Letters
LETTERS Fascism John Judis's article, "Can Reagan Keep the Promise of Liberalism?" (January issue), is a fine analysis of contemporary American liberalism. But two of the causal connections...
...Others, however, may be more interested in knowing who was "deep throat," and the reason he was saying such nasty things about Richard Nixon...
...The future will belong very much to those in touch with the sensory world...
...Government are called feminists...
...Will Riker Cincinnatus, New York Off hey Mark V. Markovin says ("Letters," February issue) that my memory erred when I wrote ("Prague Winter," January issue) that "the last free election" in Czechoslovakia occurred in 1948...
...When liberal government programs fail, citizens believe that such failures are inherent in all non-market approaches—that is, in socialism...
...Our greatest fear is that we will be out-resourced before things are settled...
...But it's not apocryphal that the American medical establishment, depending too much on artificial devices, is failing to train doctors to rely on their senses as a sound basis for diagnosing—to the detriment of us patients...
...The institutions we are suing are powerful and seem to have endless resources...
...Jeffrey Stein Washington, D.C...
...Mark C. Maniak New York, New York Numbers As a computer programmer, I found your articles on computers and privacy (November issue) most interesting...
...Facing them without The Progressive would be almost impossible...
...During interrogations, a soldier hit my head with his rifle if I moved at all...
...Jensen's suggestion that the Fourth Amendment—and not the First—be utilized as a press shield is suspect for reasons that are apparent to anyone familiar with constitutional law...
...His successor might well understand the nuclear poker game a little better, but his most probable intervention in a changing Latin America is likely to escalate into a growing confrontation involving ten times the population and a hundred times the land area of Vietnam...
...I challenge the press and the public to do the same for El Salvador...
...Lest we forget...
...But these things are harmless— merely an exercise in freedom of speech...
...psychology would be obvious...
...He never quite understood the poker game and thus risked the calling of the cards...
...It is important that we see this through to establish the reproductive rights of consumers and our professional rights to practice our licensed trade...
...I share many of the experiences that some of the Ameri-" cans are reported to have had in Iran...
...Government and the press with regard to the massacres now taking place in El Salvador and the disappearance of 15,000 people in Argentina and 2,500 in Chile...
...Free press Both as a citizen and as an attorney who has looked forward each month to the arrival of The Progressive, I find I must take exception to Dwight Jensen's article on the vulnerability of the press to police searches ("Should Newsrooms Be Immune from Police Search?," February issue...
...Without a democratic-socialist alternative, fascism appears to the people as the only choice...
...Facing the 1980s without John is going to be tough and scary...
...Those who are sensitive to the rights of minority defendants to be tried by unbiased juries under the Fourteenth Amendment, and to the rights of indigent defendants to be provided free counsel under the Sixth Amendment, should be no less sensitive to the rights of all defendants to subpoena witnesses to testify in their behalf...
...He asserts that since a Fourth Amendment approach would permit "the press [to] offer magistrates plenty of reasons for declaring searches of newsrooms to be unreasonable," magistrates could...
...Robert H. Haas Landover, Maryland Schizophrenia Two articles, "Prague Winter," by Milton Mayer, and "Behind the Polish Revolt," by Don Shanahan, in your January issue, are samples of your schizophrenia...
...Sure, it has a few off-color clubs and publishes that magazine (plus one for gays, though advertised for women...
...Those who condemn one and remain silent about the other are hypocrites...
...A legal fund has been established to help defray the expense of litigation in our case...
...That you had nothing to say about his passing is inexcusable...
...intelligence officer shortly before the assassination...
...It's best to rehearse the drama before we blunder anew upon the stage of history...
...Women within the U.S...
...On the same day, reading your plea for The Progressive's Membership Fund has frightened me...
...Summers emphatically states, and I did not allege anything to the contrary, that "there is no evidence that the 'retired officer' Phillips had any part in a conspiracy to murder the President...
...Here's my $10 offered in memory of John Lennon, and may the world be as one...
...Anyone who would like to contribute should send donations to: Consumer Coalition for Health "Nurse-Midwifery Project" 2007 Linden Avenue Nashville, Tennessee 37212...
...Edward Rae Washington, D.C...
...And so your February issue arrives and, lo and behold, there is not one word on the death of John Lennon...
