The London Book FairSir, – The London Book Fair reflects the benign internationalism that can come from the business of writing. Later this week its stands and seminars will host visitors from eighty countries. The commerce of bookselling traces the contours of an international conversation about books across political and geographical divisions.
It comes as a shock, then, to discover that the London Book Fair has now become connected to an equally global trade that fundamentally undermines peaceful internationalism, fuelling conflict and impoverishment in the world’s poorest regions. Its organizer Reed Exhibitions, owned by the publisher Reed Elsevier, has since 2003 accumulated a portfolio of arms fairs which grease the wheels of the global weapons trade. Last September the Book Fair’s own venue, London’s ExCel Centre, hosted Reed Exhibitions’ crown jewel: Defence Systems and Equipment International (DSEi), Europe’s largest arms fair. On offer at DSEi was weaponry ranging from small arms, the cause of an estimated 500,000 deaths each year, to tanks and cluster bombs.
Reed Exhibitions have publicly insisted that “the defence industry is central to the preservation of freedom and national security”. Yet military buyers were invited from some of the world’s most violent and repressive regimes, including Colombia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and China, currently subject to a United Nations arms embargo. Reed claims that its arms fairs are subject to “the highest standards of scrutiny and compliance with the law”. Yet at a DSEi fair more than one company was found openly (and illegally) advertising torture equipment. Despite opposition from the local community, London’s mayor and even the Metropolitan Police, Reed Elsevier plans to bring its arms fair back to London in 2007.
We are appalled that our trade should be commercially connected to one which exacerbates insecurity and repression, and which props up regimes inimical to free expression. We call upon Reed Elsevier to end its involvement in a dirty and damaging business; and upon our colleagues to encourage Reed Elsevier to take the book trade out of the arms trade.
A. S. BYATT
J. M. COETZEE
JOHN CAREY
NADINE GORDIMER
MARK HADDON
NICK HORNBY
MIKE LEIGH
IAN MCEWAN
YANN MARTEL
WILL SELF
GRAHAM SWIFT
ADAM THORPE
ARABELLA WEIR
Campaign Against Arms Trade, 11 Goodwin Street, Finsbury Park, London N4.
Democracy in action
Sir, – In his review of Robert Conquest’s The Dragons of Expectation (February 17), Christopher Hitchens, quoting Conquest, writes, “It isn’t really true, even when compared to much worse show trials in the Communist bloc, that the ‘Rosenbergs had a genuine trial’. Not even J. Edgar Hoover thought so”. However, Hoover never in any way expressed the thought or sentiment that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had not been fairly tried. Indeed, Hoover somewhat floridly congratulated the Rosenbergs’ prosecutor, saying, “This case is truly a sterling example of our democratic processes in action and a distinctive achievement to be enrolled in the annals of our American courts’ history” (Sam Roberts, The Brother, 2001, p378).
It is true that, on the grounds that Ethel Rosenberg was a woman and the mother of two children, Hoover expressed reservations about her death sentence, but as to the integrity of the trial and the justness of the verdict against the Rosenbergs, Hoover never expressed any reservation.
HAROLD REYNOLDS
152 Bradley Road, Scarsdale, New York 10583.
Sir, – Christopher Hitchens slips when he writes “that Hitler was outpolled in 1933 by the combined Socialist and Communist vote”. In the 1933 election, held in March amid the post-Reichstag fire repression, the Nazis secured 43.9 per cent of the votes, well ahead of the combined Social Democrat–Communist total of 30.6 per cent. It was in the preceding election of November 1932 that the Communists and Socialists outpolled the Nazis by 37.3 per cent to 33.1 per cent, as the Nazi vote dropped from the 37.4 per cent won four months earlier in July (compared to 36.1 per cent for the total Socialist and Communist vote). However, the decline in the Nazi vote in November 1932 was hardly a promising augury for the future of German democracy: the prime beneficiaries of the November 1932 elections were the Communists, who attacked the Social Democrats as “social fascists” and were effectively collaborating with the Nazis in the effort to overthrow the Weimar Republic.
HENRY D. FETTER
2646 Creston Drive, Los Angeles,
California 90068.
Indonesia and Africa
Sir, – I was very honoured to read a TLS review by Roland Oliver of my book, The Phantom Voyagers (December 9, 2005). That Indonesians peopled Madagascar is well known, but the extent of their activity in ancient Africa is a thorny subject, which is probably why the professionals have not paid much
attention to it.
I am not a professional. I spent time in Africa before 1963 collecting art, setting up a museum, and making some documentary films. But thereafter my studies have been those of an amateur. As Professor Oliver implies, I may – or may not – eventually be proved wrong in saying that the thousands of stone-lined pits within homesteads in the Nyanga mountains were not built as kraals for miniature cattle, but were small family tombs similar to many in parts of Madagascar.
Nevertheless I firmly believe that the ancient cultures of Zimbabwe were more closely linked in other ways to Madagascar than is generally realized. I also take issue with Oliver’s view that Indonesians would have crossed overland to West Africa via Darfur. Philip Beale’s remarkable, problem-free journey in 2004 from Java to Ghana in a nail-less, engineless replica of one of the ships depicted on the temple of Borobudur in Indonesia, showed conclusively that Indonesian mariners could have sailed to West Africa round the Cape without undue difficulty.
I was fortunate in being able to attend Professor Oliver’s seminar at SOAS in 1959–60, convened to study “Indonesia and Africa”. With the evidence available at the time the results of the seminar were inconclusive, which is probably why the subject was subsequently left in limbo by academics. However, I remained convinced that, even at the risk of falling back on probabilities (“guesswork”, as Oliver dubbed it) where “proof” was not possible, it was – and still is – a subject worth pursuing to correct some major misconceptions about Africa’s history.
ROBERT DICK-READ
5 St James Villas, Winchester.
Josef Albers
Sir, – In his article on Black Mountain College (February 24), James Campbell refers to Josef Albers as a “German Jewish artist”. As all the Albers literature, including my own forthcoming book Josef Albers: Formulation: Articulation makes clear, he was born of Roman Catholic stock and regularly attended Mass in his later years in America. His wife Anni (née Fleischman), a member of the Ullstein publishing family which had undergone a mass conversion to Christianity in the nineteenth century, was ethnically Jewish and, while happily driving Josef to Mass in America had, after Hitler, reclaimed her non-practising Judaism.
T. G. ROSENTHAL
7 Huguenot Place, 19 Oxendon Street,
London SW1.
