Correspondence
A Note from the Publisher Knowing that a few American Spectator subscribers have experienced some delay in the processing of their subscriptions, we have fired our computer— or more...
...Now, I think Reagan is a great leader, but he's also a politician...
...It is somewhat like aborigines investing in more spears in the face of an enemy armed with howitzers and tanks...
...When Cuomo declared recently that he isn't God, Mark Russell noted that this was the first flip-flop of the 1988 presidential race...
...It means that US...
...Between 1917 and 1920, 75,000 Jews had been murdered in Ukrainian pogroms...
...Berner, flattery won't get me to say uncle...
...ICBM force unnecessary...
...Barnes, and then we^ll talk...
...Deployment of D-5 missiles will allow a per-THdent improvement of 96 warheads over existing C-4 missiles...
...Dropping D-5s into existing ICBM silos might give the Soviets a less expensive target to destroy (a debatable point), but it would do nothing to solve the land-based missile vulnerability problem...
...This is why the election of arty Republican would be preferable from the Spectator's perspective, in terms of nuts-and-bolts government...
...Spasowski's war record is maybe not impressive, but he certainly risked his life by hiding the Jewish Bronstein family...
...I said that, too...
...Some Ukrainian slavelaborers sent to fight the French resistance deserted to the French side and fought as the Bohun and Chevtchenko battalions...
...But distinction should be made between those few who served the Communist state driven (in part at least) by idealistic motives, and the majority of opportunistic careerists...
...Ukrainian nationalists were indeed as anti-Nazi as they were anti-Soviet, knowing full well that Hitler's master plan was to reduce the Slavic populations to slavery...
...Bradford and the Classics In a Uvely and provocative review of Forrest McDonald's Novus Ordo Seclorum and M. E. Bradford's Remembering Who WeAre{TAS, May 1986), Professor Charles R. Kesler, in addition to making some incisive criticisms about contemporary conservative political thought on the Constitution, criticizes M. E. Bradford's "recollections of Roman history, which need to be refreshed by some attention to Roman texts...
...In the two years since our book (Thdent) came out, American SLBM accuracy, even in existing missiles, has increased due to deployment of better navigational devices in both subs and missiles...
...The differences in ideology between the two parties, which are sometimes masked at the top, are quite pronounced at this drone level...
...Later they regretted it...
...Thichtenberg is correct only in a sUghtly technical way when he writes that Tridents "do not offset the greater number of U.S...
...There is more than one way to approach the Classics...
...Neither of them made any real attempt to move to the center because they knew they were doomed, so they went down with all flags flying to inspire the troops next time around...
...A Nazi document in the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz contains a specific reference to the pogrom referred to by Mr...
...Shube's assertion concerning Ukrainian pogroms in 1941, there can be no question some Ukrainians in Lvov participated in atrocities against Jews...
...Current design calls for the D-5 to deliver 8-14 warheads of 475Kt each: MX carries 10 warheads of 170204Kt each...
...Neither is Mario Cuomo...
...Bradford's essays on Roman texts are studies of the way those texts were understood by, and so how they influenced, American thinkers and writers...
...It is a conscious choice...
...This fact has been made increasingly clear by the downgrading of the proposed range of the THdent II from 6000 n.m...
...It is as accurate as the MX and can travel as far with an alteration in its payload...
...Okay, I'm not holding my breath...
...One could expect more from the former vice-minister of External Affairs...
...One may attempt to understand them on their own terms, as do many Classical historians and some literary critics...
...The crafty Mr...
...nomas F. Bemer New York, New York Fred Barnes replies: Sorry, Tim, but I wasn't just being provocative, though your point is certainly a good one...
...Ibd^QT, leaders of the Ukrainian dissident movement in the USSR are committed democrats who work closely with their Jewish coimterparts...
...Yet I have seen virtually no one give Friedman his due on this issue...
...Therefore, to equate the Ukrainian nationalist legacy with anti-Semitism and collaboration is a great mistake...
...Spending most of the Stalinist period abroad, he apparently did not participate in atrocities committed by Security (and others) in the country...
...What I do not accept is his contention that the D-5 makes the U.S...
...The UPA guerrillas fought a two-front war against Hitler and Stalin...
...Walter Mondale in 1984, Uke Adlai Stevenson in 1956, made one of those last stands liberals love so much...
