THE EDITOR, Sir:
THE ISSUE of peace or war was addressed by Shakespeare when one of his characters in "Measure for Measure" said, "Oh it is excellent to have a giant's strength but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant."
Henry Kissinger during his incumbency as Secretary of State of the United States of America was reported as having stated that... diplomacy ought to operate as a restraint on power.
Sir Winston Churchill, that doughty warrior of yesteryear, led a most exciting and eventful life as he observed action as a correspondent in the Boer War at the close of the 19th century and in World War I he was Minister of the Navy in Lloyd George's War Cabinet.
In World War II he was Prime Minister of England and along with Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the U.S.A. and Joseph Stalin of the U.S.S.R. was one of the architects of the Allied victory against the despotic regimes of Germany, Japan and Italy.
His life was steeped in warfare and because of this very fact when he addressed the American Congress in 1954 he sought to focus attention by creating this colloquial expression..."it is better to JAW JAW than to WAR WAR."
Who better than he to have made such a statement? Because he wished to ensure that it stimulated dramatic attention he refrained from using the typical Churchillian phraseology in which event it might have escaped attention in the preoccupation of style and language.
Both internationally and locally this aphorism gives us much food for thought.
I am, etc.,
NOEL O. EDWARDS
May Pen, Clarendon
