Princeton Professor Avishai Margalit’s new book was reviewed by John Gray in the latest NY Review under the title “Communists and Nazis: Just as Evil?” (Contact me for a copy since it is behind a subscriber’s wall.) When I read it, I dashed off a note to the professor calling him stupid and hypocritical. To my surprise, he wrote back saying that it was unfair to say such things without reading the book. Here was my follow-up:
Dr. Margalit, I want to take the trouble to explain why I found your ideas of your new book “On Compromise and Rotten Compromises” so objectionable even though I am relying solely on John Gray’s review in the NY Review. Ordinarily, I don’t pay much attention to books on moral philosophy but Gray’s title “Communists and Nazis: Just as Evil?” was enough to make me read the review and follow up with an angry note to you. Frankly, I was surprised that you took the trouble to reply to me since I was only blowing off steam. My cranky emails to authority figures like President Obama or to you, the George F. Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, are more in line with Saul Bellow’s Herzog who as you might know devoted much of his time writing to public figures not expecting a reply. I guess that in the age of email, it is easier to connect in a way that was once considered more of a form of poetic apostrophe—as in “Twinkle, twinkle, Princeton Professor, how I wonder what you are?” Now that I am 65 years old, you’d think that I would have gotten used to anti-Communist screeds, especially in a publication like the NY Review whose editors still appear to be making amends for publishing an article by Tom Hayden in the 1960s with a David Levine drawing of a Molotov cocktail on the cover. They cannot let a month go by without publishing one of these boilerplate articles explaining to the world how Evil Communism was. You’d think that the USA was the next Nepal from these frequent warnings. full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/03/21/a-reply-to-avishai-margalit/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