...And now, thanks to Gregory A. Fossedal's article, "Kemp-Bradley-Packwood" (TAS, August 1986), we are supposed to wonder if "credit for conceptual fcwesight" shouldn't go to "people like Joseph Pechman at the Brookings Institution—^ who were talking about reform twenty years ago...
...TAS, September 1986), and while I am in agreement with the general thrust of his essay, he is, I think, wrong in some of his conclusions, or, at least the implications he draws from them...
...Surely Mr...
...Second, and more important, we will soon have a missile that is better than either the MX or the Midgetman...
...In 1941, followers of Stepan Bandera, later head of the UPA, declared: "Long live greater independent Ukraine without Jews, Poles and Germans...
...As our SLBMs get more accurate (not to mention the impact of SDI), ICBMs are becoming strategic dodo birds...
...As to Mr...
...I said there had been a few encouraging signs, and that conservatives ought to take a look at several potential Democratic presidential candidates...
...Except in the odd case of a Ronald Reagan, candidates will say what will get them elected...
...Deliverability" is the key, and seven Tridents, because of relative invulnerability, navigational accuracy, and evasive capabilities, can deliver far more megatonnage on the enemy than the obsolete subs they replaced...
...If he can't come clean on this filthy issue, the kindest thing that can be said about the rest of his autobiography is that it is self-serving and hypocritical...
...The two systems are complementary, not merely redundant...
...Anti-Semitism is a horrible phenomenon which has manifested itself m virulent fashion in France, Germany, Russia, Poland, and among Ukrainians...
...However, the leading role in these acts was played by the Nazis...
...Why in the world continue to develop three missiles when the Navy already has ensured that D-5 will be deployed...
...If you are off a foot per mile over a mile distance, you're not off muc^^ if you're off a foot over 10,000 miles, you're off a lot...
...Spasowski's credibility is suspect...
...Deliverable megatonnage, or throw weight, is a function of range as much as instrumental accuracy...
...All of these arguments actually defuse one of Thichtenberg's implied other points, namely, that it is dangerous that the Soviets are adding more ICBMs than we are...
...Poles behind the San, Germans to Berlin, Jews to the gallows...
...There are not many other scholars who can write so well on Faulkner, but there are a few...
...Barnes surely realizes that the election of any Democrat would be an unhappy ocperience for most of the Spectator's readers, in that it would lead to the filling of countless mid- to upperlevel posts with appointees drawn from the Democratic party's bank of political operatives...
...Throughout the debate over the merits of tax reform there has been a parallel mini-debate over who came up with the idea in the first plac& Was it BUI Bradley while he was still with the Knicks...
...Obvious as all this may be, there is a powerful longing in some quarters to make the Democratic party what it once was, or how nostalgia would have us remember it...
...Certainly, Spasowski belonged to the Communist elite and as such has many sins, known and unknown...
...We elect a party to the White House more than a man these days and the Democratic party shows no willingness to move rightward...
...It is legitimate, however, to attempt to understand what the ancient authors meant to some group in the past...
...This behavior, it should be pointed out, was not a historical aberration...
...How about JFK and the missile gap, or LBJ, the peace candidate...
...There were tens of thousands of Ukrainian collaborators and numerous Ukrainian nationalists who shielded Jews from Nazis...
...A Better Guide than Reason, p. 4) Now that Meyer Reinhold's Classica Americana has made so much important material easily available for scholars, I fervently hope that M. E. Bradford will step back from his work on contemporary Southern writers and compose the big book on "The Reception of the Greek and Latin Classics in the Early American Republic" which he is so superbly equipped to write...
...Here is one of America's most brilliant political observers reduced by his optimism to reading hopeful signs in the fulminations of the Democratic party's current gaggle of presidential candidates...
...Tim W. Ferguson New York, New York Poor Fred Barnes...
...The real issue is not whether the D-5 would cost less than the MX or Midgetman, but rather the wisdom of restoring a credible ICBM force...
...But platforms, relatively speaking, are not as important as deliverable megatonnage assuming a reasonable level of survivability of the platform...
...Whose Big Idea...
...Be Gentle It seems to me that Wladyslaw Pleszczynski's very critical review of Romuald Spasowski's Liberation of One, published in the August 1986 issue of your most respectable magazine, is too harsh...
...Certainly, the D-5 will be a capable system and an important addition to the U.S...
