Dear Editor
Dear Editor The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words. Communist Alliances I sympathize with Ray Alan's arguments against...
...at least not until a far longer period of transition and adaptation has elapsed...
...Yet one detects a touch of the ideological, a certain "polemical clang,'' in Bell herself...
...Moers has tried to do so and, in Bell's insistence that we are all alike, she seems to have missed the boat...
...I think European unification is now the Lebensluege of many people on the European Continent...
...The principal objection to a Socialist-Communist link, or to Communist participation in an allied government, is the doubt about how sincere the Western-European Communists actually are in their repudiations of dictatorship and guidance by Moscow...
...Berkeley Carl Landauer Polemics I heartily agree with Pearl K. Bell's remark, in her review of Ellen Moers' Literary Women ("Female Chauvinism," NL, April 26), that "ideology impoverishes critical intelligence...
...Her impassioned invocation of "the fertile indivisible wholeness of human-kind" ignores certain political and economic realities...
...I think two points can be added to the list of these arguments...
...Trenton Joanne Flexner...
...put my trust in European unification as a means of limiting Communist influence...
...March 29...
...before the recognition of the East German Republic and therefore of the permanence of Germany's division, a West German friend of mine used to call the belief in German unification the German Lebensluege...
...women are even more essentially different from men, and it is foolish not to acknowledge this in discussing their writings...
...Understandably, the experience with the Popular Fronts of the 1930s is a deterrent...
...It is not America's business to dissuade her friends from their illusions, but neither is it good policy to strengthen hopes that will not be fulfilled...
...It certainly should not be a purpose of American foreign policy to relieve Moscow from its worries about its Western European semisatellites...
...Very likely, though, we are not facing a clear-cut situation...
...But conditions have changed: The Moscow god has failed even in the eyes of people who only yesterday were true believers...
...In the first place, it is extremely doubtful whether an effective government can be formed in Italy without Communist participation, and it is not at all clear that, given the present orientation of the Italian Communists, their participation would not be a lesser evil, from i NATO standpoint, than the continuation of a government incapable of action...
...A few years ago...
...Unlike Alan, however, I would no...
...The tactical advantages of taking an anti-Kremlin line have undoubtedly been a major factor, perhaps the decisive one, in the reorientation of some Italian and French Communists...
...Communist Alliances I sympathize with Ray Alan's arguments against the ban Henry Kissinger has tried to lay on Socialist-Communist alliances in Western Europe, and particularly on Communist participation in the Italian government ("Henry and the Socialists;' NL...
...American blacks are essentially different from American whites and their literature is treated accordingly...
...a lie helping to make life bearable...
...A politically unified Europe, to be sure, would be desirable from many points of view, but it will not materialize within the next decades: Economic conditions and political traditions are too different in the European countries to permit common institutions to develop much beyond the stage of the existing customs union...
...with others the change was probably the result of long-maturing convictions...
...Secondly, American opposition to the "historic compromise" the Italian Communists are trying to achieve tends to drive these dissenters ("and their French brethren) back into the Moscow fold...
...Moreover, there are many historical examples showing that individuals who modify their traditional lines of action first for reasons of expediency, eventually come to believe in the fundamental righteousness of the new course...
Vol. 59 • May 1976 • No. 10
