Letter to Prof Lodge of Limerick University re our letter exchange in the Guardian about the GDR.

16 October 2014

Dear Prof. Lodge

Thank you for your letter and the paper by Anthony Glees you sent. Yes, short letters in a newspaper are never an adequate means of expressing opinions or for putting over cohesive arguments. 

Like you, I abhor torture and maltreatment wherever it takes place and whosoever practises it. And, as I made clear in my Guardian letter, I certainly don’t want to appear to be an apologist for or defender of activities and behaviour of the GDR’s state security services. 

What motivates me to take up this issue is a determination to counter what has become the characterisation of the whole GDR experience as a ‘Stasi’ one and that the country was simply a totalitarian, oppressive and unjust state (Unrechtsstaat in Federal German terminology); there is no attempt by western politicians, historians or academics to offer a more differentiated picture or to undertake a genuine attempt to understand the GDR experience through the lives of those who lived it. 

There have been a multitude of books written by those who lived in the GDR about their experiences (including my own small booklet) but these, with the exception of those that confirm the already jaundiced picture, have been totally ignored. I lived and studied in the GDR for four years. I also married (twice) GDR women who were born and grew up, studied and worked there before coming to the UK. My mother taught in the GDR for ten years and continued to live there after her retirement.

My argument is simply that while the State Security apparatus played a powerful, significant and often unsavoury role in the country, its activities did not impact negatively on everyone by any means and many people led normal lives without any contact with them at all.  Of course, if you were an active dissident or operated against the system, you would undoubtedly find yourself in conflict with them. But, after all, every nation has its security apparatus (just look at how the security forces here have infiltrated protest groups) and some are more or less brutal and oppressive. In the GDR, the aim of the security services was also to protect what they deemed to be national security. 

I also agree with you, that a definition of torture (although “the use of psychological and/or physical abuse in order to terrorise or cow a victim to extract a confession or information” is a decent enough definition I feel) is not always easy and there are degrees of brutality. I am sure the Stasi did use methods at times that were certainly not commensurate with what I would deem ‘humane treatment’, although they would be at the less brutal spectrum of torture, I would argue. And it is likely that more brutal methods or mistreatment were implemented in the early years (late forties and fifties) and certainly less, if at all, in the later decades.

Anthony Glees’s paper which I read, only serves to underline my point. His premiss is that the GDR was an ‘Unrechtsstaat’ and he attempts to prove his point with all the weapons at his disposal, and with no effort of balance. His sources are almost if not totally exclusively West German or British.

One needs to ask: why if the GDR was such a horrific prison camp have there been no more than a handful of ex-Stasi officers convicted (despite thousands of investigated cases) - and the few that were convicted have received small fines or bail. Why if the system was so horrendous have around a third of former GDR citizens regularly voted for the PDS/Die Linke, the ‘successor party’ to the old ruling SED? And why do many more feel that with unification the baby was perhaps thrown out with the bathwater and they may have lost more than they have gained?

There is an interesting book written by an Austrian CIA operative (together with the Stasi man who interrogated him) who was captured by GDR authorities and held in Hohenschoenhausen: Verheizt und Vergessen by H. Sieberer and H. Kierstein (Berlin: edition ost 2005). While he doesn’t paint a glowing picture, he underlines that he was never maltreated or tortured and appears to have more anger about his incompetent CIA handlers than his GDR captors!

Or the book, Die DDR unterm Luegenberg [the GDR under the mountain of lies], edition ost, 2010, written by Ralph Hartmann, the GDR’s former ambassador to Yugoslavia. In the book the author has a chapter titled, ‘Stasi-Folter und Stasi -Terror’ (Stasi torture and Stasi terror) in which he demolishes the accusations of systematic torture carried out by the state security forces. In this same chapter he deals specifically with Hohenschoenhausen and relates that the director of that prison museum and a chief ‘crown prosecution witness’ is Hubertus Knabe, a West German, and well-known and oft quoted ‘SED expert’. On taking up his post he declared  Hohenschoenhausen to be ‘the Dachau of communism’. he alleges that the ‘torture cells’ that are on show have been fabricated post-GDR. There is also a train carriage there and railway tracks ‘to transport prisoners’ which are clearly supposed to be a reminder not of Dachau but of Auschwitz. However in GDR times there never was a railway track or trains for transportation to and from the prison. The museum is well-funded by the government because it serves to underline the official demonisation of the GDR.  The book’s author maintains that the present museum has had other elements and evidence of torture added since which were not there when it was used as a prison. 

