Misrepresenting Marx
29th October 2003
Your mock interview with Karl Marx (October) repeats a myth about Marx and Darwin originally propagated by Isaiah Berlin and long known to be false. While Marx did send a copy of the first volume of Das Kapital to Darwin, he never offered to dedicate volume two to him, as Berlin claimed. The myth was exposed a quarter of a century ago by Margaret A Fay and Lewis S Feuer.
Philip Gasper
Belmont, California
Anti-Germanism
27th October 2003
I believe it's against the law in most European countries to incite hatred against other countries. Joyce Hackett's (November) attack on Germans for their willingness to obey rules even when other people are not looking, and her attempt to link this to the Holocaust recalled Italian president Berlusconi's outburst earlier this year branding an MEP he didn't like a potential concentration camp guard.
Lesley Chamberlain
London N6
How bermusing
18th October 2003
What is incomprehensible about the sign "No dumping on the Berms"? (October) "Berms" exists in the English language, as it does in Portuguese ("Berma"). It means "verge," be it grass or hard shoulder. Perhaps Pico Iyer should examine the language of the colonisers before the English.
BJ Blackwell
Alcochete, Portugal
The mature Fowles
31st October 2003
One hopes that Julian Evans (November) will now re-read Daniel Martin. The Magus, in its revised edition, is still, as described by its author, an adolescent's novel. As such, it has great appeal for adolescents, of which Evans evidently was one when he read it. Daniel Martin, however, is the novel of a mature Fowles, developing the themes of The Magus. The mature Evans will also be able to appreciate Fowles's masterly evocation of the English countryside at a dramatic moment before it changed forever.
John Ballantyne
Humbie, East Lothian
Pensions for babies
30th October 2003
I am glad to see that the heavy artillery of Deutsche Bank (Letters, November) has not seriously dented my outline scheme for pensions from birth. While it is true that returns on long-dated bonds currently show a return of only around 2.1-2.2 per cent, the expected rise by mid-2004 of possibly a full point in short-term rates would move the long-term figure above 2.5 per cent - and over the rest of the century the odds must be that it will spend some time at 3 per cent or more. Any remaining gap might be regarded as a reasonable price to pay for certainty that a sustainable and adequate level of basic pension is assured. To answer one of George Cooper's specific queries, the households who would derive the greatest benefit from my scheme are those which will be least likely to have discretionary savings which they could then run down because of improved pension expectations. A gentle measure of redistributive taxation has a lot to be said for it as part of a package to produce improved and reliable pensions.
Harvey Cole
Winchester
In defence of Dong
28th October 2003
As an Irishman living in China researching a Chinese minority language, I was interested to read Jonathon Keats (October) celebrating Spanglish and mocking those who cling to disappearing tongues. I see it rather differently from here. There are over a million Dong speakers in China. But there is a mass exodus of young people from Dong villages to cities on the east coast of China, where money can be earned. This poses a real threat to the Dong language and culture. The Dong people themselves are unwilling participants in this looming cultural suicide. They have no fair choice in the matter. Either they retain their culture and remain in poverty, or they eschew their culture and survive economically. They have no Nobel prize winner, no Ilan Stavans and no Jonathon Keats to state their case, no one to enable them to preserve their identity, and to enjoy freedom and confidence in doing so. It is worth supporting them and others like them in their predicament.
Norman Geary
Guiyang, China
Explaining apathy
20th October 2003
Ben Rogers (October) is right to warn that policies aimed at restoring local communal life will not of themselves tackle the current decline in political life, which is at the heart of the drive to stimulate "active citizenship." The Hansard Society is involved in a number of projects involving "active citizens" who are committed to improving their local communities but who have a limited knowledge of national politics and often a great deal of scepticism about political institutions. Yet we have found that by bringing such people into contact with national political actors and institutions, and giving them accessible information about the political system, it has been possible to trigger an interest in and engagement with political life. It would seem, therefore, that while a commitment to creating high levels of "social capital" is commendable and indeed important, there has to be a simultaneous strategy of adult political education.
Caroline Gordon
Hansard Society
The UN and Rwanda
17th October 2003
I read with surprise the article by David Rieff (October) regarding the role of Kofi Annan in his capacity as the head of the UN's department of peacekeeping operations in 1994. Rieff concentrates in particular on Annan's reaction to a warning sent to the UN on 11th January from the force commander of the peacekeepers in Rwanda that a genocide was planned.
