Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR FAULKNER I would like lo make a point regarding Peter Shaw's review of Faulkner's essays and speeches, edited by James B. Meriwether (NL, February 28). As the London Sunday...
...Surely Meister does not need to be informed of the ways-the dissolution of distance, the stupendous propagation of knowledge, the termination of self-subsistence, the prodigious expansion of population, the transformation of war, etc...
...Charleston, S. C. Anthony Harrigan Russell Warren Howe's warning of impending diplomatic disaster for the United States in Southern Africa may have some basis in fact, but Howe does nothing to convince us of it...
...Freed from repressive government and a hostile ideological climate, and granted adequate credit, the Ghanaian private sector seems in a position to enter a phase of rapid, and indeed perhaps explosive economic growth...
...Of course Pretoria wants a whitesupremacy buffer state to survive in Rhodesia...
...etc.-in which the effects of technology have indeed been revolutionary...
...Plastrik, but they won't necessarily get it...
...Ghanaians have already demonstrated unusual entrepreneurial abilities in developing the cocoa industry through private initiative...
...Some of these people had libertarian sentiments that would "gladden the hearts of the ACLU...
...However, in Marxist-type economies, ideological considerations block the diffusion of the benefits of such investments through multiplier effects in the private sector...
...Nkrumah's governmental investments understandably evoke images of TVA in American liberals...
...given Anglo-American policy toward Southern Africa as it is today, the Soviets have only to wait for their opportunity...
...Lekachman...
...As France has a power relationship over the Malagasy government, leases most of the Diego Suarez installations and might back South Africa against Africa, the UN naval force could well be forced to use Dar...
...I should be interested to know, for example, on what authority Howe bases his claim that the South African Communist Party has "a monopoly on what little resistance activities the authorities have not crushed...
...A blockading force without shipbased and patrol aircraft would be ineffective and highly vulnerable...
...Anyway, did anyone ever seriously think Faulkner was a liberal...
...However, the South African Navy would itself be highly vulnerable to Soviet sub-surface craft...
...Howe goes on to justify his belief that such a police action was the wise course for Britain by claiming that the Black African states can use the economic boycott employed as a precedent for demanding action in the United Nations against Portugal and South Africa...
...Moreover, a blockade is a complex naval task, involving constant steaming...
...He suggests that this will mean rapid economic growth and multiplier effects for the non-entrepreneurs...
...I am at once pleased and suspicious...
...If Lekachman is really interested in relatively useful government expenditures (in combating poverty and improving educational opportunity, for instance), he would not advocate new Federal taxes (except perhaps for subsidizing state and local governments) but new taxes on lower levels of government...
...But would not the premise applyand much more dangerously so-to a precedent of force...
...Pretoria's claim about Fischer is, I think, and as I said, "credible," in the light of all the facts mentioned...
...I did not say police action was the "wise course": Historically, a course leading to escalation and a "once and for all time" solution might be preferable...
...I gather, however, that Wallerstein is defending Nkrumah basically on the grounds that his faults were less important than his having cultivated the right enemies-privileged Liberty Leaguer types within Ghana, racists and colonial rightists outside...
...Cambridge, Mass...
...Isn't it possible that both men can be staunch opponents to the Pretoria government without being Communists...
...Aaron Miller World Affairs Assistant University of Minnesota Russell Warren Howe replies: I did not intend to convey the impression that blockading such a long coastline would be easy...
...As South Africa's survival would be at stake, Pretoria certainly would take all necessary defensive action with the South African navy and air force against Soviet and Egyptian warships...
...He does not see fit to mention that Ghana had one of the largest and most sophisticated intelligentsias in Africa, many of whom regarded Nkrumah as a reckless demagogue from the beginning, others of whom were alienated later on...
...It is also, however, as far as the Federal government is concerned u time for death, a time for snooping, shooting, bombing, and boondoggling, and though Lekachman has ostensibly more edifying uses for the money, the fact remains that the Federal government spends most of its funds, killing, investigating, or bureaucratizing people while state and local governments ordinarily concentrate on providing public services...