In Glees’s paper he quotes figures for deaths in Hohenschoenhausen  ‘of between 900 - 3,000’ [a large and inexplicable margin of difference] and that ‘water torture was used there regularly’ but gives no source for this. His other source for such figures is Die Gedenkstaette fuer die Opfer politischer Gewalt et al., Die Vergangenheit (1996), an institution set up by the Federal government with the express purpose of denigrating the GDR.

But even Glees writes that there were 173,000 IMs (Stasi informants) - hardly the one in three quoted by Neil MacGregor in his original article (that would be over 5 million!).

Glees is well-known as a very conservative figure, specialising in security issues and with close ties to the security services. In 2010 was appointed a professor of trust (Vertrauensdozent) by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. Not exactly a neutral observer!

There was a lot wrong with the GDR and there was serious distortion and restriction of democratic rights, civil rights and personal freedoms, but it was not a nazi-like state and nor was it one big prison camp.

I hesitate in quoting Goebbels but his alleged statement that if you quote a lie often enough it will stick is certainly valid in this respect.

Regards

Three letters on the occasion of a forthcoming exhibition at the British Museum and a six-week series of broadcasts on the BBC have been sent for publication but it remains to be seen whether they will be.

While a new perspective on German culture is long overdue, as is a departure from the cliche's of Germany being a country identified only with nazis, jack boots, lederhosen, the SS and the the perpetrators of the holocaust, there also needs to be a proper assessment of the role played by the GDR in modern German history away from the cliches of it being reduced to the 'stasi state' and a successor to the nazi dictatorship.

27 September 2014

Dear Sir/Madam

Two of the iconic cultural figures mentioned in Neil MacGregor’s article (Made in Germany in Guardian Review - 27 September), Ernst Barlach, and Käthe Kollwitz, were celebrated and promoted in the GDR (East Germany), although the former was a committed Christian and the latter a pacifist. 

I hope the new exhibition in the British Museum and the BBC series accompanying it will not simply remove the contribution made to German culture by the GDR, as is usually done. After all, two of the greatest theatre men of the twentieth century, Bertolt Brecht and the Austrian opera director Walter Felsenstein, worked and produced some of their best works there and were supported and heavily subsidised by the government. And Heiner Müller, one of Germany’s best modern dramatists was a GDR citizen.The country’s orchestras, under conductors like Kurt Masur were world famous for the excellence of their music-making, the renowned tenor Peter Schreier and baritone Olaf Bär also learned their handiwork there. This welcome exhibition should be an opportunity to reassess German culture, but without the distorting lenses of the Cold War.

28 September 2014

Dear Sir,

To open his article on German culture (Made in Germany in the Guardian’s Weekend Review - 27 September), Neil MacGregor highlights a wetsuit used by someone attempting to flee East Germany. This is the asinine equivalent of exhibiting a hood used by British troops in their maltreatment of Northern Irish and Iraqi prisoners as an icon of British culture!

He also equates the ‘two [German] dictatorships’ by writing of the ‘…situation under both the Nazis and the Stasi.’ It needs to be stated unequivocally that the Nazis were the government of 1930s Germany, imprisoning tens of thousands of political dissidents, torturing and murdering hundreds of thousands of others in concentration camps for racial and political reasons. The regime also carried out a cultural witch-hunt, burning books and demonising ‘decadent’ artists. The Stasi did not run the GDR, it was merely a very powerful security apparatus, but always under the control of the Socialist Unity Party. It did not imprison thousands or torture its perceived enemies, even if it was often heavy handed and unjust. MacGregor also re-iterates the incredible, often used, but unsubstantiated figure of  ‘…one in three of the population were informing on their friends’ to the Stasi. The GDR was a socialist state, even if centrally and bureaucratically governed, and most people lived their lives with little or no relations or connection with the state security services.

