Date: Sun, 05 Jan 1997 18:10:05 -0600
   From: Richard Lawson <sterman@sprynet.com>

   Can we take this debate offline?  There's no reason this needs to be on
   the FFML.

I find this response from the author of "The Ways of the Amazons"
(from Thy Inward Love, where Shampoo goes back to her village, and
among other things debates the best posture her village should take
towards the government) to be truly fascinating.

   Date: Mon, 06 Jan 1997 00:14:09 GMT
   From: KLEPPE@execpc.com (Gary Kleppe)

   On Sun, 5 Jan 1997 18:07:01 -0500 (EST), Harold Ancell wrote:

   [Discussion of Chinese government and gun control snipped]

   I am not going to carry out this sort of political debate here. It is
   a totally inappropriate forum.

See above for why it might not be so "totally inappropriate".

As long as authors of fanfics try to write *realistic* stories set in
the PRC *and* attempt to whitewash its nature, something's going to
stick in my craw.  I'd prefer to see either Takahashi's approach or
something like Solzhenitsyn or the guy who is currently giving the
goo-goos conniption fits with his exposure of the Chinese Gulag.

   If you wish to continue this let us take it elsewhere.

But of course.  I'll let Solzhenitsyn provide my closing words on the
subject to the list:

       "And how we burned in the camps later, thinking:  What
  would things have been like if every Security Operative, when
  he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain
  whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his
  family?  Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for
  example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the
  entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs,
  paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and
  at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had
  **nothing left to lose** and had boldly set up in the
  downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes,
  hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?  After all,
  you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night
  for no good purpose.  And you could be sure ahead of time
  that you'd be cracking the skull of a cutthroat.  Or what
  about the **Black Maria** sitting out there on the street
  with one lonely chauffeur- what if it had been driven off or
  its tires spiked?  The Organs would have very quickly
  suffered a shortage of officers and transport and,
  notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine
  would have ground to a halt!

       If....if...We didn't love freedom enough.  And even
  more-we had no awareness of the real situation.....We purely
  and simply *deserved* everything that happened afterward."

>From the _Gulag Archipelago_....

					- Harold