Diplomacy may disarm Kim
Regarding your piece The Great Kim conundrum (8 September), could it be that Kim Jong-un simply wants the ability to make credible counter-threats over threats he perceives? Maybe he saw the movie Dr Strangelove and learned that a doomsday machine is worthless if you keep it a secret. The machine was a lower-cost way for the Soviets to compete with the US during the cold war, but it was made known too late. So now – able or not – Kim brags about hitting the US with nuclear missiles.
In the same issue, Simon Tisdall discussed members of the nuclear club’s failure to disarm themselves. Nukes appear to be here to stay. The remaining options concern only their use and the reactions to that.
Instead of more counter-threats, sanctions and retaliatory bombast, how about more diplomacy to defuse tensions and prevent a conventional-weapons attack against South Korea and others? Kim seems careful to threaten in defensive terms and to hope for an overreaction.
Spence Blakely
Portsmouth, Rhode Island, US
• There is another possible consequence of cutting off North Korea’s oil supply not considered by Tom Phillips in his fine analysis. History has an uncomfortable caution for us when it comes to this kind of thing.
It was, arguably, an economic embargo that was a factor in causing the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. That embargo, aimed at forcing Japan out of China and Indochina, pushed Japan into a choice between backing down and giving up its imperial ambitions or breaking the embargo by force to get what it needed.
Crucial in the blockade was the oil in the Dutch East Indies needed by Japan. It was the US fleet that stood between Japan and that oil.
If we shut off Kim’s oil he too may resort to military means to get it.
Terry Hewton
Adelaide, South Australia
Learning from partition
I read Preti Taneja’s Britons can all learn from India’s partition (1 September) and was captured by the penultimate sentence: “Everyone in the UK is a post-colonial subject, bound by a shared history, beyond religious or racial communalism.”
I think this is true, possibly in a deeper sense than Taneja meant. The brutal caste system in India is a legacy of the Aryan invasion over 3,000 years ago. The higher castes have lighter skin because they are the descendants of the lighter-skinned Aryans. The class system in the UK is a legacy of the Norman invasion almost 1,000 years ago.
So racial and class prejudice can be extremely long-term effects of colonialism, which impoverish us all by making the social barriers that oppress us. Maybe it is a step toward healing the wound of colonialism that immigrants from former colonies have transformed the UK into a multicultural society where it is normal to interact as equals with people of different cultures on a daily basis.
In Canada I have to face the implications of being a settler. The native population is still oppressed by the mainstream culture. But after 150 years of colonial rule they are calling the rulers to account.
Edward Butterworth
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Do cats take advantage?
By using the word “exploit” (“the domestic cat ... exploits our sentimental nature”) in his discussion of how algorithms outdo our brains, Rafael Behr (1 September) is exhibiting the same mistaken personification he disapproves of, by imbuing this animal, caught between the wild and domestic, with motives.
Perhaps we’ve all thought it about cats (“Foolish human, I will use my furrily friendly and companiable wiles in a cunningly selfish way to fool you into feeding me!”). Now I am aware I’m rising to the bait by protesting about the way felines are seen as exploitative, but Behr deprives pet owners of the credit of knowing the difference between a grateful animal and the personification of non-living beings. Would he assign the same malign intentions to all domestic animals?
My two docile rescue cats sleep on while I type, purring gently – I’d hesitate now to say gratefully, but I do believe, contentedly.
Claire Maloney
Madrid, Spain
Briefly
• When surgery is just a stitch-up (1 September) concludes with the hopeful thought that surgeons will apply scientific rigour and ethical considerations in discontinuing needless surgery. Unfortunately, evidence suggests otherwise. Instead of hoping for the goodwill of surgeons, we need to engage the whole community to change the economic and social factors contributing to the causes and consequences of placebo surgery. It is tragic to think a child may not receive adequate treatment in a public hospital following an accident because a surgeon is paid more in a private clinic to put an unnecessary scar on a person’s belly just so the patient feels better.
Sabine Pahl
Hamilton, New Zealand
• In The Rapture: yearning for the apocalypse (8 September), Dina Nayeri implies that Rapturers are essentially holier-than-thou nihilists who are doing nothing to prevent an apocalypse that will be their one-way ticket to Elysium. In your books interview, essayist Rebecca Solnit says that “An optimist thinks everything will be fine no matter what, and that justifies doing nothing.” In this respect the similarity between these two isms is striking. Yet Solnit adds that at least with hopefulness, the lifeblood of optimism, “there is room to act”. Hence my faith is in the latter.
Richard Orlando
Westmount, Quebec, Canada
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