washed away with their own blood.
The private farms were fascinating to this child from a collective, used to communist neglect. It
was interesting to compare them, he began. I mean, because I was brought up in this same
thing, in agriculture. He stumbled, trying not to say something. Like thousands of others, he
had discovered a truth that raised doubts about the entire war, about the revolution and about
the Soviet dream. So far, the dawning understanding was still dim, uncertain. But it could never
be forgotten. The word for it is rich, he said. The capitalist farms were richer.
The victims themselves scarcely seemed to feature in their minds as people. They do not
speak a word of Russian, a soldier wrote to a friend in February 1945, but that makes it easier.
You dont have to persuade them. You just point a Nagan and tell them to lie down. Then you do
your stuff and go away.
A drunken Russian is a wholly different person than the sober one, a German writer noted at
the time. He loses all perspective, falls into a fully wild mood, is covetous, brutal, bloodthirsty.
Alcohol makes men lecherous, the anonymous author of a diary of the rapes observed. It
increases considerably their sexual desire (though not their potency, as it has been my lot to
learn). I am convinced that had the Russians not found much alcohol here, there would not have
been half the number of rapes.
The anonymous author of the Berlin diary, watching from her basement room, observed that
they prefer the fat ones. Fat equals beauty because its more female, more distinct from the
male body. It was a taste that she deemed primitive, although she took some pleasure in the
thought that Berliners who had stolen or hoarded food were paying for their anti-social acts.
Gabriel Temkin was among the many troops who sampled the wines of Tokay in Hungary. The
sweet liquor was greatly, and in this case fatally, to the Russian taste. When I entered a huge
wine cellar with rows of tall, black oak barrels I saw an incredible scene, the old soldier recalled.
The floor was knee-deep in wine, and floating in it lay three drowned soldiers. They had used
their sub-machine guns to make holes in the barrels as the easiest way to fill up their mess
tins, and then, having tasted it, evidently could not stop drinking and became so intoxicated
that they drowned in it.
Unlike the Germans (who made use of captured Soviet women for the purpose), the Soviets did
not have field brothels near the front. Sex, in official terms, scarcely existed. Gabriel Temkin

recalled how one regiment reacted when it found a cache of German condoms. They blew them
up, he wrote, and the soldiers played with them like balloons.
And though women bore the brunt of the violence, German men were also victims of a kind. It
was no accident that many rapes took place in view of husbands and fathers. The point was
being made that they were now the creatures without power, that they would have to watch, to
suffer this most intimate degradation.
One woman recounted the tale of a lawyer who had stood by his Jewish wife all through the Nazi
years, refusing to divorce her in spite of the risks. When the Russians arrived, he protected her
again, at least until a bullet from a Russian automatic hit him in the hip. As he lay bleeding to
death, he watched as three men raped his wife.
When a Berlin newspaper reported that a seventy-two-year-old woman had been raped twentyfour times, the anonymous Berlin diarist wearily asked, Who counted?
Whole factories would be dismantled later in the war. Eighty per cent of Berlins industrial
machinery had been hauled away by the Soviets before their allies entered the city in 1945.
They had dismantled the refrigeration plant at the abattoir, an American officer observed, torn
stoves and pipes out of restaurant kitchens, stripped machinery from mills and factories and
were completing the theft of the American Singer Sewing Machine plant when we arrived.
To Stalins mind, only forced labour and compulsory unpaid voluntary work could guarantee
national recovery. By 1950, the Soviet economy was claimed to be twice the size it had been in
1945. This growth was not achieved by fostering the peoples leisure interests.
Rape, for instance, became less common from late June, but one reason for this was that
soldiers were striking up more stable friendships with the local women. Some would even form
households of sorts, hoping to stay and make a life where chance had thrown them. The
practice was so common that only the most brazen immorality was disciplined, such as the case
of an officer who had left six wives pregnant from Poland to Berlin. According to the Mayor of
Koenigsberg, the only Germans in his town who were adequately fed that winter were the
women whom Soviet troops had made pregnant.
And the gifts, the shoes and watches, these seemed to have a different meaning now. At the
front, they had been easy booty, fragments of abundant victory. But now, as the world of
triumph and comradeship began to fall away, they became totems, precious, rare, and at the
same time tarnished by the secret guilt of having lived, not died.
Then there were shortages of doctors, nurses, drugs and prosthetic limbs. Young men who had
lost their legs were forced to trundle around on their own home-made carts, and maimed
beggars became a common sight in Russian towns.
() wartime belief was grimmer, less sophisticated and more immediate. It was better, through
those bleak nights in the forest, to cheer for Zhukov and Stalin than to have nothing in which to
place a faltering faith.

