Letters
LETTERS to the Editor The Power and the Glory Ihope the readers of The Progressive don't think all Episcopal priests agree with the Reverend William Grosvenor Pollard that nuclear energy is...
...It is refreshing to see any mention of religion in progressive magazines, and even more so when religion is discussed with some degree of sympathy and understanding...
...Reagan is quite obviously not Hitler...
...Most people understand that there are gaps in knowledge and that there is room for legitimate differences...
...Ayub K. Ommaya Bethesda, Maryland Please cancel my subscription...
...Ronald E. Mohar Syracuse, New York Ken Brown's article begins with the erroneous assertion that the Allies introduced terror bombing in World War II...
...Rebuilding the soil, if done soon enough and by enough people, might...
...The Left's age-old affliction has been the tendency to begin with the correct ideology and then go out to find the people...
...auto workers' plight...
...James David Besser Washington, D.C...
...You ask how society can express its outrage against crimes...
...Who forbade the bombing of German factories, and what were their motives...
...The UAW has noted that low per capita military spending by Japan means that each car they build carries a lower tax burden and hence can be produced at lower cost...
...The man chose to present an insanity defense...
...August issue) was an interesting and non-standard treatment of our side's moral purity during World War II...
...These are all right...
...LETTERS to the Editor The Power and the Glory Ihope the readers of The Progressive don't think all Episcopal priests agree with the Reverend William Grosvenor Pollard that nuclear energy is "intended by God" to play a "destined and essential role in the future course of humanity" (No Comment, September issue...
...To ground political and moral judgments in general principles such as an unqualified opposition to armed aggression is surely common to all intelligent political discourse...
...Those who compare Reagan to Hitler are obviously not referring to the former's present policies, but to their potential...
...This so-called liberation movement could very easily, upon assuming power, become another reactionary Arab enslavement cabal...
...So are the principles of surgery, architecture, pathology, engineering, and agriculture different from those of law...
...Our farm and forest soils are almost played out in this country...
...This can include punishment (not retribution), if it fulfills some positive purpose besides revenge...
...We have to believe— despite all evidence—that we would not "let it happen again...
...Might The Progressive be cringing under the subscription-cancelling lash of General Sharon's American groupies...
...More than 100 million Americans consider religion an important part of their lives, but you would never know it by reading the above-mentioned magazines...
...This ideological bias is a major reason for the Left's continuing marginalization in American politics...
...I do not know to which group Peter Beckstrand belongs, but his letter does bring up one ele-' ment of the survivalist subculture I neglected to mention: a defensive hostility to urban dwellers and Easterners, an attitude as incompatible with progressive social change as caches of freeze-dried foods and hoards of gold...
...What will happen to the teeming urban masses and their organizers when the effects of that begin to be felt...
...Richard T. Vaneski Auburn, New York Unconscionable Burden Iquestion your categorical condemnation of the actions of the Israeli government in Lebanon (Comment, "An Unconscionable Burden," August issue...
...Except for Arthur Jones's disturbing commentary (O Washington), in which he affectionately compared Menachem Begin to John McEnroe, your silent and sanitized September issue demonstrated tacit acceptance of the carnage in West Beirut...
...A therapeutic concept of justice does not do away with the concept of responsibility...
...Vaner Tangborn Guthrie, Minnesota Istill find it hard to accept that this man who "hates controversy" and tends to "define evil in the world as the debaucheries and excesses of individual people" has suddenly begun to denounce nuclear weaponry because of "an enlargement of vision" experienced after excursions to Europe in the throes of post-Watergate blues...
...But when Israel fights back, you call it aggression...
...He describes his anger upon seeing Richard Nixon, and now Ronald Reagan, equated with Hitler...
...The motives were, of course, purely financial...
...I felt, however, that the treatment was incomplete...
...Virtually the only times religion is mentioned is when the Christian Right has perpetrated another outrage in the name of Christ...
...Barry Preisler Albany, California The Hitler Equation Erwin Knoll nicely depicts the halting indignation an American leftist may feel when confronted by derision abroad ("The Hitler Equation," Editor's Memo, August issue...
...This is especially so in cases of value judgments...
...the Republicans are quite obviously not the Nazis...