...What else is new...
...Where, then, is Howe's evidence to support his belief that a new appeal for sanctions in the UN will succeed where others have failed...
...It should be borne in mind that South Africa has modern jet fighter-bombers purchased from Great Britain and France...
...but they can hardly be exaggerated...
...Miller downgrades the SACP role but offers no evidence of other serious resistance activity...
...If, as Verwoerd expects, it fails, he, like U.S...
...and British authorities...
...These aircraft certainly have the capability of knocking out a blockading squadron that lacked carriers for air defense...
...Chicago Robert A. LeVine Associate Professor University of Chicago Immanuel Wallerstein replies: Mr...
...On the one hand, getting the soldiers back into their barracks is not likely to prove much easier in Ghana than it has elswhere...
...Lastly, Howe does not take account of the fact that a blockade is an act of war...
...Because it is fashionable to treat South Africa as "the unspeakable Turk" of our era, many commentators close their eyes to the fact that South Africa is a nation of considerable strength and also enjoys great strategic advantage because of its remote location at the southern tip of Africa...
...Minneapolis, Minn...
...The best he seems to be able to do is offer a series of unsupported allegations from which he draws the direst conclusions...
...The West can oppose, but not prevent, a UN blockade in the area, using Soviet or any shipping...
...Fortunately, there are Africans who take a less cynical and patronizing attitude toward their own affairs than he does...
...With apologists like that, Nkrumah needs no detractors...
...How, then, can Howe claim that "official opinion" in Washington and Pretoria coincide over the probable efficacy of a limited police action by Britain in Rhodesia...
...Although he obviously would like to defend Nkrumah against the rightists, Wallerstein's honesty prevents him from dispelling effectively any of the seven arguments so easily accepted by those of us who know Ghana less well than he does...
...they were aggrieved at preventive detention and the destruction of a free press and an independent judiciary (which do exist in some African countries and did exist in Ghana...
...Edward Simon TAXES So it is "A Time for Taxes" (NL, March 28), is it, Mr...
...As the London Sunday Times New York correspondent who interviewed Faulkner in 1956, when he made the statement (to which Shaw refers) about shooting Negroes, I should just like to confirm that he did in fact make it, that my verbatim shorthand notes leave no doubt about this, that the subsequent sequence of sentences (which he never denied) would make no sense without this phrase, and that a few weeks after our talk-when he was being nursed through an illness in a Memphis hospital-he told the local correspondent of Time that he had in fact said it but under the influence of liquor...
...Time is on their side...
...Further usurpation by the Federal government of local resources will only make solution of the real problems of the country more difficult...
...SOUTHERN AFRICA As a military writer, I was astonished to find Russell Warren Howe taking seriously the notion that the Soviet Union could carry out a sea blockade of South Africa either alone or in concert with the navy of the United Arab Republic ("Showdown in Southern Africa," NL, February 28...
...Where does he get the strength each day to presume that works of art derive from the need to tell of the daily life of humans at work, play and conflict...
...The notion of a Soviet sea blockade of South Africa is all the more illogical because the Russian Navy does not possess aircraft carriers for defense of its surface units and the tankers necessary to fuel a blockading squadron...
...Thousands of miles of coastline would have to be covered, including Portuguese ports through which many materials reach the Transvaal...
...Godstone, England Russell Warren Howe WALLERSTEIN Immanuel Wallerstein's encomium for the Nkrumah dictatorship ("Autopsy of Nkrumah's Ghana," NL, March 14) mixes healthy skepticism concerning prospects for Ghana and Africa with some highly questionable political and economic analysis...
...Clearly, the South African government never has espoused British military intervention in Rhodesia...
...Can this continue...
...Wallerstein's invocation of the deus ex machina of world market cocoa prices as the external factor which will make or break the economic fortunes of all Ghanaian regimes seems partly correct...
...Fischer's pre-arrest disguise and Segal's Oxford conference offer pretty thin substantiation, particularly when one recalls that Fischer had aroused no official suspicion prior to the Rivonia trials and that Segal was a perfectly free agent in South Africa until he began publishing anti-government tracts...
