Dear Editor
Dear Editor Party Years 1 became a New Leader reader about 1934 or '35 and, except for the years of World War II, I have read it regularly ever since. Seldom have you published anything that moved...
...Danbury, Conn...
...dissemblance becomes their defense...
...Then Wrong maintains that Medvedev, basing himself on the work of the dissident demographer Maksudov, "concludes that the War, the famines resulting from forced collectivization, and the repressive measures killed a total of 22-23 million people...
...It's ridiculous to say that Jane Austen seeks to "destroy all patriarchal structures": If Emma is "fiercely independent" and Mr...
...Chiang begins his next paragraph by saying my article was "garnered exclusively from Taiwan's dissidents...
...Nor were women writers the only ones to have a quarrel with Milton, as Harold Bloom has shown...
...They assert that the 19th-century woman writer, though possessed of a discrete "female imagination," felt the need to storm or infiltrate the male camp...
...Davis' apologia indicates the absence of a questioning mind in her childhood years...
...The full sentence from which Conquest quotes began "He [Medvedev] argues that Solzhenitsyn and Western writers like Robert Conquest have exaggerated...
...I should note, too, that I have greatly enjoyed all my visits to Taiwan, and I look forward to going there again soon...
...But why, if her imagination is innately different, should she bother...
...It was all Mother's fault...
...The first two, by her own admission, were foolish...
...It is simply an excuse for her inability to make valid distinctions...
...prompting me to write that the episode was "virtually unreported in the West...
...Tokyo Donald Kirk Mad Women In her review of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination ("Writers and Writing," NL, February 25), Phoebe Pettin-gell admirably balances praise for their powerful new insights with warnings of tendentiousness...
...Obviously, the "schizophrenia" Gilbert and Gubar talk about is at least partly the schizophrenia of modern feminist critics...
...It would be comforting to think so...
...But she does not explain why she became a Communist??a conscious, willful act at variance with her upbringing...
...Rarely does anyone emerge from childhood without exposure to some sort of absurdities bequeathed by parents, preachers, teachers, eccentric uncles, or others attempting to impose their notions on the supposedly pliable minds of youngsters...
...In view of what happened as a result of the episode, I do not see how anyone, on the government or dissident side, could deny that it was indeed the dissidents' "climactic performance...
...Davis' life seems to follow a series of confessions??to her mother, to J. Peters and to The New Leader...
...At any rate, the figure Wrong has blundered into through a misreading of Medvedev should not stand for a moment...
...As an adult she failed to differentiate meaningful social reform from Marxist mumbo jumbo...
...After having excoriated the New York Times, Newsweek and the State Department, among others, why overlook The New Leader...
...Don't flag, Walter...
...Taiwan Challenge The Taipei government has engaged in a broad-ranged rebuttal of reports on the episode last December 10 in Kaohsiung that saw police clash with Taiwan dissidents...
...the last, in my opinion, is unconvincing...
...As a child she was unable to distinguish reasonable religious requirements from fanaticism...
...Nowhere does she admit error in judgment or acknowledge personal guilt...
...He quotes Maksudov to the effect that there were about 15 million soldier and civilian deaths during the years of World War II, and that hunger and epidemics "related to the War" may increase that figure to the 20 million War dead officially given...
...This is striking in view of the fact that totalitarian regimes do their best to conceal statistics on the demography of genocide...
...He does not...
...Solzhenitsyn's figures may be too high and Hough's too low for most categories of deaths, but the Conquest and Maksudov-Medvedev estimates are very similar...
...The notion that Bertha Rochester is a horrible Doppelganger for Jane Eyre is intriguing, but many male writers of the time were also obsessed by the idea of a soulless double: William Godwin (Mary Shelley's father), Heinrich Heine, and, of course, Robert Louis Stevenson...
...I do appreciate Chiang's interest in my article, though, and realize that directives from Taipei compel him to try to refute it...
...But in defense of the editor who wrote the head, I would note that the latest movement did represent "a new opposition" that had risen to the forefront in an historic movement...
...my estimate of the collectivization and purge deaths under Stalin about 20 million, though this is based on conservative assumptions at every point...
...First, as regards myself: He sees Medvedev as arguing that "Western writers like Robert Conquest have exaggerated the numbers of people who died during the terror and the War," in that I accept a "figure of over 60 million from 1918-53...
...conduct relations in the absence of diplomatic facilities??responded as he did ("Dear Editor," NL, February 11) to my article in the January 14 issue entitled, "Challenging the Nationalists in Taiwan," and carrying the overline, "A New Opposition...
...Knightly dominating, they get their comeuppance in equal measure...
...My own estimate of direct War deaths, incidentally, was around 14 million...
...In some cases they will resist unwelcome influences or, when resistance is impossible, they will comply with a mental reservation...
