Facts on Broadside
I would like to correct some misstatements of fact in the broad-brush criticisms of Broadside made by Liam Mitchell in a letter (GLW 19/5/93), without wanting to defend the failings of the Broadside project.
Liam uses as his main evidence of the "sectarianism" of Broadside, an old article on Jim Percy which appeared under the by-line of a journalist who has not even worked on the paper since November last year.
Liam would of course not know the reaction of some Broadside staff when this article was seen by them in the paper. And Liam might be surprised to know that some Broadside staff contacted some people at GLW/DSP to dissociate themselves from the article.
But then that would spoil Liam's construction of events to support his views.
Liam also tried hard to find evidence to support those sad views, in an article I wrote for Broadside's final issue.
His comments show no evidence of having read my article beyond the first four paragraphs. How else could Liam say that my reasons for the demise of Broadside were just that "there just aren't enough people to distribute the paper" and "the people writing for it are tired"?
For him to say my article is about "the decline of the left" confirms this. The article's intro itself states that the article isnot about the "decline" of the left. Liam seems to have missed this completely.
The article looked at five alternative publications which have closed down over the past couple of years. It didn't mention GLW for one obvious reason — GLW hasn't folded.
Far from showing "defeatism" the article attempted to face the reality of the difficulties facing the alternative press. Not being prepared to face these facts and the possible solution I pointed to, however difficult, is one of the reasons for the demise of past efforts.
The article's conclusion to all this: "The failures of the publications mentioned above seem to have a lot more to do with the need for hard-nosed business abilities to deal with the commercial realities of the publications' marketplace, than with some bankruptcy of ideas from the Left, as some commentators want to see."
Despite some people's assumptions, there were quite cordial relations between some Broadside staff and some at Green Left Weekly, DSP, Resistance, Environmental Youth Alliance, AKSI, etc. Broadside even gave free plugs when asked, such as an AKSI talking tour last year. A staffer at Broadside even supplied photos to GLW when asked recently.
And the Broadside staffers chose to ignore the more nasty things we heard were being said about the paper, including the highly aggressive letter against Broadside that appeared in Modern Times after the paper first started, apparently written by a DSP member/organiser.
But Liam Mitchell has ignored all this in his Gerard Henderson-like efforts to find something — anything — that supports his so strongly held views.
To GLW, I say congratulations on your 100th issue and keep up the good work. As my cited article stated, the demise of so many previous attempts at independent alternative progressive publications makes the success of other attempts all the more critical.
Peter Cronau
Annandale NSW
Where 'soul' comes in
Vatican policy is not now to burn believers of astronomic evidence that the Earth circles the sun. Policy on microscopic views of conception also changes. "Quickening" (original sense "enlivening"), a detectable fetal flutter mostly from about halfway through pregnancy, used to signal the soul "entering". Most heart transplanters who have to decide on brain death by brain electrical states would probably agree with abortion seekers who think recallable pain, dawning infant awareness and other soulfully-human traits come later, not with detectable fingernails and the like, as pro-lifers convince themselves. Since microscopes showed sperms entering eggs, the Vatican demands the view that souls accompany them (or in one special case a soul replaced the sperm).
Alive and human, sperms succumb in testicles, concubines, condoms or elsewhere at a million per man each few days, and no angels weep. An unfertilised egg, alive and human, perishes about monthly for most women aged 15 to 50, and no unshriven soul descends into torment. But let them meet, in uterine tube or test tube, and hell is filled with "silent screams" of soulfully fertilised eggs unless they are offered a womb or close substitute to grow in, by courtesy of conjugal love, fornication, incest, rape or syringe. Not only the humanly aborted ones. One women in three will miscarry at some time. About one in seven human pregnancies go that way. That is only the diagnosed tally, excluding early abortuses accepted as a late period, undiagnosed and unbaptized. The earlier the ovum, the more prone in general to miscarry. if natural miscarriage is an act of God, what is He doing about those condemned souls? How many souls enter in the case of "identical" twins or quins, all from division of one egg fertilised by one sperm before the dividing cells have taken on separate forms, much less "human" shape, sensation or movement?
