Monday, April 18, 2005

From Clapham with Love

Well, I saw our rival candiates from the Lioberal and Labour parties while out on Clapham high street on Saturday.

I also had a chance to chat with a Bellorussian lady who started telling me how wonderful life was in the old Soviet Union - famillies could have a room to share, and for free! The sort of Trot groups my comrades in Brixton encountered would have been enthused by such a character. I could only think of the millions of Bellorussians slaughtered by Stalin's famines, and the 1.4 million people he had shot in the Prisons of the Soviet Great Terror of the 1930's (Not Nazi style mass sslaughter, 1.4 million people shot one at a time).

Of course, she probably never saw any of this - I suppose if you kept your nose clean and weren't a famine victim life could be alright under Soviet gangster tyranny. Which could be said of much of the world today - most people muddle through, and get by, despite the horrific numbers of victims of starvation war and pandemics spread through greed, fear, and ignorance, but who don't directly touch their lives.

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