Letters
No, Mr Macmillan Sir : A possible line to take over Rhodesia is the very reverse of Mr Maurice Macmillan's proposal. Mr Macmillan's idea is for Britain, on account of her historic promin- ence, to address herself to all the states of Southern Africa and to lead a concert of powers, wedded in varying states to demo- cracy, against the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union as it appears in embryonic form in Angola and Mozambique. The opposite to this is complete laissez faire, to do nothing at all as a government, to jetti- son all political inhibitions and restraints, to be really—not compulsively—liberal and to allow our fellow countrymen to do and behave as they will. In other words to chal- lenge totalitarianism with the one and only weapon capable of defeating it. This was what Mr Solzhenitsyn the other night was asking the West to do.
It was laissez-faire which discovered Africa in the first place. It was not the con- tainerised verbiage of Kissinger and Wald- heim which brought the dark continent into the light, but shorter, private communica- tions like 'Dr Livingstone, I presume'. What monstrous, perverse and wrong- headed totalitarianism it is on our part to meet returning mercenaries with posses of police, and to remove their passports. We have come a long way indeed from that excellent patriot Ernest Bevin—a socialist —who said that the object of his foreign policy was that any man should be able to take a ticket from Victoria and get to where the hell he liked.
All English victories have been won by liberation and by turning a blind eye to those signals from authority which urge restraint and circumspection. So I counsel Mr Wilson to beat back the clamour of collective effortists and to refuse world talks, indeed any talks at all. And if he must go to sea in HMS Tiger to stand off shore somewhere on the 4500-mile circumference of Southern Africa and joyfully receive tele- vised reports of what his countrymen, released by him from previous constraints, are once again up to on that precious continent.
Victor Montagu Mapperton, Beaminster, Dorset
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