Arthur Alexander – "Soldier of Love (Lay Down Your Arms)" (1962)

 

Come off your battlefield

Lay down your arms of love

And love me peacefully

“Women are crazy and men are stupid,” the late George Carlin once said.  “And the main reason that women are crazy is that men are stupid.”

I think the reverse of that statement is also true.  When a man does something stupid, it’s probably because of a woman.  (As the French say, “Cherchez la femme!”)

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When Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year,  a 30-year-old Ukrainian IT professional named Nikita Knysh decided to use his hacking skills to help his country defend itself against the Russkies.

Knysh recruited other hackers and founded a group nicknamed Hackyourmom, which has been waging a cyberwar against Russia ever since.

Nikolai Knysh

One of Hackyourmom’s more colorful operations was honey-trapping Russian soldiers into revealing the location of a secret base located in southern Ukraine.

From a recent article about Hackyourmom in the Financial Times newspaper:

Using fake profiles of attractive women on Facebook and Russian social media websites, [Hackyourmom’s members] tricked soldiers into sending photos that they geolocated and shared with the Ukrainian military. 

“The Russians, they always want to f*ck,” said Knysh. “They send [a] lot of sh*t to ‘girls,’ to prove that they are warriors.”

A few days later, [Knysh and his fellow hackers] watched on TV as the base was blown up by Ukrainian artillery. 

Let he who has never been suckered by a “woman” on social media cast the first stone at these hapless (and horny) Russian soldiers.

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Arthur Alexander’s “Soldier of Love (Lay Down Your Arms)” was the B-side of his 1962 single, “Where Have You Been (All My Life).”

The song would likely have been lost to history but for the fact that the Beatles recorded a cover of it in 1963.  That Beatles cover was not officially released until 1994, but a bootleg of the record began to circulate in the late 1970s.  

Arthur Alexander

Marshall Crenshaw heard that bootleg and covered the Beatles’ version on his 1982 debut album.  He didn’t hear Alexander’s original recording of it until some time  later.

Pearl Jam also covered “Soldier of Love” in 1998.

Click here to listen to Arthur Alexander’s original recording of “Soldier of Love.”

Click on the link below to buy the record from Amazon: