Looking Back: Past opinions provide perspective

Looking Back reviews opinions published in The Spokesman-Review during this week in history.

Soviet-Nazi Pact, Aug. 25, 1939

An editorial decries the nonaggression pact signed by the Soviet Union and Germany.

“The sham battle between Bolshevism and Nazism is over. The hammer and sickle and swastika are joined in loving embrace. Stalin and Hitler clasp hands, and Communism becomes a communion of dictatorships. Ironic as it is, the nonaggression pact, which amounts almost to a mutual defense agreement between Russia and Germany, is a momentous historical event. It upsets the balance of power in Europe and may change the map of the world.”

The editorial concludes: “This latest Moscow pact should end all pretense of Russian sympathy for democracy and any spiritual relationship between Communism and democracy. On the contrary, Communism, in effect, makes common cause with fascism, and now the deluded followers of both, who have been shouting epithets at one another, are bound by mutual interest.”

WW II prejudice, Aug. 25, 1944

An editorial pointed out the prejudice exhibited in letters printed in The Spokesman-Review.

“Another letter to the Forum contains a blanket, undiscriminating condemnation of all Japanese, both enemy aliens and native citizens of Japanese extraction.”

It continues: “All Americans share the burning anger caused by Japan’s perfidious attack upon Pearl Harbor and are united in determination to avenge that crime and the other outrages committed against American prisoners of war by their Japanese captors. But our vengeance must be directed at the nation and its leaders, not against a race without distinction between those share the guilt of the wrongs done to us and those who, as American citizens, share their country’s abhorrence of those wrongs.”

Forest fires, Aug. 27, 2002

An editorial applauded the Bush administration’s new approach to fighting forest fires.

“Hug a tree too tight, these days, and you might get incinerated. Here in forest fire country, we can see close to home – too close to home, in some cases – the results of national forest management practices that can only be described as nuts.

“Last week in Oregon, President Bush announced that he intends to restore some common sense and modern forestry to the national forests. Good for him. These forests have spent too long in the fond embrace of lawyers, federal judges and the environmental litigation and obstructionism industry.

“Granted, there were reasons for the recent decades of litigating to block logging, litigating to block road building, litigating to block forest planning and litigating to interfere even with salvage operations in the wake of tree disease. By the latter 1900s, forests had been heavily logged. Harm was done. And a political movement, aiming to silence chain saws at all costs, was born.

“Neither extreme is good for the forests.”