Dear Editor
Dear Editor Tito I was not surprised to see Mark Hopkins join the chorus in celebrating Tito's 80th birthday ("Correspondents' Correspondence," NL, June 12). After all, when one-time...
...Shufro seems to be saying that what's good for the consumer is good for the worker...
...O tempora, o mores...
...A growing majority of the younger Communists, some of whom Tito has lately thrown out of the Party and into jail, has no respect or love for him either...
...Like some of the respondents, though, I feel badly about abandoning the minority that still wants to resist-not because of alleged treaty obligations, which never existed, or because of our role in the assassination of Diem, but simply because of the past comradeship in arms...
...Though it is true that they are still widely distributed, everyone in Yugoslavia knows they are hardly ever bought...
...on the contrary, it is deeply torn over the very national and ethnic issues that divide the country...
...Our prolonged presence can do no real good, but we should certainly grant asylum to those South Vietnamese who are seriously threatened with Communist reprisals...
...At this moment Tito cannot claim to have solved the most serious problems of his Communist regime...
...Can you understand that...
...I may be grateful for my automobile, but my gratitude is small comfort to the bored assembly line worker in Detroit...
...After all, when one-time anti-Communist addict Richard Nixon is cham-paigning with Leonid Brezhnev-not the Leo-nidas of the Thermopylae-in the Kremlin's St...
...the essayists and poets V. Gotova, Z. Tomicic, and V. Pavletic, as well as others whose writings have had a tremendous impact on the nation's younger generations...
...Obviously, it is totally irrelevant now whether you, I, or somebody else would have allowed the United States to reach the present impasse if we had been in charge of policy...
...Tito's published speeches were ideologically and politically logical when they were edited by Edvard Kardelj, and more literary and less boring in earlier years when they were written by Djilas...
...Today, however, I am confident they have ceased singing praises to the marshal...
...Berkeley, Calif...
...I hope he will not mind if some of us read it with quite another...
...The Party is no longer "the real center of power...
...Your Belgrade correspondent, who evidently enjoys living in Tito's paradise, tells us that Tito is "affectionately called Start ('the old man') by bis people...
...Tito himself admitted in one of his "secret speeches," recently published by the Croatian press, that the Serbs and Croats have never hated each other to the point where civil war seemed imminent...
...To make matters worse, his organization has always been nonconsecutive...
...His pilgrimage to Moscow reveals his ultimate hope that the Soviet Union might save Yugoslavia for the sake of the Communist cause...
...Since we cannot save the present Saigon regime once we leave—even if we consider it worth saving-we have nothing tangible to lose by pursuing such a course...
...When the old brush factory worker said to Richard J. Margolis, "It's better than dying...
...New York City Bogdan Raditsa Vietnam Survey I should like to congratulate The New Leader for its "Vietnam Survey" (NL, May 29...
...That slaughter will change little if anything in the end, and therefore a settlement along the lines indicated is imperative...
...Having a Slovenian mother and a Croatian father, he speaks a language that is neither Serbian, Croatian nor Slovenian but a sort of jugo-lingo...
...New York City Edward G. Shufro Richard J. Margolis replies: To question a man's job satisfactions is not to question his worth...
...I have all the sympathy in the world for those who hate the necessity of choosing the least evil course of action, since it will still be very bad...
...A million meaningless careers"-all those people, that is, who provide Richard J. Margolis with his car and telephone, his refrigerator and typewriter...
...All those meaningless people who sell him his clothes and groceries, who arrange for him to have electricity and toothpaste...
...or Europe...
...However unenthusiastic many South Vietnamese may be about the prospect of a Communist-dominated government, there is every reason to believe the vast majority still prefers that prospect to the continued progressive destruction of their country...
...I hope he means by "his people" the lackeys and courtiers, not the populace at large...
...Does he feel offended that they prefer shuffle-board to Monteverdi, or Hialeah to the Prado...
