Page 12 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • March 26, 2014 Boycotts could really work Let us all cheer the frantic concern that has been stirred up as Russia seems poised to take over the Crimea and threaten the Ukraine. Let us all boycott Russian products! This should be easy. Most Russian exports are based on cruelty to animals or excessive alcohol content. Stop eating caviar ripped from the bellies of pregnant sturgeon. Stop wearing sable, which is the skins of animals put to death in a cruel manner. Stop drinking Russian vodka, which is much too strong for the liver. Of course boycotts will not do us a bit of good. Putin is trying to act tough in the Ukraine because, as is the case in most Eastern European economies, he cannot get his act together at home. The Russian economy is a flop because it sustained itself on boundless militarism and Russian and Ukrainian and Uzbek kids who had to roam the world beat- ing people up under orders from Moscow got tired of being hated, as they still are. My wife once had a pen pal whose husband, who worked a part-time job as a circus fire eater named Wotan Wahn- sinn -- Crazy Wotan -- was a reservist in the East German Army. Every time the Czechs became unruly, his DDR reserve unit was called up to scare them. When my daughter visited Prague, the Czech police arrested some freshmen for bad actions in the subway. The Princeton Glee Club manager tried to reason with in Eng- lish. They sneered at him. My daughter told them in German that they would be in big trouble if they did not release the men in custody. The Czech police froze and stood at atten- tion as the American kids escaped. You cannot make this stuff up. The DDR is long gone. The memory remains. The Scandinavians, Germans, French, and Dutch are able to make their economies work. The rest of the Euro- pean countries cannot seem to do this and they continue to drag the functional countries down in the hope that the German dynamo and the French and Dutch mini-dynamos will enable them to pay their bureaucrats for work that never gets done. This will not happen. A guy I need to do some research for me in Hamburg suggested Euros. I offered him dollars. He is now one of my spies. The nations that cannot make their economies work fall back on their possession of the moral high ground. America, Britain, and the Soviet Union won World War II! When I was still a very young man, I read a French school textbook I bought at the New York World’s Fair that blandly reported that France won the war with the help of help of her allies. This is, of course, true. The French lost about 200,000 sol- diers, while the Americans lost about 400,000, and the Rus- sians -- who started the war through their agreement with Hitler to carve up Poland -- lost about 21,000,000. They also lost their shot at taking over the world, when the Ger- mans wiped out most of their army, but never mind that. The Germans are expected to go on paying for the Holocaust, and the Dutch and the French for their colonial empires. In the heyday of their colonialism, the French and the Dutch virtually guaranteed every colonial officer or bureaucrat a slave girl from the local population, to be replaced as she started to show her age. Most of the French and Dutch wives put up with it because, in those days, women did not work outside the home and they were better off socially being married to a man with revolving concu- bines than a nobody who fell back on his wife or daughters as collateral. When the Japanese assaulted, and in some cases mur- dered, hapless Dutch women, the Indonesians laughed. Sukarno, the Indonesian dictator, married a Japanese bar hostess and elevated her as his primary wife. Could he have been sending us a message about several generations of institutionalized rape by the Dutch and not the Japanese? It was payback time. When the Japanese engaged in the same sort of com- merce in Korea and Taiwan, they were branded as mon- sters by ignorant politicians along the Hudson River and in Bergen County. The British in Shanghai and Hong Kong got rich in the same business as the landlords of brothels where Chinese slave girls as young as 12 or 13 toiled to make their owners rich, but the landlords and administra- tors were not only white, but spoke English, and thus could do no wrong. When the Japanese recruited angry Han Chinese patri- ots to throw the “white faces” (the British) and the “red beards” (the Russians) out of China, they cut Nationalist China in half with the help of millions of Chinese. Gen- eral Joseph Stilwell and General Clair Chennault tried to stop them. They failed miserably and got a lot of brave Chi- nese and some Americans killed. This was called “Opera- tion Ichi-Go.” The Japanese literally cut mainland China almost in half with the help of a million or more Chinese who hated our wonderful Russian and British allies even more than they hated the Japanese. Look it up. We need to know this stuff about world events and the background of this stuff for the sake of our grandchildren. We do not need to fight World War II over again and maybe lose this time to make the old guys feel better. If we try, we will lose the ground wars in detail. Russian soldiers generally fight with the knowledge that the Battle Police will shoot anybody who does not perform. The Russians reject homosexual soldiers, and when possible, kill them. Women are not accepted as members of combat troops. The Russian Army is an effective killing machine. U.S. soldiers get psychiatric referrals and a medical dis- charge if they cannot cut it. They do not get a rock in the face and a knife in the belly if they turn out to out to be gay as they do in the Russian Army, though they some- times get shot and listed as combat dead to comfort