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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1

This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.

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Soviets were clearly stagnating in hindsight, but at the time? Direct comparisons were few and far between, and the people who had a chance to make them certainly seemed surprised enough.

"Even the Politburo doesn't have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev," [Yeltsin] said. When he was told through his interpreter that there were thousands of items in the store for sale he didn't believe it. He had even thought that the store was staged, a show for him.

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He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution."

The Soviets didn't even manage to send people to the moon, but until they were at the brink of dissolution they also didn't even admit they had been trying. Walter Cronkite even bought the Soviet line, ''It turned out there had never been a race to the Moon.'' The fact that Soviet lunar lander hardware and a Saturn-V-scale launcher had ever existed was only revealed decades later, by accident.

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