Open Letter to Trump and Putin

Dear Presidents Putin and Trump

In your latest "I'm not afraid of you" or "Mine are bigger than yours" showdown, you are both ignoring some basic facts. Each of you has the capability at your disposal to destroy in horrific fashion much of our world and everything in it - living creatures; creations of man; creations of nature. We all get that. Furthermore you will render these areas and vast terrain around them uninhabitable for decades or longer.

President Trump:

1. So far America is the only state to annihilate two entire cities and their residents with nuclear weapons.
2. Who can possibly believe the U.S. after the totally false claims, broadcast to the world, of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
3. Who will ever forget the images of that poor naked girl in Vietnam with her back on fire from your own chemical - napalm? She only represented thousands of others I am sure. Thankfully she still lives and is not fake news.
4. How many thousands of others have had their bodies blown to bits as part of American "collateral damage?"
5. Thankfully it has not happened but what would the feds do if one of your states decided to secede? Would force be used?

President Putin:

Your country and its history is no better.

1. In 1956 your country sent tanks into Hungary to violently suppress any attempts by its people to break free of the iron curtain of the Soviet Union.
2. In 1968 Czechoslovakia received the same treatment. In both cases the state being suppressed allegedly requested your help.
3. Let's not forget Georgia in 2008
4. There can be no doubt about the contribution that Stalin made to saving your country and the world from Hitler and ultimately defeating him. However he was also known to be a ruthless military man executing some 170,000 of his own men. See: Stalin and WWII
5. Stalin attempted to starve an entire nation - the Ukraine - and thousands of his own peasantry because they were "trouble makers'. It appears now that you and your government are attempting to suppress any acknowledgement of this brutality.

Both of You:

Unfortunately the educated world does not believe either one of you. Neither one of you is qualified to play the "holier than thou" role. There are many countries in the world whose people reject both of you and your systems. Ask Scandinavian countries or Iceland and their peoples if they would rather be a part of either of your nations.

You are both schoolyard bullies but the world is the schoolyard. If you are acting on behalf of and with the best interest of your people then how is it that you are both billionaires?

Why don't you pause and take a lesson from Kennedy and Khrushchev who had a similar standoff, and BACK OFF. There is too much at stake.

You live in different societies that will always be too different for one to convert the other. Brutality to fellow men and women is wrong whether in the open or under some other guise.

Please stop and think

The Brewster

You might also like to read my post: Americn and Russian cooperation: Stellar examples