1984, George Orwell, 1948

-

What was required in a Party member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who
knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshipped false gods.
He did not need to know that these gods were called Baal, Osiris, Moloch, Ashtaroth, and the
like: probably the less he knew about them the better for his orthodoxy. He knew Jehovah and
the commandments of Jehovah: he knew, therefore, that all gods with other names or other
attributes were false gods.
He was a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasmsone of
those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought
Police, the stability of the Party depended.
He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it,
in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by
staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.
In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinkingnot
needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

Winston watched them disgustedly. And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power
had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never
shout like that about anything that mattered?
His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which
any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not
be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right!
But there was still that memory moving round the edges of his consciousness, something
strongly felt but not reducible to definite shape, like an object seen out of the corner of ones
eye. He pushed it away from him, aware only that it was the memory of some action which he
would have liked to undo but could not.
Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having
no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed
itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept
the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what
was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was
happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything,
and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of
corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.
He did not suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual
woman, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of
purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her
own, and could not be altered from outside.
The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that
was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been
possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his
own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he
perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.
The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain
where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low,
when they have an aimfor it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much
crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily
livesis to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.
The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain
world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living.
From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from
generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only
without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other
than it is.
If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For
the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in ones own infallibility with the Power to learn
from past mistakes.
Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.
He knew in advance what OBrien would say. That the Party did not seek power for its own ends,
but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail,
cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and
systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for
mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind,
happiness was better.
What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself,
who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific, Robert Leckie, 1957
-

It is an American weakness. The success becomes the sage.