...Midgetman is extremely expensive, and hasn't even begun to have been priced out yet...
...In the flnal analysis, Nfr...
...As a matter of fact, the record of Kennedy's administration (yes, including the Heller tax cut) serves to illustrate what we could expect from one of the tough new Democrats...
...These references might score debating points, but they obscure history...
...As Douglas Dalgleish and I have recently argued, neither of these missiles will be survivable in any of their reincarnations...
...I'd Uke to clear up one of your misconceptions: Reagan is not God...
...While many Ukrainians courageously risked their lives to save Jews from the Holocaust, it is also true that the Germans found an eager and cooperative population in the Ukraine when it came to liquidating Jews...
...The Democratic candidate in 1988, like John Kennedy in 1960, will sound like a centrist...
...TVident missiles are also more accurate than Poseidons, and Trident missiles are mirved...
...There are compelling political, economic, and strategic reasons for maintaining this leg of the THad...
...Just compare the congressional staffs (or the votes of House members, for that matter...
...I refer TASs readers to pages 174-17S of Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom (paperback edition), where they will find Friedman's proposal for a flat tax, complete with supply-side reasoning...
...strategic deterrent...
...I read it as another DIVAD...
...It is the responsibility of all democrats to combat it...
...There's a recent, precedent for this, the 1976 election...
...Bradford seems to me most successful when he is appreciating what the Classical Past meant to Our Past...
...Thus, THdent II has been outfitted with more, newer, and more powerful warheads, thanks to the tradeoff in range...
...Do you think he should, if that means raising taxes...
...In the long run this will be much to our advantage...
...I don't...
...Itouble is, the candidates that conservatives might like either aren't inclined to run, or don't stand much of a chance of winning...
...As Elie Wiesel has suggested, however, it would be wrong to ascribe national guilt to any group...
...A few clarifications are in order...
...In his book Spasowski Ues about his role in Communist Poland's anti-Semitic purges of 1968...
...While German propaganda was largely responsible for whipping up anti-Jewish hysteria among the peasants, Ukrainian nationalists were not themselves blameless...
...Get Cyrus Vance, Theodore Sorensen, and Robert McNamara to endorse Star Wars in a special issue of Foreign Affairs, Mr...
...There are enough real defense problems to be concerned about without resorting to misrepresentations of some of our concrete and observable defense successes...
...I can think of no other so well prepared to give us the nittygritty feel of what the Classics meant to the generation of the Founding Fathers...
...Adrian Karatnycky ("The Ukrainian Option," TAS, August 1986) mentions the thousands of Ukrainians who lined the streets to welcome the invading Nazis in 1941, an understandable reaction after years of Stalinist oppression...
...The party members who will write the platform, fill the cabinet, and set the agenda show no sign of becoming enlightened...
...The best way to recover Roman history as it signified to the English Whig or likeminded commonwealthsman of the late eighteenth century is to ignore such diverting questions as what it meant to the republican historians...
...Ihie Ukrainian nationalists denounced and resisted Nazi imperialism and the Nazi ideology which regarded the Ukrainians as a race of subhumans...
...Further, Soviet anti-submarine warfare (ASW) advances are not to be dismissed lightly...
...This being the case, one must conclude that Ukrainian antiSemitism was an indigenous phenomenon for which the Ukrainians themselves must bear fuU responsibility...
...A Note from the Publisher Knowing that a few American Spectator subscribers have experienced some delay in the processing of their subscriptions, we have fired our computer— or more specifically, our computer service center...
...Soviet propaganda notwithstanding, Jewish suspicions of Ukrainian nationalism are based on bitter historical experience...
...He, like FDR, promised a balanced budget, but hasn't delivered...
...Schweikart's contention that I should not worry about the prospect of an even newer generation of Soviet ICBMs pointed in the general direction of my suburban Washington townhouse...
...Anyway, most voters don't make their presidential preference based on who's going to be assistant secretary of transportation for road repairs...
...One only has to recall the experience of the Carter presidency to understand how sub-cabinet officials can set a liberal course for a Democratic administration, even if the guy in the White House isn't a liberal...
...But that doesn't always have to be the case...
...It attributes the brutal murder of 7,000 Jews on July 16, 1941 to the German Sicherheitspolizei (document R58/214, p. 191...
...Pray that they keep it up...
