bob <thanatos@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Jonah Thomas <jethomas5@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> >Iskander <theinfinitiveofgo@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> >> > If a hunting rifle was still a weapon of mass destruction we
> >could> > have a bloody revolution every thirty years and the
> >mainstreamers> > would unanimously keep their mouths shut.
> >>
> >> It's still a weapon of mass destruction.
> >
> >No, it's supposed to cause significant casualties or property
> >destruction. Hard to kill even a hundred people a day with a hunting
> >rifle, and harder to even get started the second day. If a hunting
> >rifle is a wmd then so is a sharp knife -- you could kill just as
> >many people by slitting their throats provided you had them all lined
> >up orderly for it.
>
> Do you think about this often?
No, but occasionally when people talk about hunting rifles and
revolution. I read an autobiography by Nicolai Borodin. He was a child
during the russian revolution, and he wrote about his experience up to
the time he defected to britain in the early 1950's. Highly political,
it reads like gray propaganda, but a lot of it is funny. When he was a
young microbiologist he got sent to georgia. He met two bureaucrats who
hated each other. Each of them told him the other was conspiring to
remove georgia from the USSR. Eventually the secret police arrested both
of them for conspiring together to remove georgia from the USSR. Later
he was sent to britain with two assistants to buy equipment to make
penicillin. His assistants hated each other. They re****ted each other to
the secret police for conspiring to defect to britain. As soon as he
found out, he defected to britain because he knew how the rest of that
story would turn out, and he'd be held responsible for them....
He had a pretty easy time of it during the war, in the caucasus. The day
the germans invaded he volunteered for the army. His boss told him not
to be stupid and got him out of it. He'd shot people for his youth gang
during the disorganised times after the revolution, and he'd been
adopted by the Red Army, he trained in cavalry and then they sent him
off to learn microbiology. So in the caucasus he ran a vitamin factory,
and diagnosed livestock epidemics, and also he trained snipers (who were
very enthusiastic) and machine gunners who were supposed to follow
behind the troops and shoot deserters (who were not enthusiastic at
all).
After the war his little institute in Ajerbaisan had a night guard, an
old man who couldn't actually bring himself to guard anything. Kids
would break in to steal stuff and the old man would give them candy.
Borodin went to the capital to untangle a pay problem and the secret
police there asked him about the old man and he told them a story about
giving candy to thieves or something. They laughed. The man had been in
the secret police during the troubles, and he got a reputation because
once when his team was supposed to execute a small town of
counterrevolutionaries they didn't have any carbine bullets. If they
used rifles to kill them there would be too much noise and the future
victims would get scared and go berserk and maybe kill the whole squad.
So he did it the old fa****oned way. They rounded up a few thousand
counterrevolutionaries and took them a few at a time into a basement or
something, and made them kneel down and get their throats slit. No
noise. Everybody waited patiently, and faced with the problem suddenly
in the basement they just did what they were told. The policemen laughed
that the old man now literally wouldn't hurt a fly.
And it's that last story I thought about. It doesn't take WMDs to kill a
lot of people if you can make them stand in line and wait for whatever
you're going to do to them. I don't think about this often. The last
time I remember thinking about it was at the DMV, where there was a
giant long line that went way out the door into the summer heat. Once I
actually got into the building I saw that the people in line never got
out of sight. They did all their business in one big room and then left
by the same door that their replacements were standing in line. But if
they had been taken a few at a time into some other part of the building
we would have waited anyway. You have to have a driver's license. After
I got my license once in person they let me renew the plates over the
internet after that.
I didn't tell Borodin's stories exactly right. He went to georgia but it
might have been the transcaucasus where the bureaucrats ratted on each
other. Etc.
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