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The Citizen, 1990-04-04, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 4, 1990. PAGE 5. Warfare brings out the animals I’ve been reading a book called “The Eco Wars" by a Canadian writer, David Day. Mostly, the book describes the stupid things we’ve done to tear up Terra Firma - deforestation, desertification, nuclear pro­ liferation and like that. But there’s one chapter devoted to what may be mankind’s favourite pastime -- war. And more particularly, our efforts to get animals to fight our wars for us. Consider the humble pigeon. A self­ effacing bird whose idea of a good time is a few kernels of corn and the opportunity to carpet bomb a bronze statue or two. Little enough to ask of life. We repay them with a good neighbour policy that approaches genocide. Did you know that 20,000 homing pigeons were killed during World Wars One and Two? And not in the name of drumsticks, either. Those birds were acting as couriers for the Allied Forces - beating their little wings off. dodging flak and shrapnel and snipers’ bullets to carry messages wrapped around their legs from one military command post to another. The homing pigeons tragic flaw was being too good at its job. Military boffins were so impressed by the pigeon’s The International Scene Poland suffers in first hard step BY RAYMOND CANON Events are moving so fast in all of eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union, that it is difficult to keep tabs on all of them, let alone the aftermath of momentous decisions. One thing that has interested me during the past few months has been how well Poland would be able to make the transition from a basket case of a planned economy to something approach­ ing an efficient free enterprise economy similar to what we have in the' western world. I should qualify that statement right at the beginning. There is actually no such thing as a free enterprise economy any more; there is too much government influence or interference these days for any country to consider itself as being in that category. Actually we have what is considered to be a mixed economy but what Poland is trying to do is make the transition from a system that was totally planned by the state into one in which the state makes considerably fewer decisions. The new Polish government, i.e. Solidar­ ity, is trying to do something about the whole matter in the short time of one year, which would be remarkable even for an economy already classified as free enter­ prise. Since January 1 of this year Poles have been living with the new system. Here are some of the things they are seeing. Let’s take a look at gasoline prices which have been left to find their own level in true market economy fashion. To say that the change is dramatic would be putting it mildly; the cost has gone up no less than eight-fold which means that drivers can ill afford to go hardly anywhere. This has led. for one thing, to the disappearance of line-ups at the border. Who can afford to get even that far? If you decide to leave the car at home and take the street car in Warsaw or any other city, you will find that willingness to put its tail feathers on the line that they investigated the military potential of larger flying suicide squads. Crows, ducks, geese - even turkey vultures were sent to bird boot camp to imbibe the rudiments of the courier business. Actually, the j,umbo avians were fairly quick learners, but the idea of using bigger birds for battle communications never really caught on. Somehow the image of battle plans flying in, clutched in the talons of a vulture failed to captivate the military mind ... Fortunately, the fumbled torch of a Feathered Forces concept was snatched by Doctor Louis Feiser. Dr. Feiser is destined to live forever in the annals of military obscenity as the inventor of napalm, but that wasn’t his only contribution. He also gave us the Bat Bomb. In theory, it worked like this: Doctor Feiser and a crack squadron of medical seamstresses suture incendiary devices (i.e. tiny bombs) to the furry chests of a whole bunch of bats. Said bats are then dropped from an airplane over an enemy city. They flutter down and seek out attics, eaves and other dark, combustible crannies where they hang out for the night. But first, being fastidious, they gnaw the sutures of their body packs. This activates a delayed-action fuse and poof! Suddenly an enemy city has hun­ dreds, perhaps thousands of fires to contend with. That was the theory. What happened was the bats got impatient and gnawed their sutures well ahead of schedule, burning down a $2 million US aircraft hangar. your ticket costs you only four times more than it did before. Given the fact that wages have remained basically the same, can you imagine what Poles are experiencing with regards to their wallets. Coal for heating homes has gone up by no less than 600 per cent while sugar and flour are so expensive that local bakers are looking into the possibilities of buying both products abroad. This climb in prices has not been lost on the consumer either; when he or she goes to the local bakery, they discover that bread has gone up an astounding 1800 per cent. If there are wage increases, and there are some, the government has decreed that they cannot be more than 30 per cent of the current rate of inflation which is calculated to be in the vicinity of 60 per cent. So far most people still have the same job they had last year but unemployment is expected to start climbing as the less efficient businesses discover they can no longer operate under existing conditions and declare bankruptcy. You might think that the people would Letter Thanks for your donations THE EDITOR, I would like to thank everyone who donated to the Heart & Stroke Foundation during our recent campaign in Blyth. A total of $827 was collected. This amount is down from last year due to a shortage of canvassers. Special thanks to the canvassers Mary The views from Mabel's Grill Continued from page 4 all got together and stopped providing us with food." Yes. said Hank, but not only can farmers not agree on anything, but some consum­ ers have gone so long without real food that they could go on eating chocolate bars and potato chips and drinking pop for months and never know the farmers had gone on strike. FRIDAY: Ward says he’s really confused But Great Moments in Animal Warfare don’t play national favourites. The Rus­ sians tried strapping grenades to dogs trained to run under tanks. When an antenna on the dogs back touched the underside of the tank ... KA-BLAM! No more tank. (Or dog). Alas, the Russkies forgot to teach the dogs how to read. As often as not the tanks they chose to belly