MacGregor also writes about Meissen in the same distorted vein: ‘ …so the factory set up by August the Strong received commissions to make official portraits of the leaders of the East German Communist state.’ The factory’s main role in the GDR continued to be to produce traditional first class Dresden porcelain, but it did indeed make small ceramic medallions, mostly commemorating German cultural figures like Goethe, Lessing and Schiller and extremely few of ‘communist figures’.

Dear Madam/Sir,

The author of the feature Made in Germany in the Guardian’s Weekend Review (27th September) writes that ‘Later that year the Russians removed the entire art collection [from Dresden after allied bombing in February 1945]. This may convey the impression that they stole the collection, but in fact they removed it to keep it safe and returned every single piece once the Gemaelde Gallerie was restored. Russian forces took great care to prevent looting of art treasures in Germany and in fact, immediately the war was over, promoted the rapid re-establishment of theatres and music-making, as well as encouraging and supporting artists to begin working again.

It was Britain and the USA that carpet bombed what was widely acknowledged to be one of the most beautiful and culturally-rich cities in the world. They did this with no reflection on what they were destroying - an architecturally unique city containing an immense collection of some of the world’s most valuable art works. The war was clearly coming to an end; Russian troops were poised on the Czech-German border only miles away from Dresden and the city was packed with refugees fleeing the front. By any measure that destruction was a an act of human and cultural barbarism.

Press Ownership

Letter to Guardian 30 November 2012

Harold Evans is bang on target (A clever solution – but why the silence on ownership? - Guardian 30 November). In all the howling and squealing about the need to ‘maintain the freedom of the press’ hardly anyone is addressing this key issue. Freedom only has meaning if equal access and diversity is guaranteed. For Cameron et al to cry wolf about ‘state interference’ and the danger of overthrowing a long and proud tradition of a free press displays a lack of knowledge of history. The press throughout its short history has been censored by the ruling elite with, fines, bans and stamp duties imposed to prevent the publication of popular, usually,working class newspapers. Only since the increasing concentration of ownership in the hands of the wealthy has the state ceased hounding the press. Leveson’s modest suggestion is, in any case, not calling for state regulation, simply giving a putative regulatory body statutory powers; otherwise it would remain a toothless poodle like the present Press Complaints Commission.

Jonathan Freedland is right to warn of the probable protracted emasculation of the BBC World Service (Guardian 14 July 2012: This world class institution explains Britain to the world). Its role has been vital in providing those living in countries where news and information was scarce or distorted with a more objective picture. It knew that it had to report broadly and truthfully to maintain credibility, and it used journalists who knew first hand the countries on which they reported. It is a pity, however, that British listeners of the BBC are provided with a much more bland and tendentious news and information service than the better informed World Service listeners. It is also true that, despite its worthy reputation, it also pursued an establishment political agenda. Broadcasts to communist countries were also aimed at undermining. Blacklists were used to filter those employed by the BBC and, certainly in the case of broadcasts to East Germany, the Corporation was not averse to making up their own ‘listeners letters’ as they received so few! I only wish we here in the UK could receive World Service news bulletins instead of the superficial fare we are invariably fed.

4 November 2011

If there were any doubts remaining about Poppy Day now being a largely jingoistic exercise, the present British Legion poster campaign will settle them. They portray celebrities like Helen Mirren saying: ‘The true stars are our troops’, and Katherine Jenkins:’ It’s our unsung heroes who deserve the applause’. It has always been said that 11 November is a day to commemorate those soldiers who died fighting to defend their country (primarily in the First and Second World Wars). I was unaware that it now means cheerleading for British troops under any circumstances. Those now fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and bombing in Libya as well as those who humiliated and murdered innocent Iraqi civilians can hardly, I would submit, be termed ‘stars’ or be deserving of applause. I’ll be wearing a white poppy to commemorate all those, both civilian and military, killed in wars. It is the only possible honest and meaningful statement.

