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Letter of the week: Flawed US foreign policy


Emily Tamkin’s column on the US’s weak moral authority in international affairs (World View, 19 February) coincided with the death of Dianna Ortiz, an American nun who was tortured in Guatemala in  1989 by security forces trained and equipped by the US. Once recovered, she revealed evidence of decades-long US complicity in human rights abuses in a war that cost more than 200,000 lives. The US’s methods in Latin America have changed since then but its agenda remains the same: protect regimes favourable to US policy even when they perpetrate gross abuses (Honduras, Haiti); undermine or overthrow elected leaders whose policies are viewed unfavourably (Honduras, Nicaragua, Bolivia); or impose illegal economic sanctions (Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua) that affect the poorest people. Were Joe Biden to “begin to repair America’s moral standing in the world”, in Latin America it would require a reversal of more than a century of US policy. ....

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Letter of the week: Beauty in the banal


With reference to Nicholas Lezard’s Twitter antagonist (Down and Out, 12 February), disdain for the banal might not be the evidence of high-minded seriousness some would assume. We find respect, even reverence, for the commonplace in poets such as William Blake, who famously wrote of seeing the world in a grain of sand, or the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh (not noted for frivolity), who celebrated being able to “wallow in the habitual, the banal” after successful major surgery. Vermeer and other Dutch interior artists’ luminously detailed scenes of daily middle-class domesticity remain powerfully affecting; similarly, the contemporary artist Claire Kerr’s treatments of everyday scenes or discarded objects and fragments elicit a profound, response. In an age where constant, urgent demands on our attention can leave us feeling harried and helpless, it feels salutary occasionally to pause to appreciate the banal, everyday lives we lead. ....

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