Post something nice about Russia.

[DFW]

75. He was the only farm boy in his unit

Though badly injured, he was used to bitterly cold winters. A retreating unit noticed he was still alive and rescued him. All the city boys froze to death. Göring, after his capture, explained how the Nazis talked their people into a war. He said, of course the people don’t want war. Why should “some slob on a farm” go risk his life in a war when “the best he can hope for is to come home in one piece.” My father-in-law was that slob on a farm.

Stalin demanded to be allowed take Berlin in return for offering up a few million of his “volunteers,” never mind that we gave him untold billions in materiel, and that he stole the entire gold treasury from the Spanish Republic in 1936. No, he couldn’t take it with him, but nor did he or any of his successor socialist brothers ever give any of it back, even after Franco died, and the dictatorship ended. By the way, taking Berlin meant Stalin took the Reichsbank as well, with untold billions in gold in it. I saw a tiny bit of it when the Soviet Union collapsed, and even that was mind-bogglingly vast. One of the rogue KGB guys who made off with it in 1991, and who was involved in selling some of it in the UK and the USA, told an American colleague, “your children are already too old to ever see the end of what we have.”