THE PEOPLE'S FORUM
THE PEOPLE'S FORUM Standpat China Policy Dear Sirs: I like the positive tone of your recent editorials on our standpat China policy. The first step, as you say, is to lift our self-defeating...
...Even if it had been ineffective in alleviating the problem to any great extent, the gesture would have demonstrated a charitable attitude...
...Drouth has caused food shortages, as it has for centuries...
...America has had surplus food that could have been offered to help the Chinese...
...Evelyn Read Rosemont, Pennsylvania Food and Birth Control Dear Sirs: After reading Senator George McGov-em's informed and eloquent "The Most Important War" in your December issue, the intelligent reader must ask himself, "Why no mention of birth control...
...Theoretically and technically, of course, production could increase enough to feed at least ten billion people before the end of the century...
...The first step, as you say, is to lift our self-defeating ban on trade and travel with China...
...a trial subscription confirmed my interest...
...Independence would not only bring great material benefits to Puerto Ricans and allow them to be masters in their own house, but it would do much towards re-establishing the confidence of the peoples of the world, and especially the peoples of Latin America, in the United States as a country which does not have any political or economic designs over any other country...
...Your article on Adlai Stevenson was so perceptive—made me wish even more that I had voted Democratic in his time, as I did in 1964 for Mr...
...The library is unique in subject matter and in conception...
...Johnson, whose foreign policy now scares me almost as much as Mr...
...The Rosenberg-Sobell case has troubled the conscience of our country and the world for many years...
...Puerto Rico had acquired self-government just at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, when it was invaded and subjected to military rule by the United States...
...Today such reputable publications as Newsweek, Chicago Daily News, Washington Evening Star, Cleveland Plain Dealer, and many others are calling for a re-examination of this case...
...The problems faced by the Chinese have been immense...
...Mrs...
...conferences on disarmament or Vietnam...
...More modest in our building and financing than in our purpose, we plan to serve individuals and groups throughout the nation, by mail and in person...
...I look forward to each issue of The Progressive...
...Both the United States and China today are absorbing the shocks of a crucial history lesson the hard way...
...I do enjoy him, and his "July: The Green Achievement" was a fine piece of writing...
...P. W. Williamson Ipswich, Massachusetts Happy Discovery Dear Sirs: Perhaps you will be interested to know that a good Republican (albeit a liberal one) of some thirty-five years has become an enthusiastic admirer of your magazine...
...Ours is a non-profit project...
...We welcome collections of pamphlets, clippings, reports, articles, briefs, and other materials on civil liberties cases...
...Surely if our opinions and judgments about China are to have any validity, they must be based on reality and truth...
...It certainly is understandable if we are intensely disliked by China...
...Anyway, I am happy to have discovered The Progressive...
...Bedil American Library Meerut 17, India Enjoys Borland Now Dear Sirs: Just about a year ago, I wrote (and you published) a letter chastising Hal Borland for wandering from his subject into what seemed to me a faintly ridiculing approach to the problem of poverty...
...Indeed, the time may be near at hand when our newsmen and scholars as well as our scientists may gradually be able to gain entry and help overcome our corrosive backlog of ignorance and misinformation...
...In short, it is becoming more and more evident that famines, riots, revolutions, and diseases associated with malnourishment will certainly blight the world community unless we greatly increase the food supply and effectually limit human reproduction...
...Congress are applied to Puerto Rico although the Puerto Rican people have no voting representation in that Congress...
...As long as the United States remains in military occupation of a Chinese province —namely, Taiwan—Peking can hardly be expected to engage in substantive talks with Washington...
...Morton Sobell New York, New York Puerto Rican Independence Dear Sirs: The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico has every right to become an independent nation...
...The cases raise questions ranging from academic freedom to wiretapping...
...Mrs...
...To avert this ultimate conflict and move towards peace in the Far East, our geopolitical strategy must finally overcome the counter-productive wretchedness of our military means...
...Banks and business, too, will require a good four or five years to train personnel to compete in the expanding market...
...Presently, our escalation of the Vietnam war is digging a yawning chasm into which the United States and China are, willy nilly, being sucked towards a fatal confrontation...
...Not only has our government cut off all direct contact between American and Chinese people, and "managed" news concerning China, but pro-Chiang propaganda has been planted in the American press by agents of the regime of Chiang Kai-shek...
...Concomitantly, until accorded full Great Power status, now denied exclusively by the United States, China is not likely to welcome any back-door bids to U.N...
...Attorney General Nicholas de B. Katzenbach, Justice Department, Washington, D.C., urging that he support our petition for a hearing...
...It contains briefs, memos, reports, articles, and non-legal materials on almost 5,000 cases, most of them filed since 1950...
...His article, read with a slight slant from another direction, sounds remarkably like a Birch Society argument...
...Leonard S. Schlafer Roosevelt, Puerto Rico Ignorance about China Dear Sirs: Two books on China which every thinking American ought to read are A Curtain of Ignorance by Felix Greene (an Englishman who has lived in America most of his life), and The Other Side of the River: Red China Today, by Edgar Snow (an American...
...Martha B. Merk Portola Valley, California...
...and now I would be as little willing to part with The Progressive as with the Atlantic Monthly, which I have been reading since college days...
