Publicity for Communism

Sir: I should like to reply to the letter of Mr. Bern Dibner in the Oct. 27 issue. If he believes that the best way to destroy Communism is to keep it under cover, then I believe that he is thinking dangerously. The mere fact that TIME features men like Gromyko and Vishinsky on its covers should be the first step in a great deal of publicity for Communism. For if we are to fight those "who are pledged to destroy us," we will have to do it in the open. The naivete of the American public lies not in our publicity of Communism, but in our ignorance of it, and our willingness to accept propaganda without bothering to study its basis. GENE DESCHERER Englewood, N.J.

High High

Sir: Congratulations on the story of India-Pakistan [TIME, Oct. 27]. After reading this masterpiece of reporting, the people of America certainly have a better understanding of the age-old problems facing present-day India.

VANCE W. SNYDER Greenwich, Ohio

Sir: Once in a great while a periodical produces a classic. Down in the annals of fame, with Will Irwin's The City That Was and William Allen White's memorial to his daughter, will surely go "The Trial of Kali." From every standpoint, literary, philosophical, humanitarian, it is impressive. . . .

NANCY POPE MAYORGA Los Angeles

Sir: In a magazine characterized by consistently good, and sometimes spine-tingling writing, the article on Kali impresses me as hitting a. very high high. . .

GRANBERY TUCKER Washington, D.C.

Sir: ... I feel impelled to congratulate your author on an amazingly colorful piece of accurate writing. My 23 years in India says he knows what he is talking about. . . .

GEORGE GARDEN Cincinnati

Unavoidable Minimum

Sir: . . . Nowhere do you attempt to give any other than a superficial one-sided analysis of the blood-soaked scene. For two centuries the British exploited and perpetuated the medieval illiteracy and intense poverty of our masses, by stifling all industrial and educational development to the unavoidable minimum. Rigidly enforced legislative measures magnified petty local differences to a vast national scale, where Hindus and Moslems secured desperately needed government jobs mainly on a religion basis, till in the ensuing bitterness and frustration a power maniac like Jinnah could suddenly leap out of the shadows and, screaming wildly, lead hundreds of thousands over the chasm's edge. . . . We have made our mistakes, but history will record that a great portion of the guilt lies on that "admirable" power now so "benign in her twilight."

K. R. SONDHI Brooklyn, N.Y.

Moral Imperturbability

Sir: In TIME, Oct. 13, you wrote: "One of the most shocking facts of recent history is the moral imperturbability with which democratic nations, like the U.S. and Britain, have handed over millions of people in eastern Europe to the inhuman mercies of a police state."

Late is better than never. I am very glad to see at last that a serious American magazine expresses what we "liberated nations," people of central and eastern Europe, were thinking since two years ago. . . .

The paper protests of the U.S. Government against crooked elections in Poland and Hungary or against Petkoff's condemnation make the dullest Communist leaders just laugh, because they know as well as you that the U.S. Government is neither prepared nor willing to back its protests by that which counts, i.e., by force. . . .

STANISLAW PODCZASKI (Displaced Person) Caracas, Venezuela

Old Truths, New Understandings?

Sir: In the story of the controversy between Dr. Fisher of Canterbury and Bishop Barnes of Birmingham [TIME, Oct. 27], I note a penetrating description of a general problem of a "liberal" interpretation of the Christian faith. But I believe the conclusion that "the Apostles' Creed means what it says" is an oversimplification of a much deeper problem.

The views of Bishop Barnes are not new or unique within the Church of England. In Doctrine in the Church of England, the Report of the Commission on Christian Doctrine appointed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York in 1922, both the view that belief in the actual historical Virgin Birth is a necessity and that "the historical Incarnation is more consistent with the supposition that our Lord's birth took place under the normal conditions of human generation" are stated as being held in the Church of England. The Report concludes: "We also recognize that both the views outlined above are held by members of the Church, as of the Commission, who fully accept the reality of our Lord's Incarnation, which is the central truth of the Christian faith. . . ."

RALPH E. MACY Cambridge, Mass.