1 November 2011

Dear Sir
Stephen Pinker (If it bleeds, it misleads: why the Cassandras got it wrong; Guardian 1 November 2011) sets up an Aunt Sally to press a dubious argument. Surely the task today is not to solve the impossible and rather pointless conundrum of whether more people are killed by wars today than in previous eras, but to rail against the iniquity of war itself as a means of solving the world’s problems. Body counts, even if accurate, can never reveal the true horrors of war. The fact is that the world today is devoting inordinate and unafordable amounts of wealth on weapons of war instead of on education, health and well-being - that is the real horror. In a report for the British American Security Information Council, the US alone is planning to spend $700bn on nuclear weapons over the next decade. This is how real destruction and killing takes place today.
What Pinker ignores is that all wars in history have, in essence, been fought for economic reasons. Today’s power-brokers have other means at their disposal than actual invasions or killing with weapons hardware. Hundreds of thousands are dying of hunger and poverty as a direct result of the wastage of weapons spending and imperialist policies of imposing imbalanced trading mechanisms; guns are a last resort to be used on those few incalcitrant nations that refuse to toe the line.


John Green

5 July 2011

Dear Sir,

Erecting a monument to Ronald Reagan in London is an offence not only to Londoners, but to all humanity. This small-time actor, a one time Nazi sympathiser and anti-Semite climbed the career ladder by shopping his fellow actors and film-makers to the House Un-American Activities Committee. It is a terrible comment on our times that someone like Reagan, with a political mindset stuck in the McCarthy era, ignorant, simplistic in his thinking and an inveterate liar could be elected president of the USA. His avuncular charm masked his sclerotic cowboy imperialist mentality. He used secret drug money to fund an illegal war (according to the findings of his own country’s judiciary) against revolutionary Nicaragua which wiped out the cream of that country’s young leaders and professionals. He also led the invasion of the tiny island of Grenada with the excuse that Cuba was building a missile base there. Reagan’s championing of a massive US re-armament campaign under his paranoid Star Wars initiative would almost certainly have led us into a third world war if Gorbachov had not thrown in the towel. It was Gorbachov who ended the Cold War, not Reagan.

Letter publishewd in Guardian 24 May 2011 on Labour Party policy
Ed Miliband says he ‘has listened’ to what the electorate wants, but his latest policy statement is nothing more than a rehash of his acceptance speech after winning the Labour Party leadership. So what has he learned by listening? ( ‘Why I’ll never hug a husky’; Guardian 21 May)
He says the last Labour government ‘made mistakes’, but it wasn’t mistakes it made by adopting its ideological obsequiousness to big business. It accepted the precepts of the global financial institutions and believed, sailing blithely on the wave of incontinent consumer spending, that ‘boom and bust’ were of the past. It is its failure to understand the incendiary characteristics of casino capitalism that has led us into the present ongoing crisis.
His language, too, shows that he hasn’t understood the need for ideological change. Giving people a chance to ‘get onto the housing ladder’, as he writes, reveals the same blinkered thinking that characterised New Labour. Housing should be a right, and most people want simply that: a decent place to live. The ladder concept is a Thatcherite one and implies buying to invest, moving up the property and status chain, and it is that sort of thinking which created the housing bubble in the first place.
Until the Labour Party is able to offer people an alternative vision to outdated capitalism and imbue them with realistic hope of a society based on justice, fairness and stability, they will be doomed to repeat the sad history of social democracy throughout Europe.

Letter to NS

The description of many socialists and social democrats as being essentially conservative is a not a new concept, but conservatism needs to be properly defined. Maurice Glasman (NS 3 April 2011) seems to confuse this with ‘blue’ Conservatism. Many on the left wish to see the reinstatement of the essential human values of community, solidarity and equality of opportunity – all conservative values. The so-called Conservatives are the real revolutionary wreckers because they are prepared to destroy any sense of society, of social cohesion and human progress in their worship of market forces and the profit motive. We have allowed them to hijack the conservative idea with our own amour fou for revolution. The majority of citizens want, above all, stability and security in their lives, not revolutionary turmoil. The Conservatives can never offer that because their belief in the sanctity of market forces means that life will be continual turmoil, marked by financial crises, job insecurity and destructive individualism. Socialism, based more on co-operatives than state-run enterprises, can offer that security and stability, as long as the necessary checks and balances are in place to prevent state domination, as happened in Eastern Europe.

