Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR ITALIAN COMMUNISTS The vicissitudes of International Communism are indeed amusing, and nowhere have these meanderings been better portrayed than in Silvio F. Senigallia's article,...
...And eventually, revolutionaries get a bit of power and respectability and then proceed to devote themselves mainly to survival and entrenchment...
...Chicago, Ill Herbert Berg FOREIGN POLICY Your anonymous correspondent ("Dear Editor...
...Under these circumstances...
...Etzioni says truly...
...indulgence of Third World sensibilities...
...Los Angeles, Calif...
...I refer to his answer to the problems involving the reallocation of the permanent Security Council seat now held by Taiwan: "The most obvious solution is that neither Peking nor Taipei be seated permanently at this time...
...Last, how could the insurance companies, which are notoriously nonsocially motivated, be persuaded to participate in a scheme which promises them so little profit...
...The warm feelings that developed over this period remain in the hearts of the American people, and, I believe, in the consciousness of the people of China...
...Richard Salz Edward M. Kennedy's policy statement on Red China is disappointing—not because of what he advocates but because of the underlying self-defeating rationale...
...Revolutionary organizations rarely, if ever, keep their initial fervor...
...While one can hardly challenge such noble sentiments, one also cannot help but note that neither of these distinguished gentlemen have attempted to give us any notion of how we could go about doing this...
...This mawkish sentimentalism does not jibe with either the wildness of Chinese anti-U.S...
...After a century of semicolonization and humiliation, they once again have a government that, if nothing else, is free of foreign influences...
...and anti-Soviet) demonstrations or America's "Yellow Peril" paranoia...
...Los Angeles, Cat...
...New York City Eric Bf.nti.ey ROTH In her otherwise commendable review of Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint ("What Hath Philip Wrought...
...I don't think at all that Professor Hook would lie, but there is another way of looking at it...
...Etzioni proposes that all those who are in danger of falling into poverty be made eligible for some sort of insurance, underwritten by private insurance companies and the Federal government...
...Interestingly...
...For over 100 years," the Senator writes, "the United States has taken a deep interest in the welfare of the Chinese people...
...In short, if Mao is to reunify and modernize his country, it makes more sense for him to have a foreign bogey to execrate than to establish relations with a power (us) with whom he will never be very friendly anyway...
...Yet we never heard him say anything like the comments which are reported by Sidney Hook...
...Significantly, Kennedy's one truly unworkable proposal seems to be predicated on an attempt at U.S...
...i would certainly not quibble with the assertion that the present Czech and Hungarian regimes "were forced on the people by military might and are maintained by the force of foreign arms...
...Those who have moral objections to a Negative Income Tax will surely not be willing to take out a policy that publicly declares them to be on the borderline of poverty...
...by then pillars of the Establishment, defending themselves from the wild and irresponsible criticisms of their as yet unborn juniors...
...Policy on China," NL, March 3) seem to believe that the United States ought to engage in a "dialogue" with Communist China...
...May I suggest to a man who might very well be in charge of our foreign policy one of these years that in his attempt at being fair-minded he winds up being ludicrous...
...Better yet would be a rotation of all nine Council seats...
...And apparently Hook took no notes at the time, so we only have Hook's memory at a remove of many years...
...In a recent interview by George Plimpton published in the book section of the Sunday New York Times, he recalled the sexual candid-ness in his two earliest books, Goodbye, Columbus and Letting Go...
...DEAR EDITOR ITALIAN COMMUNISTS The vicissitudes of International Communism are indeed amusing, and nowhere have these meanderings been better portrayed than in Silvio F. Senigallia's article, "Italy's Bourgeois Communists" (NL, March 3...
...Why would Brecht have picked Hook, of all people, for such a special avowal...
...How would we determine who is really unable to find renumerative employment without falling into the abuses of the present welfare system...
...Some of us heard Brecht make wild conversational remarks, to which he would not have wished to be held...
...It fits into only one category, labeled "Portnoy's Complaint, by Philip Roth...
...New York City Martin Rosenbaum POVERTY I am rather astonished at Professor Amitai Etzioni's bizarre proposal for eliminating poverty in his article, "Insuring the Poor" (NL, March 3...
