Grouping nations

SIR –“Eastern Europe” may be a geographic oddity, as you argue, but the term is not likely to be changed by any locational arguments (“Wrongly labelled”, January 9th). Greece is farther east than most countries usually thought of as belonging to the region, but it was never behind the Iron Curtain. It is political and military demarcations that separate the East from the West, rather than geography.

And although you are certainly right that countries that used to be behind the Iron Curtain are quite different from each other, their political past unites them in many ways that will not quickly disappear on account of new political divisions. Communist ideology is still alive in many a bosom and often in surprising ways, such as attitudes toward job security, health insurance and public safety. And so is the resentment for having been left in Soviet clutches for such a long time, which still feeds all the complaints about false geographical divisions of Europe. Geographic labelling is thus best left alone.

Ranko Bon
Motovun, Croatia

SIR – Your plea for the relabelling of outmoded categories of countries described the term “Third World” as meaning the non-capitalist, non-communist parts of the world during the cold war (“A menagerie of monikers”, January 9th). Actually, the expression “Third World” was coined by the French economist Alfred Sauvy in a 1952 article with reference to all non-industrialised nations: “for this Third World ignored, exploited, despised as the Third Estate was, itself aspires to become something”. (This was a clear reference to Abbé Sieyès's quote from a French revolutionary pamphlet, “What is the Third Estate?”)

The term “Third World” was largely misunderstood from the start as referring to non-aligned states, when its purpose was to underline the importance of underdeveloped countries, the wretchedness of their condition and the unavoidable ascent that would ensue. Their increasing economic and political importance plainly vindicates the parallel.

Cyrille Brisson

People power

SIR – You suggested that when it comes to reforming American health care, the will of the majority is being obstructed by an undemocratic Senate, where “41 senators from the 21 smallest states” can block any bill (“It hasn't been pretty”, January 16th). But this assumes that these senators would be all from the same party. In fact, there are more Democratic than Republican senators from these smallest states. The problem for the Democrats is not the filibuster but that they flatly refused to try to woo even moderate Republicans on a bill that, according to the polls, is opposed by most of the electorate. Who, exactly, is trying to obstruct the will of the majority here?

Carlton Getz
Salt Lake City

* SIR – I get a little hot when I hear complaints about the lack of progress resulting from Barack Obama's approach to foreign policy (“Time to get tough”, January 16th). Lack of progress compared with what? The previous eight years of finger-wagging, accusation-making, threatening and lecturing resulted in what? No progress with North Korea; Iran smothering its domestic reformers and actively pursuing a nuclear capability; a more totalitarian and threatening Russia; a more assertive and obstructionist China; the emergence of Venezuela as a credible threat with sympathisers winning elections in Ecuador and Bolivia; the dissipation of the coalition of the willing and the reticence of allies to follow America's lead in anything.

No lasting diplomatic successes of any kind in eight years. With a track record like that, conservative opponents of President Obama's approach should be embarrassed to show their faces in public, much less pontificate about anything.

Robert Atwood
Rutherford, New Jersey

Rehabilitating Gerald Ford

SIR – The tired characterisation of Gerald Ford as the American president “who could not walk and chew gum at the same time” hardly deserves repeating (“Harper goes prorogue”, January 9th). That quote came from Lyndon Johnson's caustic tongue in the 1960s (though “walk” is a sanitised version of the vulgar verb that LBJ used). Johnson was vilifying Ford, then minority leader in the House, because of his warning that the Great Society programme would unleash high deficits and inflation.

Ford was right of course, and when he became president he had to mop up the mess left by his predecessors—economic stagflation, Vietnam and Watergate. Ford fared well, presiding over a dramatic reduction in inflation. On the diplomatic front he signed the Helsinki accords that helped to stimulate east Europe's liberation movement, restored integrity to the presidency and bolstered American prestige at a time when it was sagging.

Johnson's remark was misleading for another reason. Ford handled multiple tasks dexterously, especially in athletics. He played football at the University of Michigan and received professional offers after graduating. In the White House, he regularly skied, golfed, swam and played tennis.

Yanek Mieczkowski
Professor of history
Dowling College
Oakdale, New York

Banning the burqa

SIR – Far from being the odd man out, France's attitude to religion is spot-on (“The war on French dressing”, January 16th). Religion is a private matter and should be kept that way. Countless millions have died in religion's ongoing campaign to force its beliefs on its victims. Religion is socially divisive by design and is mostly about the desire of competing religious hierarchies to control people's minds, just like communism or fascism. Religion seems to have an amazing immunity from normal laws. If anyone advertised that by taking a certain medicine one would live for ever and go to heaven, the product would be banned under the trades description act. Yet religion can publicly make its totally unprovable claims and get away with it.


Brian Smale
Hoeilaart, Belgium

Blowing bubbles

SIR – You outlined the perils of creating money that exceeds the justifiable value of an economy (“Bubble warning”, January 9th). We need a word to describe the consequential twin dangers of inflation and asset bubbles, and may I suggest the French word “soufflage”. Soufflage is what we have had since the start of the Greenspan era, during which the response to an earlier period of excess money creation has been further excess money creation.

The response to soufflage is to return to equilibrium by destroying excess money in one way or another. Perhaps “desoufflage” would aptly describe this. However, the holders of America's vast external debt, particularly the Chinese, have enough clout to avoid this. Desoufflage is therefore being felt through the loss in the value of dollar-denominated assets and the knock-on effects of this.

Georges Hébert
Westmount, Canada

Political theory

* SIR – The Anarchist Anti-Defamation League has informed me of The Economist's latest vile slur, absurdity, and calumny against anarchy. You introduced an article on cancer and stem cells by writing that, “The notion that tumours are chaotic masses of anarchic cells has been falling by the wayside recently” (“A strand apart”, January 16th).

Cancerous tumours are not “anarchic”. Maybe they are out of control, but they do not profess anarchy, nor do they follow the precepts of anarchism, which are support for individual liberty and its offshoots—peace, free trade and free markets—and opposition to the state and its works: theft, property destruction, and mass murder on an unparalleled scale.

William Stepp
New York

The gates of hell

SIR – Lexington complained about America's discourteous border officials (January 16th). This is nothing new. I remember being screamed at by a bantamweight female guard at New Orleans airport for the crime of crossing the portals of the Holy Metal Detector with a camera still strapped to my neck. That was in 1992 and for a domestic flight, which goes to show that rudeness from the Guardians at the Gates is far from being a recent development. Security bosses all over the world seem to think that the public will not deem Cerberus functional if it is not baring fangs.

Flavio Zanchi
Retford, Nottinghamshire

* Letter appears online only