Xenophobia is not new
I couldn’t work out what was “new” about Europe’s latest crop of xenophobes and despotic rightwing politicians (9 February). With their hackneyed appeals to fears of refugees and other minorities, they seem no less familiar than Red Riding Hood’s surrogate grandmother.
What is startling is that they could again fire up so many of the continent’s conservative amygdalas less than a century after the second world war, and at a point in history where international cooperation and altruism on climate and other anthropogenic crises was never more desperately needed.
In the same edition, the Rule of Law Index published by the World Justice Project reports human rights in retreat in 71 of the 113 countries surveyed. While Donald Trump leads the west’s renunciation of democratic values, the Australian government has also moved alarmingly to the right in its flouting of UN refugee conventions and its recent mooting of draconian security curbs against investigative journalism.
John Hayward
Weegena, Tasmania, Australia
Great questions of our time
The question of how Europe and Asia will be connected might provide the UK with an opportunity to act as a go-between for Europe and Asia. But this is surely not, as argued by Bruno Macaes (2 February), the great question of the 21st century. There are at least four greater questions. First, how will the rise of China be managed? Second, how will catastrophic climate change be averted? Third, how will democracy be sustained? Finally, what will replace capitalism as the dominant mode of global production?
Stewart Sweeney
Adelaide, South Australia
Humans are part of nature
George Monbiot (5 January) is right to highlight the ways that human activity is affecting the living world. However, the losses are only half the story. Though we compete against many species, we also inadvertently create habitats in which other species can thrive. Modern cities may not look like a promising natural environment but rats, raccoons and foxes all live successfully within them, while here in northern Germany the increased areas devoted to maize grown for biogas production are also fuelling a wild boar population explosion.
We also affect life at a microscopic level. In recent decades we have dramatically improved the survival of some species by inventing chemicals to destroy micro-organisms. The micro-organisms, however, are fighting back by developing multidrug resistant strains. WHO now recognises antimicrobial resistance as an serious threat to global public health.
We humans must realise that we are not just observers of the natural world – we are part of it.
Anne Humphreys
Agethorst, Germany
Preparing for the end
More than 50 years ago, my grandmother, then a widow, started her own döstädning (“death cleaning”) (2 February). Too late, I discovered that she had got rid of several things I would have loved to keep. However, she compensated for that by offering to each of her grandchildren a carefully selected gift from her own objects of sentimental value. I received two very nice china cups and saucers, inscribed Don d’amitié with gold lettering. A treasure indeed. Following her example, we do the same with our grandchildren when they reach 21.
Jean-Marie Gillis
Wezembeek-Oppem, Belgium
• My father’s only yen was for the skirls of bagpipes to send him off (his Scots heritage and a military burial); similarly, I have a jones for a bevy of professional keeners, just as wealthy Romans in antiquity had at their pyres during the night. I do feel some compunction about having to put them on call – zero-hours contracts and all; perhaps they could be compensated upfront were I to misapprehend the icy fingers’ timing. Do the Irish still keen?
RM Fransson
Wheat Ridge, Colorado, US
Briefly
• Your photo of the anti-government protest in Addis Ababa in your 2 February issue is captioned, “people from the Oromo”, yet I can’t see any women in it. Their absence highlights the powerlessness of women in that society and I would expect the Weekly to focus on that fact. In Ethiopia (as elsewhere) it’s largely men who are responsible for strife. Simply labelling the photo correctly, “men from the Oromo”, would make that important point, and would remind readers who runs the world, and it isn’t women.
Susan Grimsdell
Auckland, New Zealand
• I am sure that many Scots and Irish people would welcome Labour’s forced cut-price land proposal (9 February). Such a proposal might partially compensate them for the land that was forcefully taken from them a couple of hundred years ago.
Eddie van Rijnswoud
Kalmunda, Western Australia
• One wonders what Pedanticus would have made of the book review of Enemies Within (2 February): “In a rather chilling incident Philby sent men over the border from Turkey into Georgia in 1948 only to vanish immediately’’. Was he a magician as well as a traitor?
Johnny Hackett
Wonthaggi, Victoria, Australia
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