Letters
Letters to the Editor Hissing from the News Hooray for Ben H. Bagdi-kian's "Missing from the News" (Media, August issue). It's unfortunate that the media monopolies won't let the truth of this...
...But I also detect signs of progress and a learning curve in Soviet life...
...Paul, Minnesota Upheaval in the East Robin Blackburn's piece on the Soviet Union and similar "socialist" societies in Europe ("Upheaval in the East," July issue) presents what has come to be viewed as a "progressive" position...
...Finally, GOONs served as auxiliaries for the FBI at the siege of Wounded Knee in 1973 and the fire-fight at Oglala in 1975...
...Since I wrote the article, we have had the turbulent Congress of People's Deputies in Moscow and, as if in response, the July strikes of coal miners in Siberia and the Ukraine...
...One of the most famous of these took place in the Vorkuta mines...
...However, Brian (not Bryan) Farrell was an officer in Arlington, Texas (not Dallas), and he actually resigned (he wasn't dismissed) after killing three people with his "notched" service pistol...
...Gorbachev has called local elections which will provide, one must hope, a further channel of "perestroika from below...
...One man in an undemocratic "workers' state" out-maneuvers his opponents and consolidates his rule by placing his own people in key positions...
...I would not discount the danger of a hard-line backlash along Chinese lines—one that would certainly be decked out in workerist rhetoric...
...This 1 per cent were the beneficiaries of the 1981 Kemp-Roth bill, a tax forgiveness of $120 billion a year...
...Not only did the Federal Government arm and train the GOONs, its agents provided them with the names of "enemies" and intelligence about where to find them...
...He doesn't see important differences between Stalin, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev because "the system" remains the same, with mass shootings and slave labor waiting just around the corner...
...marshals, and in BIA special-operations groups...
...Bill Lueders Madison, Wisconsin The authors reply: On November 13, 1988, Mulugeta Seraw, twenty-seven, was beaten to death with a baseball bat in Portland, Oregon...
...The Bill of Rights is a sacred document, and many people—even politicians—believe it should not be altered...
...Nikita Khrushchev was prompted to release millions from the Gulag by a wave of camp revolts...
...As a married woman who has struggled for four years with the options available to the infertile, I can assure you that the issue was not just between Mary Beth Whitehead and William Stern...
...They will be good and evil depending upon the character and motivations of the women who make them—that is what freedom is about...
...Perhaps it seems unmannerly to raise such historic issues as slave labor, mass shootings, and denial of even rudimentary freedoms in the current banquet atmosphere of glasnost...
...Blackburn's assertion that "communist" states are "workers' states" would ring quite differently in our ears if we were to recall that until quite recently, the sullen passivity of Soviet political life was unbroken save for the highly visible—and correspondingly persecuted— handful of refuseniks and vocal dissenters...
...All letters may be edited for clarity and conciseness...
...Mikhail Gorbachev's forceful personality and skill in outmaneuvering opponents within the undemocratic Communist Party apparatus have effected promising, though as yet only nascent, changes...
...At a special Central Committee meeting whose deliberations were published in the press on July 20, Gorbachev declared: "If perestroika is a revolution—and we agreed that it is...
...We will have an end to the violence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not when we have "dialogue" but when we have justice...
...Catherine Siegner Anna Sochocky St...
...Though there are many babies of other races that my husband and I would be glad to adopt, we are considered politically incorrect parents because we are white...
...Members of skinhead and neo-Nazi groups were reportedly responsible for 55 per cent of these crimes...
...Political terror along the lines of the raw Central American model is apparently considered a legitimate option by our Government...
...Yet a depression is so certain if debts mount into the higher trillions that even well-to-do people should see merit in taking preventive measures...
...military intelligence and FBI agents trained and armed civilians— mostly off-duty Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) police and Pine Ridge Reservation tribal employees—as paramilitary auxiliaries...
...That is Kendyl Gibbons's reading, and it is one which echoes the views of the team of experts hired by the Sterns to demonstrate that Mary Beth, a "hysterical," unprofessional, lower-middle-class woman, was out of her mind...
...There can be no substitute for self-initiated actions by working people to demand democratic control of all organs of society...
...Then the arrests, show trials, and shootings begin...
...They're beating Afro-Americans to death in the streets throughout the Northwest" ("Citizens Organize Against Neo-Nazis," by Anna Sochocky and Catherine Siegner, Datelines, August issue...
...We need not suppose that all decisions made by women will be morally superior to those made by men in order to justify offering women the choices made possible by technology...
...They will be different choices, certainly—that is what power is about...
...What your reviewer missed, I feel, is that by these activities the GOONs fall within the technical definition of what are called death squads...
...It is the case that she did not want to go to the trouble of carrying her own child...
...One man has pleaded guilty, and two await trial...
...Blacks were targets in thirty-one of the incidents, and Native Americans, Asians, and Hispanics were targets of most of the rest...
...We have not, so far, seen arrests, show trials, or shootings...