...This is hardly an attack on low Japanese military spending but, rather, part of an argument that runs like this: If the United States abandoned the monetarism that overvalues the dollar, if it had a national health system and an adequate public pension system, and if it spent less on the military, domestic cars would be more competitive...
...The dilemma of The Progressive, I believe, is that it chose to judge the Israeli actions "as we would similar actions by any other nation...
...the auto content bill is not the Corn Laws...
...I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions...
...Experts in those areas of human endeavor are, nevertheless, called to give expert testimony, and they often give differing opinions...
...Marine Corps Commandant: "I spent thirty-three years in the Marines, most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers...
...Climbing aboard the blossoming nuclear-freeze bandwagon to provide a Protestant figure for association with—if not leadership for—the movement in this country would give Billy Graham the market he needs to maintain his previous popularity, and appears to me to be a more likely context for his new-found courage...
...While I am inclined to agree with Knoll's general perspective on the trivialization of history, I think that in this case he misses the point...
...I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1901-1912.1 helped make Mexico and especially Tam-pico safe for American oil interests in 1914.1 brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916.1 helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City [Bank] boys to collect revenue in...
...F. Watts Pleasantville, New York Thank you for Frye Gail-lard's article on Billy Graham's changing Christian faith...
...Thorn Richardson Seattle, Washington emphatically agree with the message in Erwin Knoll's August Memo...
...For too long, Graham has served as a kind of court jester for the Establishment—as an apologist for the Cold War, for neglect of hunger and poverty, for abuse of power in high office...
...And the domestic content bill is an attack on capital, specifically on its right to locate wherever its holders desire, regardless of social costs...
...There may be lessons we can draw, living as we do in the shadow of the "most monstrous crimes against humanity...
...I had a swell racket...
...That aside, the characterization of the invasion of Lebanon as an attempt to "impose a 'final solution' "—with all its intended irony—is to me offensive, and suffers from all the shortcomings Knoll outlines...
...Susan Benda Washington, D.C...
...I shall be doing my best to encourage others to subscribe...
...Of course the principles of psychiatry are different from those of law...
...Brown would do well to spend about six years studying the history of World War II in detail before attempting to sustain the thesis that the Allies invented terror bombing...
...All of this shows me how badly out of touch the Left is with the people, particularly the poor people, for whom it presumes to speak...
...In time, I hope, Graham will speak more to the issues of the day in straightforward terms, when he has come to realize that faith, if it is real, does have something to say about social injustice, poverty, and the arms race...
...In view of Erwin Knoll's August Memo, it is quite evident that he should turn over his editorship to a more competent person or seek psychiatric help...
...I was disappointed and offended to discover, therefore, that in the Comment section four pages following, this equation reappeared...
...Criticism of Israel's "defensive" move into Lebanon—a full-scale military onslaught with the most efficient and destructive weapons that American arms manufacturers have been able to create—will be denounced as anti-Semitic and support for the terrorist activities of the PLO...
...Ronald Pajari Saint Paul, Minnesota Billy Graham's mission to Moscow was an attempt to help avoid a nuclear holocaust...
...It is simply irresponsible to equate the invasion of Lebanon with the Nazis' methodical program of rounding up and slaughtering millions of unarmed Jews, gypsies, political activists, and other "undesirables...
...But good grass-roots organizing begins where the people are, not with the organizers' own "correct" agenda...
...As to the main point of Besser's essay, I certainly agree that we should not live as if the Bomb had already dropped...
...Mental illness is a psychiatric matter...
...Ben Maser Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Iam writing to cancel my subscription...
...All the organizing and "social activism" in the world is not going to change that...
...Is an adult, then, who has the mind and understanding of a three-year-old child to be held criminally accountable for his conduct simply because his body may be thirty years old...
...The insanity defense in our legal system arises from the same legal principles that say we do not execute young children and animals for crimes (as was done at one time...
...When I was a young priest, I fell for Pollard's line and gave to his fund to build a "peaceful" nuclear reactor in Japan...
...Finally, there is a matter of accuracy...
...The emotional-retributive answer is: By organizing a lynch mob, either an old-fashioned necktie party or a trial dominated by people's fear of crime and their belief that it's better to be safe (send the guy to prison) than sorry...
