NEWS & VIEWS
NEWS& VIEWS Limiting Arms The arms-sales policy of the United States comes in for heavy criticism in Arms Control Today, journal of the Arms Control Association headquartered in...
...Two pages away was a news story headlined: Mexican EDITOR OUSTED BY REBELS...
...JOHN DEEDY...
...When the memorial address is given in the Abbey, I hope George Eliot's shade will not be patronized by too much praise of her innocuous qualities, but that the congregation remembers the woman who stopped going to church, who lived with George Henry Lewes without benefit of clergy, and who wanted to join 'the choir invisible.' "Of course George Eliot, eventually, went to church again, to please her father, and was, in the end, grateful for her brother Isaac's forgiving letter after her marriage to John Cross...
...But if we insist on making her respectable after her death, let us make it clear that it is to gratify our own desire for respectability...
...2) unilateral restraints on arms exports generally...
...I was among those who were delighted and moved by the dedication of the memorial to Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., of December 1975, but Hopkins was a great religious poet, and the placing of a memorial in the Abbey was wholly appropriate...
...George Eliot was a great agnostic writer, the first English novelist whose art embodied her faith in the need to live without the opiates of Providence and Eternity...
...Odds and Ends -The New York Times for July 9 carried a full-page ad sponsored by the Sub-Secretary of Information, Presidency of Mexico, and captioned: Mexico's ELECTIONS EMPHASIZE NATION'S POLITICAL STABILITY...
...A Protestant minister in Evanston, Ill., reportedly sees Mary Hartman as "Everywoman, facing life like a Christian should...
...Cited is the sale of F-4 aircraft to South Korea, F-14 aircraft to Iran, and Lance (and possibly Pershing) missiles to Israel...
...Sentiment is far from unanimous on the logic or propriety of memorializing George Eliot in Westminster Abbey [News & Views, 7/16/76...
...Especially deplorable, ACT declares, is the sale to the Third World of weapons whose primary or exclusive function is either to attack cities or to deliver nuclear warheads...
...In the June 25 Times Literary Supplement, Barbara Hardy of the University of London's English department expressed concern over the possible appropriation and patronizing of George Eliot...
...government agencies...
...NEWS& VIEWS Limiting Arms The arms-sales policy of the United States comes in for heavy criticism in Arms Control Today, journal of the Arms Control Association headquartered in Washington...
...Other appropriate good causes might include help for battered wives, marriage reform and research into contraception, alcoholism, and race relations...
...Once the distinction between tactical and strategic has been breached, ACT maintains, the escalation from conventional to nuclear weapons may seem less drastic...
...The journal adds that once Washington has decided to sell arms to a friendly and strategically important country, there appears to be no well-defined quantitative or qualitative limit to the program...
...Let us not forget her powers of satire and criticism: she made some devastating remarks about the English establishment in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, and even called Queen Victoria 'our little humbug of a queen.' "In a first version of this letter, I suggested that to give George Eliot a memorial in the Abbey was sentimental, but I expect my preference for keeping her outside also springs from sentimentality...
...George Eliot, cont...
...arms exports to particular regions have emerged from high-level diplomatic discussions, often without review by the relevant U.S...
...In fact, the major decisions to escalate the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of U.S...
...File under 'C' for Contretemps...
...Comments Pro Ecclesia, journal of the far right: "Might be a consequence of some of the new catechisms...
...Luck's rationale is that a lead by the U.S...
...will ever consider adopting restraints of their own...
...The long history of American arms sales is updated in ACT, and another accusing finger pointed at the Ford Administration and the Secretary of State: "Secretary Kissinger, in particular, has perceived arms sales as an important factor in counteracting Soviet influence in the Third World...
...Unless there is a reversal of the perception of arms sales as a major tool of diplomacy, says Arms Control Today, effective long-term multilateral limitations on the global conventional arms race will never be attained...
...Her comments: "The George Eliot Fellowship is no doubt right in expecting support for their appeal from those George Eliot readers who admire her chiefly for those 'affectionate and closely observed descriptions' with which she 'immortalized' the Midlands countryside...
...According to the story, the "rebels" were "conservative employees apparently supported and encouraged by the Government...
...Nor is the distinction made that a weapons' system, which may be "tactical" when deployed in Europe, becomes "strategic" when transferred to such areas as Korea, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf...
...There's only one sane course, in the opinion of the article's author, Edward C. Luck, director of the Conventional Arms Control Project of the United Nations Association: (1) a moratorium on exports to the Third World of arms that can be used to attack cities or carry nuclear warheads...
...I would like to raise the dissentient voice of a reader who would, in the first place, praise her for courage, vision and humanity...
...is necessary before other suppliers (France, Russia, etc...
...And with the growing danger of nuclear proliferation, "the transfer of nuclear capable delivery systems could raise dangerous ambiguities regarding the intentions and capabilities of the recipient countries, especially in regions, such as South Asia and the Middle East, in which at least one country appears to have access to nuclear weapons...
...Attentive readers of George Eliot will inspect with care their capacity for self-righteousness: observing the dubious satisfaction of feeling virtuous about not giving money, I have sent one small cheque to the NUS Fighting Fund, and another to Oxfam...
Vol. 103 • July 1976 • No. 16
