GLASGOW'S feral contemporists, having failed to achieve the lynching of 10 men and one woman on George Square as a sacrificial offering to the sports deities, now turn on an easier target, the famed Red Road flats, built in the 1960s by the architect Sam Bunton (1908-1962) ("Glasgow 2014 live tower block demolition provokes storm", The Herald, April 4).

Of course these towers are monsters, but something infinitely more monstrous seeks their destruction to inaugurate Glasgow's own Commonwealth festival of kicking and biting. It exactly parallels the destructive glee with which Glasgow School of Art, just a few years ago, demolished the distinguished modernist Foulis Building, in favour of the present, white architectural botty-burp by Steven Holl, which spreads its visual miasma over the whole of Garnethill. We were invited to "celebrate" that local drawn-out act of destruction, with drinks. Now the world is being invited to watch Glasgow pan in something in an instant, just for fun. Fun's always better if something suffers and dies in its midst.

As Friedrich Nietzsche said in The Genealogy of Morals, "without cruelty there is no festival". He was meaning by this that the oldest, most primitive cultures (still cultures, mind, not pre-cultures) committed acts inflicting pain and death precisely to signal their power to impose and maintain order and societal integrity. For instance, they have scapegoats. Nietzsche concluded that such acts are a celebration not only of political cohesion, but also of the very will to live itself. This is the hallmark of barbarism, and it conjoins with heedless joy in Glasgow today, leading city of the Renaissance of Savagery seen throughout the Occident.

Compassionate pessimism is replaced by an unscrupulous and positively wicked optimism, all in a ferment of the most revolting healthiness. I shouldn't be surprised if certain donkeys were flung alive from these towers immediately before detonation.

Do we, for whom Glasgow is our most beloved city, finally despair? I think we might.

Alexander Stoddart,

Sculptor in Ordinary to Her Majesty The Queen in Scotland,

Castlehead, Paisley.

WE were appalled to learn that Glasgow City Council and Glasgow 2014 organisers believe that the destruction of hundreds of homes in a city with a housing crisis should be served up as celebratory entertainment. Is this to be our message to the world - that we blow up social houses? The mass demolitions in Glasgow and other cities have been part of a deliberate and planned reduction in social housing of which we should be ashamed.

Of course you could hardly choose a better symbol of the way major sporting events, including this, are used to clear out poor communities and replace them with speculative homes for the aspirational middle class (presumably the "changing face of Glasgow" that council leader Gordon Matheson refers to). In fact, had the announcement come two days earlier we would have assumed it was the perfect April fool - almost believable, but no-one would actually be that crass - would they?

Neil Gray, University of Glasgow and Glasgow Games Monitor;

Iain MacInnes, Scottish Tenants Organisation;

Sarah Glynn, University of the West of Scotland;

2/2 333 Hope Street,

Glasgow.

I SPENT part of my childhood in a housing scheme in the east end of Glasgow. I remember the house as being damp and cold with terrible condensation. But I also remember the kindly, friendly neighbours who shared my block of flats, people who had very little money, but who were rich in generosity of spirit, and had that special warmth and sense of humour, peculiar to Glasgow, which helps make it such an outstanding city.

It is good that the house I lived in has been demolished, and better houses have been built. But I could not have watched its destruction on live television, to be broadcast around the world. It was my home.

Opening the Commonwealth Games with a bang is one thing, but respect must also be shown to the feelings and sensitivities of those who once lived in the Red Road flats, and more importantly, those people, many of them the most vulnerable in our society, who are still living there.

Ruth Marr,

99 Grampian Road, Stirling.

THE idea of making the blowing up of the Red Road flats part of the opening ceremony for the Common­wealth Games is so stupid and barbaric that I hope it is withdrawn in a cloud of protests.

There are several negative aspects of the idea but the most damaging is the revitalising of the canard that Glasgow is a violent place best to be avoided.

Hugh Boyd,

65 Antonine Road, Bearsden.

WHEN speaking about the decision to demolish five tower blocks during the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony Glasgow City Council leader Gordon Matheson said: "There is no doubt this will be a hugely emotional moment for former residents who live near and far, but it is a celebration of the significant role Red Road has played in our city's social history over the years." The words "celebration" and "Red Road" will not fit well with the families of the many members of the workforce who built Europe's biggest high-rise and later died from asbestos poisoning through asbestosis or that most pernicious of cancers, mesothelioma.

This is the social history that has not been mentioned by Councillor Matheson in the interviews I have heard in the past few days and is one that he perhaps does not know despite the fact that a former civic leader, Alex Mosson, played a key role in many of the activities that led to change. The fact that former Red Road workers were the people who went on to campaign for justice for asbestos victims and gave leadership to the rest of the UK must never be forgotten by the people of the city.

Improvements in social security, the rights of bereaved relatives to compensation, improved medical treatments and in some cases access to chemotherapy that was refused on cost grounds were all delivered through the efforts of Glasgow people.

All of this was achieved by groups like Clydeside Action on Asbestos and Clydebank Asbestos Group supported by their solicitor advocate, the late Frank Maguire; they resolutely refused to accept an unequal status quo and campaigned to convince politicians, oncologists, judges, trade unions and the Scottish public that there were many wrongs that must be put right.

Many are no longer with us, but real Glasgow heroes like Hugh Cairney and Harry McCluskey continue to campaign for their peer group. On many occasions they have met with success, particularly since 1999 and the emergence of the Scottish Parliament.

Holyrood has delivered significant improvements for workers damaged by asbestos exposure; almost always, to its great credit, with cross-party consensus. These considerable changes includes the recent Scottish legislation regarding compensation for asbestos-related pleural plaques which places Scottish claimants in a far stronger legal position than their equivalents in England.

Added to this, the appointment of a senior judge who deals more expeditiously with mesothelioma cases in Scotland is perhaps one of the most important of the advances made for this vulnerable constituency - all delivered by the efforts of the support groups that carried forward the aspirations of the people who built the Red Road flats.

In fact events in Glasgow and the West of Scotland led to what is now an international movement that continues to campaign for a global ban on asbestos production and use, particularly in developing countries.

That is the real social history of Red Road.

Tommy Gorman,

17 Crosbie Street, Glasgow.