Tuesday's comment from the papers in...

Today in Times Comment

• David Aaronovitch: Wicked untruths from the Church
• Carol Sarler: Hanging is no gentle way to go
• Dean Godson: No way to combat terrorism
• Chris Ayres: I woke up. I smelt it. $12 a cup
• target="new"Mick Hume: This organic view is bananas
• Michael Gove: Paradise is Hell: why I hate Desert Island Discs
• Gerard Baker: Lessons learnt from Great Depression

And from the rest of the papers...

• Gordon Brown: (The Telegraph) - We must defend the Union
• Rachel Sylvester: (The Telegraph) - Brown and the conservatory-building classes
• Jan Etherington: (The Telegraph) - Over 55? Talkin' bout my generation
• Ian McMillan: (The Guardian) - Let's have maiden sonnets instead of maiden speeches
• Polly Toynbee: (The Guardian) - Religion doesn't rule in this clash of moral universes
• Simon Ings: (The Guardian) - Learning to love robots
• Dominic Lawson: (The Independent) - Why China might have Olympic regrets
• Steve Richards: (The Independent) - Electoral reform could be just what Brown needs. But if he is to act, he must do it soon
• Sarah Churchwell: (The Independent) - The big issue in America is not race, it's class
• Tony Benn: (The Daily Mail) - For democracy's sake, there must be a free vote on the Embryology Bill
• Maurice Saatchi: (The Financial Times) - Business and politics are worlds apart

And from around the world...

• David Brooks: (The New York Times) - The long defeat
• Mark Helprin: (The New York Times) - Make Sudan an offer it can’t refuse
• Eugene Robinson: (Washington Post) - 4,000 dead for what?
• Bret Stephens: (The Wall Street Journal) - How al Quada will perish
• Philip Bowring: (International Herald Tribune) - Taiwan's chance to expand its vision
• Brad Glosserman: (The Japan Times) - Japan peers into the abyss

Comments

[Candadai Tirumalai]

Sarah Churchill's comments on race and class in America are certainly interesting. But the fact still remains that racial tension has historically been greatest between the white underclass and African Americans. This may have been due to the fact that some poor whites had nothing but the notion of racial superiority to sustain them. Was this entirely the creation of an exploiting white upper class? I doubt it. Behind race lurk complex emotions whose origins may lie in the double-stranded, twisting-spiral structure of Western civilization, which therefore needs to enter a new phase. Barack Obama has seen this possibility. In the 1970s it was not uncommon for black radicals to characterize Western culture as the work of dead white European males (DWEMs).