Dear Editor:

It was just after Christmas on December 29, 1940 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave a “Fireside Chat” about the ongoing word war via radio. The following are excerpts from that speech which are most relevant to today’s war in Ukraine:

“This is not a fireside chat on war. It is a talk on national security; because the nub of the whole purpose of your President is to keep you now, and your children later, and your grandchildren much later, out of a last-ditch war for the preservation of American independence and all of the things that American independence means to you and to me and to ours…

The people of Europe who are defending themselves do not ask us to do their fighting. They ask us for the implements of war, the planes, the tanks, the guns, the freighters, which will enable them to fight for their liberty and our security. Emphatically we must get these weapons to them in sufficient volume and quickly enough, so that we and our children will be saved the agony and suffering of war which others have had to endure…

In a military sense Great Britain and the British Empire are today the spearhead of resistance to world conquest. They are putting up a fight which will live forever in the story of human gallantry…

Our national policy is not directed toward war. Its sole purpose is to keep war away from our country and our people…

We must be the great arsenal of democracy. For us this is an emergency as serious as war itself. We must apply ourselves to our task with the same resolution, the same sense of urgency, the same spirit of patriotism and sacrifice, as we would show were we at war…

There will be no ‘bottlenecks’ in our determination to aid Great Britain. No dictator, no combination of dictators, will weaken that determination by threats of how they will construe that determination…

We have no excuse for defeatism. We have every good reason for hope - hope for peace, hope for the defense of our civilization and for the building of a better civilization in the future.”

Hal Moorefield

Boothbay