Galway Advertiser 2003/2003_08_14/GA_14082003_E1_023.pdf 

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Galway's flash mobbers await students' return before first big hit
BY DECLAN VARLEY GALWAY city is bracing itself this week for its first flash mob -- the new internet based craze where large though harmless crowds mobilise within minutes to partake in some innocent fun mainly at the expense of large retailers. In flash mobs so far across the world, hundreds of people have gathered quickly in large stores and asked finance questions of staff before dispersing just as quickly as they had gathered. The Advertiser has learned that there are plans to stage a flash mob in the know when or where it's about to happen. "If the event is flagged in advance, it loses its appeal. Part of the whole thing is the spontaneity. "With so many computerliterate students coming back to Galway in the autumn, we are in a prime location to carry out some and time for swarming. Word spreads quickly. And before you know it, hundreds are in one place making bird sounds or chanting inanely. "Everything makes a lot of sense nowadays, a bit too much sense. Then, for 10 minutes, you get to do something completely nonsensical. You get to be a kid for a few minutes," said The Man. Even friends who got his mob "summons" didn't know he was the organiser, he says - and that secrecy is part of what has people hooked. Only organisers know the details. Participants are told to synchronise their watches and gather in nearby bars, organised in clusters according to their birth month. Volunteers, who get cues only minutes prior by mobile phone, hand out slips of paper with instructions - the precise minute when the mob should appear and disappear. The slips must be hidden after memorising instructions and everyone must disperse no later than two minutes after it ends. Galway, you have been warned.

Alt.com
The man who told the truth
I remember the father of a friend of mine saying at the time the East German government decided to erect a wall dividing the two parts of Berlin that nothing should so clearly show that communist state had failed. This was the early 1960s, a decade which, as we now know, saw the world come closest to an all-out nuclear w a r between the United States and the Soviet Union. Kennedy was president. The invasion of Cuba, sponsored by the US intelligence agency and important people at the Pentagon, had gone disastrously wrong. Not only did the invasion fail, it failed embarrassingly, leaving the US and its president looking not merely incompetent but foolish in the eyes of the world, most importantly, in the eyes of the Kremlin leadership. The next move in the international chess game was the erection of the Berlin Wall. Far from looking like a bad move, it seemed to many in the West a sign of strength and intimidation. The Berlin Wall remained in place until one amazing day and night when the people on both sides tore it down, in some cases literally. The sudden collapse of the East German government became the signal for die collapse of communism throughout Eastern Europe and finally in the heartland itself, the Soviet Union. We are all wise after the fact. Once the Soviet Union had gone the way of die dodo, you could hear all kinds of politcal pundits nodding their heads, as if to suggest that they knew it all along. They didn't. They were part of the "bandwagon' effect. It's hard to believe now, but many intelligent people in the West thought seriously that communism was the wave of the future. Although much was known about the way in which communist countries worked in practice - prison camps, economic mismanagement, censorship of writers, wide-scale corruption by the leadership - it was regarded as almost "bad form' to make too much of it. The means of reaching me communist Utopia might be a bit rough, but they were - surely? - justified by the glorious end in view. The score card of those in the West who preferred turning a blind eye to what was really happening behind the "Iron Curtain' is a long and shameful one. A considerable number of scholars, academics, writers, and philosophers either neglected or refused to speak the truth. One man who did speak the uncomfortable truth is historian, novelist, and poet Robert Conquest. After flirting with communism while a student at Oxford before World War II, he joined the British army and in 1944 was posted to Bulgaria as a liaison officer to the Bulgarian forces fighting under Russian command. At the end of the war, he became press officer at the British embassy in Sofia and watched the communists overthrow the democracy they had promised and replace it with a Stalinist occupation. In 1948 he moved back to London, after helping his second wife escape from the purges. Conquest was determined to understand how he had been fooled and why also so many others were, and continued to be. The work on which his reputation will rest. The Great Terror, came out in 1968. The facts about Stalin's terror had long been available to anyone who made the effort to find them, but Conquest organised them into a clear narrative which threw out a challenge to a whole generation that you could not be on the side of the powerless and of the Soviet Union. Such honesty did not make him friends. The writer Neal Ascherson remembers the impact of The Great Terror on western leftists: "He was very influential in that he immensely encouraged one side and was dismissed by tlie other, because people were in such entrenched positions. This meant that people accepted his facts; but they didn't accept his conclusions. Everyone by then could agree that Stalin was a very wicked man and a very evil one, but we still wanted to believe in Lenin." Conquest argued that Lenin was just as bad. The poet Conquest wittily summed it up. There was a great Marxist called Lenin Who did two or three million men in That's a lot to have done in But where he did one in, that grand Marxist Stalin did ten in. Conquest's two most influential books are The Great Terror and Harvest of Sorrow - the latter on Stalin's 'manufactured' famine in the 1920s and 30s. His most recent book. Reflections on a Ravaged Century, is a brilliant overview of the 20th century. It takes courage to tell the truth as you see it. Before Solzhenitsyn. there was Conquest: both men who told the uncomfortable truth when many preferred the more comfortable lie.

niolilui I lash iflithbers iimrvtlliiiii a furniture store last week. city in September when sufficient numbers of mobbers have been enlisted and hopes are high that record numbers of mobbers can be mobilised. One of the organisers,who wanted only to be known as The Man, said they are hoping to develop a culture of them in a city which has a reputation for having a sense of humour. It is also planned to stage a series of the event in the coming months in an effort to develop a culture of flash mobbing in the city. "Galway can take flash mobs or anything ridiculous. It's up to us now to ensure that it is good and not a damp squib," he said adding that apart from those on the list, nobody will

soft the sofas were in a London

really effective mobs. So, New York, eat your heart out Flash mob is a lighthearted variation of the "smart mob" - people who use digital technology to hastily mobilise, as activists did to protest the US invasion of Iraq, or as mobile phone-equipped teenagers simply do to organise their evening on the spur of the moment. Futurist Howard Rheingold unwittingly inspired the flash-mobbers, with his 2002 book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, which examines how technology redefines social interaction. Often anonymous flash mob organisers send out emails and post on online "blogs" specifying a date

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