Monday’s Letters to the Editor

Russia’s reign of terror

EDITOR: In the early 1950s, our great Uncle Abraham would drive from his San Francisco home to our house on the Peninsula. Abraham Dobrin (nee Dobrizhenski) was a retired rabbi who’d served in, among other places, Jamaica.

Abraham, like several brothers who were also rabbis, had fled his small shtetl in what is now central Poland. At that time the tiny mud-spattered village was under the control of the czar. Without prompt, he once told us what life was like then: little food, miserable weather and grinding poverty. But what he added has stuck with me for life.

At an earlier time, and in similar villages throughout the land, the czar’s elite assassins, hard-riding Cossack horsemen, would storm through unannounced and, with sharpened scimitars in hand, lop off the heads of men, women and children at will. For practice.

Vladimir Putin is czar, and 150 years later the Russian reign of terror rolls on and on and on.

MICHAEL DOBRIN

Santa Rosa

Plenty of blame to share

EDITOR: Anthony Morgan, writing about who should be blamed for gun violence, cast the National Rifle Association as an unworthy blame victim, adding that “no one blames Big Pharma for drug abuse” (“Don’t blame the NRA,” Letters, Wednesday). Oh really? Surely, he’s read about the Sackler family of Purdue Pharma, who, yes, have been roundly blamed for the deaths of thousands of Americans from drug overdoses — and rightly so. No, they did not put the pills in the patients’ mouths, but they lied to doctors regarding the addictive potential of their drug OxyContin. There is plenty of blame to go around for our society’s problems, and the NRA deserves its share.

DIANE NAYLOR

Santa Rosa

Cut ties to Russia

EDITOR: In his Thursday column, Bret Stephens decried the Boston Marathon’s decision to not let Russian and Belorussian athletes compete as some form of bigotry, while still sympathizing about what is happening in Ukraine (“The Boston Marathon’s brainless bigotry”). If one looks historically at sanctions that changed national behavior, the best example is South Africa, where military and economic punishments did nothing. But when they were denied the ability to compete in international athletics, the apartheid government threw in the towel.

I suggest that we go further: every Russian student’s visa should be revoked, and they should be given two weeks to leave the country. A great number of these college students are children of oligarchs. The embassy in Washington should be shuttered and relations decoupled in progressive stages. After we have suspended all direct flights to Russia, any nation that continues to have significant relations should be suspended from our airspace.

Isolate the butchers, make them pay a price, and force their country to stop their unprovoked attack.

ALAN PETTY

Santa Rosa

Huffman’s radical notion

EDITOR: There’s good and bad news in Rep. Jared Huffman’s letter urging the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to proceed expeditiously with decommissioning the Potter Valley Project.

The bad news is that he thinks nothing of throwing 750,000 people in the Russian River basin, who one way or another depend on Potter Valley Project water, under the bus. He casually discounts the value of the green electricity generated by the powerhouse and falsely claims hundreds of miles of pristine spawning grounds upstream of Lake Pillsbury when there are fewer than 50 miles.

If he were a true environmentalist, he wouldn’t support the stupid notion of eliminating a lake that holds more than 25 million gallons of desperately needed water. He hasn’t lifted a finger to gather funds necessary to study the effects of losing Lake Pillsbury.

The good news is that Huffman finally revealed his radical hand. His contention that he “continue(s) to support the Two Basin Solution” is shown to be a lie. One can hope that voters in Mendocino, Sonoma and Marin counties will realize that he should be shown the door so people who have done something, built something, cared for and maintained something can go about living a good life he and his ilk intend to destroy.

GUINNESS McFADDEN

Potter Valley

Bans don’t help

EDITOR: I am surprised and disappointed that the Boston Marathon will not allow runners from Russia and Belarus to participate in this year’s competition. In my view, this is not going to help end the violence and deep human suffering that continue in Ukraine.

In fact, this kind of ugly nationalistic fervor helped ignite this war in Ukraine in the first place. The deadly violence in Ukraine is a direct outgrowth of many decades of senseless Cold War rivalry between the United States and the former Soviet Union, now known as the Russian Federation.

If we truly want to support the people in Ukraine and bring a speedy end to this inhuman war, the only hope is a genuine peace movement that seeks reconciliation between all the conflicting parties. By demonizing Russia, its president and now even its ordinary citizens, we only add to the anger and hatred that is the soil out of which all wars are born.

RAMA KUMAR

Fairfax

You can send letters to the editor to letters@pressdemocrat.com.