And a lucky thing the Soviets did that or they wouldn't be the thriving society they are today.
But I can see the charm of the clean cut, the new deal, the fresh start as well as the next person. A few well-trained psychologists and the Man-On-The-Street---any street, anywhere---will be like putty in our hands.
The future is so difficult to predict anyway. Why worry about banana peels?
"...Habsburg--the very name evoked memories of Roman Catholicism, of the Armada, the Inquisition, Metternich, Lafayette jailed in Olmutz and Silvio Pellico in Brunn's Spielburg fortress. Such a state had to be shattered, such a dynasty had to disappear. Thus--finally--the House of Austria went into exile, to be replaced by a simple common man from Austria, and allged house painter, a man who drowned the world in a flood of blood and tears...."
More bananas------
US Forces In Philippines Facing CIA-Trained Abu Sayyaf Terrorists
By MICHAEL A. BENGWAYAN
Basilan, Philippines (March 10, 2002) --- Unknown to most, the U.S. troops especially the Special Forces now in this Abu Sayyaf lair, are facing not merely a rag-tag band of bandits but hard core Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-trained fighters.
Most of the Abu Sayyaf leaders have fought...in the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan in the 1980s after receiving training from the CIA, battling some of Russia1s best fighting paratroopers, a reality the Philippine military seemed to have forgotten.
And they are now better and well armed, thanks to the millions of dollars of ransom collected from the so many hostages they have taken, some of which they brutally tortured, beheaded and killed.
According to former Philippine Senate Minority Leader Nene Pimentel, the Abu Sayyaf are remnants of about 800 Filipino Muslim Moujahideens who, together with thousands of other Muslim jihad warriors from several countries, were recruited, trained and financed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to fight the CIA-sponsored proxy war in Afghanistan against the Russians in 1980. Pimentel, a senator from this war-torn island of Mindanao, said that the terrorists1 training as well as familiarity with the terrain in Mindanao, has made it very difficult for Philippine government troops to put an end to the Abu Sayyaf rampage. Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, coming into grips with reality and putting pride aside, has turned to the United States for assistance resulting to the deployment of 650 U.S. troops, a part of which are from the Special Forces, otherwise known as the Green Berets. She earlier saber-rattled last year the fighting words "I will pulverize you, you are just one bullet, I will decimate you" in which the Abu Sayyaf responded in July 4 by beheading hostaged American missionary Guillermo Sobero. Pimentel's disclosure is bolstered by the book of John K. Cooley titled "Unholy Wars". Cooley, in this book claimed "thousands of Muslim fighters from many parts of the world, including many young men from the Muslim-dominated but impoverished areas in Mindanao, enlisted to fight in Afghanistan with pay incentives ranging from $100 to $300 a month."
"The training of the moujahideens for guerilla warfare was undertaken by the CIA with the active collaboration of secret, usually, intelligence, services of the armed forces or select military officers in various countries, including our own," Cooley said. "When the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, the Moujahideens either returned to their home countries or proceeded to other countries and put their Afghan war military experience at the service of certain fundamentalist causes of Islam", the book revealed.
"This group (of Filipino Muslim Moujahideens) was the core of an armed guerilla band of several hundred men who moved from its Peshawar, Pakistan base to the southern Philippine Islands after the end of the Afghan war. Under the name of the Abu Sayyaf group, it operated on the fringe of the Moros Muslim insurgency," the Cxooley's book added.
The Abu Sayyaf took its name from Professor Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, an Afghan intellectual, who had preached an ultra-conservative Islamic ideology called Wahabi. Acoording to Pimentel, in the case of the Filipino Muslim moujahideens, most came back to various parts of Mindanao from their base in Peshawar, Pakistan. Cooley calls the Abu Sayyaf in the 1990s as "the most violent and radical Islamist group in the Far East, using its CIA and ISI (Pakistan1s intra-military directorate for intelligence services) training to harass, attack and murder Christian priests, wealthy non-Muslim plantation-owners and merchants and local government in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao......"
This is quite correct - but there is a little more to the story. The Wahabi are Saudi, in fact, were responsible for the accession to power of King Saud in the early part of the last century. It really does come back to them, like it or not. They still control the madrasas just as they did 100 years ago, and are still using that control to foment political and cultural recidivism.
It is doubly ironic that the imperial power the Wahabi used to rail at, Great Britain, was responsible in large part for their current position. We have taken the place of Britain in Wahabi demonology as the representatives of a culture that most threatens the control of the religious conservatives. We are a necessary external enemy, and nothing more.
As far as the CIA being responsible for arming and training the mujahadeen, that is hardly new news. Our foreign policy has been a disaster at least since the war against Spain. One consistent thing is that we either back the wrong people, or back the right people the wrong way. Considering the American propensity for siding with the Moslems, our continued support of Israel is a mystery to me.