Goodbye Saker.

POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Sunday, February 19, 2023 09:46
VIEWED: 462
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SIGNYM

Sunday, February 19, 2023 9:46 AM

This was the first article that I came across by the Saker. It was so heartfelt, lonely, hopeful.

Saker is closing down his blog. He's mentioned health issues that he needs to attend. Hubby thinks he might be terminal. I didn't always agree with Saker, especially on religion, but he was always genuine and I'll miss him.

Quote:

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Submarines in the desert” (as my deepest gratitude to you)
586,013 Views November 13, 2014

Submarine in the desert


Foreword
I have been thinking about writing this post for several months now. But in a world were everything coming from the heart is misconstrued as some form of posturing, I was frankly afraid to do so. Also, writing that kind of stuff is not what bloggers do, much less so those who try to run a halfway credible blog. And yet, every time I got a kind email, a letter or even a gift, I felt that I have to write this. God knows I am opening myself up for even more misrepresentations as usual, but I think it is well worth it. My spiritual father always used to say “one soul is more precious than the entire universe“.
So I dedicate this post to that one soul.

Introduction
My life has been one of ups and downs. Early on, after a pretty nasty childhood, it went up, rather rapidly. Then came the “fall from (pseudo-) grace” and I lost my career. It is still too early to go into all the details, but let’s just say that I used to be associated with a “three letter outfit” whose existence was not well-known by the general public and which has since been disbanded. In my field, I got to the proverbial ‘top’ pretty early on, but soon the war in Bosnia began to open my eyes to many things I had never suspected before. Then I found out about two things which got me blacklisted in my own, putatively democratic, country: I found out that a group of people had uselessly been murdered as a result of the criminal incompetence of their superiors and I found out that one guy had taken a long jail sentence while all this superiors had managed to walk away from a crime they all had committed. And even though I never went public, or even told my closest friends about it (to protect them), I was blacklisted and prevented from ever working again.

In those dark days my wonderful wife was always trying to tell me that it was not my fault, that I had never done anything wrong, that I was paying the price for being a person of integrity and that I had proven many times over how good I was in my field. I always used to bitterly reply to her that I was like a “submarine in a desert”: maybe very good at “something somewhere”, but useless in my current environment (I always used to visualize a Akula-class SSN stranded smack in the middle of the Sahara desert – what a sight that would be! I wish somebody would use a Photoshop-like software to create that pic). What I have found out since, is that our planet is covered with deserts and that there are many, many submarines in them, all yearning for the vastness of an ocean.

Modest beginnings at first
I came to the USA in 2002 with only one desire: to leave my past on the other side of the ocean and to disappear, to become an anonymous ‘nobody’ who would be left alone. More than anything else, I needed time to recover, to lick my wounds and to spend time with the only people who had stood by my without every doubting me: my wife and my kids.

The French have a very good saying:”chassez le naturel et il revient au galop” which can roughly be translated as “try to suppress your nature, and it will come back with a vengeance”. This is what happened to me. While in 2002 I had promised myself to never analyze anything more complicated that a fiction book, by 2007 I suddenly decided to start a blog. This blog. My goal? Very, very primitive: to write what the hell I wanted. I had spent so many years writing for “big people” who had very narrow limits of what they were willing to read that I decided to indulge in t

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