This cable was one of many similar warnings. The governments of Belgium, the US and France already possessed many similar warnings that genocide was planned. These governments were far more knowledgeable than the UN about what was likely to happen.
It was the US in the security council that insisted on providing a totally inadequate peacekeeping mission for Rwanda, knowing all the while that thousands of civilians were at risk. This gave the extremists plotting genocide the impression that they had nothing to fear from the outside world. Genocide was planned in Rwanda safe in the knowledge that the world would fail to act. Before the genocide began the US repeatedly resisted attempts to strengthen the UN military presence in Rwanda and it followed the same policy once genocide started.
To blame Kofi Annan while ignoring the role of each government in the security council is rather like accusing a senior official in the MoD for the recent invasion of Iraq while ignoring those who made the decision to go to war.
Rieff completely ignores the behaviour of the secretary general at the time of the genocide. Boutros Boutros-Ghali was probably the only senior official on the UN staff with an intimate knowledge of the regime that planned the genocide and the racist ideology that underpinned it. No one could have looked at the history of repeated genocide in Rwanda since 1959 and doubted for a moment that one possible result of the peace agreement collapsing would be massive violence against the Tutsi.
Linda Melvern
London N16
Virtual agriculture
5th November 2003
In his quasi-review (November) of my book on world food production, So Shall We Reap, Richard Webb takes me to task for not discussing the latest advances of the agrochemicals industry, or engaging with the machinations of Europe's common agricultural policy. He misses the point. We (humanity) are making an awful hash of feeding ourselves and doing huge damage along the way. Neither hunger nor gross over-nutrition (obesity, diabetes) are split between poor countries and rich, but are to be seen in the same neighbourhoods in almost all countries. Humanity's chances of surviving the next few centuries in a tolerable state are in serious doubt. Yet it is theoretically possible for everyone who is born into this world to be fed to the very highest standards both of nutrition and of gastronomy. In complaining that I fail in Reap to do justice to some present-day technologies and bureaucracies, Richard illustrates a key flaw in modern thinking: that another, fancier pesticide, or a few more codicils in a book of rules, are all that's needed to put things right. In reality, if humanity is to solve its own problems now and in the future, we need to dig deep: to return to first principles; sketch out a new agenda. That's what I attempt in Reap.
First, sustainable food production is an exercise in biology. We need to ask what human beings really need, and how to get the best out of the world's varied landscapes (beset as they are by El Ni?os and late frosts, and now by global warming), and how to match animals with plants, and juggle different classes of livestock. Get the biology wrong, and we court disaster. Yet modern food strategies have almost nothing to do with good biology. Most notably, plants and animals are raised separately, each in their monocultures. Ruminants (cattle) are fed as if they were pigs, on concentrates. Chains of infection are actively created, which is what led to BSE. Through an ecologist's eyes, the kind of farming that is now established in the US and Britain and is being imposed on the world seems ludicrous.
Of course, modern humanity cannot function in semi-isolated tribes, doing their own thing. We need economic and political structures to integrate human affairs. But which of our existing structures meets the elementary demands of biology, or even recognises that they need to be met? Many of us now put our faith in the free market - and indeed, its attractions are clear. But this remains a matter of faith, because free trade is untried, not least because the biggest players, the US and Europe (through the CAP) subvert it with subsidies. Yet we must doubt whether the global competition that's now envisaged can meet either the demands of biology or those of the near majority of people who work on the land and will be thrown off when the competition really starts to bite, with nowhere to go except the cities which, so the UN tells us, will contain 6bn people (equal to the present world population) by 2050. It isn't enough to repair the economic models of today (for example by dismantling the CAP). We need to devise economic systems that are matched to the problem.
Agricultural science is most likely to succeed when it abets sound husbandry: the kind that is rooted in good biology. Now, increasingly, it creates monocultures of crops and livestock that can be readily controlled by corporations. GMOs make the point precisely. Of course GMOs could help to solve some real problems, including those of the poorest farmers. But in practice they are replacing traditional farming, and the (largely cashless) economies that depend on it, with US surpluses. Thus high technology, and the science that creates it, becomes the enemy of humankind. How very sad. Richard Webb is a clever fellow, with much to offer. But I do wish he would engage with things that really matter.
Colin Tudge
Hook Norton
