LETTERS Chinese slaughter
Sir: Auberon Waugh may be mistaken (Another voice, 11 June) in predicting that a British government, of either Left or Right, would send in the army, if faced with a situation like Peking. The soldiers would not shoot unarmed demonstrators, nor would they ever be ordered to do so. But he is right in appreciating that there is an immense number of very cruel people in Britain, as shown by the statistics of atrocities perpetrated on old people, chil- ' dren and animals.
The last uprising similar to Peking was ' the Gordon Riots in 1780, finally suppres- sed by the army. Some of the ringleaders were caught and hanged, along with a number of children who had grabbed vegetables from gutters and from looted shops. Charles Selwyn, who never missed an execution, wrote in his diary with satisfaction, 'I never before saw boys cry so.' One starving teenage girl carried her baby to the scaffold and begged to be allowed to breast-feed it for the last time, but it was torn from her arms and she was dragged, howling with terror, to the noose, amidst roars of applause from the crowd. No one cared what became of the little waif, lying amongst the executioners' feet, when its mother was gone for ever.
Have the British changed so much in 200 years that we can afford to adopt a 'holier than thou' attitude to the Chinese?
Gordon M. L. Smith
44 Devonshire Street, London W1
Previous page
