Subject: Re: Britannica
Date: Saturday, March 10, 2001 1:12 AM


   Dear Peter,
     Thank you for inquiring about the abrupt cancellation of my advertised on-line chat with Britannica, scheduled for last Thursday 8 May, and thanks, too, to all those who were curious enough to wonder what happened. All that I can state with certainty is this. A couple of hours before the appointed time, I heard a message in a servile and lugubrious Australian accent on my voicemail, telling me that the announced and arranged exchange would not take place. I have since learned that the relevant Britannica page, "up" now for a couple of weeks, was simultaneously torn from the site.
     The Britannica enterprise is ultimately owned by the Safra family, a Levantine banking dynasty based in Switzerland. At the funeral of its patriarch in 1999, Henry Kissinger spoke some affecting words. You can look up the connection, and the family history, also.
     I'm sure that some people are already drawing their outmoded paranoid and leftie conclusions. I myself know nothing. After all, if a multinational firm signs a contract with Kissinger Associates, it is bound by a confidentiality agreement not to disclose the fact. (See Walter Isacson's biography of the great man.) So - to borrow an old mantra from the litany of capitalism - it would be profitless to speculate.
     I prefer not to think that the franchiser of Indonesia and Tienanmen has powerful and censorious media friends. I would rather say that he has pompous and impotent ones. It will only take a few spare dimes in a coffee tin to buy that crucial extra copy of my book [The Trial of Henry Kissinger: Verso] or to purchase an extra issue of Harper's and pass it on, and that's all the global power I have ever sought.
     Ecrasez l'infame,
   fraternally,
Christopher