AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Mr deja vu translation11/7/2023 ![]() ![]() All the preliminaries had been taken care of - the two delegations at the ready, 600 media people gathering - when an American spy plane was brought down in Russia by a Soviet ground to air missile. Mr Khrushchev - the most belligerent of modern Soviet leaders - was about to meet President Eisenhower at a summit conference in Paris. Now, in 1960 President Eisenhower was faced by the Soviets with exactly the nasty problem with which the Chinese confronted President Bush. Or Henry Kissinger's pragmatic conservative approach based on staying ever wary about Soviet moves but acting in the belief that in spite of the unending public battle between Communism and the democratic world we had to live with the other superpower. Or Kennedy's highly idealistic, rhetorical challenges to Soviet power at a time when he knew that America had the nuclear edge. ![]() The approach of Mr John Foster Dulles (for Eisenhower) - which was rigid opposition to all Soviet moves and an accompanying lamentation for their godless ways. There never will be any agreement among Americans or I suppose among her European allies about which kind of diplomacy has been most successful if any. So, through the decades of the Cold War, from the day that the Soviet Union had the bomb, and the world had only two superpowers, the constant problem of American foreign policy has been how to contain the power of the Soviet Union and its ambitions - first to get to the Persian Gulf and dominate the oil fields on which Europe and the United States depended, to help the Germans prevent their domination by the Soviet Union and all the time to match or surpass the Soviets' nuclear power. Well let's say simply that since 1945 there have been 240 wars to mock the sentence which gave the reason for the founding of the United Nations: In order to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war. And from the start the chances of the United States, the United Kingdom, China and France agreeing with the Soviet Union on anything like defining an aggressor or acting against one were remote.Īnd since the bold Article 43 of the UN Charter asking every member nation to offer "armed forces on demand", since that article was never ratified, never obeyed, in other words there was never a United Nations army that could overpower any aggressor. There was never any need for one because the United Nations laid it down in its charter that to take any military action against an aggressor all five of the big nations in the Security Council must agree. What made me say: "Oh dear it's déjà vu all over again" was the recollection of the times the United States has had to respond to a similar Soviet incident, indeed not even to an incident.Īll through the five years or so when I daily covered the United Nations it didn't take an accident or the suspicion of a spy plane for the tireless and wearisome chief Soviet delegate - one Mr Gromyko - to declare that the United States, alone, was wholly in the wrong and that he would walk out of the Security Council, which he did, and not return until the United States had made a formal apology. About the reoccurrence of some familiar plot or happening Yogi said: "It's déjà vu all over again."Īnd that's what I groaned to myself a day or two after the American spy plane crash landed on that Chinese island. I suppose the one that every schoolchild knows is the one that contains just about the only French phrase that every schoolchild knows - déjà vu - meaning I've seen it before. A later variation was: "It ain't over till the fat lady sings."Ībout a restaurant which was a favourite of baseball players he said: "The place is packed. His autobiography carries the title of one of his earliest wise sayings: "It ain't over till it's over". Because every now and then there's a new Yogi-ism. ![]() His name is Yogi Berra and though he's long retired and is 75 he's not forgotten. ![]() But this bent-over and, when not bent-over, waddling figure is nationally loved because of his way with the language and his coining of some of the most ludicrous, true simplicities that - one time or another - are on every tongue. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |