A Chip Off The Old Bloc

Back in the 90's I was newly returned from a stint abroad, and penniless as usual.
So, for the sake of a little ironic, masochistic amusement, I stayed in a West London traveller's hostel.
Sure enough, I was exposed to that mentally stultifying brew of 'friendliness', solicitousness and bombastic induction into the world of 'Drum' tobacco and extra-fat cigarettes, harvested from the willing local 'businessmen' that are so easy to find when you are in that quasi-twilit world.

In other words, so long as there aren't too many murders, the police never go near.
And if they did they would have to know what they were doing.
Scratch'n'sniff?
Ever see a drug dose disguised as a sweet wrapper?

Earl's Court is big business, bartertown for crims, cruds and governments alike.

Anyway, in walks this Australian one day, a personable young fella, not immediately identifiable as belonging to one of the strange cults that bolsters these sociologically excluded vagrants against the world, and we get to talking.

Friendly, damned if we don't go walking round to the Australian beer shop barefoot.

The conversation turned to movies, and I mentioned 'Evil Roy Brown'; in a sudden burst of enthusiasm my young pal's eyes lit up:
"That was the film my group studied......."
Then he realised he shouldn't have said that and shut up.

If you know the film, it's about an attempt to rehabilitate a wild individual called Roy Brown, who gains roaringly laughter-filled amusement from kicking crutches away and so on.

Suffice to say, this fella was a 'product' of Australia, not like other Australians, and someone they might have been proud of.
But he had been trained.
By whom? I don't know.
For what? I can't say.

Except that the whole idea of having a secret group tied in with my previous experience in 1984 when in a similar situation I found myself face to face with a Norwegian who claimed to have gone to a 'very Socialist school'.
Never mind terrorist training camps.

And so today we live in the post-Soviet world, and all these people are growing towards Middle Age, orphaned and thrown out into it.

What could they possibly do?
Obvious.
What they were trained to do.
They are the Soviet-age equivalent of the B-52 crew in 'Doctor Strangelove';beyond recall, sufficiently 'of' their free countries not to be controllable, but trained to 'fly beneath our radar' and deliver their cargo of ideology.

And they are still doing it now.

Ever wonder who you were talking to on the web?
I have one name.
How many people use that name? In my case only me.
But you can practically guarantee that somewhere there are 'cells', in traditional NKVD fashion(but oh, so soft-edged), of three or four, sharing duty at the front and doing their best to pass the batons in the baton-charge assault on other people's mental integrity.
Only they are so close to our culture that they would probably call it 'rotating shield harmonics' after Star Trek.

Here's another thought; what happened to these schools? Did they close?Change?Go even further underground?
Who knew?
And why didn't they tell us?