...While most of the Western European press has given considerable attention to the mass persecution of Croatia's progressive intelligentsia, it has been largely ignored in the U.S...
...Still, they cannot justify the present frightful slaughter...
...If I were allowed to appear at their trials, I could testify that in fact they praised Tito to the extent of attacking me for being too negative about him, and they denounced my writings as "abstract anti-Communism...
...when it is discontinued, the South Vietnamese front, and consequently the Saigon government, will in all probability collapse...
...Yet instead of working out a political solution, he has put the Party and the nation in the hands of the military and the police...
...Or perhaps they themselves were at fault...
...I guess you can't," Richard J. Margolis reported it to us with one set of connotations...
...Vladimir Hall, it is only a sign of the times that the NL follows the changing currents...
...Among those in jail are two distinguished historians, F. Tudjman (who was a Partisan general and a former director of the Labor Institute of Zagreb) and Ivan Music, both authors of extremely original interpretations of Yugoslav political history...
...Nor is it valid to argue, as several of the respondents did, that we do not know enough about the situation to make a judgment...
...The various responses to President Nixon's decision of May 8 can greatly help us to answer the question everyone should put to himself: How can the nation get out of this disastrous situation with the least delay, and without aggravating the calamity...
...Finally, from the statements of the Communist negotiators in Paris it is reasonably clear that we could get our prisoners back and obtain safety for our retiring troops if, in addition to complete withdrawal, we agreed to force Thieu out of office and reconstitute a government favorable to a compromise settlement...
...what we have to decide is where to go from where we are...
...To be sure, there are lots of details about which we know nothing, but the following assumptions are sufficiently plausible to serve as policy guides: First, the blockade and the bombing of North Vietnam cannot break the morale of the North Vietnamese and can only temporarily impair their fighting ability, if at all...
...Does he feel that because they cannot afford mansions, or at least nice condominiums, the meaningless people should erase themselves from the face of the earth when they no longer pursue their meaningless careers...
...Shufro confuses product with process...
...Carl Landauer Professor of Economics Margolis Even as a more or less typical Manhattan "limousine liberal" I cannot imagine how you could have printed such a piece of offensive elitist superciliousness as Richard J. Margolis' "Nirvana on Wheels" (NL, June 12...
...He is as dull a speaker as Stalin used to be...
...The same could be said of several hundred university professors, writers, philosophers, sociologists, economists, etc.-including former Partisans and even veterans of the Spanish Civil War-who see in Tito not a "surrogate father" but a senile old Stalinist whose historical role has long since vanished...
...Many were imprisoned as long ago as last December and no trials have yet been scheduled...
...Every day I read in the Croatian Communist press how hundreds of once prominent Party members and Marxists are now sharing the fate of Milovan Djilas and Mihajlo Mihajlov...
...To state that "increasingly, Parliament and the press speak as the loyal opposition and public defender" is to indulge in a license more befitting a poet than a political observer...
...Accused of "counterrevolutionary nationalism, chauvinism and rotten liberalism" first by Tito and then by his district attorneys, these men have not only been "deprived" of both their Party memberships and their jobs but persecuted through UDBA (secret police) investigations...
...Second, the tactical use of American airpower, although apparently effective to some extent at this time, cannot be continued indefinitely and cannot be replaced by South Vietnamese airpower...
...two brilliant economists, S. Djodan and M. Veseliva...
...Some of those who were arrested have been accused of criticizing Tito and his policies in talks with me during meetings in the U.S...
...Does Richard J. Margolis feel our society is at fault because all those meaningless people were not poets or Harvard professors...
...But there is no justification for evading all choice...
...Your correspondent describes Tito's "collected speeches" as "widely published...
...As an old contributor to your pages, allow me to make a few comments...
...That is an elitist notion at least as old as the pyramids-which were remarkable "products" but a disaster for the workers...
...Granted, there are intangibles that are also important...
Vol. 55 • July 1972 • No. 14
