Letters
LETTERS to the Editor Pill-Pushers' Profits T^iree cheers for Judith Randal and William Hines ("A Patent Hustle," November issue). It has become all too obvious that the big-time pill-pushers are...
...A Jew contemptuously rejects all crude libels against his own people...
...We've never had a greater need for a close look at the institutions that purport to tell us what we need to know...
...All letters may be edited for clarity and conciseness...
...a 1955 Supreme Court ruling held that former servicemen and women could not be court-martialed for crimes committed while they were on active duty and, while this country had its treaty to defend Vietnam, we had no extradition treaty with that country—and only Vietnam could prosecute in civil courts for crimes committed in that country once the American offenders were no longer subject to military justice...
...Assuming that Mayer is what he writes, is Milton Mayer a Jew...
...This is a Jew...
...It has become all too obvious that the big-time pill-pushers are more interested in corporate profits than in consumer protection...
...Mayer labels the American Jewish community—without exceptions or distinctions—"a hissing and an abomination...
...People go through economic and social destabiliza-tion plus a disenchantment with "legitimate authority," and in the process they find new values on which to build community...
...We need no agreement with the Soviet Union as a condition for moral, humane, and sane actions...
...At the end of World War II, Japan had no choice but to accept a U.S.-drafted constitution...
...your journal has become a PLO rag...
...To lump all American Jews together and see the Israelis as a single, homogeneous mass is to blind oneself to the reality of Jewish life in America as well as in Israel...
...Take, for instance, the article by Marty Jezer on the Citizens' Party (October issue) which gives the impression that there are only two left-wing groups in the United States—the Citizens' Party and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA...
...You refer to this as a critique of "radical doctrine gone astray...
...Is Milton Mayer a Jew...
...Such unilateral action would also test Soviet intentions, and who knows what the response might be...
...Francis J. Flaherty New York, New York Radical Chauvinism The Progressive suffers from radical chauvinism, a sectarianism that is turning many readers and potential readers off...
...Calling in to radio and television talk shows is also a useful endeavor...
...The ethics and morality of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, etc., are those of losers—of a defeated and subjugated people...
...Mayer describes Israel as "also the Arabs' 1,000-year-old Homeland...
...For thousands of years, those fundamental rights were denied to us, and we suffered for it...
...It is not, and I stand corrected...
...Flaherty's credentials are impeccable, I know, but...
...Ultimately— and on the basis of experience rather than polemics—we will have to join together in one united progressive, socialist (call-it-what-you-will), left-wing party...
...James C. Mosley Sacramento, California Reluctant Warriors In John Junkerman's interesting article, "Reluctant Warriors" (November issue), he neglected to point out that it was the United States Government that wrote Japan's Peace Constitution so that it would never again have to worry about Japanese militarism...
...A handful of Jews may be money-lenders, the vast majority are not...
...After thirty-odd years one wonders whether Lenin's "short-term" War Communism, which never ended, has a parallel in War Zionism...
...The United States could end the nuclear madness tomorrow by initiating its own nuclear weapons freeze...
...And elsewhere in the same issue, Milton Mayer did a well-deserved hatchet-job on the Reader's Digest...
...some may be self-serving philanthropists, many are self-effacing...
...Jezer also made an obviously sincere effort to propose cooperation with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA...
...Maybe you at The Progressive should suffer a little, too...
...There are so many injustices to write about, especially regarding Vietnam, that no one has to make up any just to make a point about "selective prosecutions," a terrible injustice itself...
...The author replies: I ohn Shepard is quite right...
...Getting guest speakers on such talk shows often takes no more than a telephone call...
...Hugh B. Hester Brigadier General U.S...
...Roland B. Gittelsohn President Association of Reform Zionists of America Boston, Massachusetts As a pacifist, civil libertarian, and Jew, I was appalled by "Just Like the Gentiles...
...The capitulation of the Soviet government in the Cuban missile crisis is a typical example...
...A Jew perceives both the virtues and the deficiencies of his own people, generalizing broadly about neither...
...By definition, radical social change undermines the authority of the system...
...But on April 8,1971, the Defense and Justice departments announced they would bring no such cases...
