Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR THE NEWLEADER welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words DOMINICAN CRISIS It has been 19 years since I wrote my first "Letter to...
...He made some perceptive comments on her extraordinary talent "simultaneously uproarious and deeply moving" and fused with the metaphysical...
...Professor Dallin points to the assumption by the Soviets that "neither the USSR nor the U.S...
...Once Ho achieves power there will be no possibility of free elections nor even an opposition...
...Not only is he irrational...
...Therein lies the rub...
...It is also what happened in North Vietnam in 1956 when some 60,000 peasants were executed and another 80,000 placed in concentration camps, at a conservative estimate...
...The international presence and interest of the United States are adequate to maintain a balance of power in Southeast Asia against overt Chinese aggression...
...But by the summer of 1963, at the time of the test ban treaty, the Soviets stated that "the atomic bomb does not adhere to the class principle: it kills everybody within the area it devastates...
...Your artist shows us that he is somewhat chubby, but that isn't really what your readers need to know...
...An international stability predicated upon mutual recognition of national interests is fine, but the kind of stability Brzezinski means is truly invidious...
...The Communist regime of North Korea has yet to hold an election...
...Carl Mclntyre...
...The only point at issue, as I see it, is the remuneration of our authors...
...For when he states that political change may only be evolutionary, he clearly implies that the whole demand for rapid social and economic progress in this century is dangerous to us...
...The fact that the Russians have in the past distorted the true meanings of American books in translation or implied in editorialized prefaces a meaning not in line with the American author's intent, does not per se serve as an argument for ucc...
...STANLEY ROTHMAN Department of Government Smith College...
...What glowing vistas of peaceful coexistence have been distilled from it...
...reaction to these probes did not undercut, but rather enhanced that education...
...But did not events such as the Berlin crisis of August 1961 and that of Cuba in October 1962 also reinforce that coalescence of interest...
...But if we presume a right to wield an ax on any Southeast Asian country that happens to disagree with us, we should not be amazed when it turns to China in order to redress the balance...
...And, as we now know, the Communist guerrillas in Malaysia, who were only defeated with considerable British help, represented a small segment of the population...
...JOSEPH C. HOLBROOK, JR There is no question that Theodore Draper's article "The Roots of the Dominican Crisis" (NL...
...This, of course, is what happened in the Soviet Union and China...
...Walter Lippmann has argued reasonably that the best hope for international stability probably lies in the safe old idea of spheres of influence...
...Even if the U.S...
...ANTHONY D'AGOSTINO To argue, as Professor Dallin does, that the U.S...
...he'd rather fight than switch one line of his iron-bound creed...
...As much as I respect Professor Landauer, I cannot say the same for his position...
...Bosch may not have had all the qualities when he was elected to be a perfect President, but our only hopes for saving democracy are in men like him, democratically elected men like Frei in Chile and Belaunde in Peru...
...There is no question in my mind but that victory by the Vietcong will mean a dictatorship controlled by the present regime in the North and the slaughter of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people...
...In the last analysis it only has a meaning when a people can oust its leaders if they renege on promises or if their policies do not bring promised results...
...While this convention would assure that the story be translated and published as written it will not change the fact that comments and criticisms will be state- or Party-planned and uniformly one-sided...
...Without it, thousands of articles and hundreds of books would have to have been written about something else...
...WALTER A.SHELDON FLAISLTNERY O'CONNOR Thanks for publishing that fine article by Stanley Edgar Hyman on Flannery O'Connor's work (NL, May 10...
...Certainly self-determination for any people means more than a single plebiscite...
...would not attempt to get a decision by force in the area of the "Socialist camp...
...May 24) is the best work I have seen on the Dominican tragedy...
...Long Beach, N.Y...
...Many has been the time in those 19 years that I have wanted to write and say that no matter how confused an international or domestic problem might be The New Leader could always be counted on to cut through the fog and lay bare the real issues...
...In this regard our record, while by no means spotless, is far better than that of the Communists...
...The Bolsheviks were able to obtain power in Russia even though, by the only evidence we have, they lacked the support of the great majority of the Russian people...
...reaction in Vietnam is forcing the Soviets into taking « harder line against the U.S...
...For example, after warning that events in Vietnam may unhinge the developing realism in Moscow on the implications of nuclear weapons, he goes on to describe some of the evidences of that development: the formal recognition by 1956 that wars were no longer inevitable, the admission that the USSR was no longer in a "capitalist encirclement...
...We might as well let the Russians pirate our books and publish them with distortions...
...Lest this sound like too wild a panegyric, I still have one little question in a dark recess of my mind...
...Oh well, smash this fairy tale and the fetid swamps of the Left cognoscenti will have its replacement ready within a week...
...He probably would have won in the North...
...Indeed, as both Bernard Fall and Robert Trumbull have pointed out, Diem might have lost a free election in the South in 1956...
...and the tacit assumption by 1959 that the U.S...
...Because China insists upon existing, we must be realistic and sophisticated enough to understand that, whatever we want, the other states of Asia have to make their peace with that power...
...But it's the stereotyped image of the Sino-Soviet split that sticks in a rational man's craw...
...Have we grounds to question some of his...
...New Rochelle, N. Y. ROBERT R.RICHARDSON COPYRIGHTS Permit me to briefly comment on John T. Sargent's letter (NL, May 10) answering Irving Kristol's "Of Copyrights and Commissars" (NL, April 12...
...may be respectable in those circles given to knee-jerk responses...
...Once again you have scored...
