Our Presswork
We regularly get our letters into the local papers, sometimes on our own initiative and often in response to letter others have written
Military ensures free speech
Published Date: 28 April 2009
Although I support Dorothy Forsyth and the Green Party's right to express their views, perhaps she and her party will consider for one
moment that if it was not for the military that sustains our freedom, the Green Party would not have that freedom to express its views.
Surely that alone allows the military the privilege to demonstrate its skills?
Ian McKirgan
Grassington Mews
No Military Parades - at any cost
Published Date: 15 April 2009
Surely, in times of recession or indeed times of plenty, there are better things
we can do in Eastbourne than a military parade.
There is a win-win alternative
if we give Airbourne the elbow and find an enjoyable event which benefits the town
and the environment and gives the right image for Eastbourne.
Is the Green Party
the only party sensible enough to say the unsayable 'no military parades in Eastbourne,
not for profit or loss, not at any price'? We welcome others to join us on a common
sense path to a sustainable future.
Dorothy Forsyth
Chair of Eastbourne Green Party
Meads Street
Correspondence on Military Parades
Free speech theory short of evidence
Published Date: 06 May 2009
It's an interesting theory by Ian McKirgan (Letters, April 29) that military parades are essential to free speech. Wouldn't that make Nazi Germany and the USSR and North Korea the hubs of free speech?
As for the military sustaining free speech, what evidence is there for this? If it were true, wouldn't there be some correlation between the size of the military and freedom?
Thus, China would be tops for freedom, unlike the most free countries, say Scandinavia, which aren't too heavy on military parades.
The argument that the military destroyed Hitler's Germany is always compelling but, since nine out of 10 German soldiers killed were killed in Soviet Russia, that's a limited line of reasoning.
If we owe our liberty to Soviet soldiers should we have their parade here? I think Dorothy Forsyth was saying that local authorities can find better things to do than fund military parades, and who could argue with that? I certainly think that Ian McKirgan is entitled to his own opinion but perhaps not his own facts.
John Galto
Freeman Avenue