Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR CUBAN EDITORIAL Concerning your fine editorial on the Cuban situation (NL, April 24), I would like to make the following points: 1. Comparing U.S. actions in Cuba with those of the...
...Moreover, that there might be something to be gained by letting them live seems to me to be very likely...
...I shall charitably assume that Bohn is not a totalitarian liberal...
...it is just that the "impeachers'" exercise of free speech has made him hysterical...
...New York City Marvin Zimmerman THE BOMB Congratulations to you and to Sidney Hook for "The Couch and the Bomb" (NL, April 24...
...I would not, for a minute, minimize the truly courageous efforts of the Joint Distribution Committee in its never-ending fight to save world Jewry, but we should be more realistic about the problem as it existed from 1935-1942...
...Searcy, Arkansas James D. Bales...
...Sometimes we stop them, more often we slow them down or fail to stop them at all...
...Samuels says in her review that no government would admit penniless Jewish refugees between 1935 and 1942...
...An elected official can finally be voted out of office, but not so with a Justice...
...Nor can I see why what we might call a habitual murderer is any more deserving of death than, say, a habitual rapist or kidnapper, or than anyone who perpetrates multiple assault and battery...
...Hook's case for the second category is really quite weak...
...As for the first category, Hook makes it easy for himself by careful deployment of the pejorative, "politically monstrous figure...
...Thanks to Dr...
...The Eisenhower Administration, probably fearing that Castro would inevitably turn Left whatever we did (and perhaps also fearing American public reaction to possible aid to "Red" regime) evidently decided that inaction was the better part of policy and so refused to receive Castro officially or accede to his initial modest requests for aid...
...So round and round we have gone to the current impasse in which we can say, in fulfillment of our prophecy, "See, Castro is a Communist dictator," and Castro, fulfilling his, can say, "See, the Yankee mercenaries have invaded...
...New York City Zbigniew Brzezinski Sidney Hook's reply to Dr...
...3. Even if the claim that the Cuban people overwhelmingly support Castro were true (have the returns from the free election Castro promised Cuba come in yet...
...And certainly little could have been done after 1942 to help the Jews under the German occupation...
...The trial of Adolf Eichmann turns the spotlight on the behavior of the Germans during World War II, and I, for one, whole-heartedly endorse Israeli Premier David Ben Gurion's decision to abduct Eichmann and have him stand trial before the world...
...There is no end to the catalogue of vicious crimes and thus no end to the list of possible exceptions to the abolition of the death penalty...
...The rest of the world, especially Germany, wants to forget Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, but those who survived can never forget those horrible years...
...actions in Cuba with those of the Communists in other parts of the world is like comparing a policeman who uses a gun to a thief who uses a gun...
...After reading her review, I shall certainly obtain Agar's book...
...4. Our policy of "containment" is clearly self-defeating in the long run...
...New York City Bernard Herman May I apply to Professor Hook's historical analogies in "The Couch and the Bomb" the standards of logic I once learned from him...
...Regardless of what one may think of it, there is nothing unconstitutional about calling for impeachment if an individual thinks that it should be done...
...Bobby is utterly and completely loyal to his brother, and would jump off the "Washington Monument or cut man's throat if he thought it would help Jack...
...It is obviously erroneous to compare Castro's catch-as-catchcan revolution with Mao Tse-tung's disciplined, dedicatedly Marxist movement, whose roots extend to the early years of this century, and which we had little hope of ever influencing...
...Finally, I cannot see any reason why a murderer who murders again is really more deserving of death than murderer who murders but once...
...2. Those who take a holy view toward "nonintervention" would have thereby been barred from intervening to aid our allies against Hitler's interventions, and likewise are now committed by non-intervention to piecemeal surrender to Communist interventions...
...I seriously doubt that if dictator Fulgencio Batista had stayed in Cuba and not been executed, he would be a. rallying-point today for the critics of Castroism...
...David W. Nicklas FREE SPEECH In his "Home Front" column of April 17, William E. Bohn wrote: "To have men going about calling in print and over the air for the impeachment of the Chief Justice of the United States is going a bit too far with free speech...
...Strip away this question-begging phrase, and I cannot see the truth of his empirical claim that allowing such persons to survive their defeat presents an impossible or unreasonable handicap on the forces of law and justice...
...One must rather show that he is paranoiac, a schizophrenic or a manic-depressive...
...It is, not really a true psychiatric judgment, but rather a totalitarian attitude in politics, and starts out with the assumption that everyone else is wrong no matter how correct everyone else is in fact...
...He suggests that my citation of Cuba as an example of how the self-fulfilling prophecy has worked is equivalent to saying "that we turned the simple Chinese 'agrarian reformers' into revolutionary Communists...
...Robert Lindner in his brilliant work, The Fifty Minute Hour, we have report of the psychoanalysis of a Baltimore Communist party official with a gruesome mother-fixation...
...Lindner cured him of his neurosis by psychoanalysis, and the patient quit the Communist party, returned to his wife and became comparatively normal...
