Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR PIPES While I am perhaps even less sanguine than Richard Pipes over the long-range prospects of the human race, I fail to see as he does that in the atrocities of the 20th century "we...
...But they do share with German Nazis and Right-wingers of an earlier vintage the doctrine of a "proletarian nation...
...Marshall McLuhan reviewed a book (in Buok World...
...November 10) and mentioned Aristotle...
...or of those who hold as a matter of faith that a just man should have "no enemies on the Left...
...Arlington, Va...
...But the parallels do exist...
...He says: "How very urgently we do again need the bold confidence of the Enlightenment of David Hume and his contemporaries, who believed that we are a world of men fully able to govern ourselves, through reason, with freedom, within the security of the law...
...Cambridge...
...The neo-Marxists of course are not racists...
...There are many philosophical, organizational and political differences between Nazis and neo-Marxists...
...Calif...
...So, we are right back to the old cliche: the dumb flatfoot cop, a hothead...
...The Nazis, like the neo-Marxists...
...Movers, recently from the White House, and Carl Madden, chief economist from the Main Streets of Business, do not tell us in which direction to move from this "19th-century" mentality...
...Sidney Koretz NFO MARXISM Lewis Feuer's article on "The New Marxism of the Intellectuals" (NL...
...This contrasted Germany, the "proletarian nation," young, vigorous and destined for a great future, with the supposedly decadent oligarchies of the West...
...I tried to get a young niece interested in some flashy thought, but she wouldn't listen...
...Fort Lauderdale, Fla...
...Or, is it...
...he said...
...I don't mean this as an insult, any more than Kristol does when he suggests that the bait of high salaries is needed to recruit "men of a far higher calibre into police work" (for calibre read I.Q...
...The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...John E. Slaughter University of Florida Dept...
...This concept seems to have originated with Max Scheler, a German philosopher, who during the Great War wrote a book called Der Genius des Kriciies unci dry deittsthe Krieg...
...Mass...
...who was executed by the French for opposing the post-World War I Ruhr occupation...
...Professor Feuer would, however, have strengthened his case further if he had also drawn attention to the marked similarities between the neo-Marx-ists and the Nazis in many respects...
...Darwin, ecology, the black bottom of the 1920s, and even God...
...Hitler's Mein Kampj indeed calls the peasantry "the fundament of the entire nation...
...As a matter of fact, Proust was mentioned by the Chamber of Commerce man as not being in the cards of the prevailing McLuhanacy...
...Above all, the Nazis like the neo-Marxists had a profound reverence for irrationality...
...This is—or should be?fatal for a scholar...
...On the bottom of the pyramid, as he further suggests, is the bewildered cop...
...The Nazis, like the neo-Marxists...
...Last week, from the mouth of the chief economist of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, I learned they are actually spending money on McLu-hanatic studies...
...They should dispel the illusions of those who believe that politics can be grouped simply into stereotyped categories of "Right" and "Left...
...I suppose, we'll just have to finish out the 20th century, with its hot flashes in place of step-by-step thought...
...had a considerable appeal for the alienated intellectuals...
...With Sputnik, nature ended...
...With all the tv, how come she hasn't heard of Marshall McLuhan...
...In our Global Village electronic communication gives us instantaneous information on everything...
...but in the short run, before the new brainy recruits attain seniority . . . well, I don't know as I feel too good about paying the present level of policemen an average salary of $15,000 a year, plus full retirement benefits...
...The Nazis shared the neo-Marxists' contempt for the supposedly decadent civilization of the big cities and for the "big city nomads" that dwelled there...
...As for higher pay, I quite agree that it may be the long-term solution...
...Because the Medium is the Message, I was told...
...There's only one trouble...
...Obviously, these comparisons should not be taken too far...
...Lewis H. Gann PETTINGELL Like the finger of God...
...their contempt for the democratic process and for rational discourse paralleled that of the neo-Marxists...
...She preferred to go off and read Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu...
...November 4) has made an impressive contribution to the literature concerning the New Left...
...believe in an ideology of anti-intellectualism: they abhorred the so-called lntelligenzbestien...
...But to call this the "McLuhan age" is going too far...
...The neo-Marxists extol partisan fighters like Che Guevara...
...and with social justice...
...between adherents of the Fiihrer-prinz.ip and adherents of Bakunin...
...True enough, but he might then add that Stalin's terror led to the collapse of Communist ideology and the resurgence of humanitarian values we see in Eastern Europe today, proving that while you can push all of the people around for a long time, you can't do it forever...
...between Fascists and what might be called "Afro-Fascists...
...believe in "the Triumph of the Will" as against the impersonal determinism of economic processes...
...where they err, let the historian's gloss be a corrective...
