Letters: Where NZ stands in world pecking order

Remember the blowing-up of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland by French soldiers and the deafening international silence that followed it?

Reality check

Witnessing the international furore over the apparent poisoning of the Russian father and daughter in England and now the almost unprecedented support and expulsions by major Western countries gave me pause to remember something in our past.

When the French government committed an act of war by bombing the Rainbow Warrior in one of our ports, killing someone in the process, the silence from the leaders of the Commonwealth and Britain was deafening. Likewise the rest of the Western powers.

And when two of the perpetrators were caught, tried, convicted and imprisoned, what followed was one of the most disgraceful diplomatic events in our history.

Our government was blackmailed and bullied by the French over future access to the Common Market into releasing the prisoners into French custody to serve the remainder of their lenient sentences on French territory, while once again our allies looked away.

Within months the agents were freed to return to their old jobs in the military, with military decorations to boot. So much for all the white crosses with fern leaves on them in the battlefields of World War I.

Just a reminder of where we stand in the pecking order — realpolitik, I think it's called.

L E FITTON
Whanganui

Pay rates

Annual adjustments tend only to include price movements according to the price index; they do not adjust payrolls in line with economic growth.

This will not give us a "demand" economy, but in a position where we have to cut supply.

To bring to an end the capital/labour conflict, we need a constant wage percentage and not a variable. This will give sales, profits and payroll and goods/services taxation.

The four pay rates, Basic, Trades, Technical and Professional, would preserve their relativity — $16.50, $33, $49.50, $66.

The basic $16.50 would start now and we could work towards the other rates gradually as sales increase.

The relationship may not be 1, 2, 3, 4 but they would be a constant — they may be 1, 1.5, 2.5, 3.5. Anyway, discussion would occur between capital, labour and the state.

PETER KENNEDY
Springvale

Mortal souls

In a recent letter (Wanganui Chronicle, March 16), K A Benfell wrote: "The child is a human life from the moment of conception."

I have no argument with this idea. However, I would take issue with the statement: "The soul would be created at the same moment as the body."

The late Dr George A F Knight, professor of Old Testament studies at Knox Theological College, Dunedin, wrote a textbook, A Christian Theology of the Old Testament.

In it he commented, regarding the creation story in the book of Genesis, "the result of God's action was not a soul within a body, one that could later be extracted from that body and which could then continue to exist apart from that body when the body finally crumbled in the dust''.

To quote Professor Knight: "Our Western Greek heritage of thought invites us to read into the word 'soul' a meaning which the Hebrew does not convey."

Dr Helmut Rex, professor of Church History at Knox, also noted: "Belief in the immortality of the soul is Greek in origin and had no support in the New Testament ... there is a great temptation for the believer to muddle along ... truth is essentially a matter of satisfying the emotions; or it reduces itself to an appeal to the antiquity of our religious beliefs."

JOHN STEPHENSON BD
Whanganui

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