Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR TROTSKY In his review of Isaac Don Levine's Mind oj An Assassin (NL, December 14), Max Eastman writes: "Even after [Trotsky's] home had been invaded, and his bedroom and its...
...Information and light penetrating the cracks in the Iron Curtain must expose the cruel dictatorship, misinformation and unworkable economic theories under which the Russian people are now living...
...Forty-two years of that dictatorship would justify its abolition...
...But like Napoleon at the Bridge of Areola, he was inspired to rise to heroic heights by his thirst for glory...
...I cannot imagine that Trotsky, if he had to do the whole thing over again, should have acted any differently from the way he did...
...His reply in Shakespeare's words was that "cowards die many times before their deaths/ The valiant never taste of death but once...
...Waltham, Mass...
...We must either trust them, he said in effect, or not let them in...
...I have myself THE NEW LEADER welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...Eastman expressed his puzzlement at this lack of elementary prudence, and other writers have done likewise...
...He would not be Trotsky otherwise...
...It is not necessary to share in Trotsky's Bolshevik beliefs—it is, as a matter of fact, entirely possible for anyone—to see, as Eastman now does, that Trotsky "was as firm-willed and fixated a believer in that disastrous religion as his assassin," and yet to see also that, in his lack of care for his personal safety, he was a creature of heroic mould...
...been impressed with the resemblance between Trotsky's attitude and that of Julius Caesar (in Shakespeare's version, which is based on Plutarch) on the threshold of his assassination...
...The same paradox characterizes Trotsky as well...
...More and more, as time goes by, the melodramatic appellation given him by the tabloids initially seems to have been accurate: He was the Red Napoleon...
...MILTON HINDUS COMMUNIST BURIAL In the not distant future, some form of socialist democracy will "bury" Khrushchev's Communist dictatorship...
...NATHAN D. SHAPIRO...
...John Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost represents the infernal powers, yet he is admirable insofar as he exhibits the qualities of tenacity and self-sacrifice...
...As a matter of fact, there is already a respectable little library dealing with his death alone, to say nothing of his life...
...DEAR EDITOR TROTSKY In his review of Isaac Don Levine's Mind oj An Assassin (NL, December 14), Max Eastman writes: "Even after [Trotsky's] home had been invaded, and his bedroom and its surroundings machine-gunned by a gang of 20 gunmen dressed up in police uniforms, he stuck to his fastidious notion that it would be inhospitable to search everybody who entered the fortification...
...Yes, his ideas were indeed fraught with death, he made (to modify a phrase borrowed from Tacitus) a spiritual desert of his country and he called it peace...
...Brooklyn, N.Y...
...Furthermore, didn't Karl Marx say that a Communist dictatorship must be temporary...
...They will also learn that under a free enterprise system, even if somewhat limited, war-torn West Germany is much more prosperous than Russia or Communist East Germany, and that war-torn Japan is much more prosperous than Communist China...
...Caesar, too, was urged to have a care, to heed the dreams of his wife and the words of the soothsayer, and not to go out on public business on the particular day in question...
...The Russian people, as distinguished from their self-appointed rulers, are as human, literate and sensible as we are...
...If the world manages to survive the movement he represented, his may be the name above all others that remains "to point a moral or adorn a tale...
Vol. 43 • January 1960 • No. 1
