Dear Editor
Dear Editor Solidarity In his discussion of Eastern Europe's reaction to the events in Poland ("Sealing Off Solidarity," NL, November 2), Donald R. Shanor hit upon an important aspect of Western...
...Commenting on a scene in which von Rezzori portrays a young man unwittingly participating in a Viennese crowd's celebration of the Anschluss...
...Fort Lee, N J. Stephen Housman Psychohistory Joseph E. lllick's review of Fawn Brodie'sfffcAartf Nixon: The Shaping of His Character ("Analyzing Our 37th President," NL...
...This was the case with Silvio F. Senigallia's discussion of Gregor von Rezzori's novel...
...We seem to be a nation under the influence of an emotional anesthesia...
...Strike Force and Today's FBI were especially obnoxious, just as Kitman said they would be...
...Still, Brodie's conclusion, cited by Illick, hardly seems to require the use of psychoanalysis: "Nixon certainly knew right from wrong, or at least legal from illegal and truth from falsehood...
...commonsense account...
...But he didn't care...
...New York City E. James Carlson Sadat Shortly after the assassination of President Sadat, I was walking the streets of my town...
...One person yawned, another even laughed...
...It allows for people's unconsciousness of their actions' consequences, yet it does not let them of f the hook, a la such old bromides as, "In a larger sense aren't we all guilty...
...A recent illness left me plenty of time to watch TV, though, and I have to confess that Kitman's descriptions were quite accurate...
...Los Angeles Dwayne McConnell On Target Every now and then i come across a review that tosses off a spark far more interesting than the book being examined...
...New York City William Haktman Quoting Stalin In his excellent review of Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko's The Time of Stalin ("Bolshevik Legacy," NL, Octobers), Maurice Friedberg cites Stalin's gruesome observation on the subject of boots and offers it as a candidate for Bartlett's Familiar Quotations...
...Senigallia observes: "In this revealing scene, Gregor's perplexity is unmixed with horror, and we begin to get a notion of the guiltless yet sinister complicity he shared with the millions who were equally blind to the evil around them...
...A newspaper columnist could have said as much, and no doubt many of them did...
...Perhaps that is a sign of how deeply Freudian categories have permeated our thinking...
...More care ought to be taken to make clear that Poland's problems are the fault of a corrupt, entrenched government, and not the free trade union movement...
...Using psychohistory, to this layman at least, seems a rather laborious way of arriving at the obvious...
...It would indeed make a valuable addition to the few choice sayings from the Georgian despot already in Barllett's, including "You can't make a revolution with silk gloves," and "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic...
...One scene remains vividly in my mind: A television set in a store window was showing pictures of the assassination, yet the reaction of the people who stopped to watch was-incredibly!-one of total apathy...
...Dallas Michael Dann Some Season When t read Marvin Kitman's roundup of the coming television season ("Wasteland Previews," NL October 5), I assumed that he was exaggerating, that the violence he was deploring couldn't be so explicit and excessive...
...Guiltless yet sinister complicity" is, I think, an excellent way to describe the position of many who collaborate with evils like Nazism...
...He had no emotional involvement in the truth...
...The murder of a peacemaker and the hatred around the world almost seemed to pale in significance compared to this ugly reality...
...Western reporters, both in print and on television, emphasize the economic chaos in Poland because it is newsworthy, not realizing that this stress on the negative plays right into the hands of the Communist governments anxious to turn people away from large-scale dissidence...
...Dear Editor Solidarity In his discussion of Eastern Europe's reaction to the events in Poland ("Sealing Off Solidarity," NL, November 2), Donald R. Shanor hit upon an important aspect of Western coverage...
...New York City Stuart Matthews...
...November 16) was interesting, but it didn't tell me anything that would show how a "psychohistorical" explanation differs from a The New Leaker welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...Memoirs of an Anti-Semite ("A Befuddled Aristocrat," NL, October 5...
Vol. 64 • November 1981 • No. 21
