Questioning power not a new phenomenon

Letter to the Editor

Posted 8/30/17

Many people, mainly news media, disparage President Trump’s bellicose remarks to North Korea.

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Questioning power not a new phenomenon

Letter to the Editor

Posted

Editor,
 
Many people, mainly news media, disparage President Trump’s bellicose remarks to North Korea. They belittled President Reagan’s bellicose remarks about the Soviet Union. The news media called him a cowboy who shoots from the lip. We all know what happened to the Soviet Union.
For those who think we should use only diplomacy with dictators, here are headlines and the first few paragraphs from a British newspaper Sept. 30, 1938, nine months after I was born; The British Prime Minister has been hailed as bringing “peace to Europe.” After signing a non-aggression pact with Germany. PM Neville Chamberlain arrived back in the UK today, holding an agreement signed by Adolf Hitler, which stated the German leader’s desire never to go to war with Britain again. Mr. Chamberlain declared the accord with the Germans signaled “peace for our time,” after he had read it to a jubilant crowd gathered at Heston airport in west London.
Hitler didn’t keep his signed promises made to Neville Chamberlain. A year later the German leader ridiculed the agreement as just a “scrap of paper” and invaded Poland on

Sept. 1, 1939, setting off World War II, which caused an estimated 80 million deaths, 55 million civilian and 25 million military.
Two more example of heads-in-the-sand follow: March 1927 Cambridge College Union voted on a motion by Arthur Ponson: “That lasting peace can be secured only by the people of England adopting an uncompromising attitude of pacifism.” The motion passed 213 to 138 and attracted no public attention. England’s Oxford University Union debating society voted on Feb. 9, 1933. The motion, “that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country,” was carried by 275 to 153. It is one of the most widely reported and discussed debates conducted at the Oxford Union. Throughout England people, especially elderly were thoroughly shocked. Englishmen who were in India at the time were dismayed when they heard of it.
“What is wrong with the younger generation?’” was the general question.
Before 9-11 Americans found incomprehensible someone would crash airplanes into buildings killing themselves and thousands of innocent people. Today it is equally unfathomable to many Americans how a tinhorn dictator, oceans away, poses a nuclear threat to the United States.
Edmund Burke said more than two centuries ago: “There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men.”

Paul E. Puebla
Torrington