The PR Blog

When war broke out on 3^rd September, 1939 there was no mad rush of support for the causes espoused by Britain or for Poland and other occupied European countries. Americans were very much of a mind to remain out of any European war. There was no universal feeling of kinship towards Britain and there was, in fact, quite a lot of sympathetic support for Hitler. The second most common language spoken in the USA at the time was German and to cap it all the Neutrality Act prevented any engagement, let alone involvement, by Americans with any belligerent country. That included Britain and France as well as Germany.

My late father hated four-leggers. He could not say the word that is spelled beginning with an R , has the middle letter A and ends with the letter T. Four leggers to him, as a child of the Great Depression, were the harbingers of disease and despair. His distaste for their very existence was bordering on being a phobia. Even their smaller cousins, mice, were repugnant to him. 

My father was employed in the Gold Mining industry as a metallurgist, and consequently, I spent my school days as a student in the mining towns of the outback, or at boarding school. In those days there were nuns and priests, many of them Irish, in most outback Australian towns.

I started school with the Sisters of Mercy, and after 75 years I still recall those wonderful selfless women. They lived in a corrugated tin-roofed convent, and taught in an adjacent corrugated tin-roofed school, dressed in their long black habits and veils and white wimples and bibs. In the sweltering heat of summer with no air-conditioning, the heat must have been unbearable.

In 1944, George Orwell wrote a letter to a man named Noel Willmett, who had asked Orwell about his views on " leader worship. " Orwell replied with a rather lengthy letter.

The central message he conveyed led him to write his now famous book : 1984. Life in the modern world is all too starkly resembling the world that George Orwell portrayed and President Trump is still fighting Big Brother and Newspeak, The Ministry for Truth and the band of traitors who seek to control us through fear and misinformation. 

Is Trump a fuhrer or a Ghandi? Is he a victim or a perpetrator? 

Most patriots are not naïve about the strains of war and they realize that sometimes soldiers will act out their worst under the pressures of warfare. Yet there is an unparalleled history of military dignity, observances of the rules of war and concerted effort to observe the provisions of the Geneva Convention in fighting men and women. All of this fails sometimes not because they are soldiers but because they are human.

Yet it is that humanity that can also draw out the finest behavior in those under great stress and in life threatening circumstances. 

In 1929, Joseph Stalin was hell-bent on getting the farmers to forfeit their rights to own their farms. The state would gain ownership of their land and they would end up working for the government. In order to carry out his plan, he ordered that the grain production regions of Russia and  Kazakhstan be the focus of his attention. 

Accordingly, a certain percentage of their produce would be funneled to the state. If any farmers resisted they were punished.