Word: fateful
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Fate can be fickle. Georgian leader Zviad Gamsakhurdia made history eight months ago when he became the first person to win the presidency of a Soviet republic by popular election. It was a stunning triumph for the anticommunist nationalist, who had been at the forefront of Georgia's campaign to gain independence from Moscow. Gamsakhurdia's lead at the polls was so commanding -- he had 87% of the vote -- that few doubted his hold on power. Last week he made history again, this time in an ignominious way: he became the first elected President of a former Soviet republic...
Indeed, Kennedy did so even after Eisenhower left the hapless French, stuck on the wrong side of history in their bitter little colonial war, to their fate when Dienbienphu fell. To get around these inconvenient facts, Stone uses the passive voice: Kennedy somehow finds himself in this mess. Stone somehow manages not to mention that Kennedy made his bed and then he, and after him Johnson, slept...
...world performs Wagner, without whom nearly the entire history of 20th century music is incomprehensible, including the works of such great Jewish composers as Mahler and Schoenberg. Neither Mahler nor Schoenberg could be performed in Nazi Germany solely because they were Jews; should Wagner suffer, in principle, the same fate...
...rise to a dismal new enterprise: the MIA industry, which plays on the farfetched notion that there are dozens of American prisoners still being held captive in Southeast Asia or China or the former Soviet Union. The industry thrives on false leads, bogus photographs and unprovable allegations about the fate of the 2,273 U.S. servicemen still unaccounted for 17 years after the war ended. Its toxic by-products are the protracted pain of the relatives of the MIAs and continuing public confusion about the extremely remote possibility that there might be any POWs still alive in Vietnam or anywhere...
Even if Kalugin's account, like so many tantalizing tales before it, leads to a dead end, it has given new life to the MIA industry. Wild claims about the fate of the POWs flourish because of the virtual impossibility of determining what happened to every single American who disappeared in Vietnam. After previous conflicts, the U.S. learned to live with similar uncertainties: the graves of the unknown soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery are monuments to the tens of thousands of fighting men left unaccounted for after World Wars I and II and the Korean War. Yet perhaps because...