...Perhaps you can also get the AT&T Communications Award...
...Not one word...
...Soon, I think, even the Playboy Foundation will be called feminist...
...Some, for example, may be satisfied with the knowledge that a recent and otherwise saintly President resigned his office when the House Judiciary Committee discovered to its shock that he had dissembled (even lied) while attempting to protect a group of minor employes charged with burglary...
...Is it because of the coffee plantations in El Salvador, or the American-owned copper mines in Chile...
...I fear the future will not be ours...
...intelligence officer met with Oswald shortly before the crime, and subsequently incited a Cuban contact to help fabricate a false story about an Oswald link with Cuban diplomats...
...Finally, the preservation of the anonymity of sources by reporters necessarily prevents the reader from assessing the credibility of those sources, and therefore the credibility of the story...
...And the impact of that on contemporary U.S...
...I, too, was interrogated for hours...
...I have had no luck in finding out the legal status of this question, and would like to hear from people who have had experience with the problem...
...But like so many liberals and radicals today, you fail to see that vilification of all things Soviet incites the reaction and militarization that you so ardently oppose in this country...
...I was beaten and kicked by guards...
...Congratulations on getting the Hugh ?. Hefner First Amendment Award...
...uses the term "bleeding heart liberals...
...Women climbing the corporate ladder can be feminists...
...What I have done—in my book...
...The obstetrician has decided to leave the state in order to practice without harassment...
...They're not going to rob me of another voice...
...It refers to me in connection with the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the allegation that Lee Harvey Oswald was in contact with a U.S...
...That, clearly, must be exhaustively investigated...
...And the General Electric Investigative Journalism Award...
...Summers does not shoot down the House Committee's suspicion of Phillips's credibility on key matters, and notes sensibly, "The allegation is that a U.S...
...I cannot understand the selective blindness of the U.S...
...On the other hand...
...Milton Mayer Carmel, California Midwifery I was pleased to see Judith Randal's article, "The Patient Woman," in your December issue...
...No mention of shock, sorrow, anger, or rage...
...The article is inaccurate in several respects: I have never publicly speculated that one-time CIA officer David Phillips met with Oswald, nor have I argued that Phillips was probably the mysterious "Bishop" alleged to have met with Oswald...
...Melvin E. Levison Brooklyn, New York Playboy The word "feminist" has lost much of its strength over the years...
...But two of the causal connections between liberalism and fascism were left unclear...
...Clearly, liberal economics ultimately fail and produce a social crisis conducive to fascism...
...Perhaps you are leaning backwards in order to convince your readers of your respectability when you criticize American society and policy...
...After all, hasn't it contributed to feminist causes...
...It may be aprocryphal that, at the MGM Grand Hotel fire, a player an hour before the blaze was trying but failing to alert people to the presence of smoke...
...Andy Lifson Madison, Wisconsin Sitting here reading the Rolling Stone commemorative issue on John Lennon has made me laugh and cry...
...Daniel Conway Detroit, Michigan Hostages I am writing as a former hostage...
...Deprive the senses and you impair the quality of thinking...
...has depressed me, angered me, and filled me with Lennon's spirit...
...The whole matter of "Bishop" and Phillips is extraordinarily tricky, as the author goes to great lengths to point out in his fine book...
...Adam Schesch Madison, Wisconsin Editor's Note: Adam Schesch described his experiences in Chile in the February 1974 issue of The Progressive...
...Why is there a double standard on repression...
...Like the abortion controversy, the issue is by no means one which is either black or white...
...It seems reasonable to me that I should have a voice in determining whether my Social Security number is used for university identification...
...I was referring to the 1946 election—May 26, to be precise—in which the avowedly Marxist parties polled an absolute majority of the party vote...
...citizens were victims of the Chilean military junta—a close ally of the United States, which overthrew a democratically elected government in 1973...
...Somehow, it doesn't improve when Day uses it...
...Ed Taylor Chicago, Illinois Nuclear poker Michael T. Klare's article, "An Army in Search of a War" (February issue), was excellent...
...Every time some little old bigot writes a letter to his "Dear Editor" you will usually find somewhere in it a reference to his main enemy, "you so and so, bleedin' heart liberal...
...Susan Johnson Sizemore Nashville, Tennessee The senses Your comment, "The Fire Next Time" (January issue), provides an oblique but only too incisive look into our wav of life...
