LETTERS
On the Problem of Pornography Editors: A few observations on the discussion of pornography in your Spring 1978 issue ("The Problem of Pornography," by Murray Hausknecht, with comments by Lionel...
...according to a Constitutional Court ruling of 1965, it is to be weighed in conjunction with "the overall behavior of the applicant...
...One of these was denounced in Parliament as "a wicked book," and Milton was named in another action as a violator of the licensing law...
...It includes the bastardization of all rules of historical evidence to justify temporary and contradictory policies of a leadership single-mindedly dedicated to maintaining itself in power...
...And I have it on the word of one of your editors who frequently dealt with Paul that, despite his major disagrgements with Dissent's general orientation, he was a model of generosity, cooperation, and simple human decency in his relations with the magazine...
...Now Connolly tells us that although we may believe (it is not a question of belief but of fact) that "American Communism was a moral and intellectual disaster," we must defend Communists' "absolute right" to their opinions...
...But would any liberal, or nonliberal for that matter, want or dare to support the right to freedom of speech for a film designed for pleasurable viewing that ended with the hacking to bits of blacks or Hispanics...
...Mankoff that there is no law or decree by that name...
...It is clear from reading his letter that he sees all Communists in all places at all times as victimizers, that he would view Joseph Stalin and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn as having been members of the same worldwide party of inhumanity...
...His strength lay elsewhere—the questions he raised, the provocative nature of his replies, the validity of his utopian vision...
...Such revisionism combines an elitist narcissism with a startled juvenile shriek at being attacked...
...Though Connolly limits his time frame to the early 1950s, thus falling a victim to the current fad for slicing history into salami-sliced segments, those he defends cannot escape the record of the 1930s and 1940s...
...Milton's work is concerned with the search for truth, not sensation...
...I find Shlomo Avineri's portrayal of Saul Bellow's views in this account of the conversation unrecognizably simple-minded and hawkish...
...This is not to deny that individual cases of hardship and of arbitrary decisions can be cited—but they are in the courts...
...It is therefore natural that he cannot focus on the Communist as a victim, which is what my article was all about...
...On the strength of this ruling, a dismissed teacher sued for reinstatement and was found suitable for another position...
...Epstein, particularly upset by the fact that he once praised Goodman, seems determined to undo that slip by sheer venom...
...With the American Communists, it was an article of faith that political brickbats were only legitimately thrown in one direction...
...After -all, it seems that there are still those who would support the showing of "Snuff' though they themselves would never dream of attending it...
...It is also to have been guilty of not demanding punishment for those who were responsible...
...But it will not be pushed around either, and it must be mindful of the systematic efforts of the East German government to infiltrate its civil service...
...To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, "A corpse is a corpse is a corpse," and both the American Nazi party and the American Communists will defend themselves without my help...
...The Republic will not abandon its constitutional principles to please 6,000 terrorists and their friends...
...But to Epstein, Goodman is a corrupter of youth ("the squalor of youthful communalism"), a naive believer in "decentralism," etc...
...Which civil liberties...
...After last year's terrorist acts, rightists have clamored for stricter laws, but the government has refused to panic...
...Baruch when I wrote on Milton and the problem of liberty in the Antioch Review, Fall 1953...
...For, unfortunately, each of the II States handles the 290 security check for civil service applicants in its own way— it is liberal where Social Democrats and Free Democrats rule...
...292...
...Was it a victory for humanity that Abraham Polonsky couldn't direct a film for twenty years...
...Are we here meant to have an image of the 42nd Street viewer as a free, responsible agent, exercising his reason and his free choice as he slumps in his seat, hidden from the daylight world, savoring the aroma of child porn...
...He defends those who created their own history, raised the slogans of socialfascism, swallowed without noticeable gagging the verdicts of the Moscow trials, the Nazi-Soviet pact, the mutual Nazi-Soviet rape of Poland, and the establishment of Soviet social-imperialism in Eastern and Central Europe...
...The student representation almost everywhere is dominated by left groups, including Spartacus, the official Moscow affiliate...
...What radicals are referring to as Berufsverbot is Article 33 of the Constitution, which requires civil servants to defend the Constitution...
...Not having identified with anybody for the past 30 years, I am reluctant to defend the rights of the apologists for the twin brutalitarian regimes of either Hitler or Stalin...
