More Cossack News

The note from Professor Anonymous yesterday about the Zaporosian Cossacks absolutely delighted the Great Plotnik. When he asked for details from the Great Plotnik Fact Checking Division, which due to cutbacks now consists of one squirrel, two pencils and one old volume of the 1960 Encyclopedia Brittanica (Be-Co) (BZ: This is the volume that has been missing from your Britannica since you were in Elementary School: the squirrel had it), the fact checker was unable to verify or deny Anonymous's comments. But they sound accurate to Plotnik.

What it reminds him is that history is always written by people with the best writers.

And victims are almost always the wrong victims.

We live in a world of Have and Have Not, and that has been the case since Eve (Have Not) ate the Apple and God (Have) was furious at her. He had lots of apples. He invented them, he could have put more on the tree at any time. She just wanted one crummy apple. Look what happened.



And who wrote the book about it. Eve? Na na na.

Professor Anonymous points out that the Jews in Poland were seen as agents of the landlords, which they probably were. But there was a reason. Throughout the Middle Ages and onwards, Jews were periodically rounded up for political reasons and either expelled from the kingdom or made to live in ghettoes surrounded by gates and high walls. The only way this tiny ethnic group could survive was to ally itself with the King. But they had to pick the right King.

Kings came and Kings went. The really successful ones wrote books about it.

It goes all the way back to the bible. Joseph saved Egypt from famine, but when the Pharoah died and his son took over, the son couldn't remember what Joseph had done for the Egyptians. He enslaved Joseph's people, who later become known as Jews. This was a case where the Jews guessed wrong.

But they wrote the history. It is called Passover.

On the other hand, the Egyptians probably don't tell this story the same way. They probably look at Jews who wanted to leave Gorgeous Egypt the same way the English look at the colonists who wanted to leave Mother England or the slaveholders looked at their beloved darkies. Ingrates.

Stories always have two or three or four sides and you seldom get more than one.

So the traditionally impoverished and landless peasants saw the Jews as the enemy, when they SHOULD of been pissed at the landlords.

This doesn't mean the Cossack peasants didn't have cause to be frustrated and furious. They were just furious at the wrong people.

It also doesn't mean the victims didn't have cause to be furious at their attackers.
They too were furious at the wrong people. Both groups should have united to take down the King.

But they didn't. Instead, they told stories. And all of us grew up hearing the stories our own people chose to remember. They're good stories. But they're rarely the whole story.