Dear Editor
Dear Editor British Realities In "Dog Days in Britain" (NL, September 9), Norman Gelb tells us that the people of the United Kingdom "have of late proved themselves to be unreliable, undisciplined...
...Let's hope that Gorbachev and his colleagues do not enjoy a similar triumph...
...Perhaps, though, there was no such opportunity...
...Very few of Germany's Weimar governments were dominated by Socialists, and there was no comprehensive economic planning...
...In fact, foreigners visiting Britain have commented on the hostility toward them for many centuries...
...Khrushchev is said to have made a similar attempt to liberalize the ossified Soviet political establishment and to bury the hatchet with the West...
...But Alan quite mislead-ingly implies that British xenophobia is a relatively new phenomenon related to the country's recent economic difficulties and the national demoralization they have generated...
...I( does, however, imply that we cannot fairly blame the Social Democrats for creating the attitudes that eventually promoted Naziism...
...Cleveland Robert Strong Hayek George P. Brockway, following Friedrich Hayek, the famous Austrian economist, includes some questionable history in his column on "Strolling Down the Road to Serfdom" (NL, July 1-15...
...But no matter who or what may be at fault, the situation should now be intolerable to those in power...
...One could easily argue that xenophobia was the foundation of British greatness...
...Further, the newspapers of 1885 and, still more, of 1785 were far far more irrational in this and every other respect than the most lurid productions of Rupert Murdoch, dreadful though they may be...
...The West's stance, concludes Yanov, could be crucial [to the success of Gorbachev's undertaking]: 'It is essential that another opportunity of such historic magnitude not be lost.'" The first opportunity for better relations between the superpowers came, according to Daniels and Yanov, during the late 1950s, whenNikitaS...
...Rene Dubos once wrote, "I remember the sleepless nights and the gnawing pains from a duodenal ulcer as I tried to find a remunerative and useful place in the social order...
...Yet Daniels admits that "Khrushchev's considerable provocations," such as the Berlin Wall and the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba, are hard to fit into this interpretation of his behavior...
...Perhaps Khrushchev, like other Soviet bosses, wished to confuse and divide the West by acting aggressively while reassuring the world of his peaceful intentions...
...Indeed, men and women unable to join the ranks of wage earners might instead join groups hostile to society...
...Hayek believed (as Brockway puts it) that "the Socialist emphasis on comprehensive planning predisposed the German electorate in favor of grandiose schemes like Hitler's...
...This anguish, poignantly rendered by the late bacteriologist, illuminates the psychic state of many members of Great Britain's 13 per cent...
...It was these boards, and not the Socialists of Weimar, that "predisposed the German eleelorate in favor of grandiose schemes like Hitler's.'' This does not mean that Hitler derived much sup-porl from big business, an illusion that has been rather effectively refilled by Yale's Henry Turner...
...Mikhail S. Gorbachev and the rest of the current leadership are said to be shifting their "base [of support] from the 'little Stalins' of the provinces to the constituency of modern-minded managerial elements...
...Before Hitler's lime, that approach had been tried only during World War I, when all German industries were run by state boards full of leading industrialists—exactly what Leckachman fears...
...Chicago Peter Green National Liberation To Lucy Komisar's "Correspondents' Correspondence" piece on Bulgaria's crude effort to wipe out its substantial Turkish minority (NL, September 9) one might add the attempts of other Communist regimes to assimilate national minorities by force...
...Los Angeles Paul Smith Lost Opportunity Robert V. Daniels takes Alexander Yanov much too seriously in reviewing the Soviet exile's recent book, The Drama of the Soviet 1960s: A Lost Reform ("Reading Russia's Cycles," NL, September 9...
...All this is a paradoxical commentary indeed on oft-repeated Communist claims of support for wars of "national liberation,' Boston George Roberts...
...Dear Editor British Realities In "Dog Days in Britain" (NL, September 9), Norman Gelb tells us that the people of the United Kingdom "have of late proved themselves to be unreliable, undisciplined layabouts...
...One British Conservative has declared that the jobless are "quite unwilling to put in a day's work...
...Moreover, as Daniels also concedes, the West showed "genuine responsiveness" to Khrushchev's pacific overtures by negotiating the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, so if there really was an opportunity to change the course of Soviet-American relations at this time it is by no means clear that we simply fluffed it...
...Rumania has dealt similarly with its Hungarian minority...
...Brockway and Leckachman are right...
...But not Brockway and Hayek...
...Bronxville, New York Melvin L. Rogers Ray Alan's "Are Foreigners Human" (NL, September 9) was most amusing...
...Echoing Yanov, who currently teaches political science at the University of Michigan, Daniels writes that the Soviet Union "is now entering a new cycle" of reform...
...Citing Robert Lekachman as his authority, Brockway then suggests that planning committees "are more likely to be run by big business than by idealistic planners...
...Perhaps he is right...
...Long-term unemployment could make the weekly dole as appealing to its recipients as it is necessary...
...In Albania the authorities are even more ruthlessly suppressing the separate identity of the local Greek population and, according to Amnesty International, have filled the country's 12 concentration camps with Greek opponents of that policy...
...If so, he apparently succeeded...
Vol. 68 • October 1985 • No. 13
