Letters
LETTERS to the Editor Nobel Prize Cut-ups If Lawrence Walsh handles a camera as well as he writes, we have much to look forward to from both of his skills. His Vietnam meditation ("Vietnam for a...
...Why not try...
...Strip away the rhetoric and you've got nothing more than a grab for power...
...That was unrealistic on the assum-ers' part...
...In contrast, the murder of innocents is a long-standing policy and, for most of its history, the only tactic of Israel's "desperate opponents...
...There was no reason, alas, why a Jewish state should be able to escape the fate of other nation states, despite the Holocaust and despite the hopes of Jews and their guilty well-wishers...
...To keep the company operating...
...It is entirely predictable that "democratic socialists" would want to reassure the IMF-World Bank crowd while doing nothing to socialize the economies of their nations...
...Government and of governments throughout the world, but become hysterical when they hear any criticism of Israel...
...What is Gandhi's lesson for us...
...The secret to adaptive existence is minimization of this tendency...
...I've been an active participant in electoral politics for more than three decades, and I will remain active...
...Martin R. Haase Chester, Nova Scotia Don't Just Sit There So Becky O'Malley has enough money to send her daughter to private school ("Don't Just Sit There," January issue...
...Maybe your Jewish correspondents are trying to overcom-pensate or something...
...By allowing the Lisbon, Bonn, London, and Washington crowd back in once more, they are just making the South African job that much easier...
...Meanwhile, South Africa is just waiting to liquidate the "realistic revolutionaries" in Angola, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe...
...One person's recent act of nonviolent personal empowerment may be a model...
...I, too, grieve for Israel, but unlike you and Chomsky, I do not curse it...
...It was a crime and an outrage, but it was also an aberration for Israel, even for its current "shoot first" Begin administration...
...But when this man with a terrorist background became prime minister of Israel, and especially when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, he achieved an undeserved aura of respectability...
...So Becky O'Malley doesn't like rules and doesn't read them, except by accident...
...I am not suggesting you do poorly in other areas, but you do stand out in getting to the roots of the Palestinian/Israeli impasse...
...However, his "Just Like the Gentiles," though typically thought- and emotion-provoking, troubled me...
...Peter A. Belmont Lexington, Massachusetts Congratulations for publishing the excellent article by Noam Chomsky on the special relationship between the United States and Israel...
...It was especially damaging to Israel that such a thing happened because so many of Israel's friends had assumed that a nation born out of so much guilt and immorality by other people would somehow be guiltless and moral itself...
...Certainly, Israel is better known for bulldozers than for kindness to Palestinian widows and orphans...
...For a poor nation, the alternative to perpetual servitude is to cut itself off from the rotten system of international trade and build a new society from the ground up...
...The PLO is always right, no matter what, and Israel is always wrong...
...it has never, regardless of the enchantment of the rationale, ultimately served us well...
...To those in the know— who were on the scene— Mugabe had become a force to be reckoned with twenty years ago...
...states are subject to the madness of power...
...Orlow Rockville, 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...
...As I see it, humankind has never tolerated, much less fostered, an attitude of global siblinghood...
...You have lost our subscription...
...Frank W. Goheen Camas, Washington Managers and Underlings Mike Parker and Dwight Hansen's argument against "quality-of-worklife" programs ("The Circle Game," January issue) is specious and self-serving...
...Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez in Spain may be in the process of doing the same thing...
...The most successful companies treat employees of all strata as human beings and respect their knowledge of the work they do...
...Robert O. Kelley Manchester, New Hampshire Thank you for Milton Mayer's "Just Like the Gentiles...
...No one likes an authentic revolution, least of all the bankers and corporations who benefit when "revolutionary" societies get the same appetites for designer jeans, video games, and hot cars that consumer societies have...
...Truthfully and nonviolently we can, like Gandhi, build an irresistible moral force for peace...
...Thus, if the IMF and World Bank consent to dole out a few meager morsels, the social democrat (whether Mugabe, Soares, Gonzalez, or another) will be ready to receive them...
...That truthful, nonviolent act provoked (Gandhi's word) the authorities...
...I am not dropping The Progressive because it is the only magazine I know of LETTERS to the Editor that remains consistent, logical, historical, accurate, and timely in reporting'about the Middle East...
...What is so damaging about letting workers identify with the problems of management, or having workers get together and suggest some cost-saving ideas to management...
...Tom Blackburn Trenton, New Jersey Over the years I have read, with great enjoyment, Milton Mayer's arrogant personalized contributions to The Progressive...
