NIEL—Any democrat must welcome unreasoned abuse from an apologist for
Castrate totalitarian- ism—nor need one necessarily attribute it to malice, there being an alternative explanation. But Mr. Adler must try at least to make some show of attacking what I actually say, not something quite different. I wrote, 'From Russell's point of view, the Americans were prepared to use any means what- ever to bring down Castro' including `to risk atomic war,' and I pointed out that this false estimate had led to Russell's gross and basic mistake in taking NI- granted that the October, 1962, crisis was simply a US creation, the evidence of Soviet missiles being a provocative fake. Of course the Americans (and, as Mr. Adler says, in my view rightly) have made considerable efforts to bring down Castro. This is a totally different thing from their employing 'any means whatever' including nuclear war, to do it: on the contrary, they did not even give local tactical air support in the Bay of Pigs. And the October crisis was, of course, a Soviet- US affair, in which the Castro regime (as Castro himself now points out) was a minor consideration. (Mr. Adler also misinterprets me in other ways it could be tedious to go into)
But it may be •worth drawing attention to Russell's persistence in accepting the absurdities of Communist propaganda. with his latest outburst on the conduct of the fighting in South Vietnam (we will be having a repetition of the old germ warfare hoax next!). The charitable thing would be to assume (as unilateralists assure me) that he is in the hands of the Cohns and Schines among his entourage, and does not get even his precious access to reality.
ROBERT CONQUEST London, SW1
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