A soldiers pack is like a womans purse: it is filled with his personality. I have saddened to see
the mementos in the packs of dead Japanese. They had strong family ties, these smooth-faced
men, and their packs were full of their families.
It is odd, is it not, that there should have been need of a leader? But there was. Two men do not
need a leader, I suppose; but three do, and four most certainly, else who will settle arguments,
plan forays, suggest the place or form of amusement, and generally keep the peace?
We saw none of the enemy. That day was a dull, lost witness to the cycle of the sun, of which I
have neither memory nor regret.
In front of me marched No-Behind. He was a tall, slender, noisy fellow from Michigan who was
oddly capable of exasperating anyone in H Company merely by marching in front of him. It was
an odd affliction in that it was no affliction: No-Behind actually seemed not to have a behind. So
long and flat were his hips that his cartridge belt seemed always in danger of slipping to his
ankles. No curve of bone or flare of flesh was there to arrest it. He seemed to walk without
bending the knees of his long thin legs, and most maddening, where his trousers should have
bulged with the familiar bulk of a behind, they seemed to sag inward! When to this was added a
girlish voice that seemed forever raised in high-pitched profanity, there emerged an epicene
quality which enraged those unlucky enough to march behind No-Behind. Often I quivered to
draw my bayonet and skewer No-Behind where his behind was not.
Only the trappings of war change. Only these distinguish the Marine souvenir hunter, bending
over the fallen Jap, from Hector denuding slain Patroclus of the borrowed armor of Achilles. One
of the marines went methodically among the dead armed with a pair of pliers. He had observed
that the Japanese have a penchant for gold fillings in their teeth, often for solid gold teeth. He
was looting their very mouths. He would kick their jaws agape, peer into the mouth with all the
solicitude of a Park Avenue dentistcareful, always careful not to contaminate himself by touch
and yank out all that glittered. He kept the gold teeth in an empty Bull Durham tobacco sack,
which he wore around his neck in the manner of an amulet. Souvenirs, we called him.
There was Souvenirs himself, stepping gingerly from corpse to corpse, armed with his pliers and
a dentists flashlight that he had had the forethought to purchase in Melbourne.
Courage was a commonplace. It formed a club or corporation, much as do those other common
things upon which men, for diverse reasons, place so great a value; like money, like charity. For
it is the common on which the exclusive rests.
But that helmet! He wore it always. He wore it for fear of the heat and for fear of the bombs. He
slept with it on. He bathed with it on. It was not uncommon to see him, standing in the middle
of the stream near E Companys lines to our rear, his body ridiculously whitehis helmet on! To
mention it to him, to shout Red, take that damned helmet off! was to draw a look of animal
hatred. Under the helmet, his face became small and sharp and hateful, like an animal with
pointed teeth. Soon the helmet became a fixation with us. We wanted it off. It was a sign that
Red was going locoand after him, who? We schemed to rid ourselves of it.
It puzzled us to see the reappearance of sea bagsstrictly the issue of enlisted menand it
angered us to see them handed out to officers. This was the first piece of discrimination which
we encountered, the first flip of the Single-Sided Coin, whereby the officers would satisfy their
covetousness by forbidding us things rightfully ours, and then take them up themselves, much
as politicians use the courts to gain their ends.
After Molly and Sheila, no more affection. Only the chase. How does it go? How should I know. I
am not a Casanova, nor is this a textbook for the amorous. It is cold, yes; it is calculating, of
course; but a man should not risk involvement when satisfying lust. He must never be romantic.
He must leave romantic love to the unrequited poets who invented it.
A man who lands in the brig is apt to be a man of bold spirit and independent mind, who must
occasionally rebel against the harsh and unrelenting discipline of the camp.
Every foot of the way in these progressions made at an odd, doglike pace, there follows your
prison chaser, trotting grimly behind, his rifle at high port, like a canoeist with paddle poised
your shadow and your shame. The large black circles adorning front and back of your costume
are almost endowed with weight, you feel them so poignantly; for you know that these are there
for the prison chaser to aim at, should you break for freedom.
They concealed the match flare by taking off both of their dungaree coats, and placing them,
like a tent, over the head of one of them. They smoked by inhaling little bursts, expelling them
quickly downward, and then dissipating the telltale clouds by quick, fanlike movement of the

hands. It was a caricature, but no one thought it funny. There were fierce whispers of
displeasure, but the smokers ignored them, continuing to jeopardize the entire room for a
pleasure that could derive only from the knowledge that they were breaking a rule. Certainly
the way they smoked could not be pleasant.
This is how the Marines train their men. Keep them mean and nasty, like starving beasts, says
the Corps, and they will fight better. When men are being moved from one place to another,
spare no effort to make it painful; and before they have arrived at their destination, dispatch a
man ahead to survey the ground with an eye toward discomfort. For sustenance give them cold
food, and for tools a machete, and if the Commander has any influence with the gods of the
clouds, he must see to it that it rains.
Major Major-Shares temper was well known. But the mess corporal was of that peculiar breed of
unhandsome men who, perhaps angered by the airs of their more favored fellows, suddenly
startle them by the strength of some inexplicable and unshakable attitude.
I stood among the heaps of dead. They lay crumpled, useless, defunct. The vital force was fled.
A bullet or a mortar fragment had torn a hole in these frail vessels and the substance had
leaked out. The mystery of the universe had once inhabited these lolling lumps, had given each
an identity, a way of walking, perhaps a special habit of address or a way with words or a knack
of putting color on canvas. They had been so different, then. Now they were nothing, heaps of
nothing. Can a bullet or a mortar fragment do this? Does this force, this mystery, I mean this
souldoes this spill out on the ground along with the blood? No. It is somewhere, I know it.
An officers mess is one of the surest barometers of military success. So long as the officers
continue to pig it with the men, there is danger of defeat. But once the officers mess appears
raised almost on the bodies of the foe, contrived of sticks and pieces of canvas or perhaps only
an imaginary line like a tabooonce this appears, and caste is restored, we know that victory is
ours.
In the quiet that followed, there rose the bellow of the major, commanding, Dont shoot! Get
em with your bayonets! And then, in the ensuing silence, there was the distinct, the
unmistakable, the lucid clicking of a hammer as the major cocked his pistol. Ah, yes: get em
with your bayonets, lads: dont shoot, lads, you may hit the major.
Our position lay in a blasted wood so grim, so stark, so scarred that it might have been the
forest of the moon. The Japanese had defended here and a fierce artillery barrage had been laid
in on them. Our shells ravaged that forest of giant trees. They lay uprooted, or stood broken and
splintered, limbs dangling like broken arms, or decapitated, with their foliage tops lolling over
like a poorly cut head, or they listed, weakened by cannon fire and watersoaked with rain.
Through the day and the night this grotesque forest resounded to the crash of falling trees. And
no less than twenty-five men were killed by them, crushed to death. An equal number were
injured. And once, when we began to dynamite them, we killed another man, to prove that a
bad cure can be as deadly as the cause. A great boulder fell on him as he sat beside his
hammock.
I had perhaps a dozen books, now, among them a dictionary and an almanactwo works which
sufficed to establish me as the Sage of the Second Battalion, First Marines. Many disputes were
referred to me and my books of wisdom, with a confidence as unwarranted as the conceit it
produced.

