MAD

Che was clearly MAD: just one year after the Cuban missile crisis he said "the people [of Cuba] you see today tell you that even if they should disappear from the face of the earth because of an atomic war is unleashed in their names...they will feel completely happy and fulfilled"! Another 'icon', Malcolm X, the black nationalist leader who suggested that the “black community” would be better off if blacks ran their own economy, that is be less exploited serving black masters than white ones, was also patently MAD. When in 1964 China successfully detonated its first atomic bomb he described this event as “the greatest thing that has ever happened in the 20th century to the black people”. Readers might be tempted to seek comfort in the knowledge that these two MAD men are long dead. Surely, as we said at the time, "no one in his right mind can view other than with horror the fact that yet another threat to his life is looming on the horizon"? Alas, MADness lives on - earlier this month a group of eighty or more people heard one speaker quote Malcom X approvingly and talk "of the great joy felt not only by the Chinese people but by the oppressed people of the whole world" when China's first A-bomb exploded. Hands off China! Hands off Zimbabwe! Congratulations to the DPRK! [SIC!] Enough!