Dear Editor

...Dissenting Democrats must work, not only for the defeat of Humphrey, but also for the defeat of all Democrats who do not specifically align themselves with the minority Vietnam plank and a more progressive internal policy...

...San Francisco George Thorpe RA'ANAN Professor Uri Ra'anan ("Challenge to the West," NL, September 9) was right when he wrote that an "arbitrary and fanciful 'symmetry' is created by mentioning Czechoslovakia, Vietnam and the Dominican Republic in one breath," but he is to be censured by his own rule for writing a few paragraphs later that "there is a government—Charles de Gaulle's—whose offenses against Washington far outweigh those of Prague against Moscow...

...New York City Laszlo Thomas Kiss Fordham University...

...If necessary they would be exterminated and the country laid to waste...

...It is also true that Nixon, if elected, will shape the national "destiny for the next four years...

...One would attempt to demonstrate the moral and logical disparity of their discriminating choice with the following conjectural analogy: Had de Gaulle occupied French-speaking Belgium and set up a puppet regime in Germany's French zone, then his "crimes" could be compared with those of the Soviet leaders, who received an unconditional detente from the West while Novotny ruled unchallenged, Gomulka was steadily moving to a position of new extremism, and Ulbricht remained his dark-red old self...

...The Western alliance is, of course, composed of sovereign nations whose voluntary membership in nato was the outcome of free deliberation and remains subject to democratic revision...

...During the years preceding the shock of Prague this will was ignored or underestimated, however, by Western journalists and commentators partly because of their hostile preoccupation with Charles de Gaulle...

...And four years of Nixon would no doubt be a misfortune...

...The Kennedy Administration responded to this decision with a political contradiction when it refused to recognize France's status as an eminent Western power by denying its right to nuclear weapons, but sanctioned that of Great Britain at the Bahama conference...

...The Russian leaders also told President Svoboda that Czechoslovakia was in their territory...

...That should at least be apparent now in the light of the following quote from a Prague dispatch by Harold Jackson in the Manchester Guardian Weekly of September 5: "During the Moscow talks, Mr...

...It was the historic dilemma of Bastille versus the Winter Palace—i.e., the sovereignty of the people or the party of Lenin—which they had to face, and they chose that of the people...

...All those who take the Democratic party seriously as an agent of beneficial change must consider that if the hacks manage to perpetrate Humphrey upon the nation, then they will know that they can get away with anything.?not for four years, but for much longer, and not only on the national level, but also in state and local politics...

...De Gaulle's overtures west of the Urals were clearly motivated by his belief in the inevitability of self-determination...

...Only in this way shall we be able to seize the machinery of the party from the ghouls of Chicago...

...Dubcek, Mr...

...SANDOZ Robert Sandoz notes, in his "Facing the Choice" (NL, September 9) that "the decision of dissenting Democrats," of whom he is evidently one, "to unite or not to unite behind Humphrey" could well decide the fate of the Vice President's political aspirations...

...Smrkovsky were told flatly that they were going to be executed...

...It is probably true that Humphrey's record is somewhat better than Nixon's...

...In contrast, the Eastern alliance consists of a group of dictatorships established and controlled by Moscow's theological authority, in which the concept of popular sovereignty was eliminated by the supremacy of the respective Communist parties, whose parochial sovereignty was in turn consumed by the Russian bosses' eschatological anger last August in Prague...

...Cernik and Mr...

...The Czechs, he was told, could shout as much as they liked...

...Humphrey is now a pawn of the most objectionable elements of the Democratic party—the Daleys and Connallys...

...Making de Gaulle's stubborn but democratic statesmanship the primary object of Western journalistic indignation was an obvious mistake...

...But it should be said on his behalf that his initial decision that France must have her own nuclear force in the age of Sputniks was merely a strategical one...

...It is implied, but not stated, that these dissenting Democrats must back Humphrey on the basis of his "record...

...Still, Dubcek and his liberal comrades were well within their fundamental rights when, by choosing democratization, they decided to return to the basic principle of political justice, namely, government by free national participation...

...Yet the Western news media, disregarding the democratic record of this soldier-statesman who refused twice in his life to become a dictator by the graces of the military, picked him—instead of the Jacobins of the Kremlin whose totalitarian ethics and huge nuclear stock-pile was ambiguously inviting and discouraging to tamper with—as their favorite villain...

...But four years of Humphrey would be a disaster...

...Their act of conversion to democratic Communism was also the will of the overwhelming majority...

...The complex process of France's detachment that followed this hasty act of distrust cannot be blamed entirely on de Gaulle...