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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Enigma who wrote (26931)	1/24/1999 12:37:00 PM
From: Alan Whirlwind	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116786

It would have been easy back in the Viet Nam war to have opposed it as a waste if one would have known that eventually the Iron Curtain would collapse under it's own weight. I now hear voices lamenting how we were safer when the Russians were enemies and their nuclear arsenal was watched more carefully. Having read Orwell's 1984 I don't think so. I remember seeing on the Lehrer News Hour in the middle '80's, on what must have been the 500th anniversary of Luther's birth, a panel of "experts" on Germany and the Eastern Block. When asked when if ever Germany might possibly be reunited, their response was pretty much never. The mindset back then was that the struggle against the communists, (who were, at least up until 1979--Afghanistan--adding to their conquests), was going to be a longterm one--perhaps many decades. And everyone knew what happened to a country that fell under the hammer and sicle. It was not pretty. A more recent example was the Afghan invasion which left a million Afghans dead and set the world record for refugee creation--5 million (1/3 of the pre-war population.) No one in their right minds back then would have contemplated the fall of the Soviet Union and the utter defeat of Russia in a war against a small country like Chechnya, where even there they wiped out Samashki, a city of 65000 people, out of habit I guess. But the starving Russian army was surrounded and pummeled.