Dear Editor
Dear Editor The New Lf.ade-.r welcomes comment and criticism on an> of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words. A Prisoner Knowing of The New Leader's longstanding interest in such...
...3. Mao wanted liberty and fraternity...
...Can't you help at least Father Romanyuk...
...This is the voice from the abyss, from under the gun...
...Far from it...
...Such treatment is not new to Romanyuk...
...431120 Zubovo-Polyanskii r-n...
...For too long members of the movement have been devoting their time to explaining what social democracy does not want to be, or to day-today political matters...
...Few have ever written so persuasively on what it is??the political embodiment of the desire for freedom and equality...
...In the light of all this, it seems to me that both China and the pragma!ists of the West ha\e much to be grateful for, now that Maoisdead...
...Arrested without cause in 1944, at the age of 19, he was deported to Siberia and condemned to 10 years hard labor and exile...
...he could not even read the Bible...
...Will you abandon (us...
...Now 53, Romanyuk has spent nearly 17 years of his life in prison without having committed a single crime...
...There's only one reason why this disabled vet cant work...
...At the same time, it was clear that material progress was not an end in itself...
...For speaking out against this arrest he was punished in the camp...
...This will be his sixth year of a 10-year sentence he received for protesting the imprisonment of a dissident Ukranian, Valentyn Moroz...
...The Cultural Revolution everywhere shamed and degraded those who enjoyed power or status in industry, in education, in medicine, in the Army, in politics, or down on the farm...
...4. The Cultural Revolution did more than "shame and degrade those who enjoyed power and status...
...It killed a lot of them??and not only them but also many intellectuals and plain people u ho did not tow the new line last enough...
...Mao and the Maoists were certainly proud of their material achievements...
...For Romanyuk is in a hard labor camp in Mordovia...
...Wherever visitors went in the early '70s they were informed that the farm or the factory or the school or the hospital had produced v before Liberation, 2v after Liberation, and 3a after the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution...
...In March of 1978 a group of Ukranian political prisoners appealed to the world community in a letter stating: "Don't you hear our voices...
...It has always been accompanied by some grander goal??socialism, freedom, equality, more leisure time for culture, etc...
...In his "China's Capitalist Road" (NL, January l),hewrites...
...Yet his every request has been turned down by camp officials...
...Iuevon.ang...
...During his confinement, Romanyuk has repeatedly asked for permission to obtain a Bible...
...2. Nowhere in the world??not even in the United States??has material progress ever been an "end in itself...
...Sosnovka Uchr.ZhKh385/I-6 Romanyuk, VasylO...
...Montreal, Canada William Sorfl Mao George P. Brockway has it all wrong??or mostly wrong anyway...
...He has written over 400 letters protesting his sentence and prison conditions...
...In the same \ein, China's economy was more than "disrupted...
...In this respect, there is no difference between Mao and Teng??one believed he could achieve socialism by ideological purity, the other believes modernization (material progress) is necessary first...
...His family has been subject to harassment, too...
...Whereas most people spent the holidays with family and friends, he could not...
...The Meaning of Social Democracy," NL, January 1...
...Not only is he subjected to a harsh regimen of polishing glass, but he is also suffering from the glass dust settling in his lungs...
...there is nothing forbidding this in either Soviet law or prison regulations...
...Vasyl Romanyuk needs persistent letter writers??to give him continued hope and strength and to remind prison authorities that he is not forgotten...
...The man who built a personality cuh and, on the bodies of millions of peasants, constructed a totalitarian dictatorship that today enslaves nearly one billion people hardly deserves to have such worthy ideal attributed to him...
...Just last year his son Taras was expelled from Lviv University simply because his father is considered "an especially dangerous recidivist...
...Mar\ would have read them with amazement and despair, for they offer no explanation of history or of the workings of society, but instead propound an ideology that is merely a justification for any action the Partymighttake...
...Come on...
...nor could he celebrate the Christmas liturgy...
...As most non-Maoist Marxists will gladly point out, his theoretical writings are almost aboriginal in nature...
...Washington, DC...
...In addition, he is continually faced with arbitrary lawlessness on the part of his jailers...
...Like Adolf and Joe, Mao was a fascist, a killer for power, the destroyer of the world's oldest and one of its richest cultures...
...His address is: USSR??Mordovian A.S.S.R...
...The real objective was equality, material equality to be sure, but liberty and fraternity, too...
...IARRYPwwi...
...Let's examine this step by step: 1. True as it is that Mao was a great success story, he was not one "of the most eloquent proponents of dialectical materialism...
...It was \ir-tuallv obliterated, and the nation is still trying to re cover...
...A Prisoner Knowing of The New Leader's longstanding interest in such matters, I would like to draw your readers' attention to the plight of Reverend Vasyl O. Romanyuk...
...we are on the verge of death...
...Mao Tse-tung, one of the greatest movers and shakers of history, one of the most successful of doers, one of the most eloquent proponents of dialectical materialism, was not, in the sense generally-understood in the West, a materialist at all...
...Mary Fran Mikiitsch Social Democracy I was very impressed by Lcszek Kolakowski's effort to give social democracy a solid moral grounding...
...Those that have been answered bear the same reply: "You have been sentenced correctly...
...In 1974 Romanyuk went on a hunger strike to protest this as well as other human rights violations...
...Andrei Sakharov, Yuri Orlov and other prominent human rights advocates in the Soviet Union have spoken in Romanyuk's defense...
Vol. 62 • January 1979 • No. 2