...Then what, Mr...
...Howe refers to Soviet ships in "Durban waters," but a successful blockade of South Africa would involve covering not only Durban, but the ports of East London, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town and Walvis Bay in South West Africa...
...France's objections to the RAF using Majunga, Madagascar, to patrol Beira waters and enforce sanctions on the Rhodesian rebels have now been overcome, and pressures on Madagascar to serve as an aircraft-carrier in the event of a showdown with South Africa would be considerable...
...would similarly be land-based...
...The naval operation supply base envisaged is either Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, or the much more suitable naval harbor of Diego Suarez, Madagascar...
...Howe's article, like so many published essays on South Africa, fails to take a realistic view of South Africa's armed strength...
...Howe apparently is unaware of the USSR's lack of facilities for surface naval operations thousands of miles from its Black Sea operating areas...
...Perhaps...
...but I understand Faulkner was in a state of pickled animation in his later years and may well have been inebriated without my detecting it...
...Because Pretoria calls everyone from Walt Disney to the Archbishop of Canterbury a Communist, we should be careful not to be equally silly and pretend that no one is...
...Again, Tanzania is politically available, but Madagascar more suitable...
...Another Watts eruption, for instance, will have to be prevented in California, specifically Los Angeles, not in Washington or Vietnam...
...Naval escort aircraft and, if necessary, SAMS...
...No state emerging from dictatorship is likely or obliged to allow the ex-dictator's political machine to continue functioning...
...Meister is correct in saying that the psychological effects of the technological transformation of the environment are often misinterpreted or tendentiously distorted...
...I had not realized that to be a liberal one had to believe in dribble-down economics...
...All that can be said for Howe's analysis, finally, is that his warning for the future has merit-but hardly on the premises which his article offers...
...Has Rosenthal sold out to some sinister forces...
...Since Rhodesia has no coastline, even a mandatory embargo on Rhodesia alone would involve a blockade of South African and Portuguese African ports...
...Even if the British were to lend a carrier, it should be realized that no shipboard-based British aircraft has anything like the capabilities of the French Mirage jets possessed by the South African Air Force...
...I have analyzed the voting position, in UN...
...The answer, of course, is "no," and the reason is applicable to both hypotheses: The Western view of self-interest in Southern Africa will not allow either the use of force or "oil and other embargoes" against the Portuguese and Afrikaners...
...However, the remedy for a succession of fat and lean years has been known since it was proposed by a wellknown economic consultant to one of Nasser's predecessors...
...In this case, what I got was not a considered statement for public consumption, but an uninhibited outpouring of the "heart...
...Nkrumah was one of those African publicity phenomena like Haile Selassie and Albert Schweitzer, who were more successful at developing reputations abroad than at doing the things in Africa for which their foreign admirers praised them...
...The latter proposition is not only untenable, it is downright foolish...
...officials, would prefer British police action, isolating the Rhodesian case, and not sanctions, which could and probably would escalate...
...March 14) was well written, resourcefully substantiated, and directed at an eminently eligible target, his contention that modern technology is indistinguishable in its psychological effects from earlier technologies is preposterous...
...ROSENTHAL In recent months I have particularly enjoyed Raymond Rosenthal's pieces on modern literature, because-and this may be a devastating accusation to make-it appears that he criticizes from life...
...Instead of denying Nkrumah's failings, he assures us that "other African regimes" and "Nkrumah's opponents" are and will be no better...
...If Howe doubts the South African military naval capabilities, he should study the last Institute for Strategic Studies (London) report on the South African defense establishment...
...The South Africans would be fully within their rights to attack and sink blockading vessels...
...Failure to anticipate the lean years is no longer an excusable error...
...New York City Stanley Plastrik Wallerstein replies: Bread and Freedom, Mr...
...There is in his style, his choice of works to consider and in the very stuff of what he says, the undeniable odor of a living human being...