Let's not abuse each other over such arguments, as sterile as the ancient debate over how many angels can sit on a pinhead.
Doug Everingham
Brisbane
[Edited for length.]
Sri Lanka
Your correspondent on Sri Lanka (GLW 28th April) describes the main opposition party, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, as "left-centrist". This definition has been a source of contention for 30 years on the Sri Lankan Left because of the obvious strategic implications for socialists.
An analysis of the SLFP would reveal that it is a capitalist party, pure and simple. It is committed to the capitalist economy and its radical credentials lie only in its nationalisation of certain industries and tea plantations during its term of office.
Its leader, ex Premier Sirimavo Bandaranaike, has declared her support for the main plank of the ruling party's neo-liberal economic policy, the garment factory schemes. Thus low paid, non-unionised women in sweatshop labour is a bipartisan strategy.
While in government, it drowned in blood the Sinhala youth uprising of 1971. In its ranks then and today are the most zealous opponents of a political solution to the war against the Tamil people in the North and East.
Upon the recent assassination of President Premadasa instead of demanding an immediate General Election to change the disastrous economic policy of the last 12 years, it sought to play the Parliamentary game by supporting the ruling party's nominee.
S. Piyasena didn't mention at all the genuine Left alternative in the Provincial Council polls. This is the Janatha Vimukhti Sanghvidanaya (People's Liberation Organisation>)
It is a coalition of left-wing parties, estate and urban trade unions, radical monks and intelligentsia.
It demands an end to the war against the Tamils and supports their right to self-determination. It calls for an end to the privatisation programme which is forced on Sri Lanka by the IMF and World Bank.
The PLO is led by the Fourth Internationalist Nava Sama Samaja Party which is a pole of attraction to radical youth. (Details of its campaign and platform are published in the May issue of International Viewpoint.)
The NSSP proclaims on its banner, "Towards a socialist future with an evergreen earth, the dignity of womanhood sans the fear of war".
It deserves the support of socialists in Australia and worldwide.
K. Govindan
Middlesex, England
Food supplies
Recently Frank Noakes cited the late Petra Kelly's comments on population and food supplies to support the case that world population growth vis a vis world food supplies is not a problem 93). The late Ms Kelly noted that there was enough food to feed everyone in the world if it were fairly distributed.
Now this is true. The trouble is it doesn't get us very far. This was recently pointed out by United Nations Population Fund researcher, Paul Harrison, in his 1992 book, The Third Revolution.
Harrison notes that in practice the world is not one big happy family and does not go in for feeding itself. There are surpluses in some countries and deficits in others. Furthermore, some regions such as Asia have performed well in food production while others, including the "Middle East" and Africa, have slipped. In Harrison's view, the food trends in most individual countries are alarming. From 1978 to 1989, food production lagged behind population growth in 69 out of 102 developing countries for which data is available.
Harrison argues that while the Malthusian thesis may not be a global constraint in the way Malthus envisaged, at the level that matters in reality, the individual country, food production often does not keep up with population growth over several decades. In our time, millions of people continue to suffer dull daily hunger.
Furthermore, global figures look far from reassuring. The growth in cereal production per person has slowed. In the 1960s it grew at 1.4 per cent a year. In the 1980s, it only grew at 0.2 per cent a year.
In April, some of your readers may have noticed reports in the mainstream press on a Canberra food conference in which some leading world researchers pointed to the stresses on food production in Asia in the face of rising population needs. These stresses include land degradation, a mysterious decline in rice yields and rising fertiliser costs.
According to Dr Klause Lampe, director of the International Rice Research Institute, based in the Philippines, in order to feed a population expected to grow from three billion to five billion by 2025, Asia must grow 70 per cent more rice, on less land, with less water and with fewer inputs.
This looks worrying.
Evonne Moore
Adelaide