...One caveat: Was it fair to link Le Due Tho with Henry Kissinger as a "Nobel Prize cut-up...
...The Chinese tried this, then gave up when the revisionists took over...
...While acknowledging our Darwinian heritage and our natural propensity to band together against a hostile environment, I believe the utility of this approach has been extinct far longer than many species...
...I am writing to compensate for some of the hate mail you will receive, as you did in response to Milton Mayer's article, "Just Like the Gentiles" (October...
...I believe this should explain why I am not renewing my subscription, and why there is no check enclosed in answer to your latest appeal...
...It was always a myth that Menachem Begin was a peacemaker...
...I can understand why a few hotheaded rabbis have excommunicated Chomsky...
...they must instill a collective union consciousness in the ranks...
...So Becky O'Malley thinks her child is a genius...
...Le Due Tho had the decency to decline his cut...
...Revolution is a difficult and dangerous thing, not something that can be financed by the revolution's enemies...
...If workers are involved in management-level decisions, they can help increase production...
...How else but through this article could a Jew like me, spared most of a Jew's problems because of a name changed two generations back and unconnected with any Jewish community, know that he is truly a Jew...
...But here I am, fighting for the right of the Palestinians to recover at least a small part of the homeland that the British, the League of Nations, the United Nations, and the United States saw fit to deliver into Jewish hands...
...I would quarrel with one of his points which seems to me too strong—that Israelis or other Jews have acquired a taste for racist holocaust...
...It's true that management's chief goal is to cut production costs, but this doesn't mean the two sides must always be adversaries...
...Richard M. Bowers Delhi, New York African Dilemma While I cannot agree completely with Christine Sylvester's appraisal of the situation in Zimbabwe ("An African Dilemma," January issue), it was considerably better than most articles that have appeared elsewhere recently...
...Mike Dennison Helena, Montana Israel and Palestine Icommend your courage in publishing Noam Chomsky's "America and Israel" and Robert Engler's "From Highbridge to Haifa" (December issue...
...His Vietnam meditation ("Vietnam for a Thousand Years," December issue) eloquently makes a much needed statement...
...Austin H. Perlow Hempstead, New York Like so many others, I've had to ask the hard question, "Which subscription do I drop now...
...When Mayer contrasts Jew and non-Jew, he continues the process, albeit theologically rather than militaristically, of divisiveness among humankind...
...I cannot, for example, recall one time when world reaction caused the PLO to conduct public hearings after a massacre...
...Must anything good for the company be bad for the union...
...Mugabe and his analogues the world over have not learned the lessons of history in this regard...
...His belief that he could rely on the white settlers and their multinational corporate and financial friends to provide the money Zimbabwe needs for development has been proven a ludicrous and shameful failure...
...But the film Gandhi points the way to the achievement of dramatic, rapid social improvements beyond those attainable by electoral politics...
...So this is "progressive...
...Israel is a state...
...If a workplace has good pay and safe working conditions, and encourages employees to take part in management decisions, what's the harm if it has no union...
...QWLs seem to be a plausible way of encouraging these attitudes, but Hansen and Parker cast cold water on the QWLs for fear they would erode their union's power base...
...To damn such programs as possible "tools of management" in an exploitative sense is a bit paranoid and hypocritical...
...Do they wish merely to acquire more power...
...One can always discover reasons to feel apart from others...
...We have been getting your magazine since 1976 and have given it as gifts to our friends...
...The sign read, Peace Is Our Profession...
...Rather than focus on the affinity of the human condition, we have chosen to personalize, regionalize, nationalize, and continentalize...
...Lesley Getz David Friedentag Bermuda Dunes, California Your Comment, "After Sa-bra and Shatila" (November issue), stated: "What was snuffed out at the two refugee camps, along with those hundreds of lives, was any lingering claim by Israel to a shred of moral superiority over its desperate opponents...
...Will the Jews...
...In the name of commonality and in the interest of personal contentment let's cease our millennium-old "we-they" mentality and acknowledge ubiquitous communion among peoples...
...Yet if unions or workers were to run a company, as Hansen and Parker seem to think they should, what would be their primary goal...
...By his truthful, nonviolent defiance of authority, Gandhi was able to exert massive moral force outside electoral politics...
...In an age of homogenized journalism his opinions have remained rich and substantial...
...In the Twentieth Century, we are all learning that we cannot have all we want...
...Can he really be so surprised that Israeli persons behave as persons...
...S.M...