...Marty Jezer Brattleboro, Vermont Challenge Authority At a Gray Panther conference last summer, a workshop leader remarked that the first task of an organizer is to help to overcome people's desire to believe in authority...
...Only by what he is...
...Now our Government should live with its "mistake...
...I am a retired professor of Old Testament from the Divinity School of Duke University...
...Is it true that Alan Crawford, the author of your otherwise fine article on Conservative Digest ("More Right than Reagan," October issue), was once an assistant editor of that magazine...
...And I'll have to lower my head and plead guilty (though whether I will actually stoop to naming names will depend on what offers I get...
...Jezer's repeated references to the DSA as "Harrington's" are as belittling as referring to the Citizens' Party as "Commoner's...
...Israel proclaims itself the Jewish state...
...If the author means to imply that there were no prosecutions by civilian courts for those kinds of crimes in Vietnam, he is also misleading...
...Mayer apologizes for the anti-Semitism of the late Robert M. Hutchins, apologizes for it and implicitly almost condones it...
...All of this is, of course, at once plausible, silly, and vicious...
...Of course there are dissenters from the Begin policy...
...He seems to think the Soviets are out to "rule the world...
...As if there were no moral agonizing among the Israelis, he encompasses all of them under the damning rubric of "the britches-busting little community of Israel...
...This situation requires all of us to be respectful of each other's efforts, and to learn from each other's successes and failures in electoral politics...
...It all went up in the smoke of Auschwitz, an inevitable outcome of such idiotic illusions...
...The canards range from the money-lender charge and the charge of self-serving philanthropy to that of Jewish "clout" which presumably buys at least the lip-service of "every President and candidate for President, every Senator, every Representative, every metropolitan alderman...
...Then there was Alan Crawford's revealing behind-the-scenes look at Conservative Digest (October issue), William Steif's requiem for the Scripps-Howard newspapers (September issue), and, a few months back, Frank Browning's critical examination of Inquiry magazine (June...
...But I will send my money to Israel, where it will help build a nation where my people can prosper and live in peace...
...While insisting that the Citizens' Party is an evolving and maturing organization, I perceived the DSA in static terms as an extension of the Democratic Socialists Organizing Committee (DSOC...
...But there is more to radical politics in this country than these two mildly radical organizations: First, there is the openly socialist electoral-oriented American Left: The Socialist Party U.S.A., the Socialist Labor Party, the Socialist Workers Party, the Communist Party, and the Peace and Freedom Party...
...They desire only to preserve lives—especially their own—and the Palestinians are a real obstacle to that desire...
...I hope radicals will continue to do so...
...John A. Pummell Washington, D.C...
...There would be no risk in such a move...
...Anything, and I mean anything including the threat of the destruction of the entire Middle East by nuclear war, is justified to preserve a viable and strong Israel...
...Ulrich Haupt Carmel, California Iread Milton Mayer's diatribe against Israel, in which he actually compares Israel's actions in Lebanon to those of Nazi Germany...
...Whatever is to be done about Milton Mayer...
...The melancholy tragedy of the Middle East is that it consists of two tragedies—the plight of the Israelis and the plight of the Palestinians...
...In attempting to make its point—with the invasion of Lebanon the Israelis are no better than the Gentiles—it employed almost every canard in the anti-Semite's compendium while subscribing to an utterly racist conception of an entire people...
...Betty Brink Kountze, Texas The author replies: Amurder is not a massacre...
...Irwin Stark Hillsdale, New York Please cancel my subscription immediately...
...Alan Crawford Washington, D.C...
...But it is Milton Mayer's abject failure to make valid distinctions that particularly troubles me...
...That surely challenged authority, continuity, and stability...
...It would not be unreasonable to expect a reciprocal move, since Moscow already has proposed nuclear arms reductions...
...As if the ruthless and savage PLO had not taken over most coastal Lebanese cities, turning them into vast arsenals for the eventual destruction of Israel, Mayer writes of "sinless Sidon" and "sinless Tyre...
...I certainly hope so...
...He LETTERS to the Editor could be prayed for, if only we believed that prayer could eradicate or even diminish self-contempt...
...The same editorial, not content with Christopher Lasching the Left, concludes with a Time-style putdown of Margaret Fuller as a "Tran-scendentalist ninny...
