Letters

Vol. 48 No. 13 · 23 July 2026

Eradication v. Elimination

Oliver Cussen is correct in stating that malaria had nearly disappeared from India in the early 1960s (LRB, 7 May). But the disease came roaring back, with cases surging to about 6.4 million in the mid-1970s, owing to increasing resistance to insecticides like DDT and antimalarial drugs such as chloroquine, compounded by operational and logistical difficulties. The resistance of mosquitos to DDT, caused largely by widespread agricultural use, was a phenomenon World Health Organisation officials had noticed as early as 1952, and which Rachel Carson correctly saw as inescapable.

Cussen implies that Carson overlooked the impact of vector-borne diseases such as malaria. But in Silent Spring she wrote:

No responsible person contends that insect-borne disease should be ignored. The question that has now urgently presented itself is whether it is either wise or responsible to attack the problem by methods that are rapidly making it worse. The world has heard much of the triumphant war against disease through the control of insect vectors of infection, but it has heard little of the other side of the story – the defeats, the short-lived triumphs that now strongly support the alarming view that the insect enemy has been made actually stronger by our efforts. Even worse, we may have destroyed our very means of fighting.

It is worth noting that DDT is still officially approved by WHO as one of thirteen insecticides for use in indoor residual spraying, even though it is used by only a handful of countries, including India, against malaria and leishmaniasis.

A note on wording. Cussen refers to DDT eradicating malaria in India. WHO did launch a Global Malaria Eradication Programme in 1955, and while it still remains committed to the ‘eradication’ of malaria (meaning, under its current definition, that ‘all countries have eliminated malaria and there is complete interruption of malaria transmission globally, with zero cases across the globe’), it is clear-eyed about the current lack of suitable tools to achieve this goal. Instead, countries are aiming for the ‘elimination’ of malaria (‘the interruption of transmission in a given geographical area’). India is hoping to be certified as malaria-free by 2030.

Frederik Seelig Aarhus University, Denmark

Behind the Bookshelves

Owen Hatherley describes the mural by Viscount Hastings and Clifford Wight at the Marx Memorial Library (LRB, 9 July). During the 1980s I was a regular user of the library and was confused by the fact that although there were postcards of the mural for sale at the librarian’s desk the mural itself wasn’t visible anywhere. The librarian explained that it had been concealed behind sheets of brown paper and bookshelves in the 1940s – perhaps coincidentally around the time Hastings left the Communist Party to become a junior minister in Clement Attlee’s Labour government. So this emblem of British Communist art was invisible during most of the postwar Communist period, from Stalin through the Cold War to Gorbachev.

There followed a long period of discussion with the library’s management about the possibility of my making a film about the mural. The library eventually agreed but only on condition that the film’s budget would also cover the restoration and cleaning of the mural to make good the forty years of neglect. The film, Marx on the Wall, includes interviews with members of the Hastings family, art historians, political historians and the librarians and users of the library. It was produced by Tariq Ali’s Bandung Productions and broadcast on Channel 4 shortly after the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

Ramsay Cameron London N16

Writing about Andy Friend’s Comrades in Art: Artists against Fascism 1933-43, Owen Hatherley refers to my father, James Holland. Hatherley states that ‘the group’s core – Clifford Rowe, Pearl Binder and the “three Jameses” – were frequent visitors to the Soviet Union in the 1930s.’ Rowe and Binder did indeed make several trips to Russia, but James Holland, James Fitton and James Boswell did not. Neither was Holland a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, as the piece implies.

Hatherley concludes by remarking that ‘there is a reason, beyond politics, that their art has had to be rescued from the condescension of art historians.’ The suggestion that they all faded away and were unimportant beyond their political stance in the 1930s is erroneous. Misha Black and James Holland were two of the chief designers of the Festival of Britain. Both took a keen interest in the professionalism of industrial art and design, and both served as president of the Society of Industrial Artists and Designers. James Fitton was a senior member of the Royal Academy and a trustee of the British Museum. He produced some memorable posters for the Ministry of Information and for various films.

These artists may not be as well known as others in Comrades in Art (Graham Sutherland and Barbara Hepworth spring to mind), but their use of art to support the cause of workers and the unemployed, and to alert people to the rise of fascism, had more impact at the time than the work of artists better recognised by the establishment today.

Jane Holland Baugé-en-Anjou, France

The Agreement that Wasn’t

‘These are not the first direct talks between Lebanon and Israel,’ Zain Samir writes (LRB, 25 June). ‘In 1983, after Israel’s brutal invasion, the Lebanese president, Amine Gemayel, signed an agreement with Israel that was rejected by parliament and by most of the country’s leftist and Muslim factions. It triggered one of the bloodiest phases of the civil war and eventually the agreement collapsed. Then, as perhaps will be the case now, large sections of the Lebanese population weren’t consulted.’