...Reconsiderations of authors are a normal aspect of criticism, often fruitful and rewarding...
...In 1965 Howard Moody wrote in "Toward a New Definition of Obscenity" (Christianity and Crisis, January 25): "Should we not as Christians raise a new standard of 'obscenity' not obsessed with sex and vulgar language, but defined rather as that material which has as its dominant theme and purpose the debasement and depreciation of human beings—their worth and their dignity...
...we might ask...
...evidences her respect for human beings and her commitment to human freedom...
...Such a list could be extended indefinitely, piling documented particular upon documented particular...
...Baruch's description of the 42nd Street viewer (as distinct from the Ivy League viewer...
...On May 22, 1975, the Constitutional Court ruled, and six months later the Bundestag confirmed, that an applicant for the civil service "must be advised of all adverse information, that he may answer in the presence of his counsel, that a negative decision may be based only on facts that could be brought up in court," and that in case of rejection he has the right to appeal...
...When Cynthia Epstein speaks of some of her best male friends and colleagues being porn-movie regulars (hmn...
...Even in such conservative places as Freiburg and Munich the halls are covered with antiestablishment posters and announcements of partisan events...
...Nor will I defend the practice of screening as perpetrated in Mr...
...To borrow his words in defense of the worst excesses of pornography is surely to make the worse appear the better reason...
...On the right, we learn that Hitler was really guiltless...
...Perhaps Connolly is a crypto-revisionist, certainly revisionism is growing popular...
...And I think we had all better make some distinctions such as she does...
...It is entirely probable...
...I cannot see how the cause of liberty was advanced by the FBI's harassment of terrified schoolteachers who had yellowing copies of the New Masses in their attics...
...Connolly is also disingenuous when he distinguishes between the revisionists who insist that the American Communists were a persecuted minority who alone possessed the key to right political action and the critics on the left who denounced them, and when he proposes a third way, which essentially places the halo of martyrdom on Communists...
...GEORGE MANN Cleveland Heights PETER CONNOLLY REPLIES: With the innumerable victims of Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism Mr...
...It seems that, in this conversation, there have been misunderstandings all around...
...By this standard, anything goes, yet even the most tolerant must draw the line somewhere...
...I do not believe that Soviet prisoners were aided by the U.S...
...He writes, "In retrospect, their absolute right to their opinions must be zealously defended by anyone who cares about human rights and does not wish to reserve his compassion for those with whom he identifies...
...may be adduced as a reason for rejection only if their nature is so grave as to cast serious doubt on the candidate's ability to uphold the principles of freedom and democracy...
...3. Supporting a dictatorship over a monolithic political party in the U.S...
...Then he began worrying about Vorster...
...After all, even more than a decade before the 1950s, there were those of us who did not need the revelations of a captured Buchenwald or a Solzhenitsyn to know the horrors of Hitler or the bestialities of Stalin...
...It should be noted that the Areopagitica is concerned with religious differences only...
...government's denial of pensions to wounded Communist veterans or by the cutting off of Social Security payments to the widows of Communist party leaders...
...it is tough in right-wing, Catholic States such as Bavaria and Wuerttemberg-Baden...
...that relentlessly insisted on blind obedience from its members and hoped to extend its dominion over the rest of the American population—a party that was masquerading as a fighter for the American working class while acting, on every important issue, solely to advance the policies of the Soviet Union...
...Surely the merit of Milton's argument against the feasibility of censorship—the only point on which I invoked his manyfaceted essay—can be judged apart from the specific situation that elicited it...
...Such revision takes peculiar turns...
...Perhaps our priorities have been confused ever since they were so happily known in the 1930s when the real enemies were Hitler and Franco...
...If one existed, it would be more liberal than the present in some States...
...I used to think that this kind of mistake could no longer be made, but now I'm not so sure...
...There was an interval of several months before publication of the book, To Jerusalem and Back, in which this conversation appears again—and Bellow no doubt would have taken Avineri's objection into account...
...Finally, in speaking for freedom of choice I did not paraphrase Milton...
...In speaking of the necessity for man's freedom of choice, Spitz freely paraphrases Milton: "Those who would deny him that choice, who insist instead that he forsake his reason and his right to free decision-making and place his conscience into their custody, demand that he cease to be a mature and responsible individual...
...All that he stresses—Good man's sexuality, his stylistic shortcomings, etc.—were commented upon in his lifetime...
