In his Sept. 10 letter, "Hardly a Western phenomenon," Barry Ward said things I wanted to say (with regard to the Bengal Famine in 1943). However, both he and Dipak Basu, author of the Aug. 27 letter "Who represents the Western spirit?," missed one very important point: Despite there still being plenty of rice in Bengal and despite major efforts by the British, much of the food in the area was hoarded by richer Bengali farmers!
In a similar act related to living in glass houses, we see frequent calls from China for the West to pay for its pollution misdeeds. Ignorance of the facts makes this plea seem reasonable. China has been a major polluter for more than 1,000 years, spewing carbon from massive areas of kilns running at over 1,300 degrees C, blackening the skies for miles and denuding vast tracts of woodland, all to bring us their famous ceramics, etc. Would the Chinese government care to repay humanity for the major damage to the environment that this created?