Education the Cure-All?
Sirs:
. . Your Letters section is filled these days with the buzz of servicemen condemning the brutally wanton way in which many G.I.s are conducting themselves abroad. People write to you and seriously nominate fellows like Senator Bilbo and Colonel McCormick as Man of the Year. And so it goes. . . .
Apparently it seldom occurs to anyone but the N.E.A. and a few others that the cure for all this ignorance is education; . . . that in order to have an educational program compatible with a high standard of living and a high standard of democracy, adequate facilities and crackerjack personnel are needed ; that the foundation and maintenance of top quality public education is essential to the survival of democracy; that "the voice of the people is clear and temperate in proportion as the people are well informed and well educated."
The servicemen who are discrediting their country and that amazing guy who attributes the winning of the war to the activities of egomaniac McCormick are sad examples of stingily financed school systems. . . .
TIME fails in its duty as a dispassionate narrator of current affairs when it registers more preoccupation with tabloidish crime and divorce stories than with the efforts of a thinking minority to awaken the nation to the vital need for good schools and good teachers.
(Y 3/C) LAWRENCE W. STRATTNER Norfolk, Va.
Making Monkeys
Sirs:
Read with interest your article on a U.S. press reporter stating that the Japs "had made us look like monkeys" [TIME, Aug. 27]. As members of the occupation forces on Kyushu we have seen the monkeys being made and the coddling and too easy handling of the little yellow apes.
The Rising Sun flag still floats over villages in our area. Jap officers demand written authorization of unit commanders before allowing American troops to take souvenirs, rifles, swords, etc. Jap officers and civilians ride around in automobiles while American troops, with a limited number of trucks and jeeps, must walk.
Japanese-Americans, citizens of the U.S., brag of going back to the states as soon as transportation is available. When asked why they came back to Japan, they all give that well-known toothy grin and say, "My mother was sick," or "dying," or "dead," "and I had to return to take care of the family."
Such is the condition of treatment of the Japanese by the occupation forces in Japan. After reading your articles on treatment of Runner Zamperini, Lieut. Colonel Boyington, and other American P.O.W.s, we of the occupation forces are thoroughly disgusted with the way our superiors want this mess handled. We predict another war against the conquerors of the American occupation force within 30 years.
[OCCUPATION FORCE OFFICERS' NAMES WITHHELD] Kyushu, Japan
Not I, Sir
Sirs:
I would like to send you a word of thanks to be passed on to the reviewer of my book, Prater Violet, in the Nov. 5 issue of TIME. I think he did a marvelous job, and he certainly helped to start the book off in the biggest way.
I have only one mild word of protest. I am not, as you have twice stated in your columns, the original, or part-original, of Larry in Maugham's The Razor's Edge. I can stand a good deal of kidding from my friends, but this rumor has poisoned my life for the past six months, and I wish it would die as quickly as possible.
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD Santa Monica, Calif.
Super-Buchenwald Policy
Sirs:
The current occupation policy in Germany and Japan can only be described as insane. The propaganda, distortion and hatred of five years, combined with the sociological stupidity of the professional militarist, is producing one of the most amazing procedures in history. "Denazification" and "de-industrialization," as currently pursued, can have only the most tragic consequences for Europe and Asia.
Our super-Buchenwald policy of destroying nations by removing their means of existence is tearing the economic heart out of Europe and the East. Confounding chaos, it prevents natural recovery and reduces the area to an arena of conflict between the Communist Heartland and the Capitalist Citadel. Retribution, an inadequate motive for an atomic world, must be suspended to permit Europe and the East to live.
WESLEY M. BAGBY
Head, Department of Social Sciences Pfeiffer Junior College Misenheimer, N.C.
Bad Words for Britain
Sirs:
It is time that blunt attention be called to a state of mind prevalent among a shockingly large percentage of American servicemen with regard to Great Britain, our principal ally in the war just ended. Nobody who has had an opportunity to talk to representative numbers and cross-sections of men in various theaters of war can escape the conclusion that never have more violent anti-British feelings been uttered by more young Americans than at the present time.
I am not referring to half-jocular sportsmanlike expressions of rivalry, nor to informed criticism of British institutions, but to open antagonism based on superficial stray bits of information and on hackneyed slogans picked up at random, all interwoven in a net of prejudice which would brighten the last hours of the German war criminals if they were aware of its extent. . . .