With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, Eugene B. Sledge, 1981
-

During the first few days, Doherty once asked one of the recruits a question about his rifle. In
answering, the hapless recruit referred to his rifle as my gun. The DI muttered some
instructions to him, and the recruit blushed. He began trotting up and down in front of the huts
holding his rifle in one hand and his penis in the other, chanting, This is my rifle, as he held up
his M1, and this is my gun, as he moved his other arm. This is for Japs, he again held aloft
his M1; and this is for fun, he held up his other arm.
The bread made by our bakers was so heavy that when you held a slice by one side, the rest of
the slice broke away of its own weight.

This was not the dispassionate killing seen on other fronts or in other wars. This was a brutish,
primitive hatred, as characteristic of the horror of war in the Pacific as the palm trees and the
islands.
While I was removing a bayonet and scabbard from a dead Japanese, I noticed a Marine near
me. He wasn't in our mortar section but had happened by and wanted to get in on the spoils.
He came up to me dragging what I assumed to be a corpse. But the Japanese wasn't dead. He
had been wounded severely in the back and couldn't move his arms; otherwise he would have
resisted to his last breath. The Japanese's mouth glowed with huge gold-crowned teeth, and his
captor wanted them. He put the point of his kabar on the base of a tooth and hit the handle
with the palm of his hand. Because the Japanese was kicking his feet and thrashing about, the
knife point glanced off the tooth and sank deeply into the victim's mouth. The Marine cursed
him and with a slash cut his cheeks open to each ear. He put his foot on the sufferer's lower jaw
and tried again. Blood poured out of the soldier's mouth. He made a gurgling noise and
thrashed wildly. I shouted, Put the man out of his misery. All I got for an answer was a cussing
out. Another Marine ran up, put a bullet in the enemy soldier's brain, and ended his agony. The
scavenger grumbled and continued extracting his prizes undisturbed.
The bodies were badly decomposed and nearly blackened by exposure. This was to be expected
of the dead in the tropics, but these Marines had been mutilated hideously by the enemy. One
man had been decapitated. His head lay on his chest; his hands had been severed from his
wrists and also lay on his chest near his chin. In disbelief I stared at the face as I realized that
the Japanese had cut off the dead Marine's penis and stuffed it into his mouth. The corpse next
to him had been treated similarly. The third had been butchered, chopped up like a carcass torn
by some predatory animal.
I realized that compassion for the sufferings of others is a burden to those who have it. As
Wilfred Owen's poem Insensibility puts it so well, those who feel most for others suffer most in
war.
Until the millenium arrives and countries cease trying to enslave others, it will be necessary to
accept one's responsibilities and to be willing to make sacrifices for one's countryas my
comrades did. As the troops used to say, If the country is good enough to live in, it's good
enough to fight for. With privilege goes responsibility.
The Republic, Plato, cca. 380 BC

