Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR ZAGORIA In "Russia's New Asian Offensive," (NL, January 17) Donald S. Zagoria states that "the main question remaining is whether the Johnson Administration has the political...
...Is India partitioned into Communist and non-Communist sections...
...And think of the biographies...
...and Roche's argument that Steel ignores the implicit immorality of his own position leaves unscathed Steel's main contention that the American policy is not only immoral but contrary to the national interest in containing Chinese Communism...
...Most of the literary commentary is beyond me, all the theater notices are unfamiliar, and I become somewhat uneasy over the assurance you bring to political comment...
...Of course, the gap between Memmi and the uneducated natives is altogether as great as the gap between them and Sale, if I can be so generous as to overlook the muddle-headed non-sequiturs of his review...
...Why does Roche "fully expect someone to suggest that the best thing that could happen in Asia would be a Communist takeover in India...
...Any moral purposes of the American engagement are vitiated by the immorality of this vicious war...
...Belmont, Mass...
...Sale preposterously confuses two almost entirely distinct matters: the problem of communicating with uneducated African tribesmen and the problem of propitiating their educated leaders...
...They have not yet learned that Popular Fronts do not work, that a union with the Communists only gives them unwarranted prestige, unjustified power, and threatens the independence of the original movement (Wallace's Progressive party is a prime example...
...And that poses to all of us-liberals, socialists, radicals alike-this question: Should we sympathize with colonial revolts when their real meaning is the expansion of totalitarianism...
...If the U.S...
...Really, isn't this an absurd charge for Roche to make...
...Then the following thoughts emerged: If Steel had said only: "I can present data to elaborate the theme 'power politics is what is truly involved,' and left it at that, Roche would, if he responded at all, be called upon to agree or disagree...
...Robert Erwin Thank you for the juxtaposition of articles by Ronald Steel and John P. Roche...
...In 1947 Victor Serge wrote a letter to Polilics (March-April, 1947, p. 76) which, despite the breakdown of the Stalinist monolith and its replacement by national Cornmunist dictatorships, seems to me as cogent today as it was then...
...I would re-word Zagoria's concluding statement this way: Failure to expand bombing of North Vietnam-if that should prove necessary-would only play into China's hands, and reduce Soviet influence at Ho's coure...
...Do we serve any higher cause by inundating both North and South Vietnam with napalm and TNT to gratify a nihilistic obsession with anti-Communism...
...is a paper tiger which can be vanquished will be something less than convincing to Ho Chi Minn and his lieutenants...
...I hope by next spring to have a small volume of my own...
...I am reminded of the New York Times advertisement in which a lot of American professors proclaimed the immediate need for a free press in Vietnam...
...continues to step up its military involvement in Vietnam and in particular its air strikes against Haiphong and other North Vietnamese targets, the North Vietnamese government is persuaded to choose the road of reasonableness instead of the road to ruin, the latter serving the interests of Red China more than those of North Vietnam...
...Cast a cold eye/Horseman, pass by...
...And tons and tons of commentary and reviews in two dozen magazines and weeklies...
...Bombing of North Vietnamese targets not only does not "play into China's hands," but rather shortens the distance to the negotiating table...
...Check enclosed herewith...
...Zagoria has the thing turned around backward...
...Wherever the Saigon generals firmly re-occupy an area, they can only begin the killings, torture, and forced labor of a counter-revolution...
...Moreover, there can be no question of trading 15 million people (unless Roche envisions the United States "trading" its capacity to kill everybody in the country for "concessions...
...his fondness for radical and cheerful dandyism of the 18th century variety which makes him excellent on Firbank, Swinburne, Waugh, Wilde, Amis and anyone who takes large, hearty or vigorously effete swipes at the status quo...
...I am prepared to listen to a Sermon on the Mount-but not from Machiavelli...
...There are a number of pragmatic bases for opposing the intervention, but these attacks run against the wisdom and expedience of fighting to maintain the autonomy of South Vietnam...
...And even China realizes that it too loses if the U.S...
...Cuernavaca, Mexico Allen Haden...
...It is what he interprets Steel as saying we should do that gets Roche all worked up...
...Is India in the throes of revolution...
...I have no cliche image and don't see why any other moderate reader should...
...The '20s have consumed my life, eaten half of it up...
...Fair division of spoils...
...I find prescriptions interesting, but have painfully little knowledge in most instances against which to test their validity...
...As long as U.S...
...Does China relish the prospect of bombing of its brand new nuclear installations...
...When Viet-Reporfs associate editor John McDermott accuses Irving Howe and sane of being "too obsessed with anti-Communism," he is merely exemplifying the new mood of the Left-a feeling of neutrality toward Communism (it has been called "a-Communism"), and a belief that any anti-Communist activity is reactionary and undemocratic...
...And has this not tended to stem the tide of Chinese influence in Hanoi...
...to Edmund Wilson...