Letter to Guardian

Garton Ash offers the Arab countries advice on overcoming their dictatorial pasts by holding up Germany as a model: ‘out of the experience of dealing with two dictatorships contemporary Germany offers the gold standard for dealing with a difficult past’ (Guardian 17 March - Germany can show reborn nations the art of overcoming a difficult past). His description is a good example of how not to conduct Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with history). His amnesia or ignorance of the way West Germany dealt with its Nazi past is astounding. Hitler’s chief of counter insurgency became the Federal Republic’s top intelligence agent, Nazi generals like Hans Speidel continued to serve in the top echelons of the army (General Bastian, who became a leading Green and peace campaigner was forced out of the Bundeswehr by unreconstructed Nazis still in positions of power); leading judges, doctors and academics who served the Nazis with ardent commitment continued in their former posts while those who had fought the fascists were often persecuted, had their pensions docked and were treated as lepers. The present meticulously orchestrated campaign against the GDR state security forces has more to do with extirpating any remaining ‘nostalgia’ for the GDR and of the idea of an alternative to capitalism than it does with a genuine desire to overcome the past.

Letter to Guardian

26 January 2011



Dear Sir,

Ian McEwan is either being extremely naïve or disingenuous in his justification for accepting the Jerusalem prize (letters 26 January). To compare his action with that of Daniel Barenboim completely misses the point. Barenboim is actively bringing together Palestinians and Israelis to work for a common purpose and to begin a dialogue with each other through music. He has been vilified for his efforts by the Israelis. If McEwan thinks the Israelis will see his visit as a gesture of opposition to their policies he is living in cloud cuckoo land. They will rightly see it as an endorsement of the legitimacy of their policies. Like McEwan, many used similar arguments in relation to apartheid South Africa, but such so-called ‘dialogue’ didn’t work, but the boycott did. He thinks ‘literature can reach across the political divide’ - not by collaborating with oppression it can’t. The names of other writers who accepted the Jerusalem Prize he lists to justify his decision did so at a time before Israeli politics took on its present extreme belligerence, inhumanity and arrogant rejection of international law and opinion.
Please think again Ian.

Full letter to Guardian (pblished in a truncated version)

Yet again a case of the police spying on environmental activists (Guardian 10 Jan - Undercover officer who spied on Green activists quits Met). With the ongoing terrorist threat and government cut-backs in police funding, serious questions need to be asked about why the police are squandering valuable resources on keeping legitimate democratic organisations under surveillance. As far as I am aware, no environmentalist organisation has ever been accused of countering or undertaking action that endangers life or threatens the democratic state. At the most extreme, such organisations may have trespassed and perhaps, at times, caused minimal damage to property – actions that can be pursued through the normal legal process. These organisations are not clandestine and make no attempt to hide their views. Of course, when undertaking actions for maximum publicity they will sometimes have to keep exact plans secret. This is no reason to treat them as the ‘enemy within’ or like terrorists.

More sinisterly, it reveals a mind-set at the top of our police forces belonging to the bad old days when the duty of the security services was seen to be serving a governing elite that was intent on maintaining its own class privilege and conservative concept of government. In such a context it is little wonder that many ordinary policeman see brutality against student, environmental and political demonstrators as legitimate because they are ‘the enemy’.