...In a court, it is the law that determines whether mental illness constitutes insanity...
...This practice is manipulative, irresponsible, and, as the editor notes, a form of rhetorical excess which trivializes the Nazi phenomenon...
...That has earned it the frantic opposition of Ronald Reagan, the National Association of Manufacturers, General Motors, and everyone else on the Right...
...The article shows how disconnected 95 per cent of our society has become from the soil community which sustains it...
...Retributive justice is just a code word for revenge...
...Hyperbole is no substitute for serious argument...
...Eric R. Siegel Berkeley, California Ken Brown seems to forget that some 3,745 V-2 rockets were fired on England by the Nazi government during World War II, not to mention the V-l buzz bombs and air attacks by bombers...
...On the other hand, the Nazi holocaust, for all its unimaginable horror, was not a nuclear holocaust...
...they also prolonged the war and condemned many of their own soldiers to needless death...
...But to trivialize the fear of "doomsday" as a "low-grade infection" is not even close to being important...
...No one seriously suggests excluding engineers from courtrooms, even if they do contradict each other, and few accuse them of selling out to the highest bidder...
...The survivalists are best ignored (they prefer it that way anyway), and the opportunists are usually victims of their own paranoia and shallowness...
...If you want to blame someone for the circus-trial Hinckley had, blame the news media and the people who control the news media, who are fanning the flames of the public's fears of crime, Russia, communism, subversion, liberalism, and human rights advocates to prepare the way for the fascism they will need to keep this country under their control in the bad times coming...
...One problem is the relationship between psychosis or other mental disorder, insanity, and responsibility...
...Dan Luria UAW Research Department Detroit, Michigan Billy Graham's Conversion As one who has long been critical of Billy Graham— for vastly oversimplifying and privatizing the Gospel—I was most pleased by Frye Gail-lard's article ("The Conversion of Billy Graham," August issue...
...For what it is worth, you have gained my lasting respect and admiration...
...Starvation by the carload, that's what...
...But the next time you pop your frozen pizza in the oven, think about that "nice little Vermont homestead," because you may have to buy some vegetables from it some day...
...So why that evil-looking caricature of Graham on your cover...
...As a subscriber more versed in psychiatry than politics, I hope this article does not reflect the depth of thinking generally presented in your pages...
...Nor does local content "blame Japanese workers for the U.S...
...Your anti-Israel bias is too much for me...
...In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism...
...This comparison, far from trivializing the Nazi experience, may be our only way to bring the potential of the Reagan experience into focus...
...don't you believe the jury should have all the facts it could get to determine what his mental state was at the time of the crime...
...Barbara Tuchman claims (in Stillwell and the American Experience in China) that the Japanese introduced the practice during their conquest of China in the late 1930s...
...As far as I can tell, many if not most "liberal" magazines chose to remain silent...
...I hope he has now learned to be wary of those who wield power...
...It was passing strange that he was greeted with an avalanche of criticism for trying to do what we all should be doing...
...Insanity is a legal determination...
...How can anyone observe the first year and one half of the present Administration and not come to the conclusion that Ronald Reagan is the most Hitler-like tyrant in American history...
...This has been the tendency in those quarters of the Left which are heavily populated by college professors and articulate middle-class radicals who write so frequently in the progressive media...
...By leaving them intact and bombing cities instead, the Allies not only killed thousands of innocent civilians...
...everybody is a free-lance writer these days), be socially active, by all means...
...Patrick Foley Winters, California Spiteful Protectionism As one who thought I shared certain basic political values with The Progressive, I was shocked at the naivete and confusion evidenced in your comments attacking the UAW's domestic auto content initiative ("Sanctions and Misplaced Spite," August issue...
...Community organizations are rarely mentioned in progressive magazines...
...In China in 19271 helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested...
...Out of respect for the Palestinian and Lebanese victims of this latest Israeli outrage, I certainly hope not...
...And the idea that the invasion will resolve the Palestinian issue seems to be tragically shortsighted, to say the least...
...Gaillard's article included the observation that the mainline press is "customarily indifferent to matters of religion...
...There will always be some need for their testimony as long as such issues as whether someone intended to do something or whether someone was mentally competent to consent to something are part of our law...
...Excesses of guilt are unnecessary...
