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To: Rarebird who wrote (73828)	7/23/2001 2:51:48 AM
From: E. Charters	Respond to of 116893

For the record, the majority of Germans, including his brother, thought Hitler was a complete asshole. He was not swept to power but succeeded with a minority of the popular vote on a split. I believe it was 46%, which is not a majority. But it's all you need with control of the army to run a country into the ground. A majority of opinion may have believed that the Bolsheviks were a legitimate enemy, as a coalition of European and American forces thought when it aided the Mensheviks and White Russians few years earlier. But a majority could not have known what that war would lead to in terms of the awful human price. So don't let's keep blaming the majority of Germanic humanity for what went wrong in their country any more than we should blame a majority of the Yugoslavians for what went wrong in theirs. What went wrong was the machinery of the state was setup so it could not be resisted or checked. It is called a police state. What is needed to resist that is less government and control of what is said and written not more. The good thought police and the bad thought police are indistinguishable. Frank Zappa was right. We need a return to hippy values to fight the autocracy of ethically unitarian moral self-righteousness. All true evil is done cold bloodedly in the name of good. We think of Adolph as the personification of evil. I don't think his greatest mistake was "evil" at all. No more than any of our leaders today. He was simply mistaken. He thought he could get away with a lot of things that it should have been apparent he could not. (Bear in mind that I am not saying that is very advised to do these things, but that getting away with it is what holds people back these days, not the "morality" of it.) Very early in the game it should have been crystal clear to Hitler as it was to his commanders (Somewhere around the splitting of the army at Stalingrad) that he would not succeed in conquering Russia and invading England. At that point he should have looked at the inevitable and acted accordingly. But they fooled themselves and grasped at straws in the wind. This was not moral blindness but sheer egotism and bad military judgement. Things were going wrong and they could not admit it. Hitler has been widely praised for his lightning strokes of military genius, but if we analyse the military's astonishing conquest of Europe it owes far more to Irwin Rommel than Adolph's purported decisions to go through the Black Forest. I knew some of the scouts who led the armour and as they tell it, routes around the Fr. defenses were part of army group planning since before the war. That much should have been obvious. And that would be Rommel's "fault", as the pre-war career soldier who had formed armoured war battle theory and written on it. BTW, the German army at that time did not have much in the way of superior armour or other weaponry to the allies or numbers thereof. Their initial successes in Russia and W. Europe was entirely due to one thing. Organization, usage of weaponry and their enemy's lack of it. And for that we can go back to the Romans or at least the Prussian officer corp. No, I am not for boiling babies or procreating with swine. But I am not sure there is an ethical reason why. Other people don't like it and write nasty things about you if you do. That is good enough for me. EC<:-}

To: Rarebird who wrote (73828)	7/23/2001 7:09:55 AM
From: long-gone	Respond to of 116893

Here's truth Monday July 23, 6:51 am Eastern Time S.African miners begin vote on Thursday strike (UPDATE: Updates with mining chamber comment 6-7, 12. adds companies) By Allan Seccombe JOHANNESBURG, July 23 (Reuters) - Thousands of South African gold and coal miners began voting on Monday on a proposed strike from Thursday over pay, the National Union of Mineworkers said. ``The voting has started. It will take the whole day and we will know tomorrow after we've collated all the results,'' said Moferefere Lekorotsoana, the union's spokesman. Mines affected by the strike include those owned by AngloGold , Gold Fields and Harmony , South Africa's three largest gold producers. Miners in the Carletonville area started voting from early in the morning, he said, and workers in the Free State and KwaZulu-Natal were to start in the afternoon. No times were available for Mpumalanga and the Johannesburg area. If the workers vote to go on strike, the NUM would give the mining companies a 48-hour notice of strike action. The Chamber of Mines said talks would formally resume with the NUM on Tuesday, but informal discussions had been held with the union over the weekend. ``On some mines there is a smaller chance of strikes than on other mines because of the position of some of the mines and their wage scales, which might be at a higher level and can pay increases,'' said the chamber's spokesman Frans Barker. ``There is a chance that at quite a number of mines the strike can be averted,'' he told Reuters. The union, which represents about 170,000 gold miners and 20,000 in the coal sector out of a total mining workforce of more than 500,000, is demanding a higher base salary and an annual wage increase of 8.5 percent in each year of a two-year deal with the gold companies. The NUM wants pay for entry-level employees to start at 2,000 rand ($242.9) a month from the current industry minimum of 1,200 rand per month level now. The companies are offering nine percent for the lowest category employees and between 7.25 percent and 7.5 percent for all other mineworkers. In the second year the companies are offering between 7.25 percent and 10.8 percent. ``Some of the mines are looking at the minimum wage issue very carefully to see how they can get to 2,000 rand because they don't want to affect the viability of the mines or jobs. Many are looking at that over a period of time,'' Barker said. Negotiations are also deadlocked on medical benefits and leave in some gold operations, while the collieries are stuck on wages, benefits and meal intervals. The last major labour action on South African gold and coal mines was in August 1999. ($1 equals 8.235 Rand) biz.yahoo.com