their bereaved families. The U.S. Army is an effective Affirma- tive Action program for people who cannot get it right in the mainstream society they defend. Control of air space wins battles for us. What we really we need to do is not get involved in a shoot-out, which will certainly get peoples’ attention, but might not work out well for us. Sodden clods may think that the good old USA can take anybody, any time, anywhere. Their knowledge of military history is subjective. The Rus- sians faced off with the Wehrmacht for four years in the 1940s when both sides generally shot their prisoners. They suffered huge losses, but they won. Check out the photo- graphs of the U.S. 106th Division marching to the rear with their hands up at the Battle of the Bulge after they surren- dered without a fight. Check out the Germans, who expect to die in the next few days, leaning down from their tanks and half-tracks and laughing at the Americans. Europeans have seen these newsreels. American spent 10 years in Vietnam and came out with a split decision. We are now doing the same in the Middle East. We do not want to get involved in a land war in Europe. The best bet is to make the Russians understand that an attack on the sovereignty of the Ukraine will lead to mas- sive boycotts of any Russian products sold outside Russia. Our economic power may be able to convince the Russians that the United States is not about to roll over and play dead if the Russians attempt to take over the Ukraine, where they are manifestly not wanted by the vast majority of the people. The time to use The Bomb is not yet here. The time to tell the Russians where to get off is definitely here. The answer, however, is not The Bomb. I grew up wait- ing for New York City to blow up and was elated when the Soviet Union finally collapsed. We do not need to see those days again. What Russian product can you do with- out? All of them? Go for it, but remember this: The single greatest problem the world faces today is not the African slave trade, the destruction of the American Indian, the Armenian Holocaust, the Jewish Holocaust, the Rwandan Holocaust, the Korean comfort women, or the abuse of the Palestinians. The single greatest problem of the world today is that the Russians have a surplus of missiles and tanks that would probably work and an economy that does not work. We need to deal with that first and deal with everything else afterwards. Franklin Lakes Scribe Board of education to meet The Franklin Lakes Board of Education will meet on Tuesday, March 25 at 8 p.m. The meeting will be held in the music room at Franklin Lakes Middle School, 755 Franklin Avenue in Franklin Lakes. The public is invited. Computer classes available The Franklin Lakes Library will host a computer class for beginners on April 2, 4, 9, and 11at 11 a.m. Learn how to use a personal computer, navigate the Web, search for information, create documents, and use e-mail. Partici- pants must be able to commit to all four classes. Experience is not required. On April 17, learn to use the Morningstar Investment Center. This online research program provides compre- hensive financial information about the New York Stock Exchange, American Stock Exchange, and NASDAQ stocks. Registration for both programs is under way for Franklin Lakes residents. Non-residents will be put on a waiting list and contacted if space is available. To register, call (201) 891-2224, extension 106. The library is located at 470 DeKorte Drive. Closing reception announced The Gallery at the High Mountain Presbyterian Church in Franklin Lakes will host a March 29 closing reception for its month-long retrospective on Cornelia Baker. The public is invited from 3 to 5 p.m. Refreshments will be served. The exhibit includes works created over the course of Baker’s career, including monotypes, serigraphs, paint- ings on canvas, and giclée prints on paper and canvas. All exhibited work is priced for sale. Baker, a Franklin Lakes resident for 50 years, worked out of her home studio and at the Art Center of Northern Jersey. She was inspired by everyday objects found around her home and immediate surroundings and the architecture she encountered in her travels. Located at 730 Franklin Lake Road in Franklin Lakes, the gallery is open weekdays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Library hosts programs for adults Two programs for adults will be presented at the Frank- lin Lakes Library on April 1. Seating for the free programs will be provided on a first come, first served basis. For start times and other information, call (201) 891-2224. The library is located at 470 DeKorte Drive. Zelda Cutler, a former photographer for “The New York Times” and “Newsweek,” will present a slide show featuring the artistry of internationally-known photogra- phers Henri Cartier-Bresson, Margaret Bourke-White, and Roman Vishniac. “Photography: A Window to the World” will include information about these photographers’ back- grounds and techniques. Learn how to prepare a resume as Paula Rueger presents “Get to Work Resumes.” Rueger, a certified professional resume writer, will provide guidance on how to prepare a resume in this challenging hiring environment. She has experience helping people at all career stages. Dorney presents children’s art program The Franklin Lakes Public Library invites children in grades three and up to “Art Kids Rule” on Thursday, March 27 at 4 p.m. Brandon Dorney of Arts Kids Academy will present this interactive art experience. Attendees will dis- cover the waterscapes of Claude Monet and create a mas- terpiece of their own. This program is for Franklin Lakes residents. Registration may be completed by calling (201) 891-2224 or by visiting the library at 470 DeKorte Drive during regular hours.