Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words. POLISH LIBERALISM This is simply to congratulate The New Leader on...
...Howard Hubbard SENSE & SENSIBILITY After reading John Simon's "In the Cruellest Month" in your April 13 issue, I wonder if something rather sad isn't creeping into his work...
...Of course, if Pachter does not think Marx's statement as quoted by me is anti-Semitic, so be it...
...The feasibility of counter-force, for example, does not depend on the total 100 per cent vulnerability of Soviet strategic forces as Steel contends...
...New York City A. M. Rosenthal Metropolitan Editor, The New York "Times" SOVIET JEWS Henry Pachter's attempt ("Dear Editor...
...As a former correspondent in Poland, I cannot really find it in the generosity of my heart to agree with your editorial note implying that this was the first time the myth of Polish liberalism had been discussed in American print...
...On the basis of past experience, however...
...If we do not make better use of the next few years in understanding these problems than we did during the Eisenhower period and again during the Kennedy era, then the thermonuclear jig will be up...
...I would, however, like to ask Hyman three questions: 1. Why do you restrict your reviews to books whose heroes, heroines, villains and other characters are homosexuals, lesbians, prostitutes, rapists, harlots, sadists, nymphomaniacs, libertines, fornicators, cuckolds, free-lovers, masochiste, practitioners of incest, devotees of eroticism, sex deviates and perverts of all types, not to mention drug addicts, alcoholics, etc...
...And in the same letter there is also a remark about "Madame Blind ehemalige [née] Cohen:' The fact that at that time Marx most likely was disintegrating somewhat mentally goes to confirm the assumption that these were his real feelings...
...Note the skillful juxtaposition of phrases: the one a complement, the other so subtly telling...
...April 27) to whitewash Marx of the stigma of anti-Semitism would perhaps be convincing if it were not for other corpora delicti dispersed in Marx's writings—pamphlets and published correspondence...
...I found Field's article perceptive—a word which of course always means that the writer conforms to the reader's own views...
...If such an absolute definition were correct, counter-force would have been infeasible both before and after McNamara's Ann Arbor speech because of Soviet missilefiring submarines...
...105-108 such an array of Marx's almost incredible insults against Czechs, Croats, and other Slavs (except the Poles) that Kautsky felt compelled to plead extenuating circumstances for his teacher...
...He explained this scandalous falling from grace of the man who had already written the Communist Manifesto by the psychosis to which Marx had succumbed after the defeat of revolutionary Hungary...
...And he actually demanded the complete "annihilation" of those "reactionary races...
...Here is a conclusion thoroughly incompatible with Steel's advocacy of a "minimum" deterrent...
...Apparently not, however...
...At the same time, in a little review of Herzl's Der Judenstaat in the official organ of German Social-Democracy, the reviewer ridiculed the notion of a Jewish State by calling it Utopian and reactionary...
...I am fairly safe in referring to the person who made those statements as an anti-Semite...
...I'm not wildly optimistic...
...Pachter's implied assertion that Marx's friend Friedrich Engels attacked Duehring (in his Anti-Duehring) because of his antiSemitism is also wrong...
...New York City Max Nomad Please inform Henry Pachter ("Dear Editor...
...I then become uncomfortable, and for two reasons: I feel that the critic has refused to meet his primary responsibility, and I am unsure just what this refusal tells, or can tell, the reader...
...it was a typo— Ed.] As for crediting Engels with Bebel's quotation, that is his privilege though it does reflect on his "scholarship...
...And what about his and Engel's reference to Lassalle as "Baron Itzig" and even "der jüdische Nigger" (Vol...
...Tan Hardcastle stops short...
...2. Is our population of 190 million interested in these alleged human beings to the exclusion of all others who comprise our society...
...In the recent remarks on Strategic Retaliatory Forces, McNamara remarked, apropos of the public "arms debate," that "the wide differences in perspective that this discussion has revealed would seem to indicate that we have failed to convey, at least to certain important sections of the American public, the basic fundamentals of the strategic problem confronting our Nation in this nuclear age...
...I think...
...As a member of the Annual Literature Award Jury of the Commonwealth Club of California who is responsible for helping appraise roughly 175-200 books annually by California authors in all categories, I am also highly interested in Stanley Edgar Hyman's book reviews...