...He might try reading some of the correspondence from the German General Staff, objecting to the Nazi program, not on humanitarian grounds, but because it represented a considerable waste of resources and was totally inefficient either in exploiting or eliminating people...
...Man remains a rich, unpredictable compound who defies the best efforts of both reformer and fiend to control or predict his behavior...
...The Nazis used to present as proper models for youth guerilla fighters like Albert Leo Schlageter...
...Thomas Jefferson, a contemporary, called David Hume "the great apostle of Toryism . . . this degenerate of science, this traitor to his fellow men...
...DEAR EDITOR PIPES While I am perhaps even less sanguine than Richard Pipes over the long-range prospects of the human race, I fail to see as he does that in the atrocities of the 20th century "we are dealing not with aberrations but possibly some entirely new principles of human management whose implications for the future can be only vaguely suspected...
...Arthur Knipper POLICE BEHAVIOR Reading Irving Kristol's review of James Q. Wilson's Varieties of Police Behavior (NL, December 2) has added fuel to a longstanding grievance...
...Pipes goes on to say that Stalin's terror demonstrated that "properly treated, the individual can be divested of his memory, judgment and will, and put to any use one finds convenient...
...Frightful Portent," NL, December 2.) As evidence of this Pipes says that in Worid War I, "the individual for the first time ceased to count on his own human level, becoming instead a mere undifferentiated unit of a sum-total, a commodity with a precisely definable flesh-and-blood value...
...I, for one, don't want him, with his low frustration threshold, carrying concealed weapons out of uniform, let alone making wrong decisions under pressure when in uniform...
...They also stressed the supposedly special virtues of youth and of its combative instincts...
...We learn from the September Letter of the President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science...
...Walter Orr Roberts, himself involved in atmospheric research, that the 18th century has the answer...
...The New Leader also supplies many articles and items which are extremely useful in connection with classes in the social sciences...
...Evil is, of course, not an "aberration," but neither is courage or humanity...
...Finally, Pipes says that in the Nazi death camps, human beings were "exploited up to a point and then efficiently eliminated...
...In short, man's inhumanity to man is not another 20th-century invention that has been recently perfected...
...The Nazis, like the neo-Marxists...
...Eric M. McKirRiudi...
...I'hoebe Petlingell's "Time to Cleanse the Temple" (NL, December 2) blasts S. G. F. Brandon's inept playing of the historical game known as "What Really Happened...
...The neo-Marxists all too often resort to visceral thinking and to a vocabulary as violent and depraved as that once customary in Germany, There are even minor similarities in political style...
...Many investigators of the "Final Solution" have indeed been struck by the number of deracine intellectuals who not only served as theoreticians of terror, but actually took a leading part in the work of the Ein-suizkotnmandos...
...To get the answer we must go to Science...
...The old problem of adjusting ends to means is a fragmentary 19th-century problem . . . and the utmost nobility and integrity no longer serves as means of human navigation or hope...
...We can't move backward in time...
...I have questioned for years now the fact that off-duty policemen are allowed to carry concealed weapons, while the rest of us are thrown into jail for the same thing...
...The Nazis detested what they called "Western pluto-democracy...
...The Nazis, like the neo-Marxists, idealized the healthy and supposedly uncorrupted peasantry as against the urban proletariat...
...The need for more extensive gun-control measures in this country arises in large measure from the fact that the presence of lethal weapons in otherwise "normal" violent situations (family quarrels, brawls, minor street incidents) quite often leads to personal tragedy and mass violence...
...Buffalo, N. Y. Philip McDonnell KUDOS I enjoy your magazine very much, and I especially count on it for insights and balance often so lacking in other journals of "stature...
...The Nazis shared the neo-Marxists' belief in violence, their hatred of what they called the Philistines, their burning and total enmity to what German reactionaries used to call das System (the Establishment...
...Gainesville, Fla...
...For the mythic, saga bases of Western religions are best reinterpreted by theologians and poets...
...And here is the crux of the matter: . . the police organization," as Kristol writes, "is one of those organizations in which, as you go down the hierarchy, the number and range of decisions increase...
...The Nazis thought with their blood...
...of Social Sciences MOYERS Bill Moyers ("Mass Media in the Age of Dissent," NL, November 18) sees Marshall McLuhan as the "latest and most colorful exponent" of modern communications theory...
...It was just such an incident that precipitated the Harlem summer riots of 1964: An off-duty policeman, drawing a concealed pistol, shot and killed a boy allegedly fleeing from a petty theft...
...I wonder if Napoleon's armies meant that much to him on their own human level, or whether Julius Caesar didn't also compute his legions as commoditites...
...Palo Alt...
Vol. 51 • December 1968 • No. 24