...they are not "responsible...
...Justify your viewpoint or I will become one of the readers who will prove your assertion that what you said will cost you many subscribers...
...You may be surprised where the mass workers' parties of France and Italy and the Benn wing of the British Labor Party stand...
...And part of "where the people are" is their churches...
...Robert Weller Savanna, Illinois...
...Joseph Pollock Pennsauken, New Jersey As Beirut burned at the savage hands of the Israeli invaders, I was outraged to find almost no condemnation of the invasion of Lebanon in your September issue...
...Shirley DeWine Berwyn, Illinois The Last Just War Ken Brown's "The Last Just War: How Just Was It...
...The PLO has some convincing rhetoric about "self-determination of peoples," but its actions clearly tell us it would coerce and intimidate with brute force...
...He has often lent a kind of blessing to the iniquities of our time...
...If you are delirious with a high fever, or someone slips LSD in your coffee, are you still "responsible" for your actions...
...I couldn't agree more...
...The Progressive's editors would do well to study the class politics of managed auto trade and local content...
...parts and labor in the approximately 20 per cent of their total production that the major foreign-based auto multinationals sell here...
...Kim White handover, Maryland The Couch in the Courtroom Iam dismayed by your Comment, "The Couch in the Courtroom" (August issue...
...In such an atmosphere, which already exists in many communities, the procedural protections you praise become as meaningless as the guarantees of freedom of speech and freedom of the press in Article 125 of the Soviet constitution...
...I know enough Jews who are appalled by the destruction being wrought in Lebanon by a Jewish state to know that criticism of this type of action cannot be dismissed as anti-Semitism...
...Those teeming urban masses are the outward signs of America's soil parasitism...
...Arnold Gleisser Lyndhurst, Ohio Perhaps by now you have lost many friends and subscribers because of your comments on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon...
...As a child of Jewish parents who survived Nazi Germany, I have often been offended by the propensity (especially in left-liberal circles) to condemn by equation with the horrors of the Hitler era...
...The Japan Auto Workers Union, the federation of (company) unions at the eleven Japanese auto firms, supports the local content principle...
...Charlene Burton Klamath Falls, Oregon I am appalled that The Pro-I gressive has swallowed the right-wing propaganda on the insanity defense hook, line, and sinker...
...John A. Zunes Chapel Hill, North Carolina Doomsday Decade I ames David Besser's Last JWord ("The Doomsday "Decade," August issue) is another of those weary assertions in the urban media that those who have chosen to return to the challenges of the life of the soil are somehow not participating in the important issues of the day...
...Getting psychiatrists out of the courtroom is not as easy as you think...
...I might have given Al Capone a few hints...
...What seems to distinguish The Progressive in this instance is that it chose to use such principles to judge the actions of a "friend" of the United States, as indeed it seems to have judged the actions of the United States itself in the past...
...Bananas and Leathernecks After reading Charles M. Fair's "Adventures in the Banana Trade" (September issue), an excellent, chilling account of man's inhumanity to man, I was reminded of a quote by General Smedley Butler, the late U.S...
...I can only repeat that The Progressive has gained my lasting respect for the courage to say what it knew it had to say...
...It would also cap the foreign sourcing of major components by the U.S.-based companies...
...Far from being quota legislation, the bills—which have 240 Congressional sponsors and active Administration opposition—would require substantial U.S...
...Would progressives prefer that the PLO rule other Arabs by torture, murder, mayhem, vicious extortion, exploitation, and restriction of women...
...I am opposed to, and horrified by, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon...
...The Progressive editorial stumps me with its "class analysis": If plant closing legislation would be an attack on capitalists, why would local content be an attack on workers...
...Your Comment in the August issue doesn't mention PLO shelling of Israeli settlements, the PLO arms buildup, or PLO terrorist acts...
...It isn't likely to attract a new reader, say, in a public library, who might feel favorably disposed toward Graham and thus negative toward a magazine that portrays him on its cover as someone who is sinister and mean...
...The people who now refer to themselves as Palestinians (for hundreds of years they considered themselves Syrians) must be regarded as quite distinct from the group of terrorists that calls itself the Palestine Liberation Organization...
...I teach that to my students...
...Are the Arab residents of Israel and nearby territories really suffering such terrible indignities...