...Sigmund Richardson EDMUND WILSON I agree in general with Hilton Kramer's estimate of Edmund Wilson ("Measuring the Loss," NL, December 6), although I think he might have made more of the small cluster of bleak, strong, penetrating ideas that have kept Wilson afloat for so long...
...To Lionel Trilling: Keats, Kafka and Babel...
...R. W. Flint DECISION I have hesitated to renew my subscription because, frankly, I think The New Leader is talking over my head...
...Was India liberated by a Communist movement (like the Vietminh...
...Wm, N. Fitzpatrick, m.d...
...If we leave, it would be because by some miracle the course of historical progression changed...
...Well-informed voices have said what will happen if we stay in Vietnam...
...In short, pacifists aside, those who condemn the war as "immoral" must do so because they believe the Communists are right and we are wrong...
...Several thousand essentially civilian Vietcong administrators have been at their posts for years...
...The educated African, of course, can add two and two and compose a syllogism, and if he is well educated can even discern the foolishness of saying freedom is a matter of obeying one's father...
...Others are articulate about the results if we leave...
...Steel's article includes a description of what is happening in Vietnam and a prescription to remedy the difficulty...
...determination is expressed in bold military terms in Vietnam, Chinese claims that the U.S...
...is pressured by circumstances into too great escalation...
...This attitude of neutrality towards Communism seems to have reached an apex when the editors of Viet-Report, contrary to all intelligence, maintain the fiction that "antiCommunism is not an issue in Vietnam...
...I'm sure the excellent Mr...
...The ratio of people murdered by Ho's Army and police for political reasons, as compared to the number murdered by successive South Vietnam regimes for political reasons, is about 9-1 in favor of Hoif favorable is taken to mean fewer people murdered...
...Steel also argues that we can't make something out of nothing-in this case the government of the South Vietnamese generals...
...Baltimore, Md...
...And let me repeat once more: There are two grounds and two grounds only on which one can condemn our intervention as "immoral'" (as distinct from unwise or imprudent...
...Roche avoids Steel's substantial arguments...
...Primary among these is the problem of the democratic Left's relation to Communism...
...It is u matter of tact or taste whether we choose to characterize as "stupid" the African who cannot add two and two or see any reason to move his truck from the path of oncoming traffic, or whether we call him culturally maladjusted...
...Unfortunately, the new generation of radicals seems unable to, or unwilling to (most probably the latter), discern radical totalitarian movements from radical democratic movements...
...It means that the 'national emancipation of Indo-China' is actually the establishment of a totalitarian regime and that the bloody events now taking place there are simply one phase of a worldwide campaign directed by a power which cares nothing for the liberty and well-being of the Annamese...
...The killings, torture, and forced labor of a revolution have already been inflicted...
...Some of them are cold-bloodedly cogent, but their authors have no right to wrap their realpolitik in the lineaments of Higher Morality...
...One can imagine him plighting his troth to Mary McCarthy over those lines...
...The important thing is that he is incompetent to handle money, work in a factory or a store, in fact to contribute at all to the process of modernization to which his country is inexorably committed, and for which rationality is indispensable...
...In an Oriental landlord society, especially one exploited by Western planters for years, not many upper peasants will be found...
...A REPLY I should like to take this opportunity to answer some of the critics of my response to Ronald Steel ("Machtpolitik Liberal Style," NL, January 3...
...The absurdity of Sale's attitude is made manifest by his attempt to draw an analogy between a subtle and sophisticated writer like Albert Menimi., (who would be as unhappy as Sale himself living in that "battered hut") and those various mental incompetents Sale describes earlier...
...How much I have read in and of the '20s...
...This double fondness for the cold and the cheerful has baffled many a critic...
...Is this really machtpolitik...
...Cambridge, Mass...
...Acres of commentary on a dozen poets, all of whose works I know...
...should suddenly fade away like the Cheshire cat, all that would remain would be the broad grin on the face of Mao Tse-tung...
...One must either condemn war and violence in generic terms-i.e., be a pacifist -or condemn this war as unjust...
...Approximately half the population and two-thirds the area of South Vietnam are controlled by the Vietcong...
...the African states are trying to avoid cold war entanglements while they seek aid from all powers...
...But I greatly object to Kramer's idea that the '20s were "so different in actuality from our cliche image of it...
...the African countries are poor and covetous...
...When I read Roche's article, at first I felt bewildered before two "arguments" seemingly hopelessly divergent...
...The United States is a wealthy country...
...As a Communist [said Serge], Ho Chi Minh rules in the name of the Kremlin...
...a translation of Santiago Rusinol from the original Catalan with a concluding essay of my own calling attention to the vigorous body of literature, almost totally unknown in the U.S., in Catalan and Languedoc...
...If we stay, to me it is in the service of established and probably inexorable historical determinants...
