wytchcroft (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wytchcroft) wrote2009-03-08 09:07 am
wytchcroft) wrote2009-03-08 09:07 am
Entry tags:
and something for Alek, Alex - and Borges lovers in general
A good friend sent me a fake newspaper made up from amusing clippings out of various journals and broadsheets - I would guess by the style that this is from the Guardian, but I don't actually know the source. This may seem unbelievable but it's true. (apparently)
ITALY'S STRUGGLE TO DISBAND THE ARMY THAT NEVER WAS
"It is a plot of which Jorge Luis Borges would have been proud: some of the best military and judicial minds in Italy are wrestling with the problem of how to dispose of the unwelcome legacy of tens - perhaps hundreds - of thousands of soldiers who never existed.
Though commanded by a real Lieutenant General, headquartered in Padua, Italy's so called Terzo corpo designato d'Armata was a fiction - a giant cold war bluff. It was dreamed up in the 50s to convince Moscow that NATO's frontline was altogether more solid than was the case.
300,000 army troops -most of them imaginary - were recruited and promoted, fuel was notionally stored, and ammunition supposedly distributed in perhaps the most elaborate exercise ever in Italian fantasia.
The army was disbanded in 1972 but archives and barracks the length of Italy have remained clogged with what La Stampa has said is "tonnes" of paper, And none of it can be destroyed. Under Italian law, officially secret documents can only be pulped once they have been declassified. And they can only be declassified by the office or unit that created them. And, of course, this doesn't exist....
As the former president Francesco Cossiga remarked, "At times, real life is more like novels than you might think."
John Hooper.
HA HA HA!!:)))
ITALY'S STRUGGLE TO DISBAND THE ARMY THAT NEVER WAS
"It is a plot of which Jorge Luis Borges would have been proud: some of the best military and judicial minds in Italy are wrestling with the problem of how to dispose of the unwelcome legacy of tens - perhaps hundreds - of thousands of soldiers who never existed.
Though commanded by a real Lieutenant General, headquartered in Padua, Italy's so called Terzo corpo designato d'Armata was a fiction - a giant cold war bluff. It was dreamed up in the 50s to convince Moscow that NATO's frontline was altogether more solid than was the case.
300,000 army troops -most of them imaginary - were recruited and promoted, fuel was notionally stored, and ammunition supposedly distributed in perhaps the most elaborate exercise ever in Italian fantasia.
The army was disbanded in 1972 but archives and barracks the length of Italy have remained clogged with what La Stampa has said is "tonnes" of paper, And none of it can be destroyed. Under Italian law, officially secret documents can only be pulped once they have been declassified. And they can only be declassified by the office or unit that created them. And, of course, this doesn't exist....
As the former president Francesco Cossiga remarked, "At times, real life is more like novels than you might think."
John Hooper.
HA HA HA!!:)))
Re: from Borges and Eco to Lieutenant_Kije
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf5w-PP6UQo
Re: from Borges and Eco to Lieutenant_Kije