...It is the law that determines whether and how to hold people responsible for their behavior...
...As long as our rulers can encourage people to take revenge on those convicted (and sometimes only accused) of crimes, they can take the pressure off themselves for not doing anything to remedy the causes of crime...
...It is just this principle— that people should have the right to guide investment politically—that underlies The Progressive's, my, and the UAW's endorsement of plant closing legislation and a real public transit program...
...Your concern with protecting John Hinckley's privacy is particularly grotesque...
...Michael Sean McDonough Appleton, Wisconsin What would you do if you were an Israeli, bearing in mind that when you deal with the PLO you must take into account its murderous history, its unabashed use of deceit, its takeover of a neutral land, its use of the people of that land as human shields, its indiscriminate killing of its own kind, Christian or Moslem, and the fact that its fellow Arabs want no part of it as a permanent "guest...
...If the laws were more specific, there would be less controversy, but we would still be faced with differing ideas of justice in our society...
...This comparison, he claims, "trivializes" the Nazi experience and inaccurately describes the Reaganite New Right...
...I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street...
...So go ahead and organize, free-lance write (I do that myself...
...We have such examples of Moslem self-determination in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, and Pakistan...
...Apparently, The Progressive thinks it "right on" to constrain domestic investment but "spiteful protectionism" to do the same to foreign investment...
...If, as Churchill proclaimed, Western civilization itself was at stake, why was the destruction of these factories forbidden...
...This fear that history will repeat itself does not, however, justify the inaccurate labeling of policies we oppose as "Hitlerian...
...Exhorting everyone to some vague notion of "social activism" contributes nothing to the discussion...
...Clearly this has always been the prescription for a small readership...
...Responsibility is probably a philosophical decision...
...the size of the American business investment in a German factory determined the likelihood of its surviving an Allied bombing raid...
...What would your attitude be if a substantial number of sorely aggrieved American Indians took over a part of Canada and began to lob rockets, shells, and assorted Russian hardware across the border, refusing to recognize the right of the United States to exist...
...Yet churches have been the most consistent supporters of low-income organizing from the earliest days of Saul Alinsky...
...Free trade" is not a labor demand...
...it simply says that after responsibility is established the question is, "What do we have to do to remedy the problem (including repairing the damage done) and to keep it from happening again...
...When they are mentioned, the churches involved are left out...
...Psychiatrists appear in court as expert witnesses, not at their own pleasure...
...I find your positions on the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, your defamation of Arabs as a people, and your hypocrisy on the brutal and racist policies of the Begin-Sharon Jabotinskyites now ruling (and destroying) Israel to be quite dreadful...
...The factories belonged to corporations with such names as "Ford AG" and "German General Electric," and they were the backbone of the German war effort...
...Criminals need only to be punished, and then "justice has been done," even if this results only in harming everyone: the victim, the offender, and society...
...and "the market" needs no additional homage...
...Peter Beckstrand LaFarge, Wisconsin The author replies: There is a world of difference between self-obsessed survivalists, a group including some back-to-the-landers, and the new members of the agricultural community who have a genuine desire to enhance society through their interaction with the land...
...Others, like The New Republic (which is sometimes referred to as a liberal journal), have relieved themselves of the unconscionable burden of commentary on the Israeli destruction of Lebanese and Palestinian lives and property by wholeheartedly endorsing it...
...Instead of criticizing Billy Graham and his kind, we should support efforts to stop the no-win insanity of the arms race...
...Bob Willis Peoria, Illinois That was a fine article about Billy Graham, indicating real growth, decency, and compassion for someone of great influence who used to represent reactionary views...
...The best he could do was to operate a racket in three city districts...
...If judges, lawyers, and juries don't need or want psychiatric testimony, let them quit asking for it...
...But I read The Progressive, Mother Jones, In These Times, and others quite regularly, and I would make the same observation about the left-wing press...
...The logical answer is: by demanding that the causes be found and corrected...
...The Marines operated on three continents...
...The concept of responsibility simply refers to who or what caused something, and should not be confused with the concept of what should then be done about it...
...Now, after years of graduate study in physics, I realize that nuclear power plants are a real threat...
Vol. 46 • October 1982 • No. 10
