Letters

New Internationalist, May, 2002

The New Internationalist welcomes your letters But please keep them short. They may be edited for purposes of space or clarity. Letters should be sent to letters@newint.org or to your local NI office. Please remember to include a town and country for your address.

Refreshed

NI 343 (Rush to Nowhere) gave my senses a real workout. The cover picture seemed to say it all. The greedy are destroying the only home we know.

I relish the sound of the Slow Food Movement, the Slow Cities Movement, the Shorter Work Week and the Society for the Deceleration of Time. Wonderfully refreshing titles, full of hope in a world rapidly spinning out of control.

The picture of the cowboy resting and playing his flute while his cattle peacefully graze (Southern Exposure), was truly breathtaking. To me this picture encapsulated the need to truly live and SEE the world. Not to exist in a science-tyrannized world, where gawping at television or computer images, spellbound by the clock or jumping to the inane noises of ghastly mobile phones, is imagined to be real life.

David Harvey Chippenham, England

Call me retentive, but...

I have never liked it when one woman presumes to speak for all the women in the world ('Boo to Captain Clock', NI 343), particularly when:

(a) I find much of her writing meaningless/unintelligible;

(b) she perpetuates (arguably) negative stereotypes concerning women (ie that we are unreliable, untrustworthy, irrational and governed by our uteruses) and appears to believe in gender essentialism;

(c) she is (again arguably) culturally bigoted: according to the work of, for example, Margaret Mead some cultures stereotype men as governed by whim and women as reliable, in contrast to the superstitions of industrialized countries;

(d) she is palpably wrong. I seldom act on impulse myself and am actually a bit of an anal retentive.

Susy Briadwood Leeds, England

The vision thing

Another World is Possible (NI 342) was a balm to the soul. We all need dreams in order to imagine a new and different world before we can start to transform them into action.

Gina Behrens Wingello, Australia

The truth will out

Cathryn Ollif Armidale, Australia

Anyone who read 'Scars of Safety' (Currents, NI 343) will understand why now is not a good time to be an Australian with any sense of compassion. It's a terrible feeling, knowing that while I live a very comfortable life, asylum seekers are being detained in inhumane circumstances in the same country. In my town concerned people, including myself, recently started a group (which has grown to several hundred) to try to raise awareness about the plight of the refugees. Such grassroots groups have sprung up all over the country. Early this year some Sydney University students visited by bus all the detention centres. The many obstacles they encountered would lead one to believe that this government has plenty to hide. Their stories can be found at www.racvic.org/oztour/mointour. html Every day more voices are raised in dissent. As word gets out I think it will become impossible for the government to persist with its current policies.

Consider Chibaro

I quite agree with Ike Oguine's concern over Robert Mugabe's tactics (View from the South, NI 343), but his plea that 'Africans must reject the temptation to engage in reverse racism' I have heard rather too many Times before - from the mouths of selfish whites in southern Africa.

In all the press coverage of (ex) Rhodesia, I have never seen the word 'Chibaro', which may go a little way to understanding Mugabe's extremism. Alerted by friends in Rhodesia in the 1970s, I later found its meaning in the book Chiboro (Pluto Press, London, 1976) by white South African MP Charles van Onselen, who recorded that between 1900 and 1933, no less than 30,000 blacks died in Rhodesia's mines from unnatural causes.

Such one-sided views, however innocent, are yet another burden for black Zimbabweans to bear, in a conflict in which only too often the British media are pro-white.

John Clarke Uxbridge, England

The long wait

It is unfair of Mr Oguine to suggest 'revenge racism' is behind the Zimbabwean people objecting to the Commercial Farmers Union members still controlling the most fertile land in Zimbabwe. In 1944-45 did the French allow people who had collaborated with the Nazis to retain their ill-gotten gains? Zimbabweans have waited over 20 years for land, yet while undoubtedly pro-business organizations like the Rotary Club attained over 50-per-cent non-European membership by the mid-1980s the CFU has remained overwhelmingly a white organization.

Keith Hallam London, England

Grow up

Your music reviews seemed more than usually out of place in NI 343, especially as they fetched up next door to a piece on acoustic ecology.

If there must be a space for pop music even in NI, why not submit that aspect of Western and Westernizing life to the same radical examination that you apply to the rest? Popular music is really one of the saddest casualties of overdeveloped commerce.

In particular, why quote the mostly sentimental and sententious lyrics with such solemn respect? That's style, not thought - part of the rebel kit which has been selling excellently since Elvis Presley first marketed the pose (though his lyrics at least were unpretentious). Let's have some real insights into the pop world from your music reviews - or preferably, use the space for more grown-up things.