JohnEngelman
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Commentary magazine was founded in 1946 by the American Jewish Committee as a Jewish opinion journal. The Commentary Reader, edited by Norman Podhoretz, was published in 1966.
The Commentary Reader begins with a section entitled “The Holocaust and After.” Unfortunately, the essays in this section do not explain the Satanic appeal Hitler had over the German people. In Mein Kampf, Hitler admits that when he lived and worked among working class people in Vienna “I believe that those who knew me then must have thought me a queer fellow.”
When Hitler was considered as an officer after winning the Iron Cross during World War I, he was rejected with the consideration that he lacked leadership ability.
Those contributing to the essay “Western Values and Total War” discuss how to simultaneously avoid a nuclear war and the Communist conquest of the world. They ignore two facts about the nuclear confrontation.
First, the Soviet Union had a no first use policy. The United States was committed to using nuclear bombs if NATO found itself losing a conventional war in Europe.
Second, in the United States many Fundamentalist Christians associated a nuclear war with The Battle of Armageddon, and thus with the Second Coming of Christ. Those thinking this way viewed a nuclear war favorably. Those ruling the Soviet Union were atheists. They knew they could not build their ideal of a classless society after civilization was destroyed by nuclear weapons.
In “China and the United States” Oscar Gass acknowledged that during the Chinese Civil War between the Communists and the Nationalists, the Communist army was better led. Then he points out that the Chinese Communist government that emerged when the Communists won the civil war was an incompetent dictatorship, that killed hundreds of thousands of Chinse, and left China a poor country.
“Reflections on Trotsky” by George Lichtheim reminded me of the Trotskyists I knew and liked during the War in Vietnam. The appeal of Trotskyism is the belief that if Leon Trotsky had won the power struggle with Joseph Stalin the Soviet Government would have achieved the ideals of the Bolshevist movement.
I do not think so. Trotsky helped Vladimir Lenin crush the Kronstadt Uprising. This was an authentic working class rebellion against the Soviet government. The forced collectivization of the peasants was Trotsky’s idea. Stalin adopted it later. Trotsky thought that Communists in capitalist countries should continue to try to foment Communist uprising against western democracies. This would have made Western countries less willing to help the Soviet Union during the Nazi invasion. If Trotsky had been the war leader of the Soviet Union during the Second World War he would have kept expecting the German working class to overthrow Hitler.
In Presenting the Bible” David Diches presents reasons for believing that Abraham really lived. For example, Abraham’s practice of sometimes claiming that his wife was his sister was often practiced in the ancient Near East.
I first read Norman Podhoretz’s essay “My Negro Problem and Ours,” when it was assigned to me by a black college professor when I was in college. In this essay Podhoretz admits that even as an adult who tries to be a liberal, he views blacks with fear and hatred. This was because when he was a boy, growing up in a mixed race working class neighborhood in Brooklyn he was often harassed and sometimes beaten up by blacks.
Podhoretz draws attention to the white liberals who would condemn him for his racism, while insisting on living in all white neighborhoods and sending their children to all white schools.
In “Negroes and Jews” Nathan Glazer points out that many Negroes have moved beyond the demand for equal rights to the demand for equal results. In “From Protest to Politics” Baynard Rustin presents this demand.
In “Hiss, Chambers, and the Age of Innocence” Leslie A Fiedler acknowledges that Alger Hiss passed classified information to the Soviet Government.
Robert Warshow’s essay “The ‘idealism’ of Julius & Ethel Rosenberg” leaves open the possibility that the Rosenbergs, who were executed for passing classified information about nuclear weapons to the Soviets, may not have shortened the time the Soviets needed to develop their own atomic bomb. At the time many Americans believed that without the help of the Rosenbergs the Soviets would not have developed an atomic bomb of their own.
In “Equal in Paris” James Baldwin wrote about his experience of being arrested and imprisoned in France for steeling a sheet from a hotel. Eventually it was determined that the sheet had been stolen by someone else, who gave it to Baldwin, and that Baldin had not known that the sheet had been stolen. With this discovery Baldwin was released.
What impressed me about this essay was Baldwin pointing out that in 1948 he moved to Paris with no knowledge of French, with forty dollars in cash, and nothing in the bank. Nevertheless, he managed to begin a brilliant career as a fiction writer and essayist.
