You Will Die To Obey

Inspired by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 'Gulag Archipelago'

Too many cows

Too many acres

You must be a kulak

Too many thoughts

Too many questions

You must be a wrecker

Too much compassion

Too much outpassion

You must be states villain

Too little clapping

Too little trapping

You must be vrag naroda

So turn in your family

So turn in your friends

Hand over your wealth

Betray your ideals

Forsake your beliefs

For the good of the nation

Or you will be purged

With a tenner in the gulag

Or a bullet to the brain pan

In the end either way

You will die to obey

For the good of the nation

Author's Note

Reviews

[TerryDarcy-Ryan akaSh..]

Wait a minute we still have real cows ? Cuz I thought we germinated them grew them in factories shoving tons of hormones and junk so they would grow faster so we could eat them faster. Oh no, I am sorry that is the chickens. Never mind! Hey, I Love the poem it is great, it is in your face aggressive. It is honest and people still act like its something they don't have to think about. The best part of your poem is the betrayal yes when it all comes down to the numbers how loyal is your person your counting on?? A bullet to the brain rather than betray my bother or no longer care. Great Job
Rock on !!!

Sheer Terror

[Davidgeo]

Thanks Terror... did you know that industrial cow farms use ground up dead cows to supplement what they feed to living cows? Yeah, it's pretty "awesome" and the reason Mad Cow disease is a thing. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy... and it can withstand temperatures over 1200 degrees Fahrenheit for hours so there is no amount of cooking that can make the meat edible. That poem wasn't really about cows though... it's about the horrible s**t the soviets did to their own population in the name of there fucked up version of "socialism". Any farmer that was deemed too "successful" were called "kulaks" and the state seized their farms and forced them off their land... it was officially called "dekulakization" and resulted in one of the largest famines in modern history, about 6 million people starved to death and another 1.3 million were sent to labor camps or executed if they did not immediately turn over their farms. I recommend to everyone that they read a book called "The Gulag Archipelago" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn... it's f*****g terrifying.

[TerryDarcy-Ryan akaSheerTerror]

over 1200 degrees that is insane, I am shocked I did not know that. I will get to the rest but my brain is fucked up right now that these mother fuckers survive that kind of heat. How can anything survive such heat. Okay I am so fucked up encephalopathy. enchephalo this part of the word is about the the brain and pathy is a generalized term for disorder. Okay I know this amazing stuff about the human body... we adapt ... only the fittest survive. So this why I am the smartest person in the building ... everyone else has a spongy brain. and when did the " kulaks "
occur that is barbaric even for the earlier decades and for these times would I have heard about this genocide?

[Davidgeo]

The worst parts of the purge known as 'The Great Purge' occurred between 1936 and 1939 spearheaded on Stalin's orders by a despicable little man named Nikolai Yezhov (who himself ended up a victim in 1939 for "knowing and seeing too much"). The Russians were executing innocent people long before the Nazi's were. They even sometimes used mobile "gas vans" to do it. In just those years alone about 600,000 were executed without trial based on 'confessions' obtained under torture. Countless more were given long prison sentences in forced labor camps (gulags); so many that even the government lost count/stopped counting because so many were dying due to the harsh conditions. And then came the great famines from all the competent farmers being stripped of their lands. Many, many, many millions of people died during and because of that communist regime.

The problem with mad cow disease (called creutzfeld-jakob disease in humans) is that it is caused by a specific protein in mammal brains called prions. Prions are one of most stable proteins in nature. Very few chemicals can destroy them and, as I mentioned before, even extreme heat does not destroy them. Most adult mammal brains have small amounts of them hanging around their brain tissue, it's why you never want to eat adult human or monkey brains... there's a good chance you'll get some in your blood stream. And once there they start to f**k up how your proteins get folded in your brain and after that it's only a matter of time before severe mental deficiencies start to show up and then, you die because your brain is full of unusable proteins. So, if you feel like you have to eat human or monkey brains make sure it's a babies brain, otherwise you'll probably get Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

[Nipplegrinder]

Socialism is treachery upon one's own people. It should be classified a disease.

[Davidgeo]

Individual human nature just doesn't jibe with the ideology on a large scale. On a slightly unrelated note, I think Ayn Rand's career was just one big troll.

[Nipplegrinder]

Perhaps. At least we got Rush's 2112 out of the bargain.

[Anjali]

very well.. it feels very profound and it flows really well.. nice work!

[Davidgeo]

Okay, but, WHY does it feel profound? It kinda seems like you aren't saying anything because you probably didn't understand what it's about. It's okay to not say anything or even better ask questions. Don't feel obligated to leave a review if you don't identify with what you read. It makes you seem vacuous and pandering.

[Anjali]

That's not true... The first word that came to my mind was the word "profound" and that's why I said it.

[Davidgeo]

Why do you think that word came to your mind though? It's always a good intellectual exercise to articulate your reasoning. Lots of words come to my mind throughout the day, one of the differences between rational thought and irrational thought is the ability to logically articulate the words that come into to your mind upon an initial impression of something. Without that ability those words don't have a whole lot of intellectual value.

[Anjali]

It just popped into my head... I just feel like it's of good quality.

[Davidgeo]

Are you just f****n' with me now? It'd be genuinely pretty f****n' funny if you were.

[Davidgeo]

Seriously though... just watch the video I posted under the poem. It puts things into context. That poem is about mass torture and murder in the name of a political ideology

[Cherrie Palmer]

I read this while eating my double bacon cheese burger with jalapenos. Looking at my daddy's M1. Thinking this old dog won't be run.

[Davidgeo]

That's a damn fine rifle. I've been looking for a 1940's era Garand that isn't 4+ thousand dollars.

Was your father a ww2 vet? My combat experience would be considered a lovely vacation in comparison to their experiences back then.

[Cherrie Palmer]

He was indeed

[Cherrie Palmer]

Marine he was 17 when he joined

[Davidgeo]

Damn Marines, I've been conditioned to dislike Marines... there's this irrational rivalry between the Army and the Marines that exists to this day that I never really understood.

Anyway, I honestly don't think I'd willingly enlist if I was alive back then. They'd have to draft me... that era for most soldiers was f*****g brutal in every sense of that word. Not that it's very easy now, but, the casualty rate back then compared to now is not even comparable. Any infantryman back then had to expect to either get killed, seriously wounded, or severely mentally traumatized. The same risks are still there today but the frequency of occurrence is astronomically lower in comparison.

[Cherrie Palmer]

Different war men and boys were fighting more than a war they were defending a way of life and home. That gives every warrior the mental advantage.

[Davidgeo]

I think I can agree with that, Germany and their allies were truly bent on world domination and it would've only been a matter of time before they invaded North America (pearl harbor made that fact painfully clear). WW2 and to a lessor extent the Korean War were truly the last time's that we didn't have a severe technological advantage over the enemy. Vietnam exposed our strategic weaknesses and overreliance on outdated tactics, but in terms of modernized equipment there was no comparison. That Vietnam thing may have been a completely unnecessary (borderline unjust) war but the asymmetrical nature of that conflict truly shaped what the modern military is today, it forced us to integrate non standard combat tactics with our fancy cutting edge equipment. War will probably never be fought like that again for a very, very, very long time if ever again at all.

[Cherrie Palmer]

Exactly 2 of my brothers served in vn and after it was a hard corner to turn