R egina Rini’s piece on “Student morality” (May 10) was perhaps too circumspect. Twice last week I visited a Gaza encampment in Oxford. There’s not much that old people like me can do but offer support, throw a few quid in the coffee fund and provide grey heads to show that this is not just the brisk intemperance of youth.
So, what to make of it? Rini politely addresses the idea that students become grown-ups who define the past and thus make the values of their youth seem orthodox, hence an illusion of moral progress. Rightly she sets the idea aside. Generalizing prescience by generation leaves us in a “hall of mirrors”.
As to the key question of distinguishing the Cambridge students of 1897 who demonstrated against degrees for women from students who since then have demonstrated against other things, the answer is simple. When you find students demonstrating on behalf of themselves or their equals, it may well be silly. When they demonstrate on behalf of people worse off than themselves, it demands attention because probably they have a point.
Regina Rini says that when it comes to student protests, “the youth are usually right”. She might want to acquaint herself with a broader knowledge of student protests throughout history – for example, the pro-Nazi demonstrations in Weimar Germany or other antisemitic demonstrations in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Like many of today’s anti-Israel protests, these often had the effect of making campuses and common spaces “no-go” areas for Jews. The most accurate generalization is not that student protests are usually right, but that student protests usually support extremist positions. You rarely see students marching or chanting for moderate, gradual reform.
The motion on Gaza put before the extraordinary general meeting of the Society of Authors (NB, May 10) made no mention of Hamas or hostages or the pogrom of October 7. Opinion among the membership is divided on this subject (whereas it was not divided on the war in Ukraine).
Regardless of the advice of the management committee that politics is not “within our mission”, I would have been happy to vote for the resolution if only it had it been a little more even-handed. And I suspect other members would have too. Yet I hear that the proposers resisted all encouragement to take a more inclusive stance, so one is bound to wonder if their aim really was unity.
Russia and the Warsaw Pact
I see no mention by Anurag Jain (Letters, May 17) or Lawrence Freedman, in his review of Peter Apps’s book Deterring Armageddon (May 3), of the Warsaw Pact. The collapse of Communism didn’t just mean that Russia’s political hegemony over a large part of eastern Europe disappeared virtually at a stroke; the coincident break-up of the Pact, a defence alliance, in effect brought the West militarily right up to Russia’s doorstep – without a corres
