A good fight in a bad cause.

Watching TSA, DEA, FDA and the rest of the alphabet soup agencies gear up their own little armies brings this picture to mind. Not the trained, well-fed and utterly self-serving bureaucrats who do evil for a paycheck, but the naive youngsters who become enforcers of oppressive state regulations in the mistaken belief that they are serving America. Hopefully, our culture is changing to where working for the likes of ATF or TSA becomes as disreputable a choice as being a Stasi agent is in today’s Germany.

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26 Responses to A good fight in a bad cause.

  1. Sergey says:

    Hitlerjuden?

    Oleg, no jokes, bur I’m not a big fan of nazi uniforms and I dont see anything aestetical in pictures like above. This is some sort of necrophilia for a guy with yours historical background.

    • Oleg Volk says:

      The photo isn’t meant to be pretty or inspiring. This how TSA creatures come off to me…they think that they are doing something honorable, I think they are at best as as misguided as Hitlerjugend, at worst as evil as their Nazi handlers.

    • Iam says:

      Is it not precisely aesthetics, to creatively engage the mind with something irrational? It’s absurd seeing that model in that uniform. It hurts my head just looking at it – it makes me think, “Wow, that’s what’s out there, kids with guns fighting for things they don’t understand!” And that’s how we SHOULD feel anytime the enemy clothes the small and robs them of their identity. If you’re reacting, reacting at all, then the photographer has done his work marvelously.

      • Sergey says:

        In case you want a picture that hurts one head just looking at it why not to photo an afroamerican teeenager raping jewish girl? Or just shooting her with a Raven.25 and robbing after? A pretty interesting topic and I’m sure it could be a more budget and effective scene for making.
        You see, a shaved head+Nazi uniform+Sturmgewer can be just another piece of art for an average american, but for a guy like Oleg or me it is something more personal than anything else. So I see nothing in common in TSA, DEA, FDA, FBI, CIA, NSA, ATF, DHS, NRA, NBA, VHS, or ACP with a joking on massacre that your has not yet seen.

        • Oleg Volk says:

          For the same reason why “Nanking, Nanking” was filmed. The director was faulted for showing Japanese soldiers as bad people…not because he depicted as them as bad people, but for showing them as people at all. Evil is often mundane, and this teenager with a shaved has has more in common with an average TSA abuser than you might think.

          • Sergey says:

            Well, Oleg, I think both of us will finally stay with his own view of what a thue fashism is.
            Thanks Lord I’ve no experience with TSA, as well as you have not met a Grozny police department officer at his duty, I hope. 🙂
            Nevertheless I can forgive or understand a guy in any modern police uniform, TSA or MVD does not matter. But I’ll never try to find any compromice with a person in feldgrau, nomatter what happends. It is a personal issue, you know.

            • Oleg Volk says:

              If confronted with the person in the photo, I would have probably shot him as a direct threat to my life. It doesn’t mean that I am not interested in the mechanism by which he came to oppose me because a very similar mechanism may be at work in our times, and with similar consequences down the line.
              And I am truly glad that I don’t deal with either Russian and Chechen police…even though I have in my possession Mosin rifle clips sent to me by a Russian police officer.

    • JAFO says:

      Congratulations, Sergey- you completely, utterly, missed the point

  2. herddog505@yahoo.com says:

    May I suggest:

    Hopefully, our culture is changing to where liberty and independence are the natural bent of so many Americans that even creating agencies like the ATF or TSA would be as unthinkable as creating the Stasi is in today’s Germany.

    The problem isn’t so much that we’ve got misguided people in uniform, some of whom degenerate in goons. Rather, the problem is that we’ve become a country of apathetic cowards who run crying to the federal government to “SAVE US!!!! OH, SAVE US!!!!” every time we even THINK that something bad might happen. As a result, we’ve given our sheepdogs so many other tasks beyond just keeping away the wolves that they sometimes see the sheep as the enemy.

    When all you have is teeth, every problem starts to look like a wolf.

