LETTERS
Editors: It is true, as Dennis Wrong wrote ("PR on PC" Spring 1994) that political correctness has been widely discredited and often ridiculed (though it is significant that this happens far...
...An economist is serving a twenty-month sentence for a book about economic problems in the southeast...
...Genovese should read Christopher Simpson's books Blowback and The Splendid Blond Beast to better understand why conservatives need some mea culpas of their own...
...What else could he say, knowing that any opposition to the PKK would mean swift and brutal reprisals...
...Please do not take this as discounting the far more important actions of the noncommunist left...
...These results clearly prove that the PKK has no support from our citizens of Kurdish origin...
...So if you want to write about something that you like, or dislike, in or about Dissent, please do it quickly...
...Who Are Terrorists in Turkey...
...Not even Dissent has dissented from the universal hands-off policy toward Marx's writings...
...Hollander lumps Wellesley and Howard, two utterly unlike schools, together because they have both experienced controversies over black anti-Semitism...
...Buckley and Bozell say in a footnote that they only seek "social sanctions...
...In addition to the Letters from Russian Prisons published by Debs's committee, I can point to David Dallin and Boris Nicolaevsky's Forced Labor in the Soviet Union (1947), Al Herling's The Soviet Slave Empire (1951), and Paul Barton's L'Institution concentrationnaire en Russie (1959...
...Editors: Although "With the Kurdish Guerrillas," by Aliza Marcus (Spring 1994) makes several important points that display the heinous aims of the terrorist PKK that are generally missed or ignored in the Western media, it still leaves the misperception that the PKK's terror campaign is widely supported by Turkey's Kurdish citizens...
...Big business...
...How large this share was can be judged by examining the references to the 1963 edition of Merle Fainsod's standard work, How Russia is Ruled...
...Who are its opponents...
...Conservatives have been most successful FALL • 1994 • 573 in using the religious right to create a reactionary Popular Front in the past twenty years...
...It's worth quoting Buckley at length from his infamous McCarthy and his Enemies, written with the odious L. Brent Bozell: "Whether [a McCarthy] speech was a conscious effort to narrow the limits of tolerable opinion so as to exclude left-wing Liberals, only McCarthy can say...
...Even if few defend Leonard Jeffries, he is back in his job and continues doing what he has done before...
...Yet most of the PR symposiasts were professors, and the journal most read by academics, the New York Review of Books, has been resolutely anti-PC...
...And those are just the best known of the lot...
...Dissent readers have the credibility to attack PC, not conservatives...
...NOTE: We will print more correspondence on "The Question" in our Winter issue...
...If their work is forgotten here, where will it be remembered...
...If they were truly against murder, they wouldn't be cheerleaders for reactionary killers around the globe...
...that is, an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice...
...PC above all is a climate of opinion, an atmosphere of conformity, which greatly restricts free expression...
...It is remarkable what a large share of the writings on this subject were written and distributed by the numerically tiny American left...
...The McCarthys, Hoovers, and Nixons were more interested in exploiting the communist menace than in counteracting it...
...As for his comments about the March local elections, the ambassador is correct to say that the PKK's call for a boycott was unsuccessful...
...It could end torture of detainees, halt the mysterious assassination of Kurdish activists, and stop soldiers from burning down Kurdish villages...
...Genovese, take your guilt elsewhere...
...4) how American leaders borrowed from Nazis by creating local storm troopers and SS equivalents in Latin America, among other places, to prey upon their own people, killing priests and nuns at rates even Joe Stalin would have appreciated...
...Could he be thinking of Khalid Muhammad, whose campus speech in my area caused a furor that led both to invitations and cancellations at other campuses...
...Five of its deputies have been in prison since March, and could face the death penalty...
...Gee, thanks...
...It relies on terror to achieve its goals—killing teachers, judges, engineers who work for the good of the region...
...Fainsod's chapter on "Terror as a System of Power" lacks some of the detail now known, but stands up remarkably well as a survey of the subject...
...At least we agree that endless "bemoaning PC to an audience of the converted" is futile...
...Neither Genovese nor the six respondents discuss the role played by Marx and Marxism in creating the evils in question...
...The most damaging aspect of PC may not be the speech codes and the associated harassment of particular students or teachers...
...But the question is, Will the Turkish government allow such a solution...
...Communist despotism remains in China...
...This is the true goal of this constant red-baiting and call for mea culpas...
