Totalitarianism

Press, 19 July 1983, Page 20

Totalitarianism

Sir,—Regretfully, I find D. G. Sanders’s knowledge and understanding (June 30) inadequate. Poland, with the world’s twelfth highest G.N.P. in 1976, before her economic collapse, is no “developing country.” I have little to add to the Solidarity debate yet, but I sympathise with Poland’s people and Government. I dislike totalitarianism too, but hundreds of millions rejoice in liberation and advances under communism without feeling oppressed. Others, large numbers, suffer. No established Communist nation has vast unhoused, undernourished, unemployed masses, minimal education, inadequate health services, the attendant rampant diseases, political “disappearances” or imprisonment, acute torture and extrajudicial executions that America’s economic colonies have. Compared with those terrors, totalitarianism is not “the major oppressive evil.” New Zealand unions are normally democratic; antipathy towards them is cultivated by the privileged class and exploiters. Voluntary, viciously repressed unions cannot overthrow totalitarian regimes unaided; peasants, unemployed townspeople, dissatisfied soldiers, academics, revolt too.—Yours, etc., SUSAN TAYLOR. July 14, 1983.