...Only after the intifada—the uprising in the West Bank and Gaza—did various peace organizations and groups for Jewish-Arab "dialogue" in this country become bold enough to demand an end to the Israeli occupation, recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the convening of an international peace conference that includes all parties to the conflict...
...These two Communist leaders also asked the strikers to return to work after many of their demands had been met...
...I see no guarantees of a happy outcome, but at least there is a determined effort to go beyond the old bureaucratic model...
...Stern was "hoping desperately for a child to love and raise...
...I do hope The Progressive has not indulged in the same disregard for the rules of evidence regarding these crackpot groups on the Right...
...For that is what commercial surrogacy assumes and seeks to legalize...
...While we applaud the efforts of the peacemakers, we must be accurate about what caused the recent changes...
...It's unfortunate that the media monopolies won't let the truth of this article get into the hands of the people...
...The difference between then and now is not one of systems but of personalities...
...Second, I never implied that Mary Beth Whitehead reacted irrationally to the requirement that she relinquish her child...
...The remedy I have in mind would be the reimposition of high taxes on the wealth accumulating in the hands of a small, affluent minority...
...It is not just patriarchal power-lust that might move one to engage the services of a surrogate mother...
...Yes, we have death squads in the United States...
...This was no arrangement entered into out of love...
...Jon Norstag Assistant Director Navajo Nation Window Rock, Arizona Tax the Rich Why does our progressive leadership overlook the most obvious and effective remedy for our uncertain economic future...
...It involved another woman who, if she was anything like me, was hoping desperately for a child to love and raise...
...We have caused them by our policy...
...Furthermore, I am troubled by the implications of the suggestion that where bodies or children are concerned, women must not be expected to be rational or deliberate, and thus are not competent to enter into a binding contract...
...Either these abominable crimes are occurring or they are not...
...Joseph M. LaFollette Presidio, Texas Anyone who takes offense at the idea of flag-burning should be happy with the Supreme Court's decision, since it has deprived the act of burning a flag of its symbolic significance...
...Many of those involved in this activity are still in positions of authority in the FBI, as U.S...
...In the Portland area, within a one-year period ending May 10,1989, eighty-four incidents of racial harassment were reported...
...Is there something wrong with valuing our own uniqueness enough to want to pass our genetic heritage to the next generation...
...They are non-capitalist, yes, but not therefore worthy of our support...
...Can it be that we didn't understand this when we discussed it all...
...John G. Dow Albany, New York But Who's Keeping Score...
...What is and has been disempowering for women is precisely the notion that if they do not act according to the "neutral" norms of an impoverished rationalism, shorn of strong ethical convictions and stripped of emotion, they are not reasoning beings...
...Thanks to The Progressive for continuing to have the courage to print the truth...
...The Guardians of the Oglala Nation (GOONs, as they so aptly called themselves) intimidated progressive political organizers and their grass-roots supporters on the reservation, disrupted tribal elections, and stuffed ballot boxes...
...The current Soviet initiatives have not been produced by wide-ranging discussions in which all sectors of the society take part...
...We are terribly concerned by what this implies for our people, and I ask your readers to consider the implications not only for Native Americans but for politically active progressives everywhere in the United States...
...The crucial economic restructuring to come will not be devised, as things now stand, by democratic, self-managing workers' councils, but by those methods of threat and repression so familiar to Blackburn's cherished Party...
...Some say they now own 40 per cent...
...Both Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin declared that their action was necessary and justified...
...Time and again we have seen how the forces of reaction, and especially the mainstream press, will believe absolutely anything about socialist systems or the political Left, so long as it is bad...
...Agents of Repression documents eyewitness accounts of GOONs physically attacking men, women, and children, firing weapons into occupied homes, and murdering people...
...Such patronizing "sympathy" makes it impossible to rely on a woman's stated intentions, which seems to be a dangerously disempowering position...
...According to Citizens for Tax Justice, a research group in Washington, D.C., 700,000 Americans have incomes of at least $600,000 each...
...Obviously, an increase of taxes upon the affluent will draw vigorous opposition from economic royalists and their minions in the Government...
...Whether a firing squad is privately organized and financed or has been thoughtfully provided by the Party makes little difference to those who stand against the wall...
...Robin Blackburn Ottawa, Ontario Technology as Destiny Jean Bethke Elshtain's "Technology as Destiny" (June issue) left a key participant in the Baby M situation completely out of consideration...
...But the utter lack of control by the broad populace—working-class and otherwise—is exactly the same...
...Warren C. Marglin Salem, Kentucky Courting Disaster The Progressive made a great mistake when it assumed that our lawmakers will inevitably tamper with the Constitution on the issue of flag-burning ("Courting Disaster," Comment, August issue...
...The theme of my article was that regimes claiming to speak in the name of the working class and actually organizing in every workplace can be vulnerable to working-class action...
...But I was even more shocked that these extraordinary accusations were nowhere substantiated, or even referred to again...
...In July 1989, the miners of Vorkuta played their full part in the Siberian strike, winning major concessions— not just specific material rewards but also less specific promises of self-management...
