Forgotten Army Syndrome
Sir: Boris Johnson is to be praised for his intention to honour the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan (‘How, as mayor, I would help our brave troops’, 15–29 December).
Unfortunately, I believe he is up against Forgotten Army Syndrome. Burma, during the second world war, was an undeserved victim of this syndrome as well. It took 50 years before at last a fitting tribute was paid to the 14th Army Burma Veterans: at the VJ Day parade at Buckingham Palace and St James’s Park on Saturday 19 August 1995. It was tremendous and moving for the veterans, most of whom were by then in their seventies and eighties, to at last march past the Queen and great crowds of cheering, clapping people, including many children, all shouting, ‘Well done! Well done!’ How long, I wonder, before the Afghan veterans are similarly honoured?
Harold James
Kathmandu, Nepal
The Rwandan narrative
Sir: Michael Gove should be wary of accepting the standard Rwandan narrative, given his advocacy of democracy as a cure for Africa’s ills (‘An act of evil that recalled the atrocities of the SS’, website only, 5 January). The French, according to the narrative, are culprits because the Hutu perpetrators of the massacre of Rwandan Tutsis were allied to and had received military assistance from France. The shame is that French policy made ‘democratic’ sense and was, in effect, sabotaged by London and Washington.
As soon as the Ugandan-based Tutsi insurgents started making significant inroads into Rwanda, the nightmare prospect arose of the 15 per cent minority Tutsi ‘masters’ once again ruling over the 85 per cent Hutu ‘toilers of the soil’. This should have triggered London into backing the Hutu-based Rwandan government, possibly even providing covert military assistance. London and Paris could have then jointly approached Washington to pressure Uganda, then America’s ‘model’ African state, into withdrawing its support for the Tutsi insurgents.
By upholding the authority of the Hutu-based Rwandan government, there would have been no genocide of the Tutsis, nor the subsequent ‘revenge’ genocide of fleeing Hutus in the Congo. Moreover, a Hutu-run Rwanda would not have conspired to take over neighbouring parts of the Congo, unlike the military of Uganda and Tutsi-run Rwanda who, along with their client Congolese rebel factions, have wreaked much havoc. The West, furthermore, would have been well placed to persuade a Hutu-run Rwanda to respect its Tutsi minority, and to urge the Tutsi-dominated military of neighbouring Burundi to end their rule over the Hutu majority. Alas, it was not to be, and today we find Gove supporting minority rule in Rwanda, the antithesis of democracy.
Yugo Kovach
Twickenham, Middlesex
Michael Gove’s piece can be read at new.spectator.co.uk
Wrong year, Rod
Sir: Rod Liddle is quite right to forewarn us of the dreary and right-on nostalgia for 1968 that will fall upon us this year (‘Stand by for a year of nostalgia for 1968’, 5 January). However, Rod overestimates the way rock music was affected by the political events of ’68. He tells us, ‘1967 gave us Woodstock, which… had a certain joie de vivre’. Not quite, Rod. The Woodstock festival actually took place in 1969, and with hindsight can be seen as the ‘peace and love’ movement’s final stand.
It would be more accurate to say that pop/rock music really lost its innocence at the appalling Altamont festival of December 1969. This event saw one killing, three accidental deaths, and an army of Hell’s Angels in violent attendance. It was at this point that the spirit of music unfortunately caught up with the political nastiness spawned in 1968.
Tim Holman
St Albans
Not at your convenience
Sir: Robin Holloway has observed — as any viewer must — the Grainger museum’s uncanny resemblance to (as he puts it) ‘a public lavatory without users’ (Arts, 15–29 December). This haunting architectural similarity became celebrated 70 years ago in a cautionary verse written by the then vice-chancellor, Sir John Medley (I quote from memory):
Pass on, impatient stranger;
This is not for your affair.
Pray for the soul of Percy Grainger,
But pray relieve yourself elsewhere.
It was at the time seriously suggested that the lines should be affixed to the structure, to warn off a certain class of intending callers.
Peter Ryan
Victoria, Australia
A legacy of democracy
Sir: I thoroughly enjoyed the splendid articles by Christina Lamb and William Shawcross on the late Benazir Bhutto (‘The fears of Pakistanis’; ‘At war with hatred’, 5 January). As a former near-neighbour of Ms Bhutto’s (in South Kensington), I asked her in May 1993 if she was afraid of assassination. ‘No, that would be my destiny,’ she immediately replied. This courageous lady’s legacy must be democracy returned to her beloved Pakistan. Her cowardly killers have silenced her, but not her message of hope.
Dominic Shelmerdine
London SW7
Found in translation
Sir: I read with interest the results of your Christmas poll (‘Do you believe in the Virgin Birth?’ 15–29 December). Galatians iv 4 shows that in about ad 53 Paul hadn’t heard of the Virgin Birth (‘born of a woman, born according to the Law’). But by about ad 90, drawing on Matthew, and Flavius Josephus’s ‘Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews’, Luke wrote Luke and Acts, elaborating with Matthew on a mistranslation of the word for ‘young woman’ in an Old Testament prophecy. This sowed a seed which fell into the fertile soils of a pre-existing Mediterranean matriarchal culture as well as the profound misogynistic psychosexual muddle that afflicted the early Church fathers, of whom St Jerome and St Augustine of Hippo are prime examples.
Rear-Admiral Guy F. Liardet CB CBE
Meonstoke, Hampshire
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