]]]]]]]]]]]]]]       DO NOT IRRITATE THEM!      [[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[

     "I should like to get going with the Germans... I simply cannot 
understand why they should be so much annoyed with THE TIMES at this 
moment. I spend my nights in taking out anything which I think will 
hurt their susceptibilities, and in dropping in little things which 
are intended to soothe them."
                       Geoffrey Dawson, Editor of THE TIMES (London),
                              private letter to a friend, 23 May 1937

                             * * *

     Former Defense Secretary Harold Brown, along with another Carter 
administration official and two Democratic senators. said last week 
that the Reagan administration shouldn't publicize Soviet arms control 
violations because they would risk disruption of the unratified SALT 
II agreements and current arms talks. And indeed the Washington Post 
reported that President Reagan has backed away from suggestions that 
he publicly denounce the Soviet Union for arms violations and has 
decided to pursue discussions privately through diplomatic channels or 
at the US-Soviet Standing Consultative Commission in Geneva."
                                THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, 25 April 1983

                              * * * 

     [In 1936, Hitler's army marched into the Rhineland, the demili-
tarized zone along France's frontier. Geoffrey Dawson: Editor of the 
London TIMES; Earl of Halifax: British Foreign Minister. All Souls: 
one of the colleges at Oxford.]
     At the height of the Rhineland Crisis Dawson came down to All 
Souls. He said to me -- I can see him now standing with his back to 
the fire in the smoking-room -- speaking with real force of conviction 
(it was the only time I ever heard him urge anything with passion): 
"What has it got to do with us? It's none of our business, is it? It's 
their own back-garden they are walking into." This was the phrase with 
which they excused themselves for their connivance... Halifax in his 
memoirs uses it, as they all did: "To go to war with Germany for walk-
ing into their own backyard, which was how the British people saw it."
     That phrase is doubly disingenious; for, in the first place, it 
was not how the British people saw it, but how they were told to see 
it by these men who were there to lead tem; and, secondly, there was 
no question that we'd have had "to go to war with Germany" -- as Hali-
fax points out in the same paragraph: "I have little doubt that if we 
had then told Hitler bluntly to go back, his power for future and 
larger mischief would have been broken."
                         A.L. Rowse, APPEASEMENT: A STUDY IN POLITICAL
                      DECLINE, 1933-1939 (W.W. Norton, New York, 1961)

                        *  *  *

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