...During our conversation at Scribner's he drawled, Southern-style, but did not slur words or smell of alcohol...
...I should also like to know why Howe is so willing to accept the Communist labels given Abram Fischer and Ronald Segal by the notoriously paranoiac Pretoria government...
...Wallerstein was that two weeks' dancing in the streets all about...
...And by what fantastic stretch of the imagination does he envision a Soviet naval blockade of Southern Africa in the face of Western opposition...
...New York City Gerald Pinsky Manhattan Community College Immanuel Wallerstein's "Autopsy" is not one of the more convincing "Yes, but articles of recent years...
...LeVine puts his faith in the sophisticated Ghanaian intelligentsia who have higher standards of government than I. Let us hope, with him, that now that they are no longer silenced, they will live up to the reputation their foreign admirers have of them...
...Wallerstein seems to be telling us that action is difficult in Africa, so one should be happy if the leaders at least mouth "progressive" sentiments, no matter what they actually do...
...I said police action then would have satisfied better Wilson's aim of dampening the austral African tinder-box...
...Modern technology in fact has radically changed the human environment...
...in vino Veritas...
...Such a task would tax the capabilities of even the largest and most thoroughly trained surface navies equipped with elaborate supply forces and with operating bases nearby...
...Pinsky looks forward with much hope to the prospect that the Ghanaian private sector will have a more sympathetic government...
...Los Angeles Richard G. Watson...
...But to assume, as Wallerstein does, that the test of the new regime's democratic inclinations will be its willingness to tolerate a pro-Nkrumah party is surely to stack the cards against it...
...Unlike reputations, people and nations cannot live on publicity, or even on high-flown populist pronouncements...
...Are there no other political prerogatives...
...Elementary democratic theory and practice should make it clear that there is no need to tolerate totalitarian parties in a democratic state...
...There is in Howe's article, moreover, a peculiar equation of the attitudes held toward a solution to the Rhodesian problem in Washington and Pretoria...
...They could not be comforted by the fact that "the Nkrumah regime at least had a group of Left-wing publicists who denounced corruption often in the press, to little avail to be sure," because they expected more of their leaders than hypocritical sloganeering...
...Surely the present German Federal Republic is not injured by banning totalitarian groups...
...Pragmatically, it is probably true that a blockade of Cape Town would not be completely effective, and that surface ships off Walvis Bay - and Benguela, Lobito and Luanda, if these were included-would be vulnerable, especially if the current break in relations between the Congo and Moscow continue, and preclude use of Kitona, the old Congolese Atlantic military base...
...It opposed rebellion as reckless but now that it has happened it hopes it prevails...
...I wish him best luck 'o the worm, and when he sights his next windmill, may Zephyrus blow gentle...
...Only by contending that nothing in one's environment has important psychic effects can one maintain that technology does not...
...What, if anything, points to the contrary...
...Phoenix, Arizona Ronald Sillman TECHNOPHOBIA Though Robert Meister's attack on Jacques Ellul's megatome bombs ("Techniques of the Technophobe...
...Aaron Miller's comments seem to demonstrate once more that the concision of journal istic style occasionally breeds misunderstanding...
...What is going on here...
...Recent history, no less than current interest, shows U. S. and British resistance to the isolation of those people and repeated failures to carry off economic sanctions...
...Fleets simply cannot operate at vast distances from their home ports without a train of repair, ammunition, fuel and supply vessels...
...In Segal's case, I did not make a personal assessment, but merely quoted the conclusion, of U.S...
...The surface units of the Soviet Navy have not ventured into Southern waters, except for a limited number of cruises in the Red Sea...
...They were silenced...
...Though absolutist technophobia of Ellul's sort verges on the paranoid, his fantasies would not be quite so ridiculous if everyone maintained Meister's posture of complacent indifference toward the implications of technology...
...The recognition of this in some of the recent coups, and the popular attack on self-indulgent and hypocritical leaders, are signs that many Africans have higher standards of government than some foreign observers of the African scene...
Vol. 49 • April 1966 • No. 8