...Gerald Barnes Denver, Colorado Morton Sobell Hearing Dear Sirs: In this sixteenth year of imprisonment of my innocent husband, Morton Sobell, we are once more going into the Federal Court of New York City in an attempt to secure a hearing...
...Any additional information, and printed forms urging this, may be obtained from the Sobell Committee, 150 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011...
...Alderson Fry West Virginia University Morgantown, West Virginia Needs Reading Matter Dear Sirs: As the receipt of U.S...
...So I will not be renewing my subscription, not for a while, anyhow...
...After all, the Taiwan problem will not be resolved before peace comes to Vietnam— alas, many years hence...
...Puerto Ricans, with their traditions of political, racial, and industrial democracy, social justice, and respect for the rights and opinions of minorities, are capable of independence...
...I urgently request that all those who are concerned with this important question of justice write to U.S...
...The laws of the U.S...
...John O. Crane Institute of Current World Affairs New York, New York Fulbright's Sanity Dear Sirs: Senator Fulbright's article, "America in an Age of Revolution," in your February issue, is a breath of fresh and fearless air at a time when we need just that sort of ventilation more than perhaps we realize...
...The Senator's figures on India and South America indicate pretty clearly that increase in production is unlikely to keep pace with increase in reproduction...
...Goldwater's did...
...I am grateful to him for his stalwart championship of sanity, and to you for publishing the piece, and for your whole approach to the events of the world in which we find ourselves...
...But Senator McGovern knows better than most of us that psychological and political realities will inevitably prevent this maximum technical production of food and its just distribution among the world population as a whole...
...Her categorical stand remains: total destruction of all arms, nuclear and other...
...In spite of official statistics designed to create the impression of rapid economic growth, over the last thirty years about one million Puerto Ricans have been forced to emigrate to the United States, where they are subjected to the same prejudice, discrimination, and abuse suffered by the Negro people...
...And whatever success they are having (which both writers say is considerable), is achieved in spite of obstacles placed in their way by the United States...
...periodicals has gone down almost to nil for the last three months, the American Library in India requests readers of The Progressive to send reading material in good quantity to enable us to put the library on a permanent basis to achieve its aim and program...
...This is a unilateral act which the President should promptly make in the national interest...
...Walter Gustafson Glen Flora, Wisconsin Meiklejohn Library Dear Sirs: We proudly announce the opening of the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Library, a legal research center on civil liberties, civil rights, and due process of law, honoring Alexander Meiklejohn, First Amendment educator, who saw this project as part of his effort to teach that freedom is America's primary national resource...
...The so-called Commonwealth of Puerto Rico has only limited local powers...
...President Johnson has recently declared that five dollars invested in population control is equivalent to one hundred dollars invested in economic growth, and this seems a pretty credible estimate...
...A new book on the case, Invitation to An Inquest, published by Doubleday and written by Walter and Miriam Schneir, has revealed new documented evidence of forgery, perjury, and suppression of evidence on the part of the FBI and the Federal prosecutors, including Roy Cohn...
...Sidney Lens seems to be arguing that a few wilful men in Washington, for unknown or worse reasons, are deliberately ignoring any drives for peace in Vietnam, while nearly two million people are in disagreement with that policy...
...Any rumor from any paper becomes a fact...
...We welcome gifts of money, from $1 to $20,-000, to build and maintain the collection and to make the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Library known to those who have use for it...
...It has no minority problem, no religious problem, no racial problem...
...that the rate of production increase has typically lagged behind the rate of reproduction increase...
...Will China learn the high cost of exporting revolution before we come to realize that the export of counter-revolution is a costly boqmerang...
...One example from the January issue will suffice...
...But for the first time in China's history, death by starvation has been averted by government action, according to both Snow and Greene...
...The effect of all this is what Greene aptly calls "a curtain of ignorance"—an American public uninformed and misinformed about China...
...I started to write this letter last August after reading that outstanding issue, but I was sidetracked...
...The library has tax exempt status...
...First, acknowledge that Taiwan, in principle, is an integral part of China, as do both Chiang and Mao...
...Does the Senator endorse Pope Paul's United Nations position that increase of food is the only moral solution...
...Madhu S.L...
...Birth control, though comparatively neglected, is probably the more essential factor in winning this "most important war...
...You are beginning to sound too shrill...
...A single issue caught my eye more than two years ago...
...I haven't seen him do anything like it since, and in fairness I feel that I should comment on the positive side...
...Instead, we withhold aid and derive a fiendish satisfaction from exaggerated reports of their suffering...
...How to break the deadlock...
...Support China's entry into the United Nations on condition that Taiwan retains her seat in the Assembly on a basis similar to the Ukraine's and Byelorussia's...
...Ann Fagan Ginger Marshall W. Krause Ira M. Heyman Directors 1715 Francisco Street Berkeley, California Too Shrill Dear Sirs: For a year or so I have been less and less satisfied with The Progressive...
...To attempt to change China's status from that of an exploited, backward, agrarian country to an independent, modern, industrial nation in a matter of decades—not centuries, as development evolved in the West—is a gigantic undertaking...
Vol. 30 • April 1966 • No. 4
