Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR OLD SHATTERHAND It is a pity Robert Gorham Davis didn't dig deeper into the meaning of that "Old Shatter-hand" label on the Czech teenager's blue jeans ("Letter from Czechoslovakia,"...
...I can only outline this amazing story...
...Nevertheless, he triumphs over this drawback and always shoots as straight and true as if he used Lugers and Mausers, for he is a German at heart...
...Anyway, Kitman's column ("Counting The Dead Bodies," NL, September 25) is truer than he knows, and its truth extends to the press screenings for the New York Film Festival, which I'm currently suffering through for the second year in a row...
...Anyway, Kitman's terrific...
...it's the screenings themselves that I'm suffering from...
...Let's hope he wasn't hinting at a "final solution'' of the North Vietnamese problem...
...There is much that might be done about the ghetto, and pouring billions of dollars into it is not the complete answer, but whatever the answer is it does not involve our permitting the aggressors to take over the world, piece by piece, until our own national security is endangered...
...My view of the Vietnam war tallies with those of the Russell Tribunal, so you can imagine how bizarre Stanley Borenstein's proposal ("Dear Editor," same issue) appears to me...
...Many of them were still in print when he rose to power and all of them, I have been told, were re-issued just before the outbreak of the big war...
...When the UN demonstrated its incapacity to act effectively regional alliances were created...
...They were distributed far and wide throughout the Greater German Reich...
...It has seemed to many of us that this is a mistaken policy, but, mistaken or not, it certainly does not add up to any attempt to contain Communism...
...Niebuhr and his associates, in urging that we pull out of Vietnam, are the direct descendants of a former generation of isolationists...
...The fact of the matter is that we have done more to help Communism than contain it...
...as tired Communists the Czechs memorialize, and I daresay still enjoy reading, the Hitleresque Karl May...
...Now there are the Ghetto Firsters, demanding that we abandon South Vietnam to its fate and pour the money it costs to fight the war into a rehabilitation of the ghettos, as Dr...
...Guess he wanted to wipe the horrible experience from his memory...
...But they have chosen, instead, to take over the rest of the world by force...
...It was to avoid a similar catastrophe, World War HI, that the United Nations was created, so that aggression might meet collective resistance...
...In the '30s there were the America Firsters, who were willing to let Hitler continue his aggressions...
...in any case, they enjoyed a new turn of popularity...
...Miami, Fla...
...Briefly, this finds its beginning, but only that, in the "Leatherstocking" romances of James Fenimore Cooper...
...Keep him around...
...Similarly, May's character had a noticeably maimed hand (those cheap American shooting irons...
...Niebuhr suggests...
...And you don't get a chance for a bite to eat at the festival either...
...So the reality of new Czechoslovakia is worse than Davis knows...
...May's novels were Hitler's favorite pablum when he was a boy...
...Obnoxious as their philosophy is, disastrous as their economic system is for the peoples they have subjugated, if they will let other peoples alone and not try to bring them into their colonial empire by force, our country would not undertake to contain them...
...San Francisco, Calif...
...I don't mean to say that I'm suffering through the films: John Simon, forgive me, but I happen to like Jean-Luc Godard...
...Failure to stop aggression in the past led us into World War II...
...Karl May, a prolific producer of German westerns who flourished a half century ago, named his recurrent hero that way on the model of Cooper's Leatherstocking, who, you remember, wore buckskin hosiery...
...That third movie of the day had better be something really sensational, like a Harold Lloyd or Pierre Etaix comedy, or you leave from mere emotional exhaustion...
...That Old Shatterhand phrase "doesn't have the right ring" in English because it is a German imitation not only of Cooper's language but also his style of writing...
...In the '40s, the isolationists advocated Fortress America, which, by implication at least, meant that we should look after America First...
...These alliances were directed not against Communism as such but against aggression...
...DEAR EDITOR OLD SHATTERHAND It is a pity Robert Gorham Davis didn't dig deeper into the meaning of that "Old Shatter-hand" label on the Czech teenager's blue jeans ("Letter from Czechoslovakia," NL, September 25...
