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From: orb@whuxl.UUCP (SEVENER)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Peace through Friendship
Message-ID: <51@whuxl.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 18-Jul-84 08:46:46 EDT
Article-I.D.: whuxl.51
Posted: Wed Jul 18 08:46:46 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 19-Jul-84 03:11:39 EDT
References: <2555@ut-sally.UUCP>, <963@ihuxi.UUCP>
Organization: Bell Labs, Whippany, N.J.
Lines: 34

Mike Musing suggested that the Letters for Peace
campaign was useless because the Letters would not get
through.  He also suggested that a better method would be
to support radio broadcasts to the Soviet Union.
There may be problems with getting letters through to
the Soviet people.  But the point of a campaign like Letters
for Peace is personal contact and friendship-not more broadcasts
of rhetoric controlled by either government.  The people on both
sides , East and West , have a vital interest in insuring the
world and mankind's survival--if Americans knew Russians as friends
they would not want to kill them, and neither do the Russian people
want to kill the American people.  It is the governments obsessed
with power politics who threaten humanity's survival-not the people
under those governments.  In fact the Peace Movement in Eastern
Europe has been generally ignored by the press, but it is important
nonetheless.  Rude Pravo, the official Czechoslovakian newspaper
reported a spate of letters from young people and others calling
on their government NOT to install new Soviet missiles in response
to the deployment of American cruise missiles in Europe.
President Dwight Eisenhower predicted: "I like to
believe that people in the long run are going to do more to
promote peace than are governments.  I think that people want
peace so much that one of these days governments had better get
out of their way and let them have it." 
The American and Soviet peoples have both been continually told by
their governments to think of the other side, the families, children,
and hard-working people they are threatening to kill, as "enemies".
It is time to recognize that the  Soviet and American people
have a common stake in stopping the arms race-regardless of their
governments.  That is what Letters for Peace is all about!
   
Tim Sevener
Bell Labs - Whippany