Letters, April 4

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/04/2023 (1207 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Curlers should be proud

Re: Einarson attacked online by angry trolls (March 31)

I couldn’t believe what I was reading in the sports section. I just want Kerri Einarson to know she should be very proud of her Métis heritage and to wear the logo proudly on her pants.

Einarson and her team are one of the best teams out there and they are still so young. Einarson and other moms curling have to have great family support, otherwise they could not follow their curling dreams. Do these trolls out there not know what these athletes sacrifice? Do they not know how much they miss family while they are away?

There is also nothing wrong with their appearance — I wish I could look that good.

I think these trolls have nothing better to do than to say negative things. I bet they couldn’t accomplish half of what Team Einarson has.

Don’t let these trolls get you down; many, many people are so very proud of you and your team! Keep on curling!

Sandra Coutu

Winnipeg

Compound damage

In a perceptive column, Tom Brodbeck argues that today’s near-collapse of the health-care system is the product of years of budgetary cost-cutting (Results of Tories’ desperate attempt to right health-care wrongs won’t be in for years, March 31).

Especially valuable is that Brodbeck identifies the compounding effect of years of underinvestment. Too little investment to meet real needs may go unnoticed in Year 1, and even for a number of years, but eventually the cumulative impact of the reputed “savings” in budgetary terms erodes the foundations of important public institutions like health care and education. The result is the damage that all can see today.

The same process is at work with poverty. The cumulative effect of decades of failure to invest in measures that could drive poverty levels down is the shameful levels of poverty that we see almost everywhere, and the multiple forms of damage it’s causing.

What logically follows is that rather than cut costs to make “savings” year after year, and endure the cumulative damage that causes, governments should significantly increase public investment in meeting our real needs, and should do so consistently, year after year.

The cumulative effects of such investment would be as positive as the cumulative effects of austerity are so obviously negative.

Jim Silver

Winnipeg

Fighting for peace

In his opinion piece, Quiet pacifism inadequate response to war in Ukraine (March 28), John Wiens professes in the opening line: “I am a pacifist.” The words “pacifist”, “peace” and their variants occur 10 times among his important and sensitive insights. One can confidently assume that seeking peace in a world that is coming apart quite rapidly — and dangerously so — is just, noble and a quality that is desperately in need of encouragement.

One of the lessons of history is that certain “isms,” such as pacifism, can become extreme political forms of a movement typically considered laudable and sensible. When “isms” get it wrong, the outcome can be unjust, unwanted and on occasion lead to intense human suffering. In the case of the war in Ukraine, pacifism may simply be the wrong moral approach.

First, to address the fallacy of the claim that the war in Ukraine “is backed by the Orthodox Church.” Such a claim demonstrates an incomplete (naive?) understanding of the Eastern Orthodox full communion of churches. The millions of Ukrainian Orthodox faithful worldwide, particularly here in Western Canada, which has the largest Ukrainian diaspora outside of Ukraine itself, will be deeply affronted by this insinuation.

On the second fallacy of pressuring Russia politically, the Russian president views the history of the Ukrainian people and its future destiny through an incomprehensible set of lenses to the western mind. Therefore, having global leaders “descend en masse” to confront Vladimir Putin is, as he suggests, “fatally naive” and perhaps even dangerous. Egocentricity and narcissism combine in unpredictable ways when it comes to leadership within another “ism” — totalitarianism.

Third, in terms of war as a moral good, the doctrine of the bellum justum (justified war) is certainly much older than Christianity. One can suggest the 2017 study on this issue by Rory Cox, who demonstrated that ancient Egyptian political theory provided the pharaoh with certain exclusive rights to declare war against an incorrigible aggressor.

War is a living hell, and it is important to recognize that it disproportionately causes intense suffering among women, children and youth, the aged, and the natural environment. Avoiding war is something that we can all agree upon as much as we can agree that the dream of a peaceful and harmonious world is the desire of humanity.

On occasion, sadly but expediently, this dream is worth fighting for.

John Murray

Winnipeg

Organizations must take a stand

Don Halligan’s letter in regard to the decisions made by the IOC and the Olympics (“Ban-worthy?” April 1) about not banning Russian and Belarussian athletes is cynical and supports Russian narratives and their use of whataboutism: “What about America, what about this and that that America has done?”

Let’s stay in the present moment. No other country has threatened nuclear war as many times as Russia has in this present time. Russia is now stationing nuclear warheads in Belarus, endangering Ukraine and Europe furthermore. We have reached a new level of alert, threat and danger.

Athletes serving in the military is the point. These athletes are from and represent a military that has tortured, butchered, castrated men, raped women and children, bombed hospitals and needed infrastructure, stolen cultural artifacts, destroyed educational facilities and more to break the will of the Ukrainian people.

And let’s not forget the kidnapping of children (for which Russian President Vladimir Putin has been deemed a war criminal by the ICC) to eliminate Ukraine’s future as a country.

This is genocide.

Need I go on to explain that this war in Ukraine has reached a new level of barbarity unrecognizable in the 21st century?

If organizations do not take a stand, including sports organizations, then the message is that this is acceptable behaviour of one country towards another and that athletes of these countries are somehow exempt from the savagery being inflicted on an innocent population that only wants peace and its right to exist.

Consider the bigger picture here: this is not the kind of world I want to live in or leave for future generations. A world in which crimes against humanity are normalized through neutrality.

Christine Krucko

Winnipeg

Fateful agreement

The headline on Graeme Voyer’s review of Wanda’s War by Marsha Faubert caught my eye, and as I read the review I found it very relevant to my own father’s experiences (Wartime woes of Polish pair chronicled, April 1).

As a young man living in eastern Poland, he and many others were taken by the Soviets to work as a labourer in a lumber camp in Siberia.

That likely would have been his life were it not for an agreement reached between the British and Soviets to release many Polish labourers so they could join the British army; in my father’s case, in the Middle East. Following training, he fought in northern Africa, then Italy, including the assault and eventual capture of Monte Cassino.

Following the war, he was released from service and signed up to emigrate to Canada to work as a farm labourer in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, then moving to Thunder Bay, where he settled, married and raised a family.

He was always very grateful for the opportunity to settle in Canada rather than returning to Soviet-controlled Poland.

Richard Tebinka

Winnipeg