...Ho Chi Minh has shot my comrades and-naive though it may seemI am not prepared to say "boys will be boys" and use 15 million South Vietnamese as live bait to get him to start shooting Chinese...
...Is it not obvious that since the Johnson Administration has resisted advice to pull out or de-escalate and has instead waged war more concertedly in Vietnam, Soviet involvement has also been on the upswing...
...Roche's talk of "Tories" and "kulaks" strikes me as parochial...
...Cambridge, Mass...
...That means that he follows a policy of persecuting, if not exterminating, Trotskyists, Socialists and other independent radicals...
...Perhaps you will contribute to my reeducation...
...New York City Albert L. Weeks VIET REPORT Steven Kelman's excellent article on VietReport and the Lynd-Hayden-Aptheker sojourn to North Vietnam ("Viet-Report and the Lynd Mission," NL, January 17) raises several vital questions...
...If this war is unjust, it can only be so because we are fighting on the wrong side...
...I believe one can offer valid reasons for either course...
...Now I see the expansion of Hanoi's dictatorship as immoral-far more immoral than the weakness and anomie of the South Vietnamese state...
...Finally, a word about what is no doubt an effective debater's point, but an argument unworthy of an allegedly serious writer...
...Chicago, Illinois Uriel Robinson John P. Roche might have delivered a stinging attack, though hardly a crippling one, on Ronald Steel, if only he had not used quantitative humanitarianism based on wrong proportions...
...This use of what might be called the "idiot-we" is a bad habit of critics...
...Richard Ellman's Yeats and Joyce, Mark Schorer's Lewis, everybody's Fitzgerald...
...After reading it, I felt the description agreed with my own understanding...
...Steel challenges, quite effectively, the notion that we are defending moral interests in Vietnam...
...John P. Roche Morris Hillquit Professor of Labor and Social Thought, Brandeis University AFRICAN GAP J. Kirk Sale's obscurantist review on the cultural gap between Africa and the developed nations ("After Colonialism," NL, January 17) reflects an attitude of patronizing cultural relativism which, if adopted by African leaders themselves, would make impossible the solution of any of the urgent political and economic problems of Africa...
...For 30 years I have been a student of and commentator on politics-for the Chicago Daily News, for the government, and freelancing-but I guess I'm out of the mainstream...
...It is divergent political and economic interests, not cultural incompatibilities which primarily encumber American, as well as Soviet and Chinese, relations with Africa...
...Power politics is as accurate a label as I can find for this phenomenon...
...Furthermore, I was born in 1921 and spent all my best years in the '20s...
...DEAR EDITOR ZAGORIA In "Russia's New Asian Offensive," (NL, January 17) Donald S. Zagoria states that "the main question remaining is whether the Johnson Administration has the political vision, the courage and the patience to resist advice to expand the bombing of North Vietnam-which would only play into China's hands...
...However, I respect the scoop you made in publishing "Moscow Summer," by Mihajlo Mihajlov (NL, March 29, June 7, 1965), and I liked the Vietnam exchange between Steel and Roche (NL, January 3), so I have decided to resubscribe...
...This concept has been furthered by Professor Lynd, who has accused Bayard Rustin of Red-baiting for criticizing the SDS "united front" policy at the Easter Washington march for peace in Vietnam, and by SDS, which has eliminated from its constitution a passage excluding Communists or their apologists from membership...
...New Hyde Park, N.Y...
...Philip T. Zaleski VIETNAM EXCHANGE Though Ronald Steel's article, "Our Asian Illusions," (NL, January 3, 1966) suffers from his excessively flippant tone, he made several perfectly valid points, and Professor John P. Roche, in his reply ("Machtpolitik Liberal Style"), failed to answer them...
...How could I have a cliche image of them...
...And after the Dominican affair (so vividly criticized in The New Leader), can anyone doubt that it is old-time antiCommunism, and little else, which motivates our present policy...
...Kafka's offense, in Wilson's eyes, was his studied gloom...
...The United States has a foreign policy primarily oriented to the military containment of Communism...
...Furthermore, from a practical standpoint, Communist participation often hurts the movement more than it helps it (it can easily be argued that the presence of NLF sympathizers at the November 27 march on Washington has aided the right more than the Left, and has turned much public opinion against the war dissenters...
...Another id?©e ma?®tresse is his fondness for the coldly magisterial stance, such as one finds him attributing to Lincoln and O. W. Holmes Jr...
...The whole work of a dozen novelists, some more than once...
...Waltham, Mass...
...No doubt they meant well, but they overlooked the fact that huge numbers of Vietnamese are illiterate...
...Kramer would never admit to being a victim of cliche...
...Chesterfield, Byron, Waugh, and Amis...
...American problems with the political leadership in Africa are unrelated to Sale's problems with the befuddled truck driver...
...To the degree that the U.S...
...Is India ruled by an ilegal, corrupt, and dictatorial gang of generals...
Vol. 49 • February 1966 • No. 4
