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_______________ WHEN WHITE MEANS "WEAK" BY RUSSELL MORSE (03/19/99)
	I am truly grateful to Russell Morse for writing this article. I have been disgusted for years with "people of color" who lump all Caucasians with the American white middle class. My grandmother was a dirt farmer in northern Alabama; where's her "white man's privilege"? James Baldwin, with whom I sometimes agree, said in "The Fire Next Time" that white people don't understand the ambiguity of the blues. Baldwin, who'd lived abroad in Europe for much of his life, had apparently never heard Irish folk music. For a spokesman of the people, Baldwin had little contact with non-bourgeois whites. Like Morse, I was inundated with politicese in school about how white people are responsible for all the suffering in the world. Imperialism, implied to be invented by Europeans, is never used in reference to the Japanese or Egyptians. How is convincing whites that they are responsible for what their ancestors did (a lunatic philosophy that assumes that all 19th century whites owned slaves) going to help anything? If individuals are so chained to their ancestors' actions and status, shouldn't modern-day blacks by the same rule be enslaved? By teaching black children that they are merely the progeny of slaves and white children that they are merely the progeny of slave-owners, what will that do besides ferment racial hostility? Guilty white liberals, who insist on portraying minorities as noble savages, miss the one factor that renders us fundamentally the same: Minorities are just as capable of cruelty and perversity as whites. In denying this, guilty white liberals are the most racist of all. -- Lillie Wade
_______________ "OUT OF THE ASHES: THE RESURRECTION OF SADDAM HUSSEIN" _______________ BY ANDREW COCKBURN AND PATRICK COCKBURN REVIEWED BY BILL FRANZEN (03/17/99)
	I am not a defender of the Cockburn brothers, but I do take issue with Bill Franzen's support of the economic sanctions against Iraq. He writes that "there's a convincing counter-argument that the sanctions are necessary to weaken the regime so that Saddam can be overthrown." But so far, sanctions have only proven to be effective in killing innocent Iraqis. What are the results of sanctions -- the overthrow of the Hussein regime? No. According to an April 30, 1998, UNICEF Report, "Situation Analysis of Children and Women in Iraq," there has been an increase of approximately 90,000 deaths yearly due to the sanctions -- more than 250 people die every day (Page 42). Thirty-two percent of children under 5, some 960,000 children, are chronically malnourished -- an increase of 72 percent since 1991 (UNICEF, 1997). The health system has collapsed: Government drug warehouses and pharmacies have few stocks of medicines and medical supplies. The consequences of this situation are causing a near-breakdown of the country's health-care system (World Health Organization, 1997). Iraqi citizens have been squeezed into a precarious position by a combination of hyperinflation and collapse of household incomes. As a consequence, the number of beggars and street children has increased enormously (UN FAO, 1995). The education system is also degraded: One quarter of primary school-age children are not in school at all (UNICEF, 1997). Now ask yourself whether it is justified to starve the Iraqi population in order to bring pressure on the Iraqi government. Is it justified to cause 600,000 children to die in order to force Iraq to disarm? -- Edward Reid Washington SALON | March 24, 1999

R E C E N T L Y+| ASK CAMILLE: HARVARD'S DATE-RAPE IDIOCY BY CAMILLE PAGLIA

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