...Elsie Trenner Wrong Numbers In his review of Roy A. Medvedev's On Stalin and Stalinism ("Updating a Tragic History," NL, December 17, 1979), Dennis H. Wrong makes several extraordinary errors...
...Unfortunately, however, Chiang made much of a headline that he should know I did not write, declaring that "Kirk has deemed it fit to dignify the ringleaders as 'a new opposition challenging the Nationalists in Taiwan.'" I am well aware that "they have been there all along," as Chiang remarked, and indeed alluded to their background in my article...
...1 also believe that many journalists based in Taipei, writing for local or foreign newspapers, for obvious reasons thought it advisable to play up the government story while ignoring or minimizing that of the dissidents...
...The quotient of these in Goodman's "Fair Game" columns has been rising steadily of late...
...Gilbert and Gubar have bought the structure of his theory yet discarded many of its particular uses...
...Jim Beekman...
...On the quite different question of those dying as a result of Soviet internal actions, he gives a figure of 22-23 million in the period 1918-53...
...Could it be that by then the authorities, sensitized to the international implications of the suppression of Taiwanese, will have softened their policies toward them...
...Where once it was Mom, now it was Karl, Claude or whoever did her thinking...
...She became a good Communist as she had been a good girl because, like Jenny of the song, she couldn't make up her mind...
...Mineola, N. Y. Alan L. Benosky Liberal Muddle Walter Goodman's "Reversions and Revisions" (NL, February 25) shows once again the vulnerability of the liberal mind: There are times when all the alternatives seem equally ridiculous, and the only honest response to a world gone mad is a rhetorical question or an ironic exclamation...
...Davis' account fails to justify, or even explain, her life with the comrades...
...I apologize to Robert Conquest for my erroneous reference to him, and to Roy Medvedev for my confusing account of his estimates...
...I also interviewed Taiwan officials and requested, but did not obtain, an interview with a government specialist on Taiwanese affairs...
...Not so...
...Seldom have you published anything that moved me as much as Hope Hale Davis' "Looking Back at My Years in the Party" in the February 11 issue...
...Childhood obedience and strict moral training are not routes to Communism, or else most of us would be Communists today...
...New York City Snowden J. Herrick A persistent human problem is the reluctance to admit obvious error...
...We find consolation in explaining our mistakes as being a consequence of extenuating circumstances over which we had no control...
...The initial reports that did get out to the Western press struck me as fragmentary, one-sided tidbits...
...The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...It is a naturally endowed trait that develops very early, if it is to develop at all...
...Children can and do think for themselves...
...London Robert Conquest Dennis H. Wrong replies: Robert Conquest is, I'm afraid, entirely correct about my errors...
...Thus, Hope Hale Davis excuses her activities in the Communist Party because of her "strict moral training as a child...
...Many, if not most, can discern right from wrong at an early age...
...As for Chiang's allusion to what "other journalists" wrote, I can only stress that Taiwan authorities have gone to great lengths to rebut all reports that they regard as critical...
...The Maksudov-Medvedev figure of 22-23 million deaths is, of course, ridiculously low if mistaken to include Soviet deaths in World War II plus deaths from the forced collectivization and repression...
...To relate the preoccupations of 19th-century female and male writers would, apparently, compromise the "female imagination," showing that certain fears and hopes can be shared by the sexes...
...The authors' analysis of individual works is skewed by their hypothesis...
...Nor does Medvedev say I do??or indeed mention me at all in this context...
...I was right about the reference to Solzhenitsyn, but mistakenly attributed Jerry F. Hough's criticism of some of Conquest's estimates to Medvedev (although I brought up Hough in order to reject Misestimates as much too low on the basis of Medvedev's figures...
...But children are not necessarily helpless victims of adult fantasies...
...Tampa, Fla...
...The only extenuating circumstance I can plead (apart from the fact that I am not a Sovietologist) is that I wrote the review on very short notice to meet the deadline for The New Leader's Christmas Book Issue...
...Mrs...
...In the second sentence of mine partially quoted by Conquest, I carelessly wrote "war"??lowercase??with the intention of referring to deaths in the Civil War of 1918-21, but the editors, quite understandably, assumed I meant World War II and capitalized the word...
...These may be proportionate to our confusion, but if one is not careful, indulging a genuinely perplexed state of mind can soon lead to a cynical ferreting for the other side of the case...
...Idonot...
...this last piece had 21 of the former and seven of the latter...
...What was there in her "moral training" that impelled her to accept the values and discipline of a monstrous tyranny whose atrocities were already well publicized...
...Thus it was altogether fitting that Te-cheng Chiang, director of the Coordination Council for North American Affairs??through which Taiwan and the U.S...
Vol. 63 • March 1980 • No. 5