...In view of such outrageous overkill capability, steps toward diminishing our vast lead in nuclear weapons could be taken now to ease international tensions...
...There is another type of ancient Jewish morality—the morality of Joshua, of mortal men, of winners...
...Never again...
...Mark Picus Houston, Texas We need more articles like Milton Mayer's...
...It is not my state, and I trust that their allegiance to it does not divert the Messrs...
...it was a surrender condition...
...DSA members who are leaders and activists in trade unions, feminist organizations, community and citizens' action groups, will be surprised to learn that they have "avoided grass-roots, socialist spadework...
...Hyman Cohen Jackson Heights, New York The author replies: Ihope I understand the agonies of some of these correspondents better than they appear to understand mine...
...Ruth Dear Oak Park, Illinois Journalism Review Tiat was a sly dig Arthur Jones took at the late Henry Luce and the publishing empire he founded (O Washington, November issue...
...These other views deserve to be heard...
...Please do nor cancel my subscription...
...So long as letters are short and to the point, most local editors are willing to publish even progressive or leftist thoughts, provided they are not full of jargon...
...Donald F. Busky Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Settling Old Scores...
...If we don't want to be held responsible for making our world uninhabitable, we must institute a world government with power to prevent war between and among so-called sovereign states...
...I agree...
...Servicemen were tried for negligent vehicular homicide, for manslaughter resulting from barroom brawls, and for illegal combat-related killings...
...Moreover, this is a large and diverse nation, with contrasting local political traditions and a bewildering array of issues, constituencies, and fragmented levels of political authority...
...When the author says, "Despite strong evidence that 'fraggings' and massacres of civilians were commonplace crimes [by Americans] in Vietnam, only one case—the My Lai massacre—was ever brought to trial," he is wrong...
...Have you decided to add media criticism to your other functions...
...Is Milton Mayer a Jew...
...I take it—and I am saying nothing more than this—that the Lord requires more of us Jews (each and severally, and collectively) than he does of other people...
...Such mass murders were not uncommon, according to evidence cited in Guen-ter Lewy's America in Vietnam and Alexander Kendrick's The Wound Within: America in the Vietnam Years, 1945-1974...
...The My Lai trials certainly received the most publicity— but they were not the only crimes against civilians brought to trial by military prosecutors, and civilian prosecutors had no jurisdiction...
...Let the degenerate and barbaric Arabs settle the Palestinian people in their own countries...
...I decline...
...I assure you that backing liberal candidates in the Democratic Party, or running independents who never admit to being socialist, is not necessarily the only view on the American Left...
...Arthur Perlman Los Angeles, California Democratic Socialists Marty Jezer's article on the Citizens' Party (October issue) combined modest objectivity with respect to the present situation of the Citizens' Party with an acceptable degree of optimism about its future prospects...
...Not so Christopher Lasch, who is quoted in your Comment section ("Accepting the Universe," November issue) on how the anti-authoritarian American Left has "forced the legitimate need for authority, stability, and continuity to find reactionary political outlets...
...What works in Burlington might not work in Houston, and vice versa...
...Indeed, the dreadful massacre of Palestinians has so outraged what is probably the preponderance of Israelis that it appears unlikely the government will long survive...
...It would be nice if it were otherwise...
...Is Milton Mayer a Jew...
...One Marine was convicted of killing twelve Vietnamese civilians and sentenced to life imprisonment...
...Picus, Gittelsohn, Stark, and Cohen from their allegiance to a humanity that transcends states theocratic and secular and embraces Palestinians and Jews indifferently...
...Mayer's egregiously simplistic view, its good intentions hopelessly compromised by its inane recital of stereotypes, only exacerbates this conflict of contentious rights because it fails to recognize the very real potential for conciliation and redemption that resides with those Jews and Israelis who passionately contest the predatory version of Zionism the Begin-Sharon coalition espouses...
...Gentiles and Jews Milton Mayer's "Just Like the Gentiles" (October issue) was a masterpiece...
...Surely Mayer knows that many voices have been raised inside and outside the American-Jewish establishment against the policies of the Begin government, and that even during the invasion of Lebanon thousands of Israelis vociferously protested the Begin-Sharon military campaign...
