Letters to The New York Times and letters to The Rhodesia Herald

A Sunday sermon on the press. But trust me, it goes somewhere…

After bravely printing a piece on Israel’s use of gay freedoms to immunize itself against criticism of its treatment of Palestinians, The New York Times has now run four letters attacking Sarah Schulman’s article. Three here. And one here.

And last Sunday, the Times ran seven pro-Israel letters, out of eight, in response to a piece on Gilad Shalit.

What’s going on here? Why, when blind support for the special relationship is a central issue in our foreign policy, is the Times giving its letters column to Israel supporters?

Change of scene. I’m reading Doris Lessing lately, and she explains the role of an official newspaper and its letters section in her 1958 novel, A Ripple From the Storm.

Doris Lessing

The novel is about politics in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe) during World War II. The book is highly autobiographical. Lessing’s character Martha Quest is a 23-year-old Communist and her small group of Communists agrees to work with the Labour Party in Rhodesia. As Lessing’s own group did.

Below are two amazing passages  from this book. The first is when four Labour members of parliament illegally go to the place where blacks live in Salisbury–the Location–to hear black political demands, and Martha and some other communists go along to pass out literature. When you read this wrenching scene of black Rhodesians crying out against blind injustice, you will hear the actual voices of Palestinians today. But it is 1942, and the scene is based in fact; Lessing says so in her later autobiography.

The second passage turns on the fact that after the meeting, The Rhodesia Herald (which Lessing calls the Zambesia News in her novel) repeatedly attacked the leftwing politicians and ran tons of letters against them. And Martha Quest goes to confront the editor.

Scene 1.

[T]he [black] audience finally swept up like a flame into passionate unity with the platform [of Labour leaders], who abandoned any attempt to keep the words and sentences measured by any thought of electors, white citizens or newspapers.

One after another men rose from the body of the Hall, keen, fervent, desperately earnest men, holding small pieces of paper in their hands which they never looked at, since the flood of their anger or their hope fed words into their mouths which kept the audience laughing, clapping, groaning approval. One after another they demanded justice, freedom, brotherhood, kindness, understanding; they aired all the injustices that hurt them – phrased formally in the words of blue-books or white papers – the question of education for their children, the Pass laws, the fact that they had no vote, that their cattle were being killed in the Reserves – but every one of these bricks in the building of their servitude served as a stepping-stone to impassioned oratory. The platform answered questions, made small corrections of fact, sat smiling, and the four communists sat by the literature table, watching and listening, caught up in the hunger, the unity and the brotherhood that beat through the Hall like drums, and feeling that at last they were coming somewhere near the source of their need for service.

Scene 2.

[S]ome thirty people who regarded themselves as liberal agreed to write letters to the editor [of the Zambesia News] pointing out that the meeting in the Location had other aspects besides the subversive. But not one had been printed. Martha had therefore demanded an interview with [the editor] Mr Haggerty which had taken place that afternoon.

Mr Haggerty was a South African born and bred, and met Martha in the first few sentences with the information that he had no time for Kaffir-lovers. [Afrikaans slang roughly equivalent to schwartzer] Almost at once it became an argument on principles…

Was it democratic, inquired Martha, that since there was only one newspaper, which should therefore be more than usually aware of its responsibilities, it should print only one letter supporting the meeting in the Location to several dozen against?

Perfectly, said Mr Haggerty. According to his reckoning there might perhaps be fifty people in the Colony who might agree with such goings-on, and that fifty were more than represented by the single letter.

Fifty white people, said Martha.

That’s right, Mr Haggerty said, and then, seeing his impasse, explained that he regarded the News as a mouthpiece of black opinion as well as of white, but that he was convinced that the ‘mass of the blacks’ only wanted to be left alone. At this Martha laughed, and Mr Haggerty tapped his desk in irritation.

She asked to be told how he, as an editor, would define the basic policy of his newspaper.

He replied that it was the policy of the paper to support the existing government.

And, inquired Martha, was that democratic?

Of course, said Mr Haggerty: the Government was elected by the people and therefore it was democratic to support it.

By the white people, said Martha, and proceeded to recite paragraphs from the American Declaration of Independence, quotations from Tom Paine, Milton, Jefferson, Shelley and Byron. To which Mr Haggerty, listening with suspicion, replied that he was not interested in communist propaganda. To which Martha, delighted, made suitable reply.

To which Mr Haggerty said that if Jefferson, Paine or Milton had lived in a colony like this, they would have had more sense than to talk about liberty.

To which Martha said he had no historical feeling at all.

Liberty, said Mr Haggerty, having the last word, should be the property of the washed and the educated, and what the Kaffirs needed was discipline and hygiene.

The interview then ended, with ill-feeling on both sides.

I know the analogy is not perfect here. The Times has shown courage by running Sarah Schulman’s piece–but pusillanimity in not running letters in support of her position. And Lessing’s lesson is clear:

The oppression of blacks in Southern Rhodesia was wrong. It came to an end 40 years after the meeting Lessing describes. At the time of the Labour leaders’ visit to the Location, they were seen as revolutionary radicals upending the divine social order. Whites hated them. Today we would see them as honest liberals. Thomas Jefferson was a role model–in Doris Lessing’s Southern Rhodesia, and in Palestine today. Will the NY Times follow Jefferson’s lead?