The soul of a nation

SIR: It is a mistake for the Aust­ralian Broadcasting Corporation to decide to cancel Radio National’s weekly program Poetica. Society needs a program dedicated to the highest art form.

Overseas poetry conferences attract tens of thousands. Numerous countries honour their poets by naming their squares, buildings and airports after them—and their poems are even displayed for and read by commuters emerging from the Metro. Poetry is the soul of a nation.

Churchill’s poetic language arguably saved Western civilisation, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg address (based on Pericles’s Funeral Oration) was powerfully expressed through poetically-charged words. William Carlos Williams said of poetry: “Men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

Arthur Giannopoulos
Mitcham, SA

Victorious communists

SIR: Peter Coleman in his review of the Cold War from the Australian point of view (November 2014) raises questions about the effectiveness of ideological contributors to the “victory” over communism. For me, in almost any war or revolution, today is too early to decide who won.

However, the end of the Cold War was a superb victory for the communists. These people were the really smart ones in their country who knew that the only way to money and power was through Communist Party membership, irrespective of what you believed in. With the change, these countries were advised through various international agencies (the OECD, the UNEP, the World Bank) that the best way to economic recovery was through privatisation. I was part of this advisory group.

The result: the former heads of enterprises, all members of the Communist Party, managed to collect the money, largely from foreign sources, and bought the enterprises at relatively low prices and subsequently sold them at a good profit to foreign buyers who, within a short period, closed them down to sell their home-produced product.

Today, most of these countries in almost every aspect are cont­rolled by foreigners and the average family income is about a quarter that of Germany or France. A large number of well-educated citizens now work in the West; they received free education at home and now pay taxes in Western Europe. What a victory.

Ferenc Juhasz
via e-mail