Dear Editor
Dear Editor Africa Policy A few short weeks after reading Russell Warren Howe's "The Carter Strategy in Africa" (NL, September 26), with its statement that President Carter has "agreed to replace...
...Dear Editor Africa Policy A few short weeks after reading Russell Warren Howe's "The Carter Strategy in Africa" (NL, September 26), with its statement that President Carter has "agreed to replace [Soviet party chief] Brezhnev in keeping Somalia as East Africa's main military power," I was interested to find newspaper reports out of Washington saying that this country had abandoned Somalia, decided to play a more neutral role in the Horn of Africa, and wouldn't supply any arms to anybody...
...Paul, Minn...
...As for Walter A. Sheldon's letter: According to the British Prime Minister's office, which has access to Rhodesia's classified demographic statistics, whites number about 160,000 of a total black population of 9 million, making settlers about 2 per cent of the population...
...The figure seems far wrong to me...
...Methods, as Arafat's men have made all too clear, have a way of becoming ends...
...But the sleazy show has friends: Some of our best writers-e...
...My projection that whites will number less than 1 per cent of the population is based on my conviction that an African economy of Zimbabwe's size will be able to support a privileged white technocracy of slightly more than 50,000 people...
...Irgun I very much enjoyed Eric M. Breindel's review of Terror Out of Zion ("A History of the Irgun," NL, October 10...
...The usual answer we give is that the Irgun's cause was just, while the Palestinians' isn't...
...George Steiner predicted such a development...
...In a post-Holocaust world, Steiner maintained, products of the imagination will lose their currency...
...If the Irgun could do it, why can't the Palestinians...
...It is sad to sec Steiner's predictions being borne out, for the logical extension of this trend is an end to fiction altogether...
...Well, that may be so, but it's not good enough...
...L. Doctorow (Ragtime), Robert Coover (The Public Burning)-are doing the same thing, although their motives are purer, meaning more artistic...
...Lido Beach, N. Y. Walter A. Sheldon Russell Warren Howe replies: I agree with Mathew Lucas that American policy in the Horn is far from static...
...Lev Weisman Fictional Facts Marvin Kitman's column ("Washington a Clef," NL, September 26) pointed to a disturbing trend, albeit in Kitman's marvelously indirect way:-namely, using real people for fictional purposes...
...In the case of Washington: Behind Closed Doors, this was scurrilous, disgusting and cowardly...
...They will no longer reveal the deeper aspects of reality because reality itself will be so horrifyingly evil that it will stand beyond words and thus beyond imaginative construction...
...Howe states that the whites in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) will "number far less than 1 per cent of the population...
...New York City Matthew Lucas I believe there is a factual error in the final column of Russell Warren Howe's article...
...But as of early October, the U.S...
...Houston John Anderson...
...There is, first of all, the moral question: Is terror ever justifiable...
...was still agreeing to supply Somalia with "defense weaponry" while selling spare parts for F-5s, etc., to Ethiopia...
...I think the book's most serious flaw, however, is its claim that Irgun policy hastened the British departure...
...But the book itself has much too kindly a perspective on Jewish terror...
...This trend, I suspect, plus world diplomatic pressure, plus the cost of maintaining an army in the Middle East, would have led to Britain leaving precisely when it did-and without Begin's help...
...One story, by Richard Burt in the New York Times, even suggested that the Administration is starting to make diplomatic overtures to Ethiopia again...
...For writers to reach their audiences, therefore, they will have to rely more on a documentary form, on wrenching journalistic, everyday reality into fiction...
...There is simply no way to measure whether this is true or not...
...strategy" in Africa involved an active participation in the Horn as well as the South, I wonder what he makes of these developments...
...Since part of Howe's thesis was that the U.S...
...What is true, is that Britain was in the process of contracting its colonial empire, of which Palestine was among the last bastions...
...How much of a responsibility, then, should the Irgun bear for terror's current popularity...
Vol. 60 • October 1977 • No. 21