The Lebanese-Israeli Troop Withdrawal Agreement (also known as the 17 May Agreement, after the date of its signing), was not ‘signed’ by the Lebanese president. Indeed, Gemayel’s refusal to ratify it is the reason the agreement ended up a dead letter. The agreement was approved by the Lebanese parliament on 16 May 1983; eighty out of 91 MPs (including its Shia speaker, Kamel El Assaad) voted to back it. The parliament at that time was 54 per cent Christian, and 52 per cent of its MPs were elected mainly by Muslim and Druze voters (the country had, since gaining independence in 1943, always had consensual governments backed by at least two-thirds of MPs, and usually by 90 per cent).

The agreement was signed the day after, then passed by parliament on 14 June: 64 of the seventy MPs in attendance voted for it, with two votes against and four abstentions. One of the abstentions came from Hussein el-Husseini, a Shia MP from Baalbek-Hermel and one of the founders of the Amal movement (currently Hezbollah’s main Shia ally). He made a speech in parliament in support of the agreement, but doubted it could be implemented, given the opposition in Damascus to withdrawal from Lebanon, which the agreement stipulated as a precondition for Israel’s withdrawal. At the time, Syria occupied nearly half of Lebanon. It was Syria that pushed its local proxies and allies, which at the time included Hezbollah, to cause chaos and, with it, the collapse of the agreement. What’s more, Syria did not solely fight those collaborating with Israel: it also used its proxies and allies to fight the PLO in Lebanon. President Gemayel, to appease Syria once it had defeated its opponents militarily, refused to ratify the agreement, despite its having been passed by parliament. One could argue that the agreement was destined to fail, that it was a bad agreement, that it went against the wishes of most Lebanese people, that the Lebanese parliament, elected in 1972, no longer represented anyone in 1983, eight years into the war. But these are not the reasons the agreement collapsed.

Rayane Saadeh Beirut

Screwball

I thoroughly enjoyed Ruby Hamilton’s piece on screwball comedy, but would quibble with the idea that screwball isn’t a democratic genre (LRB, 25 June). Many of the films are stories of people outside the leisure class, often working women, as in Midnight, Ball of Fire and His Girl Friday. Financial precarity and the striving for financial security are frequent themes, as in Midnight and The Palm Beach Story.

If Sullivan’s Travels is unsuccessful, which I broadly agree with Hamilton it is, it isn’t because it fails to send up Capra, but because it isn’t trying to. It genuinely attempts to sew together the comedy and the earnest sermonising. But other screwballs do a better job of integrating the poverty of the era into the genre, to hilarious ends. I’m thinking specifically of Easy Living (1937), which I was disappointed to see didn’t make the cut at the Garden Cinema. Written by Preston Sturges but directed by Mitchell Leisen, and starring Jean Arthur, it follows a ladies’ magazine employee living week to week as she is thrust into the world of the New York rich in a case of mistaken identity resulting from an incident in which a fabulously expensive sable coat thrown from a rooftop falls on her head as she is sitting on the top deck of a bus. It’s a film that speaks directly about the poor while keeping things frothy – when there’s a technical glitch at the automat that releases all the little doors, someone with solidarity in their heart goes out to the street to scream that there’s free food inside. What follows is a small riot as the masses trip over themselves for free pot pie and turkey legs. This was a movie for a class of people for whom hunger had recently been, in some cases still was, a fact of life.

Francis Crimmins Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Blame Portugal

Alice Hunt writes about Catherine of Braganza (LRB, 9 July). In 1671 the English sent ships to Japan to reopen commercial relations there. Trade had begun long before, in 1613, with the gift of a spectacular silver-gilt telescope from King James VI & I to the retired shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, but had since collapsed. By 1673, the English were back. The Japanese welcomed them on the previous terms, but Holland alone among European countries traded with Japan and did not wish to lose its monopoly. The Dutch leaked to the shogunate that the queen of England came from Japan’s sworn enemy, Portugal. The English were rebuffed, ‘for this reason and no other’. They asked if they might come again ‘when the queen is dead’ and were told they might. But as Hunt points out, Catherine’s dowry included Bombay, where English interest now turned instead.

Timon Screech Kyoto

Kafka was a laugh

‘You could make jokes about Kafka,’ John Lahr quotes one of Sid Caesar’s writers as saying, then asks: ‘How did that go, I wonder?’ (LRB, 25 June). The answer is, just fine. Another of Caesar’s writers, Woody Allen, often mined Kafka for laughs. ‘Sex with you is really a Kafkaesque experience,’ he remarks in Annie Hall, and his story ‘The Kugelmass Episode’ ends with the following ‘Metamorphosis’-like sentence: ‘He had been projected into an old textbook, Remedial Spanish, and was running for his life over a barren, rocky terrain as the word tener (“to have”) – a large and hairy irregular verb – raced after him on its spindly legs.’

Indeed, Kafka was a comedian himself. ‘I am even known as a great laugher,’ he wrote to Felice Bauer in January 1913, ‘although in this respect I used to be far crazier than I am now.’ Max Brod recalled that Kafka would read aloud to his friends from the first chapter of The Trial, and ‘we friends of his laughed quite immoderately’ until Kafka cracked up too: ‘And he himself laughed so much that there were moments when he couldn’t read any further.’

Benjamin Letzler Mödling, Austria

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