...This would eliminate the whole useless problem of trying to dispense trivial international prestige...
...And the paternalism it implies is what would make the proposals unacceptable to the Chinese...
...Antipoverty insurance would not be a miracle cure for all of poverty's ills...
...I did not "avoid the subject," as now advised—I said them...
...The record shows that when there were "bad" things to say about Brecht...
...Audrey Small...
...NL, March 3) believes that the absence of American troops in the Dominican Republic, and the presence of Russian troops in Czechoslovakia, demonstrates that our Dominican action had popular support...
...Aaron Burns CHINA Both Edward M. Kennedy and John Sherman Cooper ("Reassessing U.S...
...I see no reason to expect that they will get along with us...
...This would only serve to point up the obvious bias of the so-called Great Powers in their insistence on this five-to-one ratio...
...Robert Conquest makes the point that while Brecht wrote a poem protesting the execution of Tretyakov, he did not print it...
...Social Democracy, in turn, got its start in the disillusionment with liberalism at the end of the 19th century...
...Frank McDermott BRECHT Since you have printed two somewhat lengthy rebuttals, by Sidney Hook ("Dear Editor," NL, February 3) and by Robert Conquest ("Dear Editor," NL, March 3) to my brief comment on Brecht and Hook ("Dear Editor," NL, December 30, 1968), let me add this...
...with the fifth position going to one of the dominant underdeveloped countries of the southern half of the world—such as India...
...Nor do we know what Hook said that might have provoked Brecht's alleged comment . . . and so on...
...The point is that Portnoy's Complaint should be judged on its own terms, not simply as a book embodying the "sexual revolution," nor as an epitome of the "Jewish novel...
...Anyhow...
...is so large, and when the payments are likely to last indefinitely...
...Soviet forces would be greatly supplemented...
...The shortcomings of Etzioni's scheme are obvious...
...It is not surprising that this government should attempt to manipulate xenophobia, long an important part of the Chinese make-up...
...Roth explained that in his third work, When She Was Good, he deliberately used a toned-down vocabulary because it suited the prudishness of his characters...
...But it seems rather implausible that the relatively small number of troops currently stationed in Czechoslovakia and Hungary prevents the peoples of those countries from rebelling...
...I am sure that in a few decades we will witness the delicious spectacle of Mark Rudd and Daniel Cohn-Bendit...
...The people of the Dominican Republic know equally well that the United States is not willing to tolerate a regime that it believes will challenge its interests in the Carribbean...
...Brooklyn, N.Y...
...The Chinese Communists do not appear to get along with each other, or with the Russian and Cuban Communists...
...Roth himself anticipated such a view...
...As Senator Kennedy notes, the Chinese have broken off the scheduled resumption of the Warsaw talks—one might add, for the flimsiest of possible reasons...
...Except in special circumstances, few people really want a revolution...
...I would add that it is unlikely to solve any of poverty's ills...
...The Chinese are at a delicate point in their national experience...
...What is happening today is simply the re-enactment of an old, old process...
...Now, the remark cited by Hook was not only not printed, but also not written, and yet it is cited as simple fact and has grown, as of March 3, into "remarks...
...rather, one should say it is the knowledge that, in case of a revolt...
...The real question is whether Brecht ever said what he is quoted as saying...
...Ann Arbor, Mich...
...And that "dominant" underdeveloped country-?how would it stand up to charges of international Uncle Tomism...
...Why not redefine the basis of permanent Security Council membership to the five nuclear powers (thus including China), or the five largest nations (thereby bringing in China, India and Indonesia, and eliminating France and England...
...How could we keep the premiums on this insurance low, when the number of poor people in the U.S...
...It is interesting to note that Communism began, in the aftermath of World War I, with much the same revulsion toward the reformist Social Democrats that the young confrontationists now display toward the Communists...
...for reasons which, unfortunately, are left unstated...
...March 3,) Isa Kapp stumbled into a wide, well-filled pit when she attributed the novel's open sexuality to a general trend in the arts...
...I resent Conquest's implication that I am a professional flatterer...
...He feels that this is more politically feasible than the Negative Income Tax...
...He was therefore one of the first major contemporary American writers to use the language freely...
Vol. 52 • March 1969 • No. 5