Sir: If the Bishop of Birmingham had investigated the genetic possibilities of the "Virgin Birth," he would have found that the development of the unfertilized eggs of mammals, including man, could have produced only female progeny.

KARL SAX Professor of Biology Harvard University Cambridge, Mass.

Garbo & the Waiting World

Sir: Will you please inform a waiting world what else, besides wearing the hat and traveling in silence [TIME, Oct. 20], Greta Garbo is doing now. . . .

(MRS.) LILLIAN P. DAVIS Nashville, Tenn.

P: Since her last picture, The Two-Faced Woman (1941), Garbo has kept busy ignoring rumors. In Washington last week, she was back on the screen--thanks to the Thomas Committee's anti-Communist inquiry. At the hearings M-G-M had been criticized for making Song of Russia (1944), a wartime boost for America's Red ally. MGM's comeback was a reissue of Garbo in Ninotchka (1939), a picture that kids the pants off Bolshevik commissars. As soon as prints are ready, Ninotchka will be re-released in most of the nation's larger cities.--ED.

Belief in Goodness

Sir: The years of the occupation and the post-bellum period of catch-as-catch-can international politics have hardened us to a degree where we have practically abandoned all be lief in the goodness of a people and the pureness of intention of a government. We have got into the bad habit of looking behind those so-called good and spontaneous actions, often to find there self-interest. . . .

Now, reading the description of the combined efforts of your President, your Government and your people in the food-saving campaign for Europe [TIME, Oct. 20], this suddenly seems to me the most important news since the Peace, because, for a long time again, we can feel the spontaneous generosity of a people as a whole, led by its Government. . . .

A. MENALDA The Hague, The Netherlands

Repugnant Picture

Sir: I, as Imam of the London Mosque, leader of the Ahmadiyya Moslems in Great Britain, crave the hospitality of the columns of your magazine--to expose the serious injury that has been caused by the publication of a picture of Mohamed (may peace and blessings be on his name) the Holy Prophet of Islam, and ... by unfortunate remarks in the body of the article headed "India-Pakistan" in the issue of Oct. 27.

The painting of portraits is not approved by Islam and the idea of making a picture of the Holy Prophet is absolutely repugnant and extremely abhorrent to the Moslems. But the slanderous picture which has appeared in your magazine depicts ideas that have no foundation in Moslem history, and the inscription below is simply exasperating. . . . Mohamed's (may peace be on him) sword never took the life of a single human being. He preached peace--not war. . . .

You again attack him in the body of the article by calling Jinnah "far too easy a villain" and "conceivably an obsessed child of Mohamed." . . . Your rebukes to Mr. Jinnah are quite uncalled for. . . . The demand for Pakistan was not a result of Jinnah's imagination, but was a natural outcome of a long economic exploitation of the Moslem masses by the Hindus, who are not even now prepared to adopt a compromising attitude and to give them their due.

M. A. BAJWA London

Another Boy from Hardscrabble

Sir: William Green is not the first successful "Boy from Hardscrabble" [TIME, Oct. 13].

Back in 1867 the famous preacher Henry Ward Beecher wrote a novel, his only one, Norwood; or Village Life in New England, which was serialized in the New York Ledger, and for which he received the then fabulous sum of $25,000. One of the minor characters was a mischievous boy from Hardscrabble, the poor down-at-the-heels farming suburb of Norwood.

When Augustin Daly [and Joseph Howard] dramatized the novel (Worrell Sisters' New York Theater, Nov. 11, 1867), he expanded Beecher's . . . character into a major part for Miss Jennie Worrell, the youngest of the three famed theatrical sisters. . . .

MARVIN FELHEIM Cambridge, Mass.

Canadian Disclaimer

Sir: If this Leslie Roberts you mention in the Oct. 27 issue thinks he reflects the opinion of Canadians as a whole, then I say he is ... crazy. . . . The idea of blaming the U.S. for Canada's dollar shortage is ridiculous. The Ottawa Government is to blame more than anyone or anything else. Was it not they who restored the Canadian dollar to par? Did they not minimize the importance of Canada's gold-mining industry? . . .

FRED CRAWFORD Toronto, Ont.

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