...Maybe American readers do not realize a small difference: in this country, a teacher who happens to be a Communist is still an American...
...she is recognizing that there is acceptable porn and there is unacceptable porn...
...Such Communist actions have deprived hundreds of thousands not only of "their absolute right to their opinions" but often their lives...
...A more tendentious, maliciously unfair study of Goodman would seem impossible...
...But what about that famous "ban on jobs" (Beru/sverbot...
...But the difference between these abuses and the McCarthy period is that public opinion, the government and the courts are on the side of those who complain in the name of democracy...
...But Epstein evidently has purpose in mind other than reevaluating a writer in terms of his pertinence to new times or a revised place in the history of intellectual ideas or literature...
...Connolly's major thesis is familiar, McCarthy was a bad man, hence everybody he attacked was automatically good...
...One thinks, for example, of the running series in the New Republic, invariably fair-minded...
...During a recent trip I did not encounter anybody who was afraid to voice his opinions, and although professors are all civil servants, I found entire departments, notably in the fields of sociology and Germanistics, in the hands of avowed Marxists, with the curriculum and even the examinations reflecting a Marxist orientation...
...Mann feels an intense empathy...
...during the late 1940s, or who used the motionpicture industry, to cite one example, as a vehicle to disseminate their parochial ideas...
...After his great defense of toleration, in a passage conveniently ignored by most liberals, Milton does advocate censorship—of atheism and Catholicism: "I mean not tolerated popery and open superstition, which, as it extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate...
...The police estimates that 17,000 East German agents are operating in West German business concerns, the Administration, political parties, trade unions, police and army...
...This, surely, is not how he has elsewhere spoken, or written, of American foreign policy or the problem of Soviet domination (and human rights) in Russia and elsewhere...
...On the Problem of Pornography Editors: A few observations on the discussion of pornography in your Spring 1978 issue ("The Problem of Pornography," by Murray Hausknecht, with comments by Lionel Abel, George P. Elliott, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Irving Howe, and David Spitz...
...although to my knowledge he has never shown similar solicitude for the 5,000 political prisoners in the [East] German Democratic Republic, he assures us that West Germany is seething with "a variant of American McCarthyism...
...Would Milton advocate the censorship of pornographic materials if he were alive today...
...It seems that he has not recently visited a German university or read any German papers...
...Most of all...
...It has nothing to do with the defense of erotic or pornographic materials, an indication that not all periods find the sexual as fascinating—or problematic—as ours does...
...Editors: Reading Shlomo Avineri's communication, "A Meeting with Saul Bellow" (Dissent, Spring 1978), 1 cannot help feeling that it's a pity Avineri did not raise his objections to Bellow's brief account of their conversation (held in Jerusalem in November 1975) after its first appearance in the July 12, 1976 issue of the New Yorker (taking up a half-page in Part One of that long piece...
...Far from conveniently ignoring...
...In short, he has done what is best described as a hatchet job...
...Overall, in a period of 18 months, the appropriate authorities handled 450,000 applications...
...0 289 On Paul Goodman Editors: Long-time Dissent readers will recall how frequently Paul Goodman's stimulating articles appeared in your publication...
...the destruction of Soviet literature as a serious occupation, and a similar censorship in the satellites...
...And he blames the "liberals" for not clamoring to defend the Communists...
...To have been a Communist, even in his time frame of the early 'SOs, was to have been guilty of: 1. Denying, playing down, or even dancing on the graves of millions of helpless corpses (educated guesses range from 10 million to 15 million) done to death by slow starvation and overwork in Soviet concentration camps...
...Presumably, they were both aware that the gun was loaded...
...in 5,600 cases "adverse information" was alleged, and of these, 328 applications were rejected for lack of loyalty to the Constitution...
...Some, such as the first perceptive critique of the J. F. Kennedy administration ("The Devolution of Democracy," Dissent, Winter 1962, p. 6), were and remain outstanding pieces...
...Does Connolly really believe that those he defends were proponents of 20th-century Americanism...
...The Areopagitica, in the form of a speech to the Parliament of England, was his reply...
...What does this imply...
...Although some lecturers whose promotion did not come through may attribute their failure to political discrimination, and the left has made Berufsverbot a household word, I should like to inform Mr...
