The Schizoid State Torrid Zones Zionist Lobby Catholic Fashions That
Pill Fruit Juice
IS INS a Record? Cambridge Arts Theatre Trust
George Rylands and others
Voluntary Service Projects Frank A. Judd The British Society of Aesthetics Sir Herbert Read and others
Ronald Vincent Smith Erskine B. Childers D. R. Elston Evelyn Waugh Silvan Jones M rs. S. I. Martin, Cyril Ray Meredith Whittaker
THE SCHIZOID STATE
Sla.—It is a commonplace of today's more sophisti- cated disagreements (especially when nationalities are involved) that one's opponent is not foolish, or mistaken, or unwise, but the irrationally-behaving v_511111 a a neurosis or a psychosis. The Americans discussing the British, or the British discussing the Germans or the French, are examples of this : and ao is Mr. Nicholas Mosley discussing South Africans. This k, however, a two-edged argument (I may not know about my own subconscious, but then You can't know about yours either), and I feel that South Africa deserves better treatment than ;Ills, especially at the hands of the Spectator. Doubt- ',ass there is, in the present circumstances, a great deal of neurosis in that unhappy country : but for ,'!'„e sake of the general sanity of our intellectual
me, ought we not to see whether there is not more besides?
The basic impertinence and irrelevance of much M. odern British criticism of the South African situa- ti" fs, it seems to me, that we try to treat the awful and tragic spectacle of two races at death tufts for a country as a simple matter of A's being "stlY to B, and as an occasion for the exercise of our own good will and generous feelings (and let t,l_s not examine too closely here the psychological basis of that good will and those feelings). The fundamental issue is the one of power and posses- human preoccupations since before history, lad however swinish or horri(ying A's behaviour to may be, it does not alter the facts of this issue. The he rights and wrongs of such an issue are by '4.° means easy or simple (if indeed they can be said L'o, exist), and in this case neither the whites nor the ?tacks can be said to be in any sense the aboriginal Inhabitants. The white (or at least the Afrikaner) Population has, at any rate, several strong arguments °I' regarding the country as theirs, and they are e'er. ilaIoly committed to it. And, just as the basic ightc and wrongs must be distinguished from the tiht1,4.1ItY of subsequent behaviour, so the practical a'11tics of it must be distinguished from the rights wrongs, if any. We must further consider that Is struggle must end in defeat and victory—there be no other result. The establishment of voting eaq,IIIIIItY between races in South Africa as it exists w',..laresent, will .not be a happy compromise to b ule.h any rational man must give his assent, it will In fact, a total defeat for the white population. o wonder Mr. Mosley's South Africans think in 'tins of death. „. As the Archbishop of Canterbury said the other ti',4y. human behaviour must be expected of human : and what is going on in South Africa, appal- Ing it is, is probably no worse than what has ;eurred in comparable circumstances in the history every nation. We should consider how much of
our humane feelings is based on the habitual absence of the wolf from the door; and when we speak of South Africa should preserve a certain respect, or at least abstain from the smarter forms of super- iority. It is they, not we, who are on the knife edge of life and death.—Yours faithfully,
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