NEAFC 31st Annual Conference.pdf - New England Association of ...

NEW ENGLAND ASSOCIATION OF FIRE CHIEFS
Herbert ’Philbrick said he was in the same cell with her.
Well, you can take your pick, but I think that there is something of great sig~
nifican.ce, something of great import, there, to the American people.
I thirik that the same thing is true in. regard to the Voice of America, which is
the other one that was exposed by a Senate Investigating Committee, and which loaded
the book shelves of libraries that we were .keeping overseas with books by Communist
authors so that they could be read, by people whom we are trying to influence in the
ways of democracy.
Well, if that makes sense, then anything goes.
But, this isn’t all academic, and this isn’t all theoretical. All of this means something.
.Here we are, in Korea, and we don’t know how to get out of there. The President
of South Korea is no good, according to the Americans, now; he is in the way of an
Armistice, and, perhaps from our point of view he is no good.
But, from the point of view of South Korea, he must be a great patriot. He had
the United Nations come in there to stop aggressi6n, and to punish the aggressors.
And what has happened?
The aggression was by North Koreans, and the United, Nations went in the~’e
as. policemen, and the policemen, in the process of stopping an aggression, were jumped
on by a worse aggressor, the Red Chinese.
Now, we are asking for an. Armistice, and we are trying to arrange an Armistice,
which will leave a million and a half Red .Chinese troops in K0rca!
It is going to take a very big stretch of the imagination to call that a victory.
And further, it dcesn’t take too much imagination to have a little sympathy with the
position of Mr. Rhee.
That can be offset by the terrible fix-that we are in. Apparently, we have got to
have an Armistice.
Now, I have heard people argue that there is no principle involved over there
at alll The question., then, is:
What are we doing there? And, why don’t we get, out of there?
We haven’t tried to win it. There-is-no end to it. And yet, we want to walk
out and leave the Red ,Chinese over there, and because the President of South Korea
objects to that, he is no good and he is a traitor.
The United States Senator and the Prime Minister of Great Britain are berating
President Rhee very seriously.
We have a situation in East Germany, which carries extreme significance. Recentl3~,
a very prominent man, speaking in the great Stareof New Hampshire, made some
referen,ce to the fact that we have got to devise some way to offset the great, appeal
of Communism to the masses of people, and he referred to the peoples .who~h:~tve
allegiance to Communism and described it as a religion.
In all the history of recent years, since the rise of Communism, I doubt:~at yo,~
could find a single case .of any mass of people rushing toward Communism. The’-:~ush
always away from Communism. The Poles didn’t rush towards Communism. Tt~e
Czechoslovakians didn t rush towards it. An.d, neither did the Russians, for th~
matter. The Communists are a great minority in Russia. The evidence in East Germany
certainly indicates that the ’Germans are not rushing towards it.
Russia, of course, is afraid of the Germans. There is no questio~p - about that. If