HENRY H. REMAK Warrant Officer, U.S.M.S. % Fleet Post Office San Francisco
Ages to Come
Sirs:
In the column headed "A Letter from the Publisher" you mention my comments on "the length of the atomic age" [TIME, Nov. 5]. I wonder if you ever did obtain the correct information. What I actually said was that, according to the Hindu scriptures, the evolution of earth's inhabitants was according to definite cycles. We have already passed the material age of 1,200 years and are 300 years into the electro-atomic age, which will continue for 2,100 years longer. The mental, or telepathic age, lasting 3,600 years, will follow that; and then comes the Truth cycle, or spiritual cycle, lasting 4,800 years. Only then will man begin to move downward toward another material cycle, after a gradual descent through the telepathic and electro-atomic ages again. During the history of the earth there have already been many ascensions and descensions of civilizations on the stairway of the four cycles.
PARAMHANSA YOGANANDA Los Angeles
P: TIME'S thanks to Yogi Yogananda for his reassuring statistics.--ED.
Come, Sweet Death
Sirs:
The men of the Axis were tyrants, but at least they had a plan for peace that would work--namely, world government imposed by force. The Russian Communists are also tyrants, but they too have a peace plan that is practical--namely, incorporation of every country into a soviet system ruled from Moscow. By contrast the American platform endorses the same old world anarchy, thinly diluted by a new League of Nations.
Obviously there are two ways to avert an atomic war. One is a voluntary yielding of sovereignty by all nations to a world government. This alternative is impossible in time to check the atomic armaments race which has already begun and which will soon produce its inevitable sequel. The other alternative road to peace is immediate action by the United States, Britain, and Canada to disarm the remaining-world before atomic know-how spreads abroad.
This alternative is also out of the question since it would mean fighting Russia. Therefore, we will of course have an atomic war. . . . Let us hope the atomic war comes soon, for the longer it is delayed, the longer time science has to make it more destructive.
FRANK G. ROBESON New Haven, Conn.
Too Atomic
Sirs:
I would like to see Dr. John Haynes Holmes's reply to Edgar D. Smith, both letters in TIME [Nov. 19].
Dr. Holmes's "Our nation stands dis graced before the world" reminds me of "the nine tailors of Tooley Street." He covers too much territory, and his own language is too atomic. A few more nouns like atrocity, outrage, perpetrator, crime, and adjectives such as hideous, disgraced, monstrous dropped from Dr. Holmes's lingual superbomber, would make us all want to crawl into holes and pull the hole in after us.... It is just as well, perhaps, that only God was present, with no help from ministers and theorists, when Adam and Eve in Eden started out to propagate the human race. The good men would have objected on the ground that sin and shame would be sure to follow, but God let nature take its course. Wars are not fought on the basis of ethics and religion. If this were so, there would be no wars.
W. H. ISBELL New York City
Can a Mongoose Climb?
Sirs:
In TIME, Nov. 26, you have an article on the mongoose in which you state that the mongoose cannot climb a tree. . . .
The mongoose can climb trees. They climb trees like any squirrel.
I have lived here for many years, and, at one time, owned considerable landed property, and very often I would take my dogs out hunting mongooses in the pastures. The mongoose would always climb trees to get away from the dogs, if he could get to a tree in time. . . .
H. R. Fox Kingston, Jamaica
P: TIME said that rats "learned to live in the trees, where mongooses cannot climb." TIME'S Science writer says that he, like the mongoose, can climb trees* but can't catch tree-climbing rats.--ED.
Intervention in India?
Sirs:
That there must remain occupation forces in the lands of the defeated peoples is unquestioned. . . . Now analyze the location of the remainder of our troops. Many are obscured away in the China-Burma-India Theater. In China, a great civil war is just in its preliminary stages and our men are in the ringside seats. In India, the situation is even more ominous, if that is possible.
Under the pretext of insufficient shipping space, our G.I.s are made to remain in India. Their presence gives latent support to Britain's most controversial colonial issue! On Nov. 23, an American in uniform was killed by rioting mobs in Calcutta. This tragedy is but a sample of the news that may be forthcoming from that unhappy country if we believe even a portion of the dire prediction of TIME'S London Bureau editors [TIME, Nov. 26].
Either we admit our willingness to intervene in the rightful business of others or we remove our soldiers out of these trouble spots at once!
JOSEPH F. PETTI Upper Darby, Pa.
About Trujillo
Sirs:
As a Dominican who knows the cruelties and oppression to which my countrymen have been subjected for the last 15 years, allow me to thank you for your article of Nov. 19th, and believe me that you could fill page after page with cruelties committed by Trujillo and his henchmen.
As a great part of my family is still in Santo Domingo, I am forced to ask you to keep this matter confidential as retaliation is the weapon that the despot uses in the most effective manner.
[NAME WITHHELD] New York City
*Except, possibly, in Jamaica, where there seems to be considerable argument but no clinching evidence.
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