It was a kick to read a recent issue of WIN. I remember reading it back in the heyday of Vietnam protests. Now the Occupy movement has reenergized many people.
For me, the peace movement was and is the best thing about America. After Vietam, I wrote letters to editors and went to demos protesting the Central and Latin American horrors. Doing research during Desert Storm, I learned that in 1961 some 342 pan-Arab and U.N. soldiers had blocked an Iraqi takeover of Kuwait—in sharp contrast to the standard U.S. military and police overkill.
As a film critic for countercultural and straight papers, I was always on the lookout for great antiwar films. For me, the best of them all was Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard). Commissioned as a study of the death camps, it cut deep into the insane cruelty of war. For years, it was banned in the United States, while jingoistic John Wayne movies were widely shown.
Classic novels like All Quiet on the Western Front and Catch-22 are well known. Not so a WWII memoir by the great Canadian writer Farley Mowat. And No Birds Sang is a vivid account of the chaos and monster deathism of that war.
Burns Raushenbush
Portland, OR
A few comments on the “Vol. 28, No. 4/
Vol. 29, No. 1” issue:
To R.A. (p. 16): I can’t tell you what to write, but I haven’t used the word “denigrate”—except to disparage it, as I am now—since I read, near the end of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, his confession (?) that he had once joked that the then-governor of Pennsylvania had de-nigr-ated (I assume he pronounced the word thus) some members of his cabinet in the hope of selling them as slaves.
And I don’t believe that renting my apartment (rather than owning it) entitles me to call myself homeless.
To R.R. (first letter, p. 4): Recent research shows that many nonhuman species have more intra-species violence than our species does.
And when you write that hunting may become increasingly necessary, did you mean it literally? And if so, do you believe that our descendants will exist only in the small numbers that enabled our ancestors to get their meat by hunting, or do you believe they will limit their consumption of meat to the tiny quantities that will be available through hunting?
In 1958, when I asked for 1-A-O (conscientious objector to combatant military service) status, the Special Form asked what I had done to show my sincerity. I wrote that I had shown my concern for human life by greatly reducing my eating of meat so as not to consume more than my share of the world’s food supply. What about grass-fed cattle? All cattle can be grass fed only if all meat eaters become demi-vegetarians, as I still am.
Alan R. Brown
New York, NY
As I know WIN has published articles on prisons and prisoners in the past, please remember when publishing anything by or about prisoners to refer to them as prisoners or convicts, never “inmates”—a term of derision inside the walls. If I don’t like someone in here, I refer to them as an inmate.
Furthermore, there’s no such thing as a “prison industrial complex (PIC).” [The term] falsely implies that somehow the various state and federal governments are making money from prisons and what few little prison industries there are. Even with our slave labor, the profits, if any, are negligible and prisons are just bleeding state budgets and taxpayers dry. For example, Michigan State [Prison] Industries (MSI) lost millions
over the past few years, according to a recent audit. Consequently, as there is nothing “industrial” or “complex” about prison, public or private, people should refrain from using this misleading terminology.
Rand W. Gould
Lapeer, MI
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