    • Oleg Volk says:

      There’s also a problem of tax-payers who think they are tax-eaters and voting against their own interests…and true tax-eaters who vote for their own ends, with the liberty-minded productive John Galts a minority at the voting booth. That’s a topic for another post.

      • herddog505@yahoo.com says:

        I suggest that the tax-eaters (good term) are part-n-parcel with the “SAVE US! OH, SAVE US!” crowd: it’s always government’s responsibility to protect them from any harm, even something as trivial as not having a cel phone or cable TV.

      • anonymous coward says:

        > There’s also a problem of tax-payers who think they
        > are tax-eaters and voting against their own interests

        There’s also the problem of tax-eaters who think they are tax-payers…

        http://www.google.com/search?q=red+states+receive+more+in+taxes

        and voting against their own interests.

        Funny how everyone thinks that they’re a John Galt.

  3. James Foy says:

    The point is to keep these agencies from becoming the Stasi (or any number of government approved murderers).
    We’ve had, in Fullerton, CA, four police beat a mentally handicapped man to death for being homeless. The ringleader will get 4 years. He should be hung. Government employees/public servants should be held to higher standards, not lower.

  4. Wess Rodgers says:

    I think the photo is jarring and disturbing, but not nearly so much as having the nice kid who used to live down the block from you, shove a flash suppressor in your ribs and as where you keep your food storage. This image evokes thoughts of reality that happens all too often, and almost always to people who thought it was too distasteful to even acknowledge, much less discuss. One of the functions of art is to combine elements of reality in such a way as to create in the viewer new cognitive connections. They don’t have to be positive, and the vast majority of Oleg’s work strikes me as very positive. However, there must needs be opposition in all things. We recognize things by understanding how they are different from other things. I have in my mind this photo, displayed beside the one Oleg posted a short time back that portrayed a father with a baby on his arm and a pistol in his hand. There are great and sometimes hideous opposites in our lives. I am personally grateful for the artistry of man like Oleg Volk. Keep up the fire, Oleg.

  5. MAJ Mike says:

    Everybody!!

    “Lighten up, Francis!”

    Its only a picture.

  6. Bob G says:

    I looked at the pic before reading, and with the thin woman with shaved head holding a sturmgewehr, I couldn’t help thinking of the survivors of concentration camps in the cases where the Nazi guards fled to escape advancing troops. Some of these survivors armed and clothed themselves with what they could find. I imagined a group of them grabbing a straggling guard and relieving him of weapon, clothing and boots.

    Then there were the partisans, many of whom did not likely have a lot of food or clothing available, arming, clothing and feeding themselves with what they could find.

    These to me are positive images, more in line with what I usually see from Oleg. For a jack-booted thug, the pic was a little ambiguous for me. I was also thrown off for a moment, because the mag in the gun didn’t look like one for the .22LR, and I assume this is the lookalike in .22 rimfire.

    Respectfully,
    Bob G

    • "lee n. field" says:

      I couldn’t help thinking of the survivors of concentration camps in the cases where the Nazi guards fled to escape advancing troops. Some of these survivors armed and clothed themselves with what they could find.

      Ditto. That’s how I interpreted the pic — as an undernourished freedom fighter/guerrilla/escapee from somewhere, working with permanently “borrowed” equipment and clothing.

      This is a woman in the picture, correct?

      • Oleg Volk says:


        “Some of these survivors armed and clothed themselves with what they could find.”

        The image in the initial post was meant to be a Volkssturm draftee. My point was that some of our foes had little choice about their role, not just because of compulsion but for lack of knowing any better.

  7. Joe. S. says:

    A very disturbing photograph and analogy as well Oleg.

  8. Endif says:

    “Gear up their own armies”

    Hyperbolic hyperbole is hyperbolic.

  9. anonymous coward says:

    Since I don’t have any Photo Shop skills, I would suggest doing a series of pictures showing officers in Nazi uniforms manning airport security checkpoints.

  10. Pingback: A good fight in a bad cause by Oleg Volk – Aug 2012 « iamrising

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