The more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me is the pleasure and charm of
conversation.
For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold,
then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many.
The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be
attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men's characters and tempers; for he
who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an
opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.
I see that you are indifferent about money, which is a characteristic rather of those who have
inherited their fortunes than of those who have acquired them; the makers of fortunes have a
second love of money as a creation of their own, resembling the affection of authors for their
own poems, or of parents for their children, besides that natural love of it for the sake of use
and profit which is common to them and all men. And hence they are very bad company, for
they can talk about nothing but the praises of wealth.
When a man thinks himself to be near death, fears and cares enter into his mind which he
never had before; the tales of a world below and the punishment which is exacted there of
deeds done here were once a laughing matter to him, but now he is tormented with the thought
that they may be true: either from the weakness of age, or because he is now drawing nearer to
that other place, he has a clearer view of these things; suspicions and alarms crowd thickly
upon him, and he begins to reflect and consider what wrongs he has done to others. And when
he finds that the sum of his transgressions is great he will many a time like a child start up in
his sleep for fear, and he is filled with dark forebodings. But to him who is conscious of no sin,
sweet hope, as Pindar charmingly says, is the kind nurse of his age.

And the different forms of government make laws democratical, aristocratical, tyrannical, with a
view to their several interests; and these laws, which are made by them for their own interests,
are the justice which they deliver to their subjects, and him who transgresses them they punish
as a breaker of the law, and unjust. And that is what I mean when I say that in all states there is
the same principle of justice, which is the interest of the government; and as the government
must be supposed to have power, the only reasonable conclusion is, that everywhere there is
one principle of justice, which is the interest of the stronger.
No physician, in so far as he is a physician, considers his own good in what he prescribes, but
the good of his patient; for the true physician is also a ruler having the human body as a
subject, and is not a mere money-maker.
Oh, no; and so entirely astray are you in your ideas about the just and unjust as not even to
know that justice and the just are in reality another's good; that is to say, the interest of the
ruler and stronger, and the loss of the subject and servant; and injustice the opposite; for the
unjust is lord over the truly simple and just: he is the stronger, and his subjects do what is for
his interest, and minister to his happiness, which is very far from being their own. Consider
further, most foolish Socrates, that the just is always a loser in comparison with the unjust. First
of all, in private contracts: wherever the unjust is the partner of the just you will find that, when
the partnership is dissolved, the unjust man has always more and the just less. Secondly, in
their dealings with the State: when there is an income-tax, the just man will pay more and the
unjust less on the same amount of income; and when there is anything to be received the one
gains nothing and the other much. Observe also what happens when they take an office; there
is the just man neglecting his affairs and perhaps suffering other losses, and getting nothing out
of the public, because he is just; moreover he is hated by his friends and acquaintance for
refusing to serve them in unlawful ways. But all this is reversed in the case of the unjust man. I
am speaking, as before, of injustice on a large scale in which the advantage of the unjust is
most apparent; and my meaning will be most clearly seen if we turn to that highest form of
injustice in which the criminal is the happiest of men, and the sufferers or those who refuse to
do injustice are the most miserablethat is to say tyranny, which by fraud and force takes away
the property of others, not little by little but wholesale; comprehending in one, things sacred as
well as profane, private and public; for which acts of wrong, if he were detected perpetrating
any one of them singly, he would be punished and incur great disgracethey who do such
wrong in particular cases are called robbers of temples, and man-stealers and burglars and
swindlers and thieves. But when a man besides taking away the money of the citizens has
made slaves of them, then, instead of these names of reproach, he is termed happy and
blessed, not only by the citizens but by all who hear of his having achieved the consummation
of injustice. For mankind censure injustice, fearing that they may be the victims of it and not
because they shrink from committing it.