...When contemplating the Popular Front, let's consider: during the Popular Front years, the New Deal had its greatest success...
...Some of the material in this last book had earlier appeared in Dissent...
...Page 333, Fourth printing, 1954...
...Who is the "we" whose "collective dirty linen" Genovese wants to wash...
...The ambassador, like his government, is trying to reduce Kurdish grievances to a fight between terrorists (PKK) and the just (the Turkish army...
...BENJAMIN Ross Bethesda, Md...
...David Horowitz, Part Deux...
...American colleges and universities are so heterogeneous that one cannot generalize about them...
...Yet Marx was opposed to the concept of human rights and said so explicitly in his essay "On the Jewish Question": "None of the supposed rights of man, therefore, go beyond the egoistic man, man as he is, as a member of civil society...
...Turkey could, for instance, legalize Kurdish-langauge education, television, and radio...
...In fact, the PKK's battle is largely an outgrowth of the grievances...
...The American cold warriors, both Democratic and Republican, have more to apologize for in their actions than many American communists who supported a distant dictatorship in the Soviet Union, but also fought for civil rights in America, better conditions for American workers, and fought against the abuses of an American National Security State...
...But it may well be we have not heard the last of this idea...
...We are unable to acknowledge letters...
...Dissent readers understand better than any conservative the crimes of communism...
...We have undoubtedly been wrong on many things, but Stalinism was most emphatically not one of them...
...But the mangling of this history in Dissent, of all places, cannot pass uncontroverted...
...I took Professor Fainsod's course in my first semester of college, in 1967...
...Furthermore, the belief that the history of humanity is the history of the class struggle permanently demonizes a portion of the human race...
...Doubtful...
...I submit that embarrassment over the failure of well-intentioned efforts at racial integration rather than intimidation accounts for the silence—insofar as it exists—in face of these demands and protests...
...Is it Eugene Victor Debs and the committee of protest against Lenin's prisons he joined in the early 1920s...
...None, however, considers the possibility that the crimes committed by Marxist regimes are inherent in the writings of Marx himself...
...Genovese himself says, "The horrors did not arise from perversions of radical ideology but from the ideology itself...
...Some day, the patience of America may at last be exhausted, and we will strike out against Liberals...
...Conservatives are only against mass murder when it's done by Reds and only hate communism to the extent it provides public education, public health care, housing, and so on...
...NUZHET KANDEMIR Ambassador Turkish Embassy Washington, D.C...
...The influence of PC on campuses means, for instance, that ethnically segregated dormitories will not be publicly criticized (but even if criticized they will not be disbanded), that few academics would publicly express doubt about any aspect of racial, ethnic, or sex preferences in admission, financial aid, hiring, and so on, about the intellectual merit of much of what goes under multiculturalism, about certain definitions of what constitutes sexual harassment etc., etc...
...Why not Harry Fleischman, another Dissent contributor, who in 1951 wrote the Voice of America's first broadcasts on Soviet prison camps...
...The picture has not changed to this day, if we deign to consider current events rather than abstract political theory...
...PAUL HOLLANDER Amherst, Mass...
...Conservatives rarely get called upon to repudiate more than a particular statement or two and are never hounded for their continued support of fascists here and abroad...
...It is remarkable how many of them were written by socialists and trade unionists...
...Sociologist Ismail Beskci was sentenced in June to four years in prison for a book he wrote about the Kurds...
...More than eight hundred Kurdish villages have been forcibly evacuated by the army...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes...
...Finally, one must wonder how the respondents to Genovese's challenge were chosen...
...Aliza Marcus Replies: Ambassador Kandemir's letter is misleading...
...q To Letter Writers • We welcome succinct letters from our readers...
...Incidentally, The Chronicle of Higher Education of June 29 reports that the University of Pennsylvania has changed its procedures in response to criticism over the "water buffalo" incident...
...Marxism is a doctrine that many good people have supported...
...Groups of students can still occupy academic buildings with impunity if such actions are sanctified by the rhetoric of PC...
...Hollander, I'm sorry to say, has become just such a Johnny One Note in the right-wing press...
...Fainsod references only eight books (other than escapees' memoirs) whose primary subject is Soviet terror...
...Nearly all of Hollander's examples of PC survivals refer to black demands and protests...
...MITCHELL J. FREEDMAN El Toro, Calif...
...Maybe so, maybe we New Yorkers (though I live in central New Jersey) underestimate how grim it is out there in the academic boondocks of central Connecticut and western Massachusetts...
