Letters

Letters

Editors:

Julian Mayfield’s letter rebutting Lewis Coser’s assessment of his piece in the “Young Radicals” symposium was printed without comment, I suppose, on grounds that it damns itself. It does. One hates to fall back on labels, but the fact is it takes a powerful self-restraint to stop mumbling “neo-Stalinist” in the reading of it. Coser was right, in the formal sense, to rest his case. The trouble is, where does this leave us? Most of the bright young left militants who contributed to the symposium are soft on Castro, show more than a passing sympathy for Nasser, see “something wonderfully hopeful” in China, and find little to complain of in the actions of Nkrumah and Toure.

Those on the left who say, “Yes, but . . .”, and raise questions about the one-party, implicitly totalitarian character of these regimes get a reaction in which they are accused, in substance, of being wise but irrelevant. To have lived through a political war or two… casts one in the role of a finger-shaker. To act with confidence on the left, now, it seems necessary to have been born yesterday.