...He has made it equally clear that if, after the war, a free and fair election is held in South Vietnam and the Communists win that election— something which has never happened anywhere??the people could have a Communist regime...
...Abraham Glicksman...
...This throws a cloak of social respectability over what is essentially an isolationist position...
...Matter of fact, Bosley Crowther and Judith Crist and Stanley Kauffmann and Pauline Kael would be at death's door to admit it, but it's those unendurable screening sessions that turn them against the festival year after year after year...
...There are layers of significance beneath it...
...Marx Lewis In Denis Brogan's phrase, quoted by Rein-hold Niebuhr in your August 28 issue, ("Without 'Advice and Consent'") the President under our system is virtually an "elected monarch...
...President Johnson has repeatedly stated that our objective is to stop aggression...
...The same thing occurred to me earlier this year, and that's when I thought of reversing the John Birchers' slogan and proclaiming: "This is a democracy, not a republic...
...On numerous occasions we have helped the Communists extricate themselves from the economic difficulties into which they have plunged their countries...
...Another reason Dwight Macdonald didn't like last year's festival is because, during one of these mid-screening interviews, with Milos Forman I think, he was sitting directly behind two Hedda Hopper types, complete to the outlandish hats, who kept asking the director about his sex life, while Macdonald and the rest of us squirmed miserably in our seats...
...Yugoslavia, a Communist country, has received billions of dollars worth of aid from us, even though in its foreign policy it is allied with the international Communist conspiracy...
...I mean, when you have to sit hours on end, from about 10:30 in the morning till about 5:30 in the afternoon, watching movie after "difficult" movie, the temptation to walk out just for a breath of fresh air really begins to have absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the movie you're watching...
...Staten Island, N. Y. Asher Brynes SCREENING SYNDROME The sad thing about all the hoopla raised by Jack O'Brian, Bob Considine and other "responsible" people over that issue of Paul Krassner's the Realist containing the Manchester satire and Disney foldout is that they completely missed the best thing in the whole issue: Marvin Kitman's travails over returning his old Army duffel bag to Washington headquarters...
...Does that support the claim that we are fighting to contain Communism...
...New York City Dan Bates VIETNAM In his article "Without 'Advice and Consent' " (NL, August 28), Reinhold Niebuhr repeats, by implication at least, what has repeatedly been asserted by the intellectuals who oppose our involvement in Vietnam, that we are fighting there to contain Communism...
...Soon as the first movie of the day is over, the public relations people run on the director, who doesn't speak a word of English but who nevertheless is easily able to fill the gap between the first movie (his) and the second, answering the most stupefyingly obvious questions...
...Can't entirely blame him...
...Last year, Dwight Macdonald lasted all of one day, then, in his "valedictory" column, denied he'd been there at all...
...Isn't it a gasser the way Ambassador Goldberg said at the UN that we do not want to impose a military solution on North Vietnam ??as though we could if we wanted to: Mayb...
...Surely you printed it tongue and cheek . . Where once we were familiar (and still are) with Sabbath observers, here we would have Sabbath-truce observers insuring that Ho doesn't play Pompey to Westmorelands' priests and Levites...
...it could be expanded to make a chapter on popular ideas in pre- and post-Nazi Middle Europe...
...Any resemblance between this statement and the truth is purely coincidental...
...The Communists, in pursuit of their objective of world conquest, are the only remaining aggressors...
...that would include the ghettos, but was not expressly mentioned because it lacked the popularity the idea has now...
...That is what we are fighting in Vietnam, not Communism...
...Had we stopped the Japanese when they invaded Manchuria, Mussolini when he invaded Ethiopia, and Hitler when he was picking off his neighbors one by one, we might have avoided that war...
...As an erstwhile American Communist he sadly remembers his reading of Marx and Engels...
...we should send a peace pilot to Hanoi (something like Israel's peace pilot, the Jewish Rudolf Hess...
Vol. 50 • October 1967 • No. 20