...Under these circumstances, it's no wonder that Ambassador Kandemir believes that "Turkish citizens of Kurdish origin support the government...
...Commentary, for example, an unambiguously anticommunist journal, has never printed a piece relating Marxist doctrine to communist cruelty...
...State Department report Patterns of Global Terrorism1993 as one of the most brutal terrorist organizations throughout the world...
...It was the left, primarily, that exposed Lenin's and Stalin's crimes...
...The fact remains that mainstream Turkish citizens of Kurdish origin support the government and oppose the PKK, its separatist goals, and its terrorist tactics...
...However, the fact remains that these critiques had little practical impact: the general notion of PC may be discredited, but most of its specifics survive, are deeply entrenched, and continue to have a considerable impact on academic discourse...
...Still, Ambassador Kandemir raises an interesting point...
...Labor and the left...
...I recently remarked to a friend who also teaches in New York City and was a contributor to the Partisan Review symposium I reviewed that my university seemed largely untouched by the PC phenomenon...
...If John Kerry is a comsymp, then why isn't Bob Dole a fascsymp...
...Why were not Barton and Herling, both of whom are still available, asked to answer...
...It must be added that many foreign journalists who were in the southeast during the elections reported that state officials were threatening people to ensure that they voted...
...572 • DISSENT More on "The Question" Editors: It was nauseating to read Eugene Genovese's whining effort to dilute his guilt as a past apologist for the crimes of Stalinism by blaming the entire left, including the anticommunist left ("The Question," Dissent, Summer 1994...
...5) their continued sorry record on race, gender, and so on...
...It is characteristic that even if the "water buffalo" incident became a joke, a recent report of the relevant committee at the University of Pennsylvania still defended the original procedures against the student who used the term...
...Over the past few months, thousands of Kurds have fled to northern Iraq to escape what they say are attacks by the army...
...As is readily admitted in your article, it presses children into its brutal terror campaign...
...He replied that this was true of his institution too, but it was because New York City was a unique environment—things were different at places like Wesleyan...
...Letters must be kept to about 500 words, typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...Among the eight are the three works just mentioned—surely a higher proportion of socialists than in the American population at large, then or now...
...in Hakkari, 89.40 percent, in Sirnak, 76.54 percent, etc...
...Editors: It is true, as Dennis Wrong wrote ("PR on PC" Spring 1994) that political correctness has been widely discredited and often ridiculed (though it is significant that this happens far more often outside than inside academia...
...The Turkish government is not fighting the Kurds...
...socialists should stop apologizing for our history on this question and start taking legitimate credit...
...3) American atomic experiments on humans...
...Would Hollander enforce integration by a policy equivalent of compulsory busing...
...Moderates and conservatives as well as liberals and radicals have been gentle to Marx...
...Over the last two years, many of the books published in the West in the 1950s and earlier about Soviet prison camps have passed through my hands...
...The point of this personal history is that democratic Editors: The American left must put an end to wasting its journal space with mea culpas such as the latest one initiated by Eugene Genovese...
...Once those outside Turkey see the PKK for what it truly is, they will arrive at the same conclusion as the majority of Turkey's Kurdish citizens...
...Ankara continues to deal harshly with writers and politicians who dare discuss the country's Kurdish problem...
...The March 27, 1994 local elections were not just a test of the will of the people in the Southeast Turkey but also a test of the strength of the PKK, specifically because the terror organization threatened those who did participate in the free elections with death However, voter turnout in various cities in the region indicated that the citizens were simply not intimidated by the PKK's threats...
...Dennis Wrong Replies: Though his target is the lesser one of mere opinion or at most questionable administrative policies in some universities, Paul Hollander increasingly reminds me of J. Edgar Hoover continuing to insist that the Communist party was a major threat long after it had become a declining political sect...
...It is not so surprising that so many Kurds view the PKK as the only group fighting for their rights...
...I wish he were more specific about just where in recent years students have occupied academic buildings and disrupted politically incorrect speakers "with impunity...
...While it may be true that bemoaning PC to an audience of the converted will not have a great impact on the phenomenon, claiming that it has been relegated to disrepute and insignificance strikes me as even less helpful as well as misleading...
...Seriously, this is one more reminder of the late Irving Howe's observation that he had seldom been attacked from the left by anyone who did not wind up attacking him from the right...
