Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words. SULTAN GALIEV In his letter of September 1, Salih Faizi charges me...
...I wish I knew what he means...
...According to the available evidence...
...Feuer obviously has not yet seen this...
...He is the man who in Germany made Hitler and he will make Hitlers in every place where his aims in life become dominant...
...Stalin's collaboration with Vakhitov did not preclude his collaboration with other pro-Soviet leaders of Moslem origin such as Narimanov, Efendiev, Ryskulov — and Sultan Galiev...
...Faizi's references to Marshal Tito and Imre Nagy are quite irrelevant in this context...
...You will search long and hard to find in recent decades clear statements of these patent facts...
...We called these people Fascists, and we meant—I think rightly—the word to be dirty word, one that designated state of mind that would lead to a corresponding state of being...
...WALTER Z. LAQUEUR 'DEATH WISH' I would like to make the following comments on Lewis S. Feuer's "The Politics of the Death Wish," which appeared in the September 1 issue...
...Why the choice of this particular moment to preach this doctrine...
...Governments that have the power to do unlimited good also have the power to do unlimited harm...
...It has been argued in the past that submission, regardless of the lightness or wrongness of the rules, is the best course for men to follow...
...4. How many intellectuals during the last 500 years have preached the doctrine of submission to a higher power on the ground that opposition would mean death...
...You will get them frequently from now on, but only with reference to relations to the Communist powers...
...I have harbored the conviction since that fateful time when Hitler came to power in Germany that if only enough people in Germany or elsewhere had seen the horrors to which Hitler's doctrines were leading, he could have been stopped...
...Finally, I wish to suggest that the prospect before us is that a great many people who have never before spoken a good word for the doctrine of submission can be expected to choose this time to preach this doctrine...
...New York City W. T. COUCH...
...It is difficult to understand how he can possibly fail to recognize the striking parallel between some of Sultan Galiev's proposals—notably the Colonial International—and Soviet policies now vis-a-vis Islam outside the Soviet Union...
...2. Feuer fails to distinguish between horrors committed by governments and horrors committed by individuals...
...1. Feuer's facts are wrong...
...I myself have seen," he says, "Asian coolies in the South Pacific treated by their French masters in ways as frightful as in the Soviet labor camps that I've read about...
...3. Feuer is right in saying "dictatorships have come and gone...
...It took some of us a long time to see that in genuine dirtiness Fascism was equalled only by Communism...
...Feuer really owes it to the readers of The New Leader to reveal the "laws of change" that, without any risks to anybody, dispose of dictators...
...It simply is not true that "The Spanish Inquisition would have made the Soviet secret police look like amateurs...
...This argument, whenever it has been made, has always been rightly recognized as an argument for the most rigid of all types of authoritarianism...
...To fail to see that individuals cannot inflict horrors on whole societies unless they happen to be heads of governments, or of organizations as powerful as governments, is simply to reveal blindness of a kind that, most unfortunately, is general in the intellectual world today...
...Who then would have been willing to pay any attention to what Feuer now says on this subject...
...At the same time, I have to grant that powerful forces are lined up with him...
...Nobody has been able to do this freely in any country dominated by the Communists at any time since they came into power...
...Feuer would have us submit...
...Feuer could go and see what was happening to Asian coolies in the South Pacific and he could, in some societies, report what he saw...
...Concerning Faizi's factual corrections, I never said that the Tatar Bolshevik republic existed in 1918...
...It has been evident for a long time, certainly since Plato and Aristotle, that division of labor and specialization are necessary to a level of society above that of bare subsistence...
...And it is this to which Mr...
...It has been clear for decades that this was the direction in which Communism was going and this is where Communism is today...
...I knew many people, very few of them intellectuals, during the six years from 1933 to 1939 who preached Feuer's doctrine of submission...
...What Feuer overlooks here, and there are a lot of others who are busily engaged in doing the same along with him, is that the "average man and average technician" is precisely the man who has not distinguished himself for his contributions to civilized life...
...He cites one of the more powerful of these forces when he tells us of "the findings of the Harvard Research Center," that "the average man and average technician in the Soviet Union is coming to lead a life not strikingly different from his American counterpart...
...SULTAN GALIEV In his letter of September 1, Salih Faizi charges me with a "hostile spirit toward Russia's victims...
...But the implication that they have come and gone because of any "laws of change" is doctrine that, if true, should have been put before the world when Hitler was in power...
...Cambridge, Mass...
...Even if Sultan Galiev was sentenced to death in the winter of 1929-1930, there is some doubt about whether the sentence was actually carried out at that time...
...As for the Sultan"s fate after 1923, there are indeed conflicting accounts about this, and the one given by Faizi is well known to me...
...that division of labor implies organization, voluntary or forced, and that organization implies hierarchy...
...But I do not think Feuer can escape the charge that he is harboring wish for the death of civilized life on earth...
...And even if they succeeded in changing the rules, unless they were genuinely lawless men, they had to submit to their own rules...
...5. My guess is that Sidney Hook will be able to take care of Feuer's charge that he is harboring death wish for mankind...
...it is more likely that Sultan Galiev was not "liquidated" until the early or middle '30s...
...There has never been a time when men in society have not had before them the necessity of choosing between submitting to the rules governing the formation of the prevailing hierarchy or taking their chances on what might happen to them if they attempted to change the rules...
...As I read him, the chief exponent of the horrors of the Inquisition in Spain and the Middle Ages, H. C. Lea, if he were living today, would repudiate Feuer's statement as gross falsification...
Vol. 41 • September 1958 • No. 33