...The Israelis need to be forced to evaluate their role in Lebanon and in the entire Middle East peace process, but they are not Nazis...
...I'm sorry about that...
...Reagan obviously believes we have to spend additional billions upon billions for destructive weapons to get the Soviet Union to surrender to the United States...
...and as the Senate vote authorizing the sale of AWACs to Saudi Arabia demonstrated, not every elected official is in the pocket of the so-called Jewish lobby...
...Or is Crawford settling old scores under a cloak of anonymity...
...Experimentation is in order, and I expect we will all be surprised by the way things work out...
...Would that the PLO's slaughter of Jews could be as passionately challenged and condemned by Israel's Arab neighbors...
...What has a "legitimate need for authority" to do with radical doctrine...
...A Jew perceives both the virtues and deficiences of other peoples...
...William F. Stinespring High Point, North Carolina In his most direct and accurate paragraph, Milton Mayer writes: "Not all Jews are Jews, and not all Gentiles are Gentiles.....You can't tell a Jew by what he says or does or calls himself (or changes his name to...
...If DSA members are now to be found on city councils in San Francisco, New York City, Washington, Detroit, Santa Monica, Santa Cruz, Cambridge, and Ann Arbor, how many would there be if DSA ceased "refraining from running candidates" and no longer "steered clear of local politicking...
...I enjoy reading The Progressive and being informed by it...
...Because Jezer assumes that DSA is not strongly organized and politically active at the local and state level, he fears conflict between DSA and the Citizens' Party only at the national level...
...Normally, such questions are answered by bringing test cases...
...A Jew resists anti-Semitism in all its guises, resists it resolutely as the enemy not only of himself but of all decent human values...
...I may reconsider...
...Then, in the same October issue, I came to Erwin Knoll's thoughtful and restrained plea for the survival of The Progressive...
...All of these organizations work hard to advance the Left movement in America, and have viewpoints worth hearing about in an open radical forum such as The Progressive could be...
...But the policy abides (or, if it is changed, it is changed by external pressure...
...He still served six months in prison, more than Calley ever spent actually behind bars...
...Unfortunately, he does not know much about the DSA or its political/electoral strategy...
...He does not find it necessary to denigrate himself by exaggerating their assets to the point of putative perfection...
...One, Two, Many My Lais Francis J. Flaherty's article, "Judge, Jury, and Sometimes God" (August issue), had a glaring inaccuracy that could easily have been checked if the proper research had been done...
...What can we, as victims of their avarice, do to break the monopolies which keep generic brands off the shelves...
...Marty Jezer's communication on the Citizens' Party (and the entire October issue of The Progressive) are a valuable part of that process...
...A. Robert Kaufman Baltimore, Maryland The editors welcome correspondence from readers on all topics, but prefer to publish letters that comment directly on material previously published in The Progressive...
...Of that total, eighty-one had been tried by the Army with thirty-eight convicted of murder and twenty of lesser crimes...
...Such political influence on prosecutorial policies was, of course, the point of my article...
...But, combat-related or not, all these cases—which by war's end numbered much higher than Betty Brink's figures—involved, at most, a handful of victims...
...Above all, a well-advertised unilateral disarmament move by the United States would send a signal not only to the Kremlin but to all peoples of the world whose lives are threatened by an impending nuclear holocaust that the United States is serious about ending the nuclear arms race and the drift toward nuclear war...
...Mayer blithely distributes the old canards that Jews are money-lenders, that they yearn to be both assertive and popular, that they are "disproportionately perfervid . . . disproportionately radical and reationary . . . disproportionately influential...
...Question: Has The Progressive become a part-time journalism review...
...As if the overwhelming numbers of Arabs now resident in Israel, including the West Bank, had not come there from surrounding countries only since Jewish settlement had made life happier and healthier for them there than in their Arab lands of origin...
...Since every electoral tactic proposed on the Left, from third party to realigning the Democratic Party to the "party within a party" approach has obvious limitations, no one can claim a monopoly on political insight...
...Would a boycott of a specific line of drugs help...
...If we are serious about popularizing our ideas, these options should be utilized as we build our own media and mass organizations...
...Is Milton Mayer a Jew...