...Is it Norman Thomas and the Commission of Inquiry into Stalin's labor camps that he led in the late 1940s...
...But Hollander ignores my expressed approval of liberal critics of PC who do not observe a double standard in that they also condemn ritualized right-wing obsessions with the subject...
...THOMAS SPENCER HOLMAN Clifton, N.J...
...The same applies to his comrades at Wellesley or Howard...
...It was almost enough to make me wish I had voted in 1965 for the Republican candidate for governor of New Jersey who promised to fire Genovese from the State University...
...GEORGE JOCHNOWITZ Staten Island, N.Y...
...The central issue is Turkish government policies toward the Kurdish minority and reports of army abuses against Kurdish civilians living in the mainly Kurdish southeast...
...q ED...
...Indeed, after pointing out that the PKK is responsible for killing "collaborators, a wide category that has included the wives and children of Kurds . . . schoolteachers, municipal workers, and outspoken dissenters," the reporter quotes an unidentified villager who says that the PKK is fighting for his rights...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
...Who are its friends in American politics...
...The PKK's methods may often be brutal, but in southeast Turkey, Kurds more often than not blame Ankara and its army for the primary abuses...
...But because we have a long "lead time" for each issue, you have to send us your letter within three weeks after getting an issue of Dissent in order to get it into the next issue...
...It massacres innocent civilians without discrimination...
...For instance, in Diyarbakir voter turnout was 79.86 percent...
...Anyone who tries to say otherwise is liable to end up in prison...
...2) the American crimes in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Guatemala, Iran, Greece, and most of Latin America...
...Editors: Eugene Genovese's diatribe in your last issue is not the only place in which I have recently seen the anticommunist left blamed for the crimes of its Stalinist enemies...
...Editors: "The Question" asked by Eugene D. Genovese may possibly be a rephrasing of a very important question indeed: why do good people so often believe in bad causes...
...Now he lectures Dissent readers on the evils of communism and besmirches the socialist aesthetic...
...Meanwhile, the pro-Kurdish Democracy party (DEP) was shut down by the constitutional court on June 16, on charges of separatist propaganda for two speeches by its former chairman and an appeal for peace in Turkey that the party published...
...Recently, the former head of the Petroleum Workers Union was sentenced to twenty months in prison for an article he wrote about the Kurds...
...Maybe Genovese can get some support in fighting "EC," economic correctness, which pervades business and economics departments at most universities...
...Perhaps when Genovese sees Bill Buckley at one of those anti-PC gatherings, Genovese can question Buckley as to why he still defends Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare as he screams about the PC tendencies in some departments of some American universities...
...It is combating the PKK, an outlawed organization listed in the U.S...
...As for my own answer to Genovese's "Question," the Fainsod book will do as well as anything...
...This is not as illogical as it may seem...
...Christine Stansell mentions that Genovese "habitually drew on Marxism...
...Remember Genovese's famous "I do not fear a Vietcong victory, I welcome it...
...The PKK is not the issue: even if the army wipes it out, the problem will still remain: do you give Kurds full rights, or do you insist that everyone is happy in Turkey and just imprison those who disagree...
...about the following: (1) the activities of the Dulles brothers and other reactionaries, both in business and government, before, during, and after World War II, specifically in collaborating with and protecting top Nazi leaders of Europe...
...If Genovese wants others to seek penance, he should go to the National Review, American Spectator, Human Events, and American Opinion, among others and ask them, "What did you know and when did you know it...
...What I was taught there about the crimes of communism did not disagree with what I had heard before at home and at school, or what 1 learned soon afterward as a member of the Young People's Socialist League and new reader of Dissent...
...This was a conclusion of the Lazarsfeld-Thielens study The Academic Mind thirty-six years ago, which investigated another "climate of opinion, atmosphere of conformity" allegedly "greatly restrict[ing] free expression," namely, McCarthyism...
...FALL • 1994 • 575...
...A high turnout could also be a sign that Kurds in the southeast want their problems solved in a democratic fashion...
...Black students opted for racially segregated dorms...
...Its Marxist-Leninist ideology is bankrupt and disavowed by all 574 • DISSENT free nations...
...We must] strive to free the conduct of the country's affairs from the influence of them and their works...
...PC also means that politically incorrect outside speakers are rarely invited to the campuses, and that when they are, they can be disrupted with impunity...
...Robin D. G. Kelley talks about "Marxists...
Vol. 41 • September 1994 • No. 4