...It is in design right now and will be deployed in 1989: the IKdent II (D-5) missile...
...Most troubling, however, is Mr...
...Basing the D-5 on land to alleviate this problem would present other difficulties...
...There is another basis, besides defeating a wimp Republican, for preferring a Democrat...
...Less than a month after that, 2,000 more Jews were slaughtered by Ukrainian militiamen during a pogrom in the same city...
...Schweikart professes we need not worry about...
...Yotz, but "judging a book and judging a man" are not two different matters when the book in question is an autobiography and the man its author...
...Remember FDR and the balanced budget issue of 1932...
...The only basis for arguing otherwise would lie in the belief that the defeat of a milquetoast Republican would be salutary for that party's, and the country's, future...
...I trust that it is not the implication of Sam Shube's remarks that such men and women should be denied their right to an independent, democratic state which could safeguard the rights of all its citizens...
...Communications remains the Achilles heel of the sea-based force...
...Reviewers often wish that writers had written another book than the one that did get written...
...Indeed, the nationalist UPA program was based on liberal democratic principles and support for an independent Ukrainian state which was to defend the rights of its Polish, Jewish, and Russian minorities...
...launch platforms removed from service in recent years...
...Christian Kopff Department of Classics University of Colorado Boulder, Colorado...
...They vote on what they see and hear...
...What he does not mention are the Ukrainian mobs who, just a few days later, marauded through the streets of Lwow, torturing and beating to death upwards of 4,000 Jews...
...OUN members executed hundreds of Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazis, and many nationaUsts in turn were executed by the Germans...
...The least they could do is acknowledge this fact, however grudgingly...
...The Germans, following Hans Robert Jauss, speak of Rezeptionsgeschichte, the study of how one group or generation in the past understood another group or author or work in the still more distant past, and talk of the Constance School...
...Barnes knows that what a politician says has little relation to what he believes and still less to how he would run the country...
...Finally, he was probably one of the least corrupted of Polish officials in the 1970s...
...This classic work—is there a supply-sider who hasn't read it?—was first published in 1%2, and is based on material originally presented in the fifties...
...Shube's "citation" of a Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) statement which calls for sending "Jews to the gallows" is nowhere to be found among the official documents of the UPA nor among those of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) headed by Stepan Bandera...
...What does all of this mean...
...That's why some conservatives— not activists, but ordinary folks—might pick a Bill Bradley over a George Bush...
...Whatever the differences between Friedman and the supply-siders, the venerable professor has done more than anyone else to pave the Road to Glory along which today's young hotshots now travel...
...The point I tried to make in my review, evidently missed by W. Yotz in his dogged effort to find something— anything—good to say about an "idealistic" Communist, is that Mr...
...Shube is right to point out examples of anti-Semitism by segments of the Ukrainian nation...
...David C Young New York, New York Buildups Although I am sympathetic to David Ihichtenbeig's arguments ("What Reagai Buildup...
...Yotz Cambridge, Massachusetts Wladyslaw Pleszczynski replies: Since "Solidarity circles" can be said to include well over 10 million Poles, I imagine there may be a wide range of opinion therein on the relative merits of former ambassadors Spasowski and Rurarz...
...The Liberation of One is not a good book for two reasons: it is written too openly for the American reader, and in a very naive fashion...
...Ukrainian Responsibility Sympathy with the Ukrainian people's just desire for national independence should not obscure the record of Ukrainian atrocities during the Second World War...
...Its candidates may create a smoke screen but that's only to confuse the yokels...
...Or what it means to Western man today...
...Was it Jack Kemp while he was still in diapers...
...But judging a book and judging a man are two different matters...
...planners are moving the subs "closer in" because they no longer need quite as much room to "hide...
...One hundred MX missiles will cost $20 billion...
...to "over 4(XX...
...This may explain the enshrining of patriot Henry Jackson, a labor collectivist and energy socialist, or the frequent recitation of John F. Kennedy's stirring words before and after the setbacks in Berlin, Cuba, and elsewhere...
...Having suffered many personal tragedies, and having been condemned to death by Jaruzelski's military court, he deserves, in my opinion, at least a justly balanced treatment in America...
...To continue to waste money on MX is silly, even if one buys the argument that we need an ICBM force on the ground, which I don't, for reason number three: Trident I (C-4) missiles are already probably capable of knocking out Soviet silos...
