Assange’s intentions
Sir: Your leading article (‘In praise of secrecy’, 4 December) notes that the latest round of WikiLeaks disclosures has ‘sent a worrying chill through diplomatic circles’, and made it more difficult for nations to co-operate. Quite so. But this is, as computer programmers sometimes say, a feature, not a bug. WikiLeaks’s founder Julian Assange is the author of a paper entitled ‘State and Terrorist Conspiracies’, in which he identifies such easy informal communications, behind the backs of democratic electorates, as a key means through which authoritarian policies can be enacted. Charles Stross, the science-fiction writer whose blog drew my attention to the essay, declares that Assange is ‘defending our democracies (despite their owners’ wishes)’. I would not go so far. But I would be very cautious about assuming Assange to be naive, rather than, say, ruthless.
Thomas Furber,
Greenwich
Labour of love
Sir: As someone who had a tricky labour two weeks ago, I found Carol Sarler’s piece about pain and pregnancy (‘Hard Labour’, 4 December) very comforting. In my experience, antenatal classes do push women to choose the natural way, and to feel ashamed of wanting relief from pain. But women are as guilty of pressuring themselves to cope with the suffering, just as they often compete to regain their slim figures in record time. I can’t deny that I was disappointed that I had an emergency Caesarian section. I hope that next time it won’t be necessary. But if it is, I will try not to feel as if I have failed Mother Nature, and be grateful that modern medicine gave me the chance to have a child.
Taffeta Gray
London W14
Mirsky is mistaken
Sir: I can assure Jonathan Mirsky that I never thrilled to the sound of the Cultural Revolution (Books, 20 November). Nor did I ever scour the latest issue of Peking News for the correct line on the Gang of Four, or go to the People’s Republic to gaze enraptured into the eye of Mao or Chou En-lai. Mirsky has long since apologised for the illusions of his youth, but he still shouldn’t have used my book Passport to Peking as the scraper with which to clean his encrusted shoes.
There is very little, he implies, that makes one ‘useful idiot’ worth differentiating from any other. Yet the consequences of trying to grasp history through a dismissive slogan are all too evident in Mirsky’s review. In a few paragraphs, he manages to put my words into the mouth of Barbara Castle, to mistake Cedric Dover’s account of Germany’s biological museums in the first years of Nazi government, and to turn poor Hugh Casson, of all people, into a communist apologist of the most reprehensible kind. The British mission of 1954 certainly had its fantasists, yet it was also a genuine and in many cases critically informed attempt to reduce international tension. As for the ‘comedy’ to which Dr Mirsky objects, much of this was indeed ‘desperate’, as I declared, but it was part of the experience of those English travellers. I prefer to take my guidance from Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who also worried about the way in which everyday life persists, with its routines, petty vanities and laughter, even in the very worst of situations. This may appear ‘scandalous’, as Enzensberger concludes in The Silences of Hammerstein, but it ‘is not to be addressed by swiftly pronounced moral judgments’.
Patrick Wright
Fulbourn, near Cambridge
CRB idiocy
Sir: I quite agree with Josie Appleton (‘A common sense revolution’, 27 November). We planned a half-day event based around Norwich Cathedral’s labyrinth, to take place on a Saturday morning in the new Hostry visitor centre. But when we arrived we found that we couldn’t use the corridor linking the Hostry with the refectory because the choristers were rehearsing, and we might encounter them on the way to their loo. Only those of us with CRB checks were allowed to walk down the corridor. This seemed particularly bizarre since the cathedral close is full of choristers and other children moving around from one school building to another. Yet we were allowed to walk around the close without having a CRB check. It just doesn’t make sense.
Laura Drysdale
via email
Music and movement
Sir: It is not just for the weekly delight of Deborah Ross’s column that I subscribe to the Spectator — though that alone is enough to make my weekend. I enjoy all the arts pages. I wondered, however, about Niru Ratnam’s piece attacking performance art, ‘Come Together’ (4 December). In Trinidad and Tobago an astounding artist called Peter Minshall has for years been designing and choreographing and producing Carnival bands which are intensely beautiful examples of performance art — physical, philosophical and visual. He brings together thousands of people (talk about ‘community building’) and his productions make strong statements about world issues. They last for two days during Carnival and then are finished — gone forever, except in the memories of people who participated or witnessed them.
Diana Mahabir-Wyatt
Executive director, Caribbean Center for Human Rights, Trinidad and Tobago
The ethnicity of hobbits
Sir: It must be some years since Rod Liddle read The Hobbit. Rather than being ‘hirsute’, they ‘have no beards’, as Tolkien states on the second page of the book. Furthermore, the picture of ‘The Hall at Bag End’ (drawn by Tolkien himself), shows Bilbo looking rather like a 1930s bank manager about to leave home for a game of golf. He is indisputably white, so it is a logical assumption that all hobbits were white.
John Duffield
Essex
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