...and (3) those who, having been convicted of "premeditated murder, murder again...
...They therefore hit on the device of being neutral until one of two contending forces has won, after which they will declare the winner to be right...
...Indeed, one of the paradoxes of the present international scene is the danger that the louder the chant, "Ban the Bomb," the stronger the Chinese pressure on Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to practice nuclear and rocket brinksmanship, on the grounds that the West is unlikely to resist...
...There comes a time to call a halt...
...Lindner was of the opinion that he never came across Communist who wasn't off in the attic, and that if he could treat them all they would leave the party and return to normal...
...I am not nearly so shocked at the John Birch Society's exercise of the right of free speech as I am by 'Bohn's totalitarian desire to call a halt to its free speech...
...In this modern age of the worship of science, to prove one's opponent wrong in fact, or wicked, malicious, immoral or sinful, is practically a compliment...
...It is obvious that he does not want to be either "a fanatic or absolutist" on this issue, but what he calls "absolutism" is nothing but the defense of a principle without any exceptions, and it is not clear why this is not the most intelligent and humane position to take on the issue...
...Geneva, New York Paul Lauter 'THE DEATH SENTENCE' Sidney Hook's discussion of "The Death Sentence" (NL, April 3) is, for the most part, a welcome addition to the growing body of opinion critical of this institution in contemporary America...
...why the discrimination in favor of the Communist conspiracy...
...He gives no reason why we should not extend the same privilege to the rapist, the kidnapper, to the habitual offender—indeed, to everyone now punished with life imprisonment...
...Erich Fromm and the ill-named Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy was sane, lucid and convincing...
...They can't decide which side they're on, since they like to join the winning side...
...The difference is in the end pursued, whatever similarities in the means...
...New York City Hugo Adam s/b Bedau REFUGEE PROBLEM "Failure of the 'Final Solution'" (NL, April 10), Gertrude Samuels' fine review of Herbert Agar's book, The Saving Remnant, strikes poignantly at the age-old question of "Am I my brother's keeper...
...Castro, equally caught up in this neurotic (because mutually self-defeating) pattern, exaggerated Yankee hostility and the lack of cooperation into threatened aggression and took even more radical steps to solidify his position...
...If not...
...it no more prohibits us from getting rid of him, than it would have in the cases of Hitler and Mussolini, whatever their popular support...
...This works both ways...
...Why was Bohn silent when Tristram Coffin wrote (NL, January 30) of the Attorney General—without indicating dissent—that: "He leads a crew of tough, young, energetic Irish politicians who, in the words of one observer, 'don't give a bloody damn about philosophy, logic or altruism...
...Does Bohn also call for the end of free speech for Communists...
...Bobby, too, is a genius at organization and at digging up buried bones.' " If Coffin thinks that this is true he should lead crusade to remove the Attorney General from office...
...Mrs...
...But the full intent of Germany to destroy the Jewish people (the adoption of the "final solution") did not dawn upon the world until it was too late...
...a most effective rebuttal of the arguments of those who, in the name of "sanity," propose a most insane and dangerous course...
...Orchard Park, N.Y...
...and, on the other hand, if it is false he should apologize...
...In the long run, if their successes are not offset by actual losses (not merely "stopping"' them), they will dominate the world...
...It results in our merely trying to stop the Communists from expanding...
...However Communist-influenced Castro might initially have been, however impatient with democracy he soon showed himself, I do not think one can deny that United States failure to develop any positive policy toward Castro's Cuba when his revolution won control accelerated, if it did not precipitate, his embrace of the Soviet bloc...
...But is it really wise or necessary, as he argues, to retain this punishment for three classes of criminals, viz., (1) "politically monstrous figures" who might become a rallying point for further rebellion, e.g., Hitler during the later 1940s...
...The very monstrosity of such political figures tends to neutralize their political effectiveness after their defeat...
...Clearly, it is reasonable to expect of the state that it should wish all its citizens— including criminals—to live, not in order to torture some of them with unending imprisonment, but in order to make possible some sort of restoration to the fellowship of men, and to fulfill the state's duty to help most those who need the most help to this end...
...SANE's psychiatric approach to politics is clear from its name, which implies that anyone who disagrees with it lacks sanity...
...and he is already thinking ahead to 1964...
...2) those who are convicted of murder and sentenced to life but who prefer to be executed...
...What I find difficult to reconcile is Hook's plea that we be intelligent about crime and humane about punishment, his own evident knowledge of the facts about human behavior in the light of which penal policies alone can be intelligently and humanely framed, and his insistence on these three classes of exceptions to the general abolition of the death penalty...
...Bobby only wants to know, "How many votes will this bring Jack...
...What a team: dogmatic and militant fanatics in Peking and anti-nuclear "beatniks" and pacifists in New York...
...As to neutralists, they suffer from the uncertainty neurosis...
Vol. 44 • May 1961 • No. 19
