Free Republic

Saturday August 6, the Sundance Cable Channel will be showing "Original Child Bomb". This hour long film is from the top secret compilation of the US Government filmed aftermath of Hiroshima, which was kept out of the public's viewing for decades. "The young soldiers who shot the film in Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a month after the dawn of the atomic age were unprepared for what they found." " 'It was to me the most horrendous, terrifying thing that I had ever seen,'camera operator Herbert Sussan, who's now deceased, said in a 1983 interview with the British Broadcasting Corp."...

Frankly speaking, I can't be objective when talking about upcoming May 9 60th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany to be marked in Russia and throughout the fmr. Soviet Union. Without exaggeration, the 1941-1945 Soviet-German War (aka "Great Patriotic War") touched nearly everyone in the fmr. Soviet Union and became the bloodiest chapter of the WWII. If you are from the former USSR and even if you are born after the World War II, you are likely to have a parent, grandparent or other family member or someone your family knew who went to the war. You or your...

Budapest, Hungary, October 1997. It was a gorgeous fall day, the sun sparkling off the Danube, the domed Royal Palace glinting on Buda Hill, smartly dressed shoppers strolling along the Vaci. Just a few years ago this place had been a fear-ridden Russian colony. Now everyone on the street was chattering away on a cell phone. Back in the Soviet days, only the Nomenklatura – the Communist elite – could get a telephone, and even they were terrified of talking freely. I was in Budapest speaking to a conference of international business leaders. Another speaker was a Moscow television news...