In Israel, the Prime Minister stands up and says, “Enough. We have to prevail.” And then the leader of the opposition party gets up and says:
The prime minister must “not do half a job, he must finish the job” against Hizbullah, said Netanyahu. “Israel must learn their lesson this time – a decisive victory without concessions to eliminate Hizbullah once and for all.”
I wonder what it’s like to live in a country where “opposition” means opposed to the other party and not to the country itself.
It was funny.
The first jokes about the Russian revolution surfaced immediately after October 1917. In one, an old woman visits Moscow zoo and sees a camel for the first time. “Look what the Bolsheviks have done to that horse!” she exclaims. As the system became harsher, a distinctive communist sense of humour emerged—pithy, dark and surreal—but so did the legal machinery for repressing it. Historian Roy Medvedev looked through the files of Stalin’s political prisoners and concluded that 200,000 people were imprisoned for telling jokes, such as this: Three prisoners in the gulag get to talking about why they are there. “I am here because I always got to work five minutes late, and they charged me with sabotage,” says the first. “I am here because I kept getting to work five minutes early, and they charged me with spying,” says the second. “I am here because I got to work on time every day,” says the third, “and they charged me with owning a western watch.”
