Dear Editor
Dear Editor EXCHANGE In the exchange among Thomas A. Billings, Bayard Rustin and Daniel P. Moynihan ("Black Education and White Liberalism," NL, December 22, 1969), all three men come off rather...
...Rosten rightly notes that Russell included among his false gods the proletariat...
...There is considerable need for a new version of "On the Superior Virtue of the Oppressed" today, and I am afraid that your magazine is at least partly responsible...
...Krickus must not think so, yet he does not suggest any alternative basis for liberal-middle class cooperation other than the kind of social reformism that has repeatedly failed to hold the liberal coalition together in the past...
...What I find so disheartening about this exchange is that practically nothing has been said about black education or black studies and so I wonder why The New Leader chose to print it...
...Chicago, 1IL Arthur Herskovitz Inane and sophomoric as Thomas A. Billings' diatribe-as-discourse was, its petty sorts of provocation were in no way commensurate with the near-hysterical (and mostly inapt) response it elicited from Daniel P. Moynihan...
...it is the allegedly smug, parochial, conceited liberal who comes off worst...
...These proletarians seem to have admirers—not, unfortunately, secret one—son the Left, the Right, and in the Center...
...It also marks a lack of human solidarity, or the subjective impotence of those "objective" intellectuals who have failed to comprehend the painful social and cultural realities entrapping the people of totalitarian states...
...Eugene Vasilew T would agree with both Bayard Rustin and Daniel P. Moynihan that the substance of Thomas A. Billings' argument in his open letter to Rustin is the purest nonsense...
...At present it is the "white working class" about which we are supposed to feel guilty...
...Elisa Hauptman LIBERAL REACTIONS In the "Dear Editor" section of the December 22, 1969 New Leader, Leo Rosten makes the point that Walter Goodman's neither incisive nor original article, "Idolizing the Underclass" (NL, November 24), was anticipated some 30 years ago by Bertrand Russell...
...The emphasis upon Lenin's role (really rather slight, since he was in Finland during the most critical moments of 1917) obscures the fact that the Bolsheviks won power in Russia because the liberals and moderate Socialists were reluctant from the first to seize power (the provisional government was formed at the insistence of the Soviet), even to act upon their own programs...
...everybody now berates everybody else for neglecting their claims...
...It is primarily the task of responsible university departments to restore the theoretical as well as real supremacy of democratic tenets at their boiling institutions...
...Interestingly, Rustin ignores this rather obvious mixing of terms...
...Lenin and Trotsky incorporated into their manifestoes the Social Revolutionary party (an agrarian group) platform of sequestration and redistribution of the great estates, and sneeringly pointed out that the Social Revolutionaries did not dare to implement this, their most basic demand, despite their heavy representation within the provisional government and the Soviet...
...To dispel the delusions of justified minority rule and violence, they should discard their rhetoric on behalf of various totalitarian leaders and regimes and should unconditionally reassert the preeminence of popular sovereignty, i.e., the principle of majority rule...
...Instead, he insists that Billings' suggestion of "the bankruptcy of liberal knowledge in the nation" is symptomatic of liberal self-contempt...
...Denver, Colo...
...As fundamental distinctions were permitted to fade, so did contradictions arise, bringing with them the prospects of anarchy and disintegration...
...The libertine use of freedom to extol its total absence, and to acolaim the masters of such political vacuums, is an extravagant social perversion which seems to have become a fashionable (though hazardous) habit among sophisticated dilettantes...
...Bingkamton, N.Y...
...Los Angeles* Calif...
...Needless to say...
...and his ad hominem argument (I am a black man who has been jailed for my beliefs) adds nothing to the exchange...
...In particular, Billings defends "soul courses" by confusing the standard English word "soul" (meaning a universal spiritual or immaterial essence) with the slang word "soul" (referring to the life style of a specific racial group...
...Gikaid Callow ROCHE John Roche's article...
