Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/272815
George Will Washington Post One hundred years after a spark in Central Europe ignited a conflagration from which the world has not yet recovered and from which Europe will never recover, armed forces have crossed an international bor - der in Central Europe, elicit- ing this analysis from Secre- tary of State John Kerry: "It's a 19th century act in the 21st cen- tury. It really puts at question Russia's capacity to be within the G8." Although this "19th century act" resembles many 20th cen - tury (and 16th, 17th and 18th century) acts, it is, the flabber- gasted Kerry thinks, astonish- ing in the 21st century, which he evidently supposes to be en- tirely unlike any other. What is more disconcerting — that Kerry believes this? Or that his response to Putin's aggression is to question Russia's "capac - ity" — Kerry means fitness — for membership in the G8? For many centuries, Euro- pean peace has been regularly broken because national bor- ders do not tidily coincide with ethnic, linguistic and religious patterns. This problem was in- tensified by World War I, which demolished the Habsburg, Ro- manov and Ottoman empires. Ukraine is a shard of the first two, and a neighbor of a rem- nant of the third. The problems bequeathed by that war were aggravated by a peacemaker, one of Kerry's pre - cursors among American pro- gressives eager to share with the world their expertise at im- posing rationality on untidy so- cieties. Unfortunately, Wood- row Wilson's earnestness about improving the world was larger than his appreciation of how the world's complexities can cause improvers to make mat - ters worse. Wilson injected into diplo- matic discourse the idea that "self-determination" is a uni- versal right and "an imperative principle of action." Several of his Fourteen Points concerned self-determination. But of what "self" was he speaking? Some - times he spoke of the self-deter- mination of "nations," at other times of "peoples," as though these are synonyms. Wilson's secretary of state, Robert Lan - sing, wondered "what unit has he in mind" and warned that "certain phrases" of Wilson's "have not been thought out." But they resonated. In the At - lantic Charter of 1941, Frank- lin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill affirmed the rights of "peoples." The U.N. Charter en- dorses the self-determination of "peoples." Which became a third ingredient, ethnic self-de- termination. Wilson had sown dragon's teeth. Lansing said the "undi- gested" word "self-determina- tion" is "loaded with dynamite. ... It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives." While Wilson was making phrases in 1918, a Ger- man corporal recovering from a gas attack was making plans. And on Sept. 27, 1938, the cor- poral, then Germany's chancel- lor, said "the right of self-deter- mination, which had been pro- claimed by President Wilson as the most important basis of na- tional life, was simply denied to the Sudeten Germans" and must be enforced. So Czecho- slovakia was dismembered. Still, the war came. Three months from the end of the war in Europe, the archi - tects of the impending victory — Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin — met at a town on the Crimean peninsula where Pu - tin is now tightening his grip. Conservatives who should know better have often said the Yalta Conference "gave" Eastern Eu - rope to the Soviet Union. Actu- ally, the Red Army was in the process of acquiring it. This process could no more have been resisted militarily by Sta - lin's allies, which the United States and Britain then were, than Putin's aggression can be. "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you," supposedly said Lev Bronstein, as Leon Trotsky was known when he lived in the Bronx, before he made the Red Army, the parent of the forces Putin is wielding. Barack Obama, who involved the United States in seven months of war with Libya, per - haps because the project was untainted by U.S. national in- terest, is seeking diplomatic and especially economic lever- age against Putin's ramshackle nation in order to advance the enormous U.S. interest in de- priving him of Ukraine. Unless Obama finds such le- verage, his precipitous slide into Jimmy Carter territory will continue. As an expression of disdain for a U.S. president, Putin's seizure of Ukraine's Crimean peninsula is symmet - rical with Leonid Brezhnev's invasion of Afghanistan late in Carter's presidency. Large presidential failures cannot be hermetically sealed; they per - meate a presidency. Putin's con- tribution to the miniaturiza- tion of Obama comes in the con- text of Obama's self-inflicted wound — Obamacare, which si- multaneously shattered belief in his competence and honesty, and may linger as ruinously for Obama as the Iranian hostage crisis did for Carter. This may be condign punish - ment for