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the people who do this work must be completely honest and trustworthy.’ That was so paradoxical that she almost laughed. ‘Honest and trustworthy?’ she repeated. ‘To spy on your friends?’
A boy with an impish grin read a piece about a clumsy farmer trying to herd a flock of geese, which the crowd quickly realized was a metaphor for the Communist party organizing the nation.
‘An incident? I asked the man standing in front of me in the line how long he had been unemployed. The woman behind the counter stood up and yelled at me. “There is no unemployment in Communist countries!” she screeched. I looked at the queue in front of me and behind, and I laughed. That’s an incident?’
She thought gloomily of the events of 1914. No one had wanted war then. But the Austrian Emperor had seen Serbian independence as a threat, in the same way that Kennedy saw Cuban independence as a threat. And once Austria declared war on Serbia the dominoes fell with deadly inevitability until half the planet was involved in a conflict more cruel and bloody than any the world had previously known.
‘I think there’s probably a controlling intelligence in the universe, a being that decided the rules, such as E = mc2, and the value of pi. But that being isn’t likely to care whether we sing its praise or not, I doubt whether its decisions can be manipulated by praying to a statue of the Virgin Mary, and I don’t believe it will organize special treatment for you on account of what you have around your neck.’
the Civil Rights Commission had produced a horrifying report on the abuse of Negroes in Mississippi. But the Kennedy administration had cleverly undermined the report.
President Kennedy had a good heart, she believed, but his eye was always on the next election.
He did not like Southern segregationists, but he was not willing to sacrifice himself in the battle against them.
‘He was similar to me,’ Walli said. ‘Except that I liked guitars and he liked guns.’
‘We were just two boys. I escaped because I had to. He shot me because he had to. It’s the Wall that is evil.’
she was intrigued by John Lennon singing: ‘Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.’ It so vividly described most people in East Germany, she thought.
President Reagan remained popular, despite having committed crimes far worse than those which had brought Nixon down: financing terrorism in Nicaragua, trading weapons for hostages with Iran, and turning women and girls into mangled corpses on the streets of Beirut.
these men were brutal tyrants, torturers and mass murderers. Stalin had not been exceptional, he had been typical of Communist leaders.
our aim has been to defeat Communism. But, in the end, Communism defeated itself.’
‘Reagan didn’t do this. Gorbachev did it. Him and the price of oil. And the fact that Communism never really worked anyway.’
Are you going to tell people that Communism collapsed because Reagan made a speech? They’ll never believe that.’ ‘Sure they will,’