...The only effective moral argument, or so it seems to me, which can be made against our present commitment (aside from objections to_the use of certain weapons) is the strategic one advanced by Lippmann, Morgenthau and others...
...Draper, as in all his work, used accuracy and the exact facts to describe the causes of the tragedy the Dominican people are suffering...
...executes its present policy vis-a-vis North Vietnam...
...In this regard it is not immoral on the face of it to strive to achieve goals which might allow necessary social changes to be brought about in a rather less bloody and despotic manner...
...First of all the mere fact that the present regime, even with American help, cannot effectively deal with the Vietcong is not evidence that the Vietcong represents in any way the aspirations of the Vietnamese people...
...And Brzezinski's thoughts about the desirability of China's dominance are irrelevant...
...Is a Russia, willing to try a desperate ploy 3,000 miles beyond its borders (its Cuban missile gambit), less dangerous, less warlike than a China yet to attack any but contiguous territory...
...The support which the Vietcong has received, when not based on terror or the identification of Ho Chi Minh with nationalist aspirations, derives from fairly standard Communist tactics in this type of situation, i.e., the killing of landlords and the distribution of land to the peasants...
...would so humiliate, provoke or weaken the other side as to imperil the tacit strategic stand-off" But when he gives the examples of the Hungarian revolution and the Cuban missile crisis, he restates this assumption at a lower level: that "each side seemed to agree not to use force to alter the status quo . What is not stated in all this careful phrasing is that the Soviets, despite all their education to the realities of world politics, were not above a serious probe into the U.S...
...firmness...
...After reading Theodore Draper's "The Roots of the Dominican Crisis" (all 16 pages of it) in the May 24 issue I can restrain myself no longer...
...The point is simply that while our intentions may be of the best, the objective situation is such that our present course may, in the long run, lead to worse consequences than would immediate withdrawal...
...I wonder why we are sometimes so slow in backing up the popular and just causes, and in not letting the Communists have the field wide open to infiltrate these movements...
...Ithaca, N.Y...
...She is an astounding combination...
...Northampton, Mass...
...New York City JOAQUIN GODOY BRZEZINSKI Zbigniew Brzezinski's reply to Lionel Abel (NL, April 26) was pompous and absurd...
...I am convinced, too, that it will encourage the Chinese to sponsor other wars of "national liberation" involving additional slaughter...
...in the end they will be the losers...
...Draper did not give us a picture of the kind of man this Colonel Caamano is...
...One may ignore his misplaced self-assurance, but for a student of international affairs to assert that China is not the dominant power of Asia is unforgiveably silly...
...I continue to support our present policy (assuming the goal is negotiations) by about 50.5 per cent, but certainly respect and am much troubled by the argument of those who, on above grounds, see the situation somewhat differently...
...A rare artist is she . a long-distance runner who will come into her own like a deep, hidden, rich vein cleared by running spring water New York City JANET E.MCKANE MORE ON VIETNAM I find it difficult to accept the logic of Professor Carl Landauer's argument in his letter to The New Leader of May 24...
...Professor Dallin suggests that "events here and there" threatened to undercut this growing realism and its corollary: de facto observance by each power of the other's strategic sphere...
...South Korea has held several...
...But while we would suffer losses, the Western powers would be literally wiped off the face of the earth...
...They represent the true Latin American Revolution...
...DANIEL S.LEV DALLIN ON USSR Alexander Dallin wisely questions (NL, "Moscow and Vietnam," May 10) the assumptions underlying the view that the Soviets must stand clear while the U.S...
...sphere, and that U.S...
...The Fascists were able to seize power in Italy with even less support...
...And while the present regime in South Vietnam cannot be said to be based on democratic consent it has, at least when compared to the North, a relatively free press...
...DEAR EDITOR THE NEWLEADER welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words DOMINICAN CRISIS It has been 19 years since I wrote my first "Letter to the Editor," an ill-advised one chastising you for saying some unkind things about the Rev...
...Unfortunately, those elements of the peasantry whose support the Vietcong has won over in this fashion have no way of knowing that in the aftermath of victory their new rulers will insist upon collectivization, and that resistance will be followed by mass slaughter...
...Professor Dallin's article seems to state the reverse: that there is some kind of autonomous fusion of interest inherent in nuclear knowledge quite apart from the measure of U.S...
...It has never been difficult for a relatively small, well-disciplined organization, which does not hesitate to use terror, to achieve considerable success in a transitional society marked by stress...
...No Asian leader would so misread the situation...
...Brooklyn REV...
...That lunatic across the ring is Red China...
...Los Angeles, Calif...
...plays the part in the Chinese scenario that calls for the imperialists to be "untrustworthy," it cannot allow the Soviet warnings to the Chinese to be proved wrong...
...Therefore, I do not see how the convention would work equally both ways as in America we have a variety of comments and critical voices permitting the reader to form his own opinion...
...The hysterical fear of all change which Brzezinski's argument reflects—like that of Metternich before the revolutions of 1848—is precisely what many of the new states resent in our international posture...
...Like reading William Blake, and Hopkins, fused with the comic in the realism OF our contemporary world...
...However, as late as May 5, 1959, Khrushchev asserted that in the event of war, t he Soviet Union "would suffer losses, and great ones...
...As is already the case between the United States and the Soviet Union, the United States and China must eventually agree not to sit on one another's doorsteps with dynamite in hand...
...In this corner we have an "evolving," Western-oriented Soviet Union struggling to burst the bonds of Marxist dogma...
Vol. 48 • June 1965 • No. 12
