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einste[f86,jmc]		Hook and Einstein

1. Hook doesn't provide a defense of the U.S.  Attacks on communists
and the Soviet Union will not substitute in many people's minds
for such a defense.  Whatever anti-Soviet arguments you offer,
they can avoid considering them with a quick, ``Yes, but the U.S.
does \ldots''.

2. A defense of the U.S. has to take into account the fact that
many people's anti-communism is naively based.  The pro-Soviet
person cannot be allowed to escape by pointing to the fact
that someone will say, ``The Soviets are atheists and all atheist
\ldots'' or ``The Russians are just uncivilized Asiatics no better
than Genghis Khan''.  Consider someone whose anti-Soviet views
are solely based on the Kosankina incident or the KAL-007 incident.
Each of these by itself could have an explanation in which the
Soviet Union is not at fault, e.g. ``Kosankina was schizophrenic,
and the U.S. took advantage for anti-Soviet propaganda''.  (I don't
know whether that explanation was offered at the time).  For KAL-007,
we can even have the explanation that the CIA did it deliberately, and
that lots of Soviet planes have been attacked by U.S. forces.  Remember
that for a non-reader, the explanation does not have to be one
that ever appeared in the newspapers.  The correctness of our conviction
that the Soviet Union and communists generally behave badly is
founded on an enormous body of evidence, but it will never be
true at the present level of intelligence and attention to the
news that everyone's anti-communism will be based on all the
information.

Therefore, we cannot let someone say that anti-communism is wrong
because most anti-communists are naive and some believe false
accusations.  They must answer the arguments of well-informed
anti-communists.  This point is important, because there is
much spontaneous anti-anti-communism arising from people who
in high school begin themselves more intellectual and sophisticated
than their teachers and classmates.  There needs to be a book
aimed at such people.  Parenthetically, the communists have
enormously benefitted from pro-communist books by Americans.
One Taiwan Chinese told me that he had become pro-communist
by reading a Chinese translation of Edgar Snow's Red Star over
China.  If I remember correctly the translation was made in
the mainland and distributed via Hong Kong.  Still parenthetically,
many people's ideas about their own countries are strongly
affected by what appears in the U.S. media.  I'll bet Time
helped convince many Vietnamese that their freedom was not
worth fighting for.

	Returning to Einstein, I suspect he did not tell you
all that was on his mind, because it was clear to him that
you were already committed to public actions that he regarded
as an attack on the Soviet Union.  His 1934 letter to Isaac
Don Levine urging him to refrain from public criticism of the
Soviet Union is more straightforward, but I suspect that
even this didn't fully express his pro-Soviet attitude.  I am
speculating on the basis of the way I was brought up and
on how pro-Soviet and pro-communist attitudes often survive
knowledge of Soviet and communist atrocities.  One
is saddened by knowledge of the atrocities, but one continues
to hope that it won't happen again and that the dream of
socialism, the emotions aroused by the songs will eventually
prevail.

	Berthold Brecht was a master pro-communist propagandist and
perhaps he made a major discovery in that direction.  Consider the opera
Mahagonny in which an American who loses his money is convicted of it and
sent to the electric chair.  The great advantage of the opera from the
propagandist point of view is that it cannot be refuted by facts.  No-one
takes it as literally true that any American was ever condemned to death
for poverty.  However, the music and the sentiments allow anyone so
inclined to regard it as a symbolic truth.  Garcia-Marquez? received
the Nobel prize for a novel in which 3,000 peasants were killed in
a Central American country at the behest of the United Fruit Company.
When asked about the reality of the incident he said that there
was some incident in which maybe 10 people were killed but he
made it 3,000 in the novel, because he liked the image of the
bodies being loaded onto freight cars.  No ordinary critics
regard this as dishonest on his part.

	Einstein probably had great sentimental pro-Sovietism taat
was mainly compatible with knowledge that atrocities were being
committed.  Moreover, he probably had personal relations that would
have been damaged by any anti-Soviet admissions that reached the
public, e.g. he may have known that any such statement would have
seriously hurt Otto Nathan's feelings.  Einstein was a very kind
man, and therefore such a consideration may have weighed heavily.
  I know this affected many
people who either remained communists or remained silent after
dropping out.  I made no public anti-communist statements till after
my parents died.