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Do I detect just a hint of poetic licence in Mike Cole's Don's Diary (THES, July 7)? The gentleman he saw in full regalia in a coffee bar in the Orange Free State could certainly not have been a member of the "Iron Guard", unless, of course, our writer had travelled back to pre-war Romania and got the Orange Free State mixed up with Transylvania. I would rather have thought that the said person would have been a member of Eugene Terreblanche's Afrikaner Resistance Movement.

Given the fact that Marxism has spawned some of the most despicable tyrannies of this century, I find something quite tragically pathetic about the young man who had devoted so much energy to reading all three volumes of Das Kapital. I will refrain from commenting on Mike Cole's attitude to all this, though he should know that Stalin, Yezhov, Beria and a host of others who consigned their enemies or supposed enemies to firing squads and concentration camps called themselves Marxists.

John Insley Raiffeisenstrasse Bad Konishofen Germany