Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR RUSSELL-HOOK Permit me to make the following observations on the timely debate between Bertrand Russell and Sidney Hook, "Communism and Nuclear War" UNL. May 26) : 1. As long as other...
...In 1953, when I was « student at the University of London, I read his What is Democracy...
...One way would be to give more generous Federal tax deductions for any money spent by the teacher on books, periodicals and other equipment used in his work, as well as for postgraduate courses and private research projects...
...He has not shown that the impossibility of evil, as well as good, resulting from complete human extinction, is really worse than universal domination by Communism...
...Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty or give me death" was not only grandly courageous but infinitely wise...
...In the 1930s, there was no social stigma attached to living modestly and frugally...
...Many instructors and assistant professors receive less pay ten years after graduating from college than is received by present-day college graduates for their first job in business, engineering or industrial research...
...The concluding paragraph reads: "It is open to the Russians, if they so decide, to force war upon us, and, if so, we must accept the challenge at whatever cost, but we shall not be wise if we, realizing what is evil in the Communist system, ourselves encourage a war...
...Russell and Hook have the same values but Russell doesn't understand Communist ideology, psychology and political strategy...
...There are ways to correct this situation, besides the obvious but often impossible one of raising faculty salaries...
...This may be true, but today's living standards are far more demanding than those of the Depression Years...
...Professor Latham might reply that the thrill of teaching budding young minds should compensate for the gross material disadvantages suffered by the beginning college teacher...
...2. Are not the Soviet leaders less likely to resort to nuclear warfare if we maintain our strength, for fear of retaliation, than if we unilaterally disarm and thereby remove such fear...
...4. Russell does not approve of the "man who condemns everybody else to death because he himself does not find life worth living...
...Thus, Russell's suggestion will serve only to increase significantly the likelihood of Communism's universal domination...
...Today, if a young married couple do not possess their own home, the appropriate labor-saving appliances, a 21-inch TV set and a fin-tailed car, they are plainly looked upon as "failures...
...May 26) : 1. As long as other nations possess or strive to possess nuclear weapons, the possibility of nuclear warfare is not likely to diminish if, as Russell advises, we disarm unilaterally...
...I should like Khrushchev and company to know that while there is breath in the last American he will fight to the death all forms of tyranny...
...New Haven Don M. Crecier...
...Russell, of all people, should know that reason alone, even when logical, does not represent the sum total of human knowledge...
...Theodore K. Quinn COLLEGE INSTRUCTORS Professor Earl Latham in his recent article on college instructors ("The Young Promethean s," NL, May 5) remarked that the junior instructor "gets more money, relatively and absolutely, than he did in the 1930s...
...Granted that birth control does not imply complete human extinction, neither does nuclear warfare...
...Another would be Federal grants and/or loans for individual research work and projects connected with improving the teacher's courses and teaching methods...
...But we need not change our high opinion of one of the world's greatest philosophers simply because he also appears to be one of the world's worst tacticians...
...A New Essay...
...New York City Marvin Zimmerman I should like to appeal from Bertrand Russell, the appeaser, to Bertrand Russell, the defender of freedom...
...New York City Kenneth Simon, Jr...
...3. If it is true, as Russell says, that life gives "the only possibility of any value," it also gives the only possibility of evil...
...Bertrand Russell would have a valiant free-world army march under a flowing white flag with orders to surrender at the point of battle...
...To accept "a challenge at whatever cost" logically embraces the risks to human survival before which Russell now quails—not for himself, of course, but for future generations...
...It was one of the declarations that assured liberty, regardless .of any philosophical analysis...
...May we never live to see the day when Russell's counsel is taken and he is brainwashed into an elderly acolyte of dialectical materialism...
...Communist force and compulsion, can only be effectively met with force...
...He believes he can play the Christian to those who regard the Christian attitude as one of mealy-mouthed hypocrisy deserving special indignities and refinements of torture...
...A third possibility, rather Utopian no doubt, would be to recognize teaching, both on the college and lower levels, as vitally essential to the national welfare and to eliminate all but a nominal income tax on salaries below $10,000...
...It is practically impossible for the average college instructor to support wife and one or two children, and at the same time maintain the consumption standards of middle-class people of his own age level...
...I wonder how Russell would react to similar objections to birth control, on the grounds that its use could prevent millions of potential offspring from being born...
...A very large proportion of young instructors soon fall into one of these categories...
...Roxbury, Conn...
...But unless he has extraordinarily high devotion to his profession, the young instructor is likely to retreat into sullen apathy, resigned to his lot and in effect conceding that "those who can't do, teach...
...Or he may become an academic politician, devoting most of his time to committee work and "empire building" to the neglect of his real duties...
Vol. 41 • June 1958 • No. 24