Obama's foreign policy carelessness and for his wishful thinking about Putin as a "part- ner" and about a fiction ("the in- ternational community") being consequential. It certainly is dangerous. George Will's email address is georgewill@washpost.com. Commentary Misreading Putin, and history Kimball Road preferred site for library Editor: As Tehama County consid- ers the location of the new li- brary for Red Bluff, the Tehama County Friends of the Library would like the public to know that we strongly support the Kimball Road site next to the Red Bluff Community Center. At our January meeting, our board and the members in attendance discussed the two proposed lo - cations at length. Our unani- mous conclusion was the Kim- ball Road site offers superior ad- vantages to the library and its patrons. The Friends board and mem- bership are composed of dedi- cated individuals, volunteers and donors, who are involved in the library's day-to-day operations, problems and solutions; people with years – in many cases de - cades – of experience working with this and other libraries. We meet regularly with library staff to discuss needs and opportu - nities. Our concern is for the li- brary, its many patrons and its outreach programs. The library should be situated to benefit cur- rent and future users. Kimball Road provides the li- brary ideal neighbors and poten- tial future partners: the Commu- nity Center, Trainor Park, and three public schools. These facil- ities already attract the library's main patron bases – seniors, par- ents and school-age students – for activities like senior lunches, softball games, after-school pro- grams, square dancing and bingo. The library will benefit by being in the center of all this ac- tivity. Also the library can work with their new neighbors for se- nior book clubs, after-school reading programs, author visits, literary festivals, and other joint outreach programs. A downtown location does not have the same partnership base or outreach. The Kimball Road location will utilize a single-story build - ing, while a Main Street facil- ity requires two stories. A two- story building needs more staff to maintain securely and the li- brary has no extra staff now. Without additional personnel, we believe a two-story library will mean either fewer open hours or an u pp er fl oo r t ha t i s o ft en u n- available for public use. Perhaps most importantly, Kimball Road has adequate parking while Main Street does not. The library's current park - ing lot is often full especially during popular programs like Preschool Story Hour, Summer Reading and Cowboy Poetry. The proposed Main Street site has no more parking than the current lot, and no room for ex - pansion. If library use and pro- gram attendance continue to in- crease, the Main Street parking lot may be inadequate before it's even built. The proposal for Kim- ball Road includes four times as much parking as the current lot, with room for future expansion. Easy parking will be much more important to library patrons than the five-minute-or-less dif - ference in drive time between the sites. With these points in mind, we urge each of your readers to join us in supporting the Kimball Road site as the preferred loca - tion for the new Red Bluff branch of the Tehama County Library. Micah Stetson, Red Bluff Solutions for salmon plight Editor: In a recent Daily News there was an article on the plight of the salmon. I have been looking into this for some time now. In the ar - ticle, two implications are made. First. "Environmentalists and many scientists argue that the only way to bring back wild fish is to remove dams." Poppy - cock. In many cases, riparian by- passes could be built that would allow the fish to return to their spawning grounds naturally. In fact those waterways should have been included in the build - ing plans for the dam in the first place. Now there is something use- ful for the econuts to work on in- stead of just opposing any proj- ect that might involve moving a shovel full of dirt. Second. Throughout the arti- cle it is implied that there is a dif- ference between "wild salmon" and "hatchery fish." Has any- body told the fish this yet? Or maybe the "natural" female just doesn't know to yell rape when a "hatchery" stud approaches her roe bed? Give me a freaking break. The hatchery smolt made it past all those striped bass wanting to eat him for lunch, and worked his way out to sea and then he avoided all the commercial fish - ermen's nets, so that after two years growing and maturing he finally fought his way upstream all the way back to Battle Creek just to face fish discrimination? Where did these people park their brains? They spent so much time in school that they forgot to take them along when they grad - uated Summa Cum Dummy? Can we get a conversation started addressing how we solve our salmon problem here in the north state? Here's an