Let Turkey join the EU
Sir: There are many answers to your editorial ‘Turkish menace’ (12 June) — but perhaps the one that serves its purpose best is: ‘EU asked for it’. Turks feel, quite simply, that they have been insulted by the EU in the way their membership application has been endlessly delayed, while dubious ex-communist countries like Bulgaria and Romania have been given the red carpet treatment. And the ultimate insult is to allow Greek Cyprus, with a population one hundredth that of Turkey, to dominate the proceedings, demanding that the Turks stand to attention while what they regard as insult after insult is flung in their face.
The EU is, admittedly, in distinguished company. Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty thought the Turks would be a walkover in 1915. The result was 250,000 Allied casualties at Gallipoli. On the other hand, Napoleon warned: ‘Never anger a Turk to the point where he draws his sword.’
Joining the EU remains the fundamental Turkish ambition: not because they have read and agreed with every chapter of their negotiations with Brussels, but because Atatürk pointed them towards Europe. The EU should try speeding up the process. The Turks will be quick to respond.
Osman Streater
London NW3
A bloody disgrace
Sir: Douglas Murray is correct that we will never know the truth about what happened on Bloody Sunday (12 June), but the government still has a responsibility to do its utmost to determine the truth. Its forces killed 14 people, half of whom were shot in the back and none of whom were armed. What was an ambiguous situation at best was portrayed by the government and military, and the London media, as some sort of pitched battle between the paratroopers and the IRA. Mr Murray ignores the plain fact that much of the confusion exists because every effort was made for two decades to bury the truth, either by the men who fired the shots or, unwittingly, by those who believed that soldiers would not massacre civilians. Should democracies be allowed to avoid responsibility for atrocities in such a manner? Regardless of any deals with Sinn Fein or what the IRA did, an accountable government owes it to the public to explain why innocent civilians, protesting against the erosion of civil liberties, were killed with complete impunity and then tarred as IRA supporters by the military.
Tom O’Neill
Belfast
Damned statistics
Sir: As an engineer, scientist and mathematician, I am completely in agreement with Rod Liddle’s view of statistics (‘Monty Hall will change the way you think’, 12 June). I have long argued, with anyone who cares to listen (and plenty who don’t), that any statistic should be completely ignored if it doesn’t come with a 1,000-page manual describing exactly how it was arrived at and what it means. And that manual should be read, pored over and discussed for at least ten years.
The human race has survived and flourished for hundreds of thousands of years without statistics. We survive using superstition, lust, greed and envy. All that statistics have done is make life miserable by legitimising with dubious science the personal biases of busybodies. It tells us that we shouldn’t drink, shouldn’t smoke and shouldn’t immunise our children with the MMR vaccine. Lies, damned lies and statistics.
Dr Tom Roberts
Derby
Jejune, moi?
Sir: While Lord Black of Crossharbour (Diary, 12 June) is entitled to dislike my review of Sir Max Hastings’s (‘Mr Hastings’ was the New York Times’s style, not mine) book on Churchill, I was puzzled that he found what I wrote scanty or meagre. At least, he calls it ‘a jejune review’, and that is what jejune means. It would be dismaying to think that your former proprietor, and my former employer, shared the semiliterate misapprehension that jejune bears any sense of immaturity or callowness. The word comes of course from the Latin jejunus for ‘fasting’, as anyone who had to sweat through Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica in the old Oxford history school will recall: the monasteries of Anglo-Saxon England were as devoted to starvation diets as any modern health hydro. It has no etymological connexion whatever with the French jeune, although Kingsley Amis used to say that the man who first misused jejune must have had a bad stammer. Perhaps Lord Black could use what is left of his enforced leisure to spend more time with the Oxford English Dictionary.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Isula Rossa, Corsica
Lifting the spirits
Sir: Congratulations on a wonderful supplement, ‘Guide to Summer Drinks’, in this week’s Spectator (12 June). It was Friday night and I settled down to read it with a good-sized glass of red burgundy. Simon Hoggart’s ‘Perfect gin and tonic’ nearly made me mix my drinks; Jeremy Clarke’s enjoyable piece on White’s Club carried on the good work before the pièce de resistance. I refer to James Le Fanu’s erudite analysis on the benefits of alcohol to one’s health and wellbeing, backed by appropriately convincing scientific evidence that washed away any niggling doubts. I was swayed to refill my glass and soon found I had finished the Spectator at the same time as the bottle of burgundy, and was in a wholly positive mood.
Stephen Williams
St Albans
No dinner for the Pope
Sir: Isn’t Charles Moore wrong (The Spectator’s Notes, 12 June) to suggest that the Pope’s proposed absence from the state banquet will be due to his preference for going to bed early, rather than to the fact (also recently revealed in the Tablet) that, unlike his master Jesus, he never eats in public?
Dr Tim Hudson
Chichester, West Sussex
Comments