...Significantly, too, the Hungarian Leo Franke!, whom he ridiculed as das Jiidchen (the little Jew) in his letters to Engels, immediately rose to the dignity of a "German" (in his The Civil War in France) when he became famous as Minister of Labor under the Paris Commune of 1871...
...At this point, at least, Simon seems to think the exercise of sensibility is sufficient to make a point...
...And Sozialisten und Krieg (Prague...
...April 27) that I do so know how to spell Bebel's name...
...Strangelove, itself a symptom of the malaise...
...The exact quotation, with its identification of the word Negro in the vernacular of Mississippi, is too heady for use in a family journal...
...In 1906 he wrote, "It is comforting [to know] that in Germany anti-Semitism will never have a chance to exert a decisive influence upon the life of state and society...
...Ronald Steel prudently disassociates himself from the "gross exaggeration and intemperate statements" of Seymour Melman, the tendentiousness of Steel's own method is obvious if one realizes that his argument—which derives most of its authority from a series of old quotes by the Secretary of Defense—directly contradicts recommendations made by McNamara in recent Congressional testimony...
...I had always thought dealing with the whys and hows was the essence of criticism...
...Then there is Steel's extremely questionable estimate of the lesson of the October 1962 Cuban showdown...
...But I think you did your readers a service by printing Field's piece, which I hope will act as an antidote to the wishfulness and wistfulness in American thinking about Eastern European Communism...
...Worse yet, he thought Lasalle forever contaminated by the Negro blood in his veins...
...The fact that he was of Czech origin may have spurred his truthtelling zeal...
...Kent, Ohio Harry N. Horner CORRECTION The last sentence in the penultimate paragraph on page 18 of Sidney Hook's essay on Leon Trotsky, "The Cunning of History" (NL, May 11) should have read: "The greatest irony of all, the views that he [Trotsky] fashioned in defense of the Soviet dictatorship against the critical revolt of his own disciples, may yet serve the Soviet Union from the very grave into which its guardians hurled him by the hand of an assassin...
...New York City Max Geltman In his letter in the April 13 issue of The New Leader...
...Paula Prentiss...
...New York City Sam Haber HYMAN AND THE NOVEL I have been reading The New Leader for several years...
...POLISH LIBERALISM This is simply to congratulate The New Leader on having published the article, "The Myth of Polish Liberalism" (April 11), by Andrew Field...
...However, when I read (in Marx) that "it is the constant circumvention of law that makes the religious Jew a religious Jew," or that "every tyrant is backed by a Jew," or that Polish Jews "multiply like lice," then...
...page 82 of the unexpurgated Marx-Engels Briefwechsel...
...Actually we have a clue here in Marx's feelings about Lasalle, whom he preferred to identify as "Baron Itzig," the "yidel...
...Look at poor Bebel...
...To be sure, Engels refers to Duehring's characterization of Lassalle as unser jüdischer Held (our Jewish hero), but by that time Marx had written worse things...
...3. What value do these books have...
...How marvelously obliaue...
...IV, pp...
...Through a typographical error, the word "serve" was mistakenly printed as "save...
...It is of course the American "intellectual elite" to which he refers, with their manic-depressive crisis behavior and their wildly divergent and anomalous reactions to Dr...
...1937), the last book written by Karl Kautsky, the dean of democratic Marxists, contains on pp...
...Sherborn, Mass...
...He does...
...An admirer of Marx may find consolation in the fact that his apostle's great antagonist, Michael Bakunin...
...For someone who ventures mild ironies at Congress and the public's "proclivity to cling to outdated strategies and irrelevant slogans," Steel betrays a weakness for vintage quotations and a rather loose grip on the more "unthinkable" parts of the problem...
...Samples of this type of internationalism can be found in Marx's definitive biography, written by the German Marxist Franz Mehring (Chapter VI, subdivision 4...
...What contribution do they make...
...But what one can or cannot learn from such writing is not nearly so important as the breech of faith and trust between critic and reader...
...I read a great many other literary critics as well, but Hyman's appraisals are by far the most original and stimulating...
...Now when Pachter tells us that Marx's opinion about the Negroes would today parallel his opinions about the Jews, he is probably right...