...Because as a matter of fact blacks are not the darlings of the fanciers of the oppressed this year...
...By presenting in benign terms such self-made strongmen as Mao, Castro, et al...
...The philosophic license to violent action, professed to by many among these revolutionary neophytes, has also been inspired by these heroes of unethical power and neoabsolutism...
...You, too, can get in trouble.'"), he might more appropriately have done so about the recently celebrated antics of Vice President Spiro Agnew...
...Thus, the lesson of 1917 is not merely that well-meaning fanatics like Lenin usually cause more harm than good, but also that timid reformers give such fanatics their opportunity...
...Boston, Mass...
...yet this constructive attempt is imperative to thwart the threat of counterrevolution...
...Krickus would have liberal politicians be more attentive to the Wallace-oriented middle class, yet he presumably does not wish the dialogue to be consummated on Wallaceite terms...
...Retreat of the Faculty," (NL, November 10...
...others who might be so tempted are warned of the consequences in the most vulgar terms...
...New York City Laszlo T. Kiss...
...In the current atmosphere of frivolity and confusion, the effort to restore the eroded prestige of 'self-evident truths' invites, of course, the risk of being ridiculed, labeled conservative, or worse...
...Billings is condescending and supercilious: His treatise on philosophical questions and repeated address to "Mr...
...who by disenfranchising their masses replaced popular sovereignty with their own), they generated the new activists dedicated to the absurd proposition that dictatorships (Communist or alleged Socialist) are the best form of government, and that those political warriors who fight with all dialectical means for the establishment of a dictatorship are admirable...
...Your latest contribution to the thesis, "Revolution Without the Masses," by Richard J. Krickus (NL, December 22) has in common with other specimens of the genre a tendency to completely overlook specific proposals...
...Thus the road was paved for cohesive, social-autocratic ideological formulas to penetrate those free academies which neglected to draw defensive lines around the tolerant doctrine of liberty...
...Rustin is patronizing and irrelevant: His effort to explain Billings to himself is also uncalled for...
...If it is consistent with Moynihan's liberal credentials to wax apoplectic about "thought control" by a highly placed government official ("Those who express thoughts disapproved of by those who control the government machinery are vilified and defamed...
...If the people in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, for instance, think that the problem of civil unrest should be dealt with by a little more cracking of hippie and black heads, should this idea be indulged by liberals...
...Are we that much interested in the exact color and texture of the bile of Messrs...
...Moynihan is merely hysterical: Is it possible to read Billings' letter as an attempt at "thought control" and "intimidation by government of a private citizen...
...This may have been what Billings meant, but it is more likely symptomatic only of Rustin's increasing tendency to force all liberal self-criticism into the straitjacket of what appears to have become, for him, an obsession...
...1969) was interesting, but he neglected the preliminary phase to the present academic explosions: the decade-long flirtation of some prominent ivy league political theoreticians—who virtually dictate the scholastic vogue—with totalitarianism...
...Frank Hastings FEUER There is some truth to Lewis S. Feuer's assertion ("The Trial of Bukharin," NL, December 8, 1969) that many Soviet, and, he might have added, Western intellectuals, "are still unable to see Lenin clearly for what he was—a fanatic who worked to destroy the only liberal government Russia ever had But Lenin and his handful of supporters obviously did not do this work by themselves...
...Dear Editor EXCHANGE In the exchange among Thomas A. Billings, Bayard Rustin and Daniel P. Moynihan ("Black Education and White Liberalism," NL, December 22, 1969), all three men come off rather badly...
...During this vexing tutorial period, the word "progressive" became a casually applied adjective, used in the classroom to absolve dictators who spoke the right political jargon, while "democracy" was reduced to a fluid concept, too ambiguous to define, too uncertain to defend...
...Rustin" are gratuitous insults...
...Billings, Rustin and Moynihan...
Vol. 53 • January 1970 • No. 1