Baldwin went on to defeat Willian Buckley in a debate at Oxford.
The Commentary Reader begins with a section entitled “The Holocaust and After.” Unfortunately, the essays in this section do not explain the Satanic appeal Hitler had over the German people. In Mein Kampf, Hitler admits that when he lived and worked among working class people in Vienna “I believe that those who knew me then must have thought me a queer fellow.”
When Hitler was considered as an officer after winning the Iron Cross during World War I, he was rejected with the consideration that he lacked leadership ability.
Those contributing to the essay “Western Values and Total War” discuss how to simultaneously avoid a nuclear war and the Communist conquest of the world. They ignore two facts about the nuclear confrontation.
First, the Soviet Union had a no first use policy. The United States was committed to using nuclear bombs if NATO found itself losing a conventional war in Europe.
Second, in the United States many Fundamentalist Christians associated a nuclear war with The Battle of Armageddon, and thus with the Second Coming of Christ. Those thinking this way viewed a nuclear war favorably. Those ruling the Soviet Union were atheists. They knew they could not build their ideal of a classless society after civilization was destroyed by nuclear weapons.
In “China and the United States” Oscar Gass acknowledged that during the Chinese Civil War between the Communists and the Nationalists, the Communist army was better led. Then he points out that the Chinese Communist government that emerged when the Communists won the civil war was an incompetent dictatorship, that killed hundreds of thousands of Chinse, and left China a poor country.
“Reflections on Trotsky” by George Lichtheim reminded me of the Trotskyists I knew and liked during the War in Vietnam. The appeal of Trotskyism is the belief that if Leon Trotsky had won the power struggle with Joseph Stalin the Soviet Government would have achieved the ideals of the Bolshevist movement.
I do not think so. Trotsky helped Vladimir Lenin crush the Kronstadt Uprising. This was an authentic working class rebellion against the Soviet government. The forced collectivization of the peasants was Trotsky’s idea. Stalin adopted it later. Trotsky thought that Communists in capitalist countries should continue to try to foment Communist uprising against western democracies. This would have made Western countries less willing to help the Soviet Union during the Nazi invasion. If Trotsky had been the war leader of the Soviet Union during the Second World War he would have kept expecting the German working class to overthrow Hitler.
In Presenting the Bible” David Diches presents reasons for believing that Abraham really lived. For example, Abraham’s practice of sometimes claiming that his wife was his sister was often practiced in the ancient Near East.
I first read Norman Podhoretz’s essay “My Negro Problem and Ours,” when it was assigned to me by a black college professor when I was in college. In this essay Podhoretz admits that even as an adult who tries to be a liberal, he views blacks with fear and hatred. This was because when he was a boy, growing up in a mixed race working class neighborhood in Brooklyn he was often harassed and sometimes beaten up by blacks.
Podhoretz draws attention to the white liberals who would condemn him for his racism, while insisting on living in all white neighborhoods and sending their children to all white schools.
In “Negroes and Jews” Nathan Glazer points out that many Negroes have moved beyond the demand for equal rights to the demand for equal results. In “From Protest to Politics” Baynard Rustin presents this demand.
In “Hiss, Chambers, and the Age of Innocence” Leslie A Fiedler acknowledges that Alger Hiss passed classified information to the Soviet Government.
Robert Warshow’s essay “The ‘idealism’ of Julius & Ethel Rosenberg” leaves open the possibility that the Rosenbergs, who were executed for passing classified information about nuclear weapons to the Soviets, may not have shortened the time the Soviets needed to develop their own atomic bomb. At the time many Americans believed that without the help of the Rosenbergs the Soviets would not have developed an atomic bomb of their own.
In “Equal in Paris” James Baldwin wrote about his experience of being arrested and imprisoned in France for steeling a sheet from a hotel. Eventually it was determined that the sheet had been stolen by someone else, who gave it to Baldwin, and that Baldin had not known that the sheet had been stolen. With this discovery Baldwin was released.
What impressed me about this essay was Baldwin pointing out that in 1948 he moved to Paris with no knowledge of French, with forty dollars in cash, and nothing in the bank. Nevertheless, he managed to begin a brilliant career as a fiction writer and essayist.
Baldwin went on to defeat Willian Buckley in a debate at Oxford.