idea. We connect Lake Shasta to the Sacramento River at Anderson by building a riparian stream between the Pit River branch of the lake and Cow Creek. Then we plant some of the fish recovered from New Zealand in the McCloud branch of the lake and let them establish their own travel plans. Whoa. That was a rush. Fred Boest, Red Bluff The truth about farmers and water Editor: We often hear that farmers are using 80 percent of the water in California. That is misleading, and refers to the "developed water" in Cali - fornia, not the total water in California. The total water use in Cali- fornia is closer to 41% agricul- ture,47% environment and 12% urban. We should remember that, unlike our neighboring coun - ties, 70% of Tehama County's water supply is from ground- water. Drip and micro irrigation re- quire smaller amounts of wa- ter applied more frequently than flood irrigation. Less flood irriga- tion results in less groundwater recharge. We need to build Sites Reser- voir and raise Shasta Dam. Jim Edwards, Red Bluff Letters Cartoonist's take Caption This editorial was published Tuesday in the San Jose Mercury News Using the n-word or any other racial slur is unacceptable, whether it's on the football field or around the office water cooler. But if the NFL really wants to es - tablish a zero-tolerance policy on racial expletives, as its rules com- mittee is considering, the league's highest ranks need to clean up their act first. Start with the Redskins. The team nickname for Wash - ington's franchise — in the na- tion's capital, no less — is a total embarrassment. It should have been dumped decades ago. But during a Super Bowl inter - view, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell continued to back Wash- ington owner Daniel Snyder's re- fusal to change the mascot. Even after being asked "if he would call a (Native American) a Redskin to his face." He sidestepped the question and defended Snyder's right to retain the name. Stanford University changed its nickname from the Indians to the Cardinal in 1972. St. John's University two years later be - came the Red Storm instead of the Redmen. More than a dozen colleges have joined them. But not the NFL. Mercury News columnist Mark Purdy has expressed his outrage often and eloquently. Last fall he wrote: "How pathetic that, in the year 2013, we're still even having this debate about whether a mas - cot based on a racial slur is, you know, a mascot based on a racial slur." USA Today columnist Chris - tine Brennan, who once cov- ered the team for the Washing- ton Post, offers this question for Goodell: "Could an expan- sion team enter any league in any sport today with the nickname Redskins?" It's simply unimagi- nable, for all the right reasons. Defenders argue that a high percentage of Native Americans say they are not offended by the name. That doesn't make it right. After all, use of the n-word dur - ing NFL games is mostly by black players. Apparently they think it's OK. If so, why should the league object? But many African-Americans do find the word offensive. And many Native Americans are ap - palled at "Redskins." Snyder last fall wrote to the team's fan base that the name "was, and continues to be, a badge of honor." Some team of - ficials claim it was intended to honor Lone Star Dietz, a Sioux, who was the coach when the team moved to Washington in 1932. That is, pardon the expres - sion, bull. The nickname was the brainchild of former owner George Preston Marshall, one of the most notorious bigots in NFL history. Marshall's team was the last in the NFL to add nonwhite play - ers, and he was proud of it. He re- fused to sign black players until, in 1961, he relented under pres- sure and drafted Ernie Davis, the first African-American Heisman Trophy winner. Davis reportedly refused to play for Marshall, so Marshall traded him. Those who know Snyder say he's not a racist. But as long as the NFL lets him call his team the Redskins, its self-righteous zeal for fighting racism in words ex - changed by players on the field is a sham. Editorial NFL should start with itself to promote racial tolerance Greg Stevens, publisher Chip Thompson, Editor EditoriaL Board How to have your say: Letters must be signed and provide the writer's home street address and home phone number. anonymous letters, open letters to others, pen names and petition-style letters will not be allowed. Letters should be typed and no more than two double-spaced pages or 500 words. When several letters address the same issue, a cross section will be published. Email: editor@red bluffdailynews.com Phone: 530-527- 2151 ext. 112 Mail to: p.o. Box 220, 545 Diamond ave., Red Bluff, Ca 96080 Facebook: Leave comments at FaCEbook.CoM/ rbdailynEwS Twitter: Follow and send tweets to @rEdbluFFnEwS OPINION » redbluffdailynews.com thursday, March 6, 2014 » MoRE at FaCEbook.CoM/rbdailynEwS anD TwiTTEr.CoM/rEdbluFFnEwS a6