Next week, the President of the United States will stand next to the President of Russia in Moscow’s Red Square commemorating the end of World War II. Last week, you learned in No Apology, No Future that on his way to and from Moscow, Bush will meet with the leaders of former Russian colonies Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Georgia on how to end the dictatorship of Aleksandr Lukashenko in Belarus.

The Kremlin has publicly voiced its displeasure with these meetings. Yet it ought to be far more concerned with an unknown, anonymous student alliance that has successfully overthrown autocrats in four ex-Soviet states, and now has Belarus and Russia itself in its gunsights. While its constituent student groups have names, the alliance itself has no name and no leader. Here is its history:

In the past dozen years, 700,000 people have sued over 8,000 companies, schools, and municipalities for asbestos-exposure damages. In 2003, some 110,000 individual claims were filed in that year alone. Asbestos litigation has bankrupted over 70 corporations, costing 60,000 jobs, and forced companies to pay out over $70 billion in court judgments and settlements. The suits were filed as “class action” lawsuits by trail lawyers, who of course got most of the money.

The litigation is predicted to eventually produce as many as 3 million individual claims, with a final total of $200 to $300 billion paid by businesses and insurance companies in judgments - or by the taxpayers via Arlen Specter’s bill in the Senate should those companies go bankrupt which many will. That’s over a quarter of a trillion dollar pot of ripped-off gold at the end of the trial lawyers’ rainbow.

And over 95% is willful fraud. The quarter-trillion dollar asbestos litigation is a criminal conspiracy between plaintiff trial lawyers and the medical doctors they bribed to fake the evidence.

In 1997, I was in Budapest speaking to a conference of international business leaders. Another speaker was a Moscow television news commentator well-known in Russia, Boris Notkin. He informed his audience about how humiliated Russians felt, losing their Empire and the Cold War, not winning many medals in the Olympics, and having their Mir space station go belly-up. He warned of a dangerous anti-Americanism emerging among Russians, who resentfully blamed America for their problems.

A gray-haired gentleman with a Central European accent stood up and asked Boris a question: “In addition to their feelings of humiliation and resentment, do Russians have any feelings of remorse for inflicting Communism upon so many countries? After their defeat in World War II, the Germans apologized to the world for being Nazis and for the horrible atrocities Nazism committed. After their defeat in the Cold War, will the Russians ever apologize to the world for being Communists and the equally horrible atrocities Soviet Communism committed?”

Boris looked straight at the man and coldly answered, “No. Russians feel no remorse. They will not apologize.”

This past Monday, April 25, Russian President Vladimir Putin reaffirmed this absence of remorse and refusal to apologize for the genocidal horror perpetrated by Soviet Communism upon so many countries and peoples. In a nationally televised speech to the Russian Federal Assembly in Moscow, he declared that “the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”

The truth, of course, is that the existence of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century

There was a very funny movie made back in 1987 called The Princess Bride. Imagine an Errol Flynn swashbuckler with a Monty Python script. One of my favorite scenes is when the hero, Westley (played by Cary Elwes) is wounded and his friends drag his limp body to a Yiddish Wizard named Miracle Max (played by Billy Crystal) in hopes of saving him. But it’s too late. He’s dead, they tell Max.

“Look who knows so much,” Max replies after examining Westley. “It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There is a VERY BIG DIFFERENCE between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do.”

“What's that?” his friends ask. Max answers, “Go through his clothes and look for loose change.”

It turns out there was an adaptive replay of this scene in the Sistine Chapel this week. The College of Cardinals dragged in the limp body of European Christianity - which means of European civilization and culture - and placed it at Josef Ratzinger’s feet. Can you save him? they asked, because we are afraid he’s dead. Their Dean and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith replied that yes, he is mostly dead - but not all dead, so there is hope for his revival. That hope is what elected Cardinal Ratzinger to the papacy.