...Taxation, a counter to accumulated wealth, can be a powerful medicine for alleviating ailments that afflict our society—such ailments as nuclear weapons, denial of human rights, poverty, homelessness, corruption, pollution of the environment, manipulation of the media...
...However, we don't believe that criticism applies to The Progressive in this instance...
...There was never a claim that she was infertile...
...His assailants were identified as members of the neo-Nazi group East Side White Pride...
...The Sterns, being richer than the Whiteheads, were able to contract out for a child...
...We share Bill Lueders's concern that alternative journals are sometimes not sufficiently tenacious in their pursuit of accuracy...
...Is this really the way people who cherish human life and value human relationships believe we can and ought to set about creating families...
...The intifada changed all that...
...The authors show how U.S...
...Surrogacy-for-pay arrangements involve nothing less than the "production, purchase, and sale of an infant human being," as Lorraine Stone has argued...
...and if it is to transform the people into a force of change in the society, then how can all of this take place quietly and smoothly...
...Jean Bethke Elshtain Nashville, Tennessee Agents of Repression The Progressive's review of Agents of Repression, by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall (Books Briefly, August issue), missed an important point...
...Do we really need to be overcome with panic when the revolutionary processes become a reality...
...Kay Taebel Arlington, Texas The editors welcome correspondence from readers on all topics, but prefer to publish letters that comment directly on material previously published in The Progressive...
...Is there something wrong with loving another person enough to want your child to be at least his (or her) genetic heir, if it cannot be your own...
...Adoption is not the easy solution it seems at first...
...A constitutional amendment making flag-burning unlawful would ensure that more flags will be torched...
...Their demands were fully and fairly reported in the Soviet media...
...Does Gibbons maintain that men have a property right to sell their sperm and women to "rent" their uteruses...
...Daniel Raphael Seattle, Washington The author replies: Daniel Raphael is evidently upset by what he sees as my indulgent and starry-eyed account of today's reform process in the Soviet Union...
...There were no bold proposals for opening up the society and no suggestions that anything was amiss that couldn't be blamed on hostile foreign powers...
...During the period of GOON operations, there were about 200 unsolved murders, mostly of politically active tribal members, on the Pine Ridge Reservation...
...The thing we must never trust a patriarchal society (or any society, for that matter) to do for us is to limit our choices before we have the opportunity to make them...
...David Troup San Francisco, California Middle East Peacemakers Carolyn Toll Oppenheim suggests in "Middle East Peacemakers" (Reflections, July issue) that the efforts of a "small corps" of peace activists have brought about radical changes in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the world's attitude toward it...
...Without that, no workers' state can come into being...
...But we have seen all this before...
...Finally, commercial surrogacy is both immoral and dangerous...
...Kendyl Gibbons Naperville, Illinois The author replies: First, it is not at all clear that Ms...
...Striking workers, with limited faith in government promises, decided to keep their unofficial strike committee in existence...
...At least, let our progressive leaders, writers, publications, and statesmen concentrate on this vital problem and its remedy...
...On June 8, 1989, a thirty-year-old white man was charged with verbally and physically assaulting a black man who was using a public telephone...
...The poor dear, she didn't know what she was doing...
...A tax on individuals and corporations with annual incomes of more than $100,000 could probably produce $100 billion in additional revenue—enough to break the back of the Federal budget deficit...
...The Soviet Union, mainland China, and other so-called socialist societies are not now and have never been socialist...
...Previously, as Oppenheim noted, they met nearly in secret because they feared the wrath of the leadership of the American Jewish community and other "friends" of Israel...
...July issue) dealt with a trigger-happy Texas policeman...
...I am sorry that Gibbons repeats this judgment...
...In 1986, the Joint Economic Committee of Congress reported that the top 1 per cent of wealthholders owned 34.3 per cent of the national wealth...
...Gorbachev's intentions are manifestly different from Stalin's, and for that the world can feel fortunate...
...This does not sound to me like a matter of opinion, and certainly not an occasion for idle speculation...
...The available children for whom we would be acceptable are so physically, mentally, or emotionally incapacitated that their care would require a full-time parent at home, which we cannot provide financially...
...We have some common ground: I agree there is such a thing as a post-Leninist party-state regime which has yet to be democratized or dislodged, though there are encouraging signs of the former...
...Some half million Soviet workers struck...
...The West Bank and Gaza have become ungovernable by Israeli occupation forces, and the status quo is no longer supportable...
...Twenty-five of these were physical assaults...
...I do not think it proper for The Progressive to leave the matter up in the air...
...it could be a deeply felt longing for the love, intimacy, and commitment of a family...
...A first step for American activists is to pressure our Government to support a negotiated peace and an end to the Israeli occupation...
...A recent No Comment item ("But Who's Keeping Score...
...Edwina White Rio Linda, California ^Extraordinary Accusations' I was shocked to read, in the lead to an article about citizen opposition to neo-Nazi groups in Idaho, this statement attributed to an activist: "They're stabbing Native Americans...
Vol. 53 • September 1989 • No. 9