Letter to Guardian on misuse of langauge by USA (not published)
20 December 2010

Dear Sir

So, ‘WikLeaks founder is high-tech terrorist,’ says Biden (Guardian 20 December). Even by the most elastic definition, ‘terrorism’ involves the imposition of extreme fear on a person or population, through the threat of dire consequences and violence. By no stretch of the imagination can the release of confidential diplomatic exchanges be construed in this way. Biden’s comments are another irresponsible attempt by the US to conceal its anti-humanitarian policies, along with its use of other Orwellian terms like ‘extraordinary rendition’ for illegal kidnapping, ‘coercive counterintelligency’ for torture and ‘humanitarian intervention’ for the invasion of other countries etc. Bernard Shaw memorably said that the USA and Britain were two nations divided by a common language, and that has never been truer. But, what is even more serious is that we are now divided by our concepts of morality.

Unpublished letter to Guardian after its attack on Unite Gen Sec Len McCluskey

Dear Sir



The Guardian leader (Leading Nowhere 20 Dec. 2010) compares Unite’s newly elected General Secretary, Len McClusky with being ‘like the Bourbons who have learned nothing and forgotten everything’. A more appropriate historical comparison would be of the leader writer with Neville Chamberlain who thought he could appease a determined, ideologically-motivated dictator. How does the Guardian propose that trade unions and the many ordinary people should fight the present draconian cuts that were singularly absent in the coalition parties’ manifestos? With a trade union movement more shackled by restrictive legislation than any other in the western world, outside the USA and the immediate threat of thousands losing their jobs, a roof over their head and many other financial blows, a wait-and-see attitude by the trade unions would be to to submit.

In McClusky Britain has a trade union leader prepared to work with others to seriously challenge government policies that have not been approved by the electorate and if fully implemented threaten to destroy what is left of the social fabric of this country after Thatcher’s onslaught.

Re BBC News on One Friday 9 July.

I wish to complain about your news coverage on Friday 9 July BBC1 10.00pm news. You had only three items: the main one (which took up almost a qare of an hour – half the time) being a report on the hunt for Raoul Moat. The second item was on the football world cup and the third on the London Olympic Village. That is, two items on sport and one on the hunt for a lone gunman – hardly ‘news’ in the real sense of the word, whether world or British.

The fact that the police hunt for a lone gunman in Rothbury was given almost half of the total news coverage is pandering to tabloid-type sensationalism and demonstrates a gratuitous infatuation with crime. It may have deserved a mention but surely not more coverage than a major world catastrophe would normally receive. The police were clearly keeping all outsiders away from the focus of their hunt and were divulging few details of what was happening, but such a lack of genuine information did not stop you milking the story even though it was dry. Your journalists talked of being ‘only 100 yards from the scene’ as if this is of relevance to their story. They interviewed ‘experts’ about ‘what might have been happening’ (because no one knew apart from the police officers involved). This is not news but empty speculation and imparts no information or understanding to the viewer.

The fact that a lone gunman on the run after killing one person was now being hunted by a heavily armed police force in an operation almost unprecedented in peacetime outside Northern Ireland or in connection with serious terrorist offences, elicits no interrogation by you is incredible. You don’t question the use of such force; you don’t question the use of draconian powers to close off civilian areas and impose a curfew on ordinary citizens – actions of doubtful legality or legitimacy. Now tht would be proper investigative journalism!

BBC News has become increasingly obsessed with individual acts of crime, giving gratuitous coverage of little informational or educational value. This is ‘bread and circuses’ of the worst kind and not the sort of intelligent news coverage one expects from the BBC with its mandate to inform, educate and entertain.
Let us have real news please!

10 March 2010


Dear Sir

It is easy to point the finger at other nations, but few countries are willing to admit to reprehensible collective acts committed during their history – some do, but only many decades later (Guardian 10 March: La Rafle confronts wartime stain on French history - Film attempts to recreate the terror of the 1942 Rafle du Vel d'Hiv, in which 13,000 Jews were rounded up in Paris). The Turks are still refusing to admit their genocide of the Armenians and we have still not addressed the role of HM representatives in the Channel Islands during the Nazi occupation. Few today realise that the Nazis actually occupied a part of Britain and that the police and island administrations co-operated willingly with the Nazis, deporting Jews and accepting the slave labour and ill-treatment of Russian POWs. No one has been asked to account for this; it has been brushed under the carpet. The Governor of Jersey was even knighted for services to the Crown!

