Sir: Marjorie Thompson, vice-chairwoman of CND issues an irresistible challenge
to lunch, if I can prove my statement that Vaclav Havel in his recent book 'records what it is like for a persecuted dissident to deal with naïve Western socialists — nuc- lear disarmers in particular'. Here goes: pp.152-3: 'When a French leftist told me with a sincere glow in his eyes that the Gulag was a tax paid for the ideals of socialism ... he cast me into deep gloom.... Can't that dear lad ever under- stand that even the most promising project of "general well-being" convicts itself of inhumanity the moment it demands a single involuntary death...' (and more on the same lines).
pp.179-180: 'Two appealing young Ita- lian women arrived in Prague with a woman's proclamation calling for ... dis- armament.... I found them touching.... virtually none of the better-known Prague women dissidents wanted to sign.... It seemed to them ridiculous that they should sign something as "women".... In our country, even though the position of women is incomparably worse than in the West, feminism seems simply "dada".'
p.184: 'What are we to think of a peace-movement.... which is virtually un- aware of the only war being conducted today by a European state?' (i.e. Afghanis- tan, 'a war of extermination which has already claimed a million dead and three million refugees'). He goes .on that one argument from a part of the Western Left provokes 'total disgust'. I'll not over-egg the pudding, but I read p.116, 145 and 150-1 in the same way, and p.152 states that the 'slogan "better red than dead"... terrifies me as an expression of the renunciation by Western people of any claim to a meaningful life'.
Mrs Thompson rightly says that on p.168 Havel says that he does not regard CND and other strugglers for peace as a Soviet conspiracy. But on p.169 he suggests that many people in his neck of the woods do.
Of course, Havel may have said some- thing else somewhere else — writers often do — but the book under review strikes me as unequivocal. I greatly appreciated Mrs Thompson's offer of a victor's lunch, but I am now part of a world that is becoming obsolete. I lit my first cigarette — the first in a long, long chain — just one week before the first the cancer-scares, in 1960, `There was a community charge.'
LETTERS
and I was brought up to think that the chaps should be the ones producing the cheque-books. Can we say the Polish Hearth Club, 55 Exhibition Road, 12.45, 27 March?
Norman Stone
History Faculty Library, Broad Street, Oxford
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