Dear Editor

...Dear Editor Nigeria I have just read David Robison's article, "The Price of One Nigeria' (NL, February 2) A pathetic and heart-rending piece of writing indeed1 An attempt to make America's "humanitarians" cry out and take up arms for a cause they do not understand and may never want to understand There is nothing unusual about this article, considering the fact that most other magazine stones on the same subject say just about the same thing All they want to impress on readers is the idea that Nigeria's Federal government should carry all the blame for the hell in what was once called Biafra Why doesn't someone write to scold rebel leader Ojukwu for the sufferings and atrocities his stubborn and inordinate ambition has brought upon the once flourishing people ot Eastern Nigeria1...

...Is a medical term applied to a type of mental malfunctioning to be explained by a single psychiatrist whose authority we should accept because his numerous footnotes indicate "a latter-day Renaissance thinker9" The scientific tradition has given us much knowledge of the behavior of the normal mind as well as of a form of failuie called schizophrenia One of the mind s functions is to control the individual's response to his physical and social environment, it is no brilliant feat to observe that schizophrenics use their crippled minds to deal with society To say that 'forms of schizophrenic alienation from the alienation of society may have a sociobiological function that we have not recognized" is not only tautological it is utter nonsense Having painfully picked my way through two of Laing's books because they had been highly recommended by my daughter's philosophy instructor, I looked for Shorter to give some explanation of why such inadequate thinking was being foisted on innocent young minds (In fact one chapter was so irrational as to strongly suggest it had been written while the author was on a drug "trip ") These two books in their entirety illuminate nothing in the field of philosophy Their contents can be summdnzed in the single idea that the insane are merely trying to get along as best they can jn a society which js really the organism that needs help The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words It is my belief that Laing's subliminal message is in his footnotes to revolutionary writers, in each book, the first author cited was Herbert Marcuse To forestall any false imputations, let me say that I do not oppose rapid, drastic change in our society—it is indeed inevitable, and can certainly be termed "revolutionary " What I do reject it, the appeal to the irrational as a method of dealing with our problems It has been said that the military is always refightmg the previous war, as exemplified by General Westmoreland s attempts to reincarnate the Korean imbroglio in Vietnam So do our own brave band of contemporary New Left revolutionaries, in a spirit of juvenile senescence, appear doggedly determined to revive the 1905 Russian revolutionary experience And Laing is without doubt a fitting foreman for this venture 4.\oca, N Y Harold Koretz, m d...

...Why should Ojukwu, the villain rather than the hero of the Ibo people, be allowed to go unblemished in the wide world of humanity after what his obstinate and futile resistance (though unjustified) has cost the Ibos and the nation of Nigeria in general Yes, I am a Nigerian, but that does not mean that I hate the Ibos, Nigeria's Federal government has nothing against the Ibos either I have many Ibo friends (now robbed away from me by Ojukwu) that I would very much like to welcome back with a passionate hug I enjoyed most of them but I hate Ojukwu and his type, who like to seek 'their selfish and ambitious ends despite the lnhu-man consequences that result from their schemings It is not surprising that he continued with his plot in the face of the starvation and death that were so rampant among his fellow citizens After all, he and his relatives were well fed and well cared for—he had nothing to lose After all, the starving populace only helped to win him world sympathy, which he so much needed to make his outlawry seem like a genuine cause After all, he knew he could fly away from "this place of death," packing along with him his relatives and his "white Mercedes car," as soon as he was done playing games with the lives of his fellow citizens After all, he knew he had a comfortable bank account waiting for him somewhere in a foreign country on which he could relax while watching Nigeria bmd up the wounds he heartlessly had inflicted on the nation David Robison, instead of helping rehabilitation and reunion in Nigeria, is maliciously doing more to establish enmity between the Ibos and the rest of Nigeria How long will it take the world to recognize the true culprit of the atrocities in the so-called Biafra7 Robison was right in titling has article "TThe Price of One Nigeria," but he should have remembered to add the fact that this "price" was made so exorbitant by the much admired General Odumegwu Ojukwu Salma, Kans Richard G Akusu Agnew In answer to the letter from Edith H Myers ("Dear Editor," NL, February 2) concerning Vice President Agnew's being the "hero of the liberals," I should like to refresh her memory In the Maryland gubernatorial election of 1966, the liberals did not vote as much for Agnew as they did against "every man's-home-is-his-castle" Mahoney Had anyone but George P Mahoney run against Agnew, the outcome of the election would have been quite different Miss Myers goes on to say that "after the racial riots had scarred Baltimore, Governor Agnew read a not act directed solely at the few extremists " May I again remind her that this "not act" was directed at the Negro leadership who had come to meet the Governor at his invitation and were thus rebuked 1 \nd las>t, Maryland's first Fair Housing Law was enacted by the Maiyland General Assembly, which recognized the importance of ihis legislation at the time when Agnew happened to be Governor So, lets be realistic and recognize that Agnew was at the right place at the right time, and that js why he is the Vice President today Oiungs Mills, Md \Urcja Rothstein Laing Kingsley Shorter ('Existential Ragpicker," NL February 16) is conect in his statement that "the essential task now confronting mankind is to rediscover, and if necessary to reinvent, the meaning of being human " However he is way off the mark in suggesting that R D Lamg has anything useful to contribute to this purpose Shorter's enthusiasm appears partly based on Laing's explanation of 'sanity and madness" which he considers to make more sense than 'a library full of standard psychoanalytic literature" Yet the hopeless inadequacies of the Freudian system —an infatuation of the pievious generation, now seen to be a passing aberration—do not m any case necessarily validate the current craze Does Laing correctly inteipret schizophrenia7 How would Shortei, or the "under 30s" be able to tell...