...Similar pogroms took place throughout the countryside, sometimes led by the local intelligentsia...
...Sam Shube New York, New York Adrian Karatnycky replies: Sam Shub^s letter raises the important issue of Ukrainian anti-Semitism and collaboration with the Nazis...
...I know a number of conservatives who voted for Carter...
...Shube...
...Not only were Ukrainian recruits sent to guard Jewish ghettos and concentration camps in Poland (Ukrainian guards outnumbered German SS, for instance, at Treblinka), but they actively participated in the extermination process, according to witnesses...
...But rest assured, if the Democrats gain the White House in 1988, they will pursue the liberal agenda as if 1980 and 1984 never occiured...
...In this case, however, I, for one, cannot agree...
...The Democrats currently believe that the Reagan eighties are like the Eisenhower fifties: a breathing space between liberal onslaughts...
...We will continue to provide you with the high quality service you deserve and have paid for...
...In some villages, the populace actually established concentration camps for Jews on its own initiative...
...By 1990, Ihdent submarines will, for all practical purposes, displace land-based missiles...
...I'm not saying that all politicians are liars, but many have an unusual definition of the truth, and it is not just my Republican prejudices which lead me to suggest that Democrats are more creative in those definitions than Republicans...
...TAS has returned to Creative Processing Systems Data Center, a firm that provided our 40,000 subscribers with excellent service from 1975 to 1984...
...If ICBMs are becoming "strategic dodo birds" it is not because our SLBMs are becoming more accurate, but because we are unwilling to defend them in the face of a mounting Soviet ICBM threat that Mr...
...advances in submarine technology have grown relative to the Soviets, and now U.S...
...Ronald K Burr Publisher Bad Bradley I trust Fred Barnes merely was being provocative in suggesting Bill Bradley (1983 ADA rating: 85) as a presidential choice for conservatives in 1988 ("Conservatives and the Democratic 10," TAS, September 1986...
...As for you, Mr...
...Which brings me to my final point...
...Enough of this nonsense...
...National security is insured not by choosing the cheapest weapons available, but by choosing the ones most suitable for a given deterrent role...
...One may try to fit them into a theory or vision of our own days, whether Freud's or Derrida's or Strauss's...
...Look, I didn't say the Democratic party was veering madly to the right...
...Larry Schweikart Assistant Professor of History University of Dayton Dayton, Ohio David Thichtenberg replies: I agree with Larry Schweikart's assessment of the E)-5 SLBM as a major strategic improvement...
...This is true of his essay on Romanitas and the South in Generations of the Faithful Heart as well as his essay on the Classics and the generation of the Founders in A Better Guide than Reason, the book that Professor Kesler appears to be criticizing in his Spectator review, since the essays in A Better Guide than Reason fit Professor Kesler's animadversions better than the essays in Remembering Who We Are...
...Each has different strengths and weaknesses...
...This is a net gain of 672 warheads just in existing subs, not counting those to be deployed between now and 1989...
...It will take the loss of at least one or two more presidential elections before the Democrats even begin to reexamine their assumptions...
...It's possible, after all, for a Democratic President to embrace a new crowd that's not dominated by the parasitic liberal crew in Washington, and usher them into his administration...
...Giving the Soviets fewer platforms to track and target can hardly complicate their ASW task...
...From this point of view, comparison of Spasowski with Rurarz cannot be done in favor of the latter, and I doubt if you can find many persons from Solidarity circles thinking otherwise...
...Sorry, Mr...
...First, admittedly MX deployment has been slow, and Midgetman promises to be slower...
...Given the cost of D-5s, Dalgleish and I estimated the savings of replacing MX/Midgetman with D-5s to be between $43 and $63 billion...
...Collaborationist Ukrainian municipal administrations frequently asked permission from the Germans to launch their own anti-Jewish campaigns...
...Dropping D-5s in existing silos would require only a fraction of the cost of deployment of Midgetman...
...There are, of course important operational differences between ICBMs and SLBMs...
...Good...
...This can be done most effectively by nations which are not stateless...
...Many of them have written in sanuzdat on the issue of Ukrainian-Jewish relations and have denounced anti-Semitism...
...Now, surely TYachtenberg would not argue that we need a force of several hundred DIVADs...
Vol. 19 • November 1986 • No. 11
