Letters

Putting the Muscle on Terrorism

Walter Laqueur's review of Robert Pape's Dying to Win and Mia Bloom's Dying to Kill (Book World, July 24) implies that democratic societies are unable to deal with terrorism without using authoritative or repressive measures. Yet the example he gives of the ability of dictatorships to control terrorism -- "there was little if any terrorism under Gen. Franco and the Greek colonels" -- is just wrong.

In Spain, Franco's repression of the Basques led to the formation of ETA (Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna) in 1959. ETA's violent campaign began in 1961 with an attempt to derail a train transporting politicians. In 1973 ETA committed what may be the most successful terrorist action in the 20th century (if success is measured by helping to achieve the group's goals, rather than by number of victims) when it detonated explosives under a car and assassinated Prime Minister Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco. The Admiral's death was a major blow to Franco's succession plans -- Franco intended to have a military junta headed by the Admiral control the country under a puppet king -- and gave Juan Carlos more freedom to work toward a democratic transition. After Spain became democratic, the majority of ETA supporters reentered the political mainstream, leaving behind a relatively small core of terrorist supporters.

In Greece the revolutionary group 17N was formed in 1973 after the military junta employed tanks to crush the student-worker occupation of an Athens university. Two years later, 17N assassinated Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens. Opposition to the Junta also led to the formation of the terrorist group ELA.

Dictatorship is not a solution to terrorism.

-- JEFF GORSKY

Arlington, Va.

Help Is on the Way

There's an old line about PR that goes something like this: "I don't care what you say about me . . . just spell the name right." Too bad your reviewer, Chris Lehmann, couldn't meet even that low standard in his acerbic review of my book SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless (Book World, July 10).

Lehmann's accuracy problems begin with his mangling of the all-caps title, which is not a "ponderous author-coined acronym for 'Self-Help and Motivation,' " as he alleges, but a natural shorthand for a phrase -- "Self-Help and Actualization Movement"--that was in common usage long before I decided to write SHAM. How does a reviewer get the title wrong? Maybe Lehmann needs to do a bit more background research on his topic before he sits down at the computer in another one of his bilious moods.

A few questions for my intrepid critic:

If the paradoxical truism I argue about the self-help movement's dependency on repeat business is in fact so "obvious," then why hasn't it been documented before, and why does self-help continue to enjoy the hold it has over so many millions of otherwise intelligent, culturally savvy followers?

If my sections on the various self-help gurus are to be dismissed as "thumbnails," why has so little of this information appeared comprehensively in print before now?