...In chapter IV of The Eighteenth Brumaire (I am using the German original, for the English translation may possibly have been doctored), Marx attacks Louis Bonaparte's (Napoleon III) Minister of Finance as "the Jew Fould, one of the most notorious members of high finance...
...brought about by the help which Austrian reaction received from the Slavic minorities oppressed by Hungary...
...indeed...
...There are four pages of such quotations in that volume of Kautsky's who, though unflinchingly devoted to Marxism, was not fond of either ot his two teachers...
...The crackpot professor's pathological outbursts against the Jews were of a later period...
...Marx's way of writing about the Jews was in line with his general propensity to indulge in chauvinistic thrusts...
...The sense of rapport gone, the possibilities for substantive communication are drastically reduced...
...city-avoidance corollary: the deterrent mechanism—it is much more than an "optimistic assumption"—by means of which we would attempt to deter Soviet strikes at our civilian population even after war began...
...Incidentally, the phrase "Socialism of the stupid" appears in the review...
...However, when it comes to speculating about the future, I would caution Pachter that this is a dangerous game—for Socialists...
...But when I find sensibility divorced from sense, I find more is said about the critic than the work...
...their "brutality toward women," and their "intellectual inferiority...
...Comforting...
...Calistoga, Calif, S. G. Rubinow MISSILE BUDGET Although in his article, "The Missile Budget" (NL, April 13...
...Significantly enough, the very last letter, written by Marx two months before his death (Vol...
...In a statement before the House Armed Forces Committee on January 27 of this year, McNamara said: "It is quite likely that the Soviet Union, in an attack upon the U. S. and Western Europe, would not fire all of its strategic nuclear weapons in a 'salvo launch.'" Then, discussing the results of "many comprehensive studies" of hypothetical attacks made "over the last two and one half years" the Secretary said: "In every pertinent case we found that forces in excess of those needed simply to destroy Soviet cities would significantly reduce damage to the U. S. and Western Europe...
...When in 1848 Germany was involved in a conflict with Denmark, he attacked the Scandinavians in general because of their "permanent drunkenness...
...he writes, "is a lovely young woman, and there must be some other profession open to her...
...589-590) contains a thrust at the German-Jewish Socialist Hepner, whose importunity he characterized as unserer Leit' Natur und Art (the expression is slangy and could be translated as "the ways of our chosen people...
...In any case...
...Here is just the sort of infantile ego-exercising that caused me to cancel my subscription to Time...
...I await each issue eagerly...
...After accepting the thesis of the Soviet anti-Semitic book Judaism Without Etnbellishment that Jews are vulgar and conniving, he fails to mention that there ought to be books to prove that the Russians are drunks, the French are perverts, the Negroes are rapists, the Italians are gangsters, the Irish are clods, the Welsh crooks, and the English rattlebrained...
...For outside their pet political ideas, even great rebels are more often than not just as "human" as most of the other specimens of what is mistakenly called Homo Sapiens...
...This interpretation, which appears to be gaining ground, seems to me entirely analogous to the belief—pandemic in this country in the '20s, I understand—that World War I had been "the war to end all war...
...Somehow, a confrontation in which the U. S. turned back a bold Soviet gamble, calculated to redress substantially their strategic inferiority, is being established as an immutable precedent which precludes further adventures and justifies the U. S. disarming down to the Soviet level...
...A useful, relevant relativistic discussion would have focussed not on the counter-force aspect of current U. S. strategy, which, by itself, is tolerably well understood anyway, but on its neglected ("unthinkable...
...He then went on to say that "a city's only strategic retaliatory force would, in our judgment, be dangerously inadequate" and that "a 'damage limiting' strategy appears to be the most practical and effective course for us to follow...
...I know people who do not believe there is anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union...
...would occasionally indulge in exceeding despicable references to Jews (and Germans...
...I enjoy its informative features on international affairs, domestic problems, politics, economics, etc...
...But Marx justified that oppression by writing: "If for eight centuries those eight million Slavs (living in Hungary) put up with oppression on the part of four million Hungarians, then this is sufficient evidence as to who had more vitality and energy—the many Slavs or the few Hungarians...
Vol. 47 • May 1964 • No. 11
