Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR SLOVAKIA In her "Report on Czech Communism'' (NL, June 10), Shiela Grant Duff betrays her ignorance of Slovak personalities and the Slovak situation when she refers to Wiliam Siroky...
...Siroky has been careful to conceal his early background, but in my years as an observer and correspondent in Czechoslovakia I learned that he was a Magyar to whom the Slovak tongue is foreign...
...The Fund for the Republic has let it be known that it no longer distributes any literature...
...A state of emergency had to be declared in Slovakia by Prague, and 160,000 Czech soldiers still remain on Slovak soil on the alert for Slovak revolt—one aimed at both Czech and Communist suzerainty...
...But as late as June 6 an article from Social Order entitled "The Legal Profession and Segregation,'' by William J. Kenealy, was sent out in thousands of copies...
...Student and workers' demonstrations and disorders in Slovakia have been of a heroic character, and Slovak freedom fighters went to the aid of the Hungarians in their revolt last fall...
...DEAR EDITOR SLOVAKIA In her "Report on Czech Communism'' (NL, June 10), Shiela Grant Duff betrays her ignorance of Slovak personalities and the Slovak situation when she refers to Wiliam Siroky and Karol Bacitek as Slovaks...
...The Fund for the Republic, if it replies to this letter, may disagree with some of the details listed here...
...Nowhere in Shiela Duff's article does the reader learn that there has all along been unrest in Slovakia...
...The Fund for the Republic has widely distributed "The Threat to Academic Freedom," an article by J. Kahn from the Proceedings of the American Catholic Association which, unfairly and inaccurately, criticizes Professor Hook's views as expressed in his hook Heresy, Yes—Conspiracy, No...
...Whether one agrees or disagrees with this book, it has been hailed as an important contribution to the subject...
...Philadelphia Robert Heckert TO THE FUND I would like to submit challenge to the Fund for the Republic through your columns...
...Bacilek is a pure Czech, not a Slovak, who has been sent to Slovakia by the central Communist apparatus in Prague to boss the Party organization there...
...The Fund for the Republic has in the past few years distributed Dean Griswold's book The Fifth Amendment Today—41,000 copies, not to mention additional distribution of first-chapter reprints...
...The Czechs can no longer find a dependable Slovak who will not lead Slovakia along the path of independence as a nation, which is what the Slovak people want...
...The Fund for the Republic has distributed 500 copies, I believe, of Telford Taylor's hook The Grand Inquest, which explicitly criticizes Professor Hook's views on the Fifth Amendment...
...One of your contributors, Sidney Hook, a distinguished philosopher and publicist, has just published a major work in the field of civil liberties entitled Common Sense and the Fifth Amendment...
...This latter volume has, of course, gone undistributed by the Fund...
...New York City Arnold Beichman...
...But the basic question will still remain: Why are the writings of so important a thinker in the field of civil liberties as Professor Hook on what seems to be the Fund for the Republic's "blacklist...
...The Slovak nation, some million strong, is consistently and wrongfully obscured and misrepresented both by Czechs and by supposedly knowledgeable international writers, with the result that people get a distorted picture of that part of Europe...
...Indeed, the Slovak spirit of revolt matches that of the Poles and Hungarians...
Vol. 40 • June 1957 • No. 26