under had a hammer and sickle on the side. Then there were the Killer Dolphins, trained by U.S. Forces in Vietnam to hunt underwater saboteurs and jab them with large hypodermic needles strapped to their beaks. Did that work? Well, sort of. An unofficial count has it that approximately 60 South Vietnamese (Guilty? Innocent? Only Neptune knows) were assassinated by armed dolphins, along with two drunken American soldiers who went for an unauthorized swim in classified waters. And who can forget the Kamikaze Cat? Back in the 40’s, British Intelligence tried dropping cats attached to bombs on enemy ships at sea. The theory was that a cat’s hatred of water would make it steer the bomb towards the target ship. Didn’t work too well. Cats slung out of speeding airplanes several thousand feet in the air lack the detachment necessary to guide missiles reliably. “Animals" wrote George Eliot, “are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.” George was right -- and more’s the pity. Animals would fare a lot better in this world if they possessed the capacity to ask a few pertinent questions or tear a strip off their human handlers once in a while. be on the verge of open rebellion. Actually so far the mood has been relatively calm. The two main exceptions to date are the miners and the farmers. The latter have a considerable amount of clout in the new government but they are facing the elimination of about one-third of their farms, since many of them are too small to be profitable in any market economy. The rather sharp increase in interest rates together with other increased costs means that they have to cut production. The miners are also in a foul mood but, if they get the money they want, they risk bankrupting the mines and thus losing their jobs. Faced with that scenario, most of the miners who opted to go out on strike, have been faced with the closure of their mines and have gone quietly back to work. Solidarity is still popular in spite of all this. In a poll taken since the first of the year, 80 per cent of those Poles who expressed a preference stated that they would still vote for Solidarity. As far as they are concerned, the past is a dead issue. The Communists in any election would get only one per cent of the votes. Holland, Melda McElroy, Connie Bromley, Kathy Bromley, Linda Stewart, Mary Lou Stewart and Sheron Stadelmann for their dedication and hard work. Thank you! Lois van Vliet Co-ordinator for the Heart & Stroke Foundation Village of Blyth. over this Poll Tax dispute in Britain and what it’s all about. All these protests seem like just the kind of protest everybody makes when they’re getting hit with a new tax, he said. Tim explained that rather than tax you on your house, Mrs. Thatcher wants to put a tax on everybody that lives in a city now. "What else can she do when she’s got to the point many people can’t even afford a house so live in the streets," he said. Letter from the editor Does the Pentagon know? BY KEITH ROULSTON Maybe retired Lieutenant Commander J. V. (Jock) Andrew should be passing a warning on to the United States govern­ ment that it may be about to be invaded and taken over. Mr. Andrew, in case you haven't heard of him, is the author of a number of books that call on English Canadians to fight back or they will lose their country, taken over by the French-speaking people of Quebec. He calls Quebec an “impregnable bastion, breeding pen and marshalling yard for the colonization of the rest of Canada.” (Impregnable and breeding pen in the same sentence?) In a recent interview Mr. Andrew, whose latest book is called “Enough! Wake-up English-speaking Canada! Enough of this Absurdity!” said he believes absolutely that there is a conspiracy afoot to get rid of English Canadians and that the French “want the whole damned country.” We folks in the newspaper business and the other media, particularly the govern­ ment-funded CBC, are part of a conspiracy to “destroy the economy of English-speak­ ing Canada.” Hmmm. Kind of strange that most of us in the business, who can barely keep up with English, would want to put ourselves out of a job when the country becomes totally French. Those French must really be devious though. They keep talking about wanting to get out of the country altogether, keep saying bilingualism isn’t enough so it must all be part of a plot. Yeh, that’s it, a plot. Surely Mr. Andrew must have seen by now this goes far beyond just taking over Canada. First of all they rigged it so we’d elect that guy Lester Pearson who, even though he wasn’t from Quebec, was a pawn for the plot by getting the whole bilingualism thing going in the first place. Of course Pearson also helped get Trudeau into office and he really got things going. Just because he could speak perfect English he lulled us into thinking that he was just trying to bring peace and harmony to the country. But he was really planting the seeds of the destruction of English Canada. But somewhere along the way those Quebec schemers realized they could get so much more, and here’s where it gets really devious and the Americans better wake up. The schemers in Quebec realized they could take over not just Canada, but all of North America if they played their cards right. They knew that Trudeau would never go along so they got Brian Mulroney (another Quebecer) in there. What else explains that the entire province, that used to be almost solidly behind Trudeau giving him nearly every seat, switches around and goes strongly for Mulroney. So Mulroney comes in and the first thing he does is change his mind and decides Canada should have free trade with the United States. You notice that Quebecers went right along? They knew it was all part of the plot. They knew that if Canada got swallowed up by the Americans, they could look to undermine the Americans too and have the whole continent to themselves. Now everything is going according to plan. Confused Canadians are rebelling against Meech Lake. Some communities are declaring themselves English only. Quebec, pretending to be upset by this and the opposition to Meech Lake, is threaten­ ing to separate again. But astute observers like Mr. Andrew knows its all part of the scheme. If Quebec separates, the rest of Canada will eventually join up with the U.S. Didn’t that guy Jean Chretien say that just the other day? Quebec will put up a good showing but then it will agree to join the U.S too, negotiating the same kinds of rights it had in Canada. Then it will start working its evil nsidc the United States and soon the entire contir ent north of Mexico will be speaking French. And Ronald Reagan thought it was the Soviets he had to fear. But Mr. Andrew, have you told the Pentagon yet?