...Even men are called feminists...
...After all, AT&T donates to many good causes...
...There's also a White House Award...
...A black defendant in North Carolina facing the death penalty is unlikely to be impressed by a newspaper's reliance on repor-torial "privilege" if the result is the denial of his right to call a witness whose testimony could save his life...
...What is not so clear in the article is the subtle way in which failing liberalism gives both socialism and democracy bad names and thus primes the people for fascism...
...No opportunity is or would be afforded the press or its representatives to present reasons, however persuasive, for a judicial officer to decline a warrant application...
...I totally condemn any mistreatment of my fellow Americans in Iran...
...I was imprisoned with three other Americans, two of whom were shot to death...
...We will be taking this issue to court for settlement...
...But only two days before he left office, President Jimmy Carter rewarded the El Salvadoran junta by giving it $5 million in military aid...
...We four U.S...
...Nothing...
...I am a student at the University of Delaware, where student ID numbers and Social Security numbers are one and the same thing...
...It's rather telling that the RDF, like the neutron bomb, was a brainchild of Jimmy Carter, the pious illiterate who was always Jimmying the threshold of nuclear war...
...Nurse-Midwifery Associates, the first independent midwifery practice in Tennessee, was forced to close as of January 1. We have been refused access to three area hospitals, and State Volunteer Mutual (a physician-owned malpractice insurance company) refused to renew the malpractice insurance coverage of our sponsoring obstetrician...
...Anthony Summers London, England The author replies: Anthony Summers's meticulous book examines in depth the efforts of the House Assassinations Committee to establish the true identity of the mysterious "Maurice Bishop," and in doing so lends credence to "the feeling," as Summers puts it, "that somebody in the CIA, or who was formerly in the CIA, is playing chess with the Kennedy inquiry...
...The two camps need not be mutually exclusive...
...Ian Wells College of Marine Studies University of Delaware Newark, Delaware 19711 Bleeding hearts In an otherwise useful article ("Rebellion in the Rockies," February issue), Samuel H. Day Jr...
...Lennon changed the world more dramatically—with a guitar and a pen—than most politicians do in a lifetime of rhetoric and slogans...
...The Rapid Deployment Force (RDF) seems designed to offer nothing but convenient hostages...
...Furthermore, I was disappointed to note that Jensen's commentary was apparently premised on the belief that the immunity of the communications media from judicial or judicially enforced intrusions should on all occasions be inviolate...
...Mass media use "feminist" left and right (well, almost...
...The ancients tell us that nothing is in the intellect that is not first in the senses...
...deny warrants or . . . attach conditions to them that would protect the press—if the press would ask the magistrates to do so...
...GE, you know, brings good things to life...
...They would be appropriate in such journals as Commentary and National Review, but they clash with the spirit of your reporting outside the Soviet bloc...
...It wasn't my memory, but my (or somebody's) typewriter finger that erred...
...This ignores the simple and immutable fact that warrants are issued on the basis of ex parte applications by prosecutors and police officers...
...I think we had best ready ourselves for a replay of the Vietnam script...
...Conspiracy, published last year by McGraw-Hill—is report the allegations about "Bishop" and the inquiry into those allegations by the Congressional Select Committee on Assassinations...
...If a radical world view is to work, one must have a political and an aesthetic consciousness...
...The educational establishment is just as bad: Schooling shuts out the senses, impoverishing the quality of learning and the quality of the lives we live...
...Not long ago, four American women, three of them nuns, were raped and then brutally murdered by the El Salva-doran military dictatorship...
...I am one of the nurse-midwives mentioned therein...
...Roy G. Kidwell El Dorado, Arkansas Denial 1 write with reference to the first item in the "Briefing" column accompanying "The Word from Washington" (January issue...
...On the other hand, the cynical and corrupt nature of bourgeois democracy, the only democracy we have known, makes the people hostile to all democratic forms of government...
...lohn Lennon Surely, a debilitating aspect of current radicalism is the unfortunate separation of aesthetic and political dissent...
...Bourgeois democracy, the ideal liberal form of government, then becomes reactionary, throws off its pretensions as a representative government (the Reagan election), and takes the working class to the cleaners...
Vol. 45 • March 1981 • No. 3