...He can not, it seems, help himself very much, because he hates his Jewish origins so much...
...And I certainly agree that the American electorate is too diverse and fragmented to be approached in a single "correct" way...
...Thus I have spent my life studying and teaching a Jewish book, which is also a Christian book...
...If so, I think mention of it in his biographical note would have been appropriate...
...This "Transcendentalist ninny" wrote a landmark feminist work in 1844, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, advocating that "inward and outward freedom for Woman as much as for Man shall be acknowledged as a right, not yielded as a concession...
...While Toth v. Quarks, the Supreme Court case to which Brink refers, held courts-martial powerless to prosecute former servicemen, it did not decide whether such servicemen could be prosecuted by military commissions under Article 21 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice or by Federal courts...
...But I can hardly be said to operate "under a cloak of anonymity," having written the first major study of the New Right, Thunder on the Right (Pantheon, 1980), which draws heavily on my experiences as a disillusioned righty...
...In fact, it is the United States rather than the Soviet Union that is trying to impose its will on other nations...
...Any sane Left electoral strategy has to focus on mobilizing the "hole in the electorate," on the millions of working-class and lower-income Americans who do not participate in the political process in any form, but whose counterparts in Europe form the mass base of Left political parties...
...Of course there were prosecutions of servicemen for killing civilians in Vietnam...
...Guenter Lewy comments: "There was speculation that the Administration considered the issue too hot politically...
...I would say that brutes like Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon may be Israelis or Zionists, but they are not really Jews, just as I would say that the so-called Christian Falangists in Lebanon, who collaborated with Begin and Sharon, are not really Christians...
...John Shepard Washington, D.C...
...A Jew tries to be both factual and fair...
...It is a pity you had to print such trash...
...My Lai, where almost 200 civilians died, led to the only prosecution for wholesale murder in the war...
...At the very least, Soviet hawks would have less justification for continuing a nuclear buildup...
...In a war involving more than ten years and hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, it could hardly be otherwise...
...It is not that simple...
...Second, we have many democratic socialist, communist, and anarchist political organizations that happen to feel that electoral activity is not the way to go, but instead prefer direct mass organizing in the communities and in the unions...
...Milton Mayer's article was the last straw...
...J Some day, when the liberals nave returned to power, I'll be seated before a Congressional committee and Ted Kennedy will look over his glasses and ask, "Are you now or have you ever been a member of Young Americans for Freedom...
...Paul Garver Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania The author replies: Paul Garver is right to take me to task for describing the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) as the "Harrington" party...
...Army (Retired) Asheville, North Carolina Pass It On Asuggestion for your readers: One of the easiest and most effective ways to share the information, knowledge, and analysis gleaned from these pages is to rework it into letters to the editors of local dailies and weeklies...
...Another, a lieutenant like Calley, had been convicted of premeditated murder, but the charge was reduced to manslaughter when the court-martial officers found they could not sentence him to less than life...
...Speaking of the early Zionists, Mayer snickers: "Who really cared about the miserable Arabs . . . ?" As if the founders of modern Zionism, from Herzl on, had not expressed genuine concern for the Arabs in their midst, as if the Jews of Palestine had not tried valiantly to live justly and peacefully with their Arab neighbors, often successfully so, until their overtures were rejected...
...Call me in three thousand years and ask me for money...
...According to Calley (the book about his trial written by three AP reporters), through the end of December 1970, 117 American servicemen had been charged with murder of civilians in Vietnam, with fifty-nine found guilty...
...DSA locals are the principal left organizing centers in dozens of American, cities, and if we are "isolated from the activist-oriented Left," I wonder what "Left" Jezer is talking about...
...Milton Mayer Carmel, California Peace through Honesty In your Comment "Peace I through Honesty" (October issue), you suggest than an honest peace movement would focus on unilateral action by the United States in halting the nuclear arms race...
...A small fraction of the nuclear warheads in America's arsenal can destroy the Soviet Union...
...Karl Kretschmer Chicago, Illinois World Government Sidney Lens's "Ban the Bomb" (August issue) cast new light on President Reagan's press conference statement, "Under no condition will I permit World War III...
Vol. 46 • December 1982 • No. 12