Letter in Guardian 17.02.2010
A tighter regulation of advertising as advocated by Jackie Ashley (Let’s take on the ads that fuel such waste, debt and misery, Guardian 15 February) could have a real impact on the way we live. It is ironic that she also suggests that Karl Marx, if he were alive today, would call for a ban on advertising. In the country which claimed to be his legacy it was indeed the case. I lived in East Germany during the sixties when there was virtually no advertising at all (apart from a few political slogans).

That’s why it was a shock for any visiting westerner and labelled ‘grey and boring’. Grey it may have been, but hardly boring. You soon adapted to the lack of garish colour and the dictatorship of ‘in your face’ advertising. Instead your eyes were attracted to buildings, to people and places; it also evoked an air of tranquillity and rest for the eyes, something impossible to find in our cities with their dazzling and seductive/offensive advertising culture. These tell you nothing about a product, merely stimulate your sexual/consumer urges.

The other upside of no advertising in East Germany was that products had little symbolic status value and young people didn’t compete with each other on the basis of what they could buy. A natural, relaxed and unhyped sexuality pertained, with no sexual objectification of women, no epidemics of anorexia, bulimia or concepts of corporeal inadequacy.

A tighter regulation of advertising as advocated by Jackie Ashley (Let’s take on the ads that fuel such waste, debt and misery, Guardian 15 February) could have a real impact on the way we live. It is ironic that she also suggests that Karl Marx, if he were alive today, would call for a ban on advertising. In the country which claimed to be his legacy it was indeed the case. I lived in East Germany during the sixties when there was virtually no advertising at all (apart from a few political slogans). That’s why it was a shock for any visiting westerner and labelled ‘grey and boring’. Grey it may have been, but hardly boring. You soon adapted to the lack of garish colour and the dictatorship of ‘in your face’ advertising. Instead your eyes were attracted to buildings, to people and places; it also evoked an air of tranquillity and rest for the eyes, something impossible to find in our cities with their dazzling and seductive/offensive advertising culture. These tell you nothing about a product, merely stimulate your sexual/consumer urges. The other upside of no advertising in East Germany was that products had little symbolic status value and young people didn’t compete with each other on the basis of what they could buy. A natural, relaxed and unhyped sexuality pertained, with no sexual objectification of women, no epidemics of anorexia, bulimia or concepts of corporeal inadequacy.

11 January 2009
Dear Sir (Guardian)
Surely no coincidence, with energy supplies low and pressures to build a new generation of nuclear power stations increasing, that a new attempt is launched to belittle the dangers of radiation. (Radiation threat overstated – Oxford professor; Guardian 11 January). The problem with radiation, like other forms of ‘invisible’ pollution, is the difficulty of accurately measuring individual doses over a lifetime. What none of the so-called experts takes into consideration is that we are no talking simply of radiation from external sources, but also about radiation caused by ingested radioactive elements – a far more serious threat. The terrible consequences of ingesting radioactive dust have been extensively documented in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia where the US and Britain used depleted uranium weaponry. The radioactive dangers from nuclear testing in the fifties and sixties came from ingested Caesium-137 and Strontium-90. Animals at the top of the food chain, like humans, tend to accumulate such elements in their tissue and this is what constitutes the greatest danger. Any increase in the amount of radioactive material in the atmosphere is potentially very dangerous. If the nuclear industry can guarantee that won’t happen, then it would be a different ball game.

That the CIA has been involved in the training of torturers in the Palestinian security forces should come as no surprise (Special Report Guardian 18 Dec). The CIA has a long history of training foreign security forces in torture techniques even though they were forbidden in the US itself (until Bush and Cheney decided it was time to remove the ‘pansy’ kid gloves). The CIA helped train the Shah’s notorious SAVAK secret police, the Pakistani secret services and a whole list of para-military forces in Central America, among others. During its war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, its infamous training manual, demonstrating the use of torture techniques, became public and caused widespread outrage. If Obama wishes to retain any humanitarian credibility, he should clean up the CIA and outlaw all torture techniques and their export.