Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR 7KUDOS I was at party the other evening where a number of current topics was discussed. I was amazed and gratified to note how many articles from The New Leader were quoted. This...
...He would sentence "the children already born and the generations yet unborn" to Communist slavery...
...Rubel has provided neat rationalization in advance for the Petainists of a future Communist occupation, of Europe...
...For it encourages the Kremlin to remain intransigent in hopes of "Western capitulation and limits our alternatives to the twin evils of war or surrender...
...There are many journals which are liberal, but few which are both liberal and toughminded...
...In the improbable event that the Communists thrust war upon us, intelligent readiness will enhance the prospects of survival...
...it is to think that Communism would put an end to all human evolution...
...To imply, as Rubel does, that even the "partial destruction" of a community in the struggle against totalitarianism is never justified, is to betray humanism...
...speak only to those who are already born...
...The destiny of all humanity, both present and future, is just as much involved in Rubel's implied advocacy of surrender to Communism as in my advocacy of resistance...
...To the extent that it has been followed until now it has succeeded...
...What gives him the right to speak for the unborn as if they were souls impatiently waiting to descend...
...I have found your journal the most useful of any American magazine that I read...
...Last year I subscribed on trial basis...
...My position is designed to avoid both...
...CORRECTION In my review of Max Nomad's book Aspects of Revolt (NL, May 8), "Waclaw Machajski was erroneously described as a friend of Peter Kropotkin...
...All Nikita Khrushchev need do, if Rubel's philosophy of survival at all costs or at any price becomes Western policy, is to rattle some thermonuclear rockets and the whole of Europe will fall prostrate before him...
...New York City Pawel Mayewski...
...The policy that I advocate, of deterrence until multilateral disarmament can be achieved, would prevent both war and universal Communist slavery...
...To wish to impose it on whole nation is to believe that man is born and condemned to remain a slave...
...They will not reproach me but him...
...This doctrine and the moral which follows from it involve the destiny of all humanity, both present and future, including those who do not think in political terms (the children already born and the generations yet unborn...
...Chicago Joseph Goldman I enclose my check for a three-year subscription...
...This is indeed a tribute to what I think is the best liberal political and educational weekly in the United States...
...Cleveland James A. Pilcher THE BOMB If we grant for the sake of the argument that the opposition of "Communism and the free world" proposed by Sidney Hook ("The Couch and the Bomb," NL, April 24, as well as his letter to the New York Times, May 2) has the meaning which he gives to it, it is difficult not to acknowledge the totalitarian character of the political moral which it implies...
...Paris, France Maximilien Rubel Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Sidney Hook replies: To maintain, as I do, that the struggle for freedom is legitimate, even if we cannot be certain to survive, is to place oneself at the center, not antipodes, of a humanism worthy of free men...
...This was the line taken, first, by those who preferred the evils of Hitler's fascism to the dangers of the struggle against him, and then by the Petainist collaborators...
...The ethic taught by Hook has, however, all its significance on the plane of individual morality: rather to die than to live under Communism...
...In effect, to affirm that the annihilation, partial or total, of the nation, or even of humanity, is preferable to an existence under Communism, is to place oneself at the antipodes of every sort of humanism...
...Despite its dangers, I know of no other positions at the moment which are less dangerous and more honorable...
...Actually, he was a friend of Nomad...
...This ethic reduces human heroism to the level of animal courage and makes of philosophy a branch, or the servant, of the military art...
...It is Rubel's policy of surrender, not my policy of resistance, which is more in accord with "the dictate of military authority" whose strategy is derived merely from the odds of victory or defeat...
...I am confident that genuine humanists, socialists and democrats will repudiate this policy...
...Such an affirmation makes sense only as a dictate of military authority which turns a tactic of national self-interest into a universal principle...
Vol. 44 • June 1961 • No. 24
