Dear Editor
Dear Editor New Soviet Hero In a recent issue of his newsletter, Soviet Analyst, Robert Conquest, the British Soviet affairs specialist who has long been a New Leader contributor, presents...
...Fort Lee, N.J...
...It is a distinction not always understood by decent people who want to condemn terrorism...
...Marxism and Titoism have both failed totally to integrate the multinational state or to find a common denominator for keeping the various nationalities together...
...He has raised the pun to the level of art form...
...The most prominent members of the Croatian Communist party, who succeeded from 1964-71 in giving their republic the beginnings of cultural independence, have been dismissed, eliminated or arrested...
...This is the thorny national question that has remained unresolved throughout the entire 60-year history of Yugoslavia...
...Stephen Housman Terrorists or Guerrillas Eric M. Breindel's review of Terror Out of Zion, by J. Bowyer Bell (NL, October 10), raises once again the question of the difference between terrorists and guerrillas...
...In addition, the Croatian jails and police system are administered by Serbs...
...It insinuated that Trotsky was killed by a disgruntled member of his own organization, or even that his death was the result of an affair of the heart...
...A terrorist attacks children, shoppers, airliner passengers, or any other civilian who gets in his way...
...Though he subsequently dropped out of the news, his next stop was obviously Moscow...
...Dear Editor New Soviet Hero In a recent issue of his newsletter, Soviet Analyst, Robert Conquest, the British Soviet affairs specialist who has long been a New Leader contributor, presents evidence of "the continuity of the present body [KGB] with traditional Stalinism" that includes the following: "Ramon Mercader, the assassin of Leon Trotsky, long settled in Moscow, has been made a Hero of the Soviet Union, Gold Star, equivalent of the American Congressional Medal of Honor...
...Milovan Djilas has repeated again and again that these responsibilities should be handled by Croats, so that the Croatians would not identify their oppression with Great Serbian rule...
...The large majority of the young Croatians in the free world were born in Tito's Yugoslavia and reared in Tito's schools...
...Bronx, N. Y. Richard H. Shulman Serbs and Croats Eliahu Salpeter's discussion of what could happen in Yugoslavia after Tito's death ("Preparing for Tito's Departure," NL, September 12) devotes too little attention to the country's gravest problem...
...But no cause justifies terrorists' random murder of innocent people, the foisting of their views at gunpoint...
...Pro-Soviet elements are strong in both the Arm) and the Party -mainly Serbs and Montenegrins-and they would do whatever is necessary to bring Yugoslavia back to the fold New York City Bogdan Raditsa...
...Frequently guerrillas have a just cause, as when the Irgun fought British troops to liberate the Jewish homeland, or when Hungarians tried to oust Soviet invaders...
...The assassin, traveling with a Canadian passport in the name of Frank Jackson that was given to him by the GPU, called himself Jacques Mornard and described himself, among other things, as a small businessman...
...Veteran readers of The New Leader will remember that at the time of the assassination in 1940, the international apparatus of the GPU, as the KGB was then called, tried to direct attention away from the real killer...
...In 1947, Louis Budenz confirmed the opinion of many by stating that the killing had been ordered by the Kremlin, and that he was personally responsible for recruiting the early participants in the affair...
...For Salpeter to explain this profound crisis of a country involved in deep national and social turmoil by using the overworked official stereotype about a Croatian "conspiracy...
...As if to mock the apologists of the Communist movement, especially the intellectual fellow travelers in New York, Mercader flew to the Stalinist haven of Cuba at the end of his sentence, then to another, Czechoslovakia...
...But it was known all along that he was Ramon Mercader, a Spanish GPU agent, whose mother was a long-time member of the Spanish Communist party and a GPU operative as well...
...He remained completely in control of himself and made no statements during his trial, sentencing and 25 years in prison...
...supposedly hatched by fascist emigres abroad," or by Moscow, is beyond responsible judgment...
...In the Republic of Croatia, for example, despite the "system of quotas," the key officeholders-the secretary general of the Communist party, and most military commanders and secret police officials-are not Croat Communists but Serbs, who total only 13 per cent of the population...
...I'd like to know, how many humorists of Kitman's stature can be found in our magazines today...
...It took a long time, but this summer the murderer received his fitting reward: Hero of the Soviet Union, Gold Star...
...Kitman asks: "How many Charlie's Angels can dance on the head of a pin...
...As to what the Soviet Union may do alfer Tito's death, I don't think that it will need to invade, as it did in Czechoslovakia in 1968...
...New York City Albert Glotzer Kitman Kudos Marvin Kitman's wit is always amazing...
...Least of all do they have legitimacy in democracies, like Germany or Puerto Rico, where they have the right to persuade voters by peaceful means...
...Publicity was not given to this, but the mere award is a sinister sign of how the KGB regards itself...
...Many also graduated front Tito's Gulags...
...But in "New Angel in Town" (NL, October 24), he really outdid himself...
...The Stalinist restructuring of the country looks adequate on paper, but in reality it deprives the national republics of real power, and the so-called leading nation freely exercises its hegemony over the others...
...Not many, I'll bet...
...Those who are still alive and no longer in jail-like V. Gotovac, Z. To-micic and S. Djodan-have been totally dispossessed: They are without jobs and their works go unpublished...
...Similarly, Croatian generals and members of the Army staff-former partisans with distinguished records, like Bobetko, Bubanj and others-have mysteriously died, and those left alive have been dropped from their positions...
...Their efforts to attract attention to tne Croatian cause for independence through hijacking or other means is motivated by the Western world's refusal to study the Croatian reality These young revolutionaries are often children of Croatian partisans, some have been in the Party, and they refuse to yield to the Party's unjust methods ol suppressing Croatian nationalism...
...A guerrilla is an irregular soldier attacking military targets behind enemy lines...
Vol. 60 • November 1977 • No. 23