...So the Berkeley public schools are holding Becky O'Malley's child back from thinking like Einstein, Curie, or Newton...
...The social democrat, typically, is a supplicant who begs for crumbs from the table of world capitalism while hesitating to seize the plunderer's rich meal...
...So Becky O'Malley's child's father is a thinker...
...Bill Douglas of Iowa, with others, corrected a lie on a sign posted outside a military base near Omaha...
...Africa is not the only region where this has happened: Mario Soares in Portugal betrayed the Portuguese people by attempting to give them the illusion that the old order would simply pack its bags and leave if "democracy" told it to...
...He changed people's thinking in ways that made for a better society...
...Henry BucherJr...
...Leon Lukaszewski Walnut Creek, California Gandhi's Moral Force Articles about the Citizens' Party and other aspects of electoral politics (October issue) serve a purpose...
...I excommunicate you...
...Don't the unions care about the well-being of their members...
...I have been an ardent supporter of The Progressive for several years, having paid considerable sums in answer to your pleas for financial support, but Chomsky's diatribe was only the latest in a series of articles distinctly unfair to the Jews...
...So Becky O'Malley provides her child with a superior home life...
...If an economy is to function, some must be underlings and some must be managers...
...And we are the young, open, tolerant radicals you want to appeal to...
...Now, after his actions in Lebanon, the Nobel committee should publicly withdraw its award or lose all credibility...
...We have tried and tried, as have other subscribers, to make allowances for your articles which have been understanding of the PLO position and actions toward Israel...
...Bill is serving a six-month sentence in a Federal prison...
...Cuba gave up years ago...
...I am a troublemaker—a fighter, but without weapons, just as Mayer says...
...Neither can you...
...I recall distinctly that in the early 1960s I was told by an African friend (who at that time was a strong supporter of Joshua Nkomo) that Robert Mugabe was by far the ablest figure in the African freedom movement...
...But your magazine must be balanced and fair at some time in some way, and you never are...
...All letters may be edited for clarity and conciseness...
...Never mind that the essentials of the exploiting system remain in place...
...I am one subscriber who will not drop his subscription...
...Many Jews have closed their eyes and their hearts...
...However, the "Johnny-come-lately" to African nationalist politics is not Robert Mugabe but Christine Sylvester...
...Apparently, some of your readers enjoy criticism of the U.S...
...The authors are dismayed because QWLs promote the idea that "We [the workers] have to make our company profitable if we are to save our jobs...
...We have read the letters to the editors from others who have said the same thing, and now we are adding our voices...
...Cultural genocide, perhaps...
...Zimbabwe's dilemma, and that of such "white" nations as Portugal, Spain, and Italy, is that they don't want to make the sacrifices needed to become self-sufficient and free of the shackles of the IMF-World Bank "international economic order...
...Hundreds can and should take similar truthful, nonviolent actions to pierce government double-speak...
...Donald K. Abbott Americus, Georgia The problem with Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe is not its transformation into a one-party state or its faltering revolution or its tribal politics...
...But it was, so far as I am concerned, the last straw...
...they corrected it to read...
...But with the December issue, we can no longer tolerate it...
...In fact, QWLs can help bridge that adversarial gap...
...And the "big lie...
...In their closing paragraph, Hansen and Parker write, "Unions must not only be able to challenge this or that company's strategy...
...Keep Noam Chomsky and the others writing...
...Labor costs can, in effect, be cut without any loss of jobs...
...There are lots of things wrong with Israel...
...Cottage Grove, Wisconsin We have been the kind of subscribers you need and want...
...Only Albania refuses to knuckle under to the banks, and for this Albania is called "Stalinist...
...If they are not heard today, they will have to be heard in the near future, not only for us to understand the Middle East crisis, but also for us to comprehend what it is doing to America...
...So Becky O'Malley is a daydreamer...
...Racism and racist brutality, yes...
...I think the Palestinians have learned this...
...Robert X. Brennan Branchville, New Jersey Iread Noam Chomsky's article with disbelief, reluctant to accept that a Jew (if that is what he still calls himself) could be so viciously anti-Semitic...
...Zimbabwe is only the latest example of a so-called "democratic socialist" experiment gone awry...
...War Is Our Profession...
...The trouble is that Mugabe believes development consists of IMF and World Bank loans, not the onerous process of capital accumulation that all nations must go through in order to reach modernity...
...in other words, to make a profit...
...That may well be his problem, and I have no doubt that some of your best friends are Jews...
Vol. 47 • February 1983 • No. 2