...Some have penetrated as far as the Chancellor's office and the Defense Minister's antechamber...
...There are no fresh insights about Goodman's work...
...In the light of history, it is impossible to agree with Connolly's statement, "American citizens have as much right to be Communists as they have to be born-again Baptists...
...There is some irony in the fact that many notable civil libertarians, zealous of guarding the rights of minority groups, are perfectly willing to deny those same rights to that group called women, implying and sometimes stating directly that pornography (which is primarily directed against women) is far less obscene than that literature which is directed against racial and religious groups...
...2. Supporting the most serious and continuous attack ever launched against the intellectual life of Western man...
...Other readers can decide whether Ms...
...I spoke for myself...
...With regard to David Spitz's piece, surely Milton must be gyrating in his grave...
...Nevertheless, CF membership is not considered prima facie evidence of unfitness for a civil-service job...
...ELAINE HOFFMAN BARUCH New York City DAVID SPITZ REPLIES: Milton's marital difficulties, not his religious views, led him to publish, without license, several pamphlets on divorce...
...I am reminded of this by the publication in Commentary (February 1978) of an article, "Paul Goodman in Retrospect," by Joseph Epstein...
...There is no possible equation here, even though the born-again Baptists have outgrown an earlier tolerance of lynching and a tendency to support Prohibition...
...McCarthyism," my foot...
...EDITH TARCOV New York City q McCarthyism in West Germany Editors: Milton Mankoff has written two letters to the New York Times on the alleged "ban on jobs" in the Federal Republic of Germany, and also, with Monica Jacobs, an article in Dissent (" McCarthyism in the [West German] Civil Service," Winter 1978...
...Moreover, the Bundestag held that "the words and acts of a young person while still a student...
...Considering that these parties find their field of recruitment mostly among students who later apply for civil-service positions, the figures do not indicate a political Berufsverbot...
...MAX MILLER New York City q The Early Fifties — Another Look Editors: In the Fall 1977 issue of Dissent Peter M. Connolly writes, "To have been a Communist is to have been guilty of something...
...I would start here...
...He implies that the genuine Communists picked up by the Wisconsin Senator's sweeps through the government telephone book should have been defended as vigorously as those innocent bystanders recklessly slandered by McCarthy and his henchmen...
...Strauss's Bavarian bailiwick...
...But what has all this to do with the issue...
...Recently a young radical acquaintance suggested that it was useless to denounce the Soviet Union while more pressing political issues exist in the United States...
...by contrast, a West German Communist works for a neighboring government that is hostile to both the Constitution and the existence of the Federal Republic...
...On the left, a belligerent Lillian Hellman and a cutesie-poo Nancy Mitford insist that the Murderers' Row in the Kremlin was worth respect...
...There is not one Communist party in West Germany but three, all legally distributing their propaganda and running for office...
...This is less than 0.1 percent of the applications, whereas all the left parties that might be considered disloyal together obtained I percent of the vote...
...This article was written—under Allied supervision—with an eye on the sad experience of the Weimar Republic, which had been undermined by disloyal officers and judges...
...It is never quite clear what...
...My point was and is that American citizens have a right to be judged by their acts, not by their alleged beliefs or by what the government thinks they might do at some time in the indefinite future...
...Murray Hausknecht remarks somewhat misleadingly that antifeminist forces opposed to the ERA and abortion are "reinforced by the zealous foes of porn," but he also goes on to say that feminists "worry about the image of women that porn encourages, and sometimes find themselves unsympathetic to traditional civil liberties...
...Mann ostensibly abhors...
...VICTOR SHRAEGER q Misunderstandings — All Around...
...And why does he ignore the hampered 291 careers of those who were exposed to the prejudice of the Communists who were in positions of cultural power in the U.S...
...Applying any other standard only opens the door to that totalitarianism which Mr...
...Furthermore, he goes on to say (and here the conservatives in the current controversy could help themselves to some ammunition, not that I am in their camp, either), "that also which is impious or evil absolutely, either against faith or manners, no law can possibly permit, that intends not to unlaw itself...
...Recently the workers of the Grundig (electronics) works elected an admitted Communist to represent them on the board of directors...
...I specifically cited the very passages quoted by Ms...
...A partial list of clarifying "somethings" may jog his memory and also suggest that an individual may be guilty without being indictable...
Vol. 25 • July 1978 • No. 3
