Politics and Morality

To the Editors:

It is sad to see so good a liberal as Andrew Kopkind condescending to Martin Luther King. However “irrelevant” he may have become, surely there are few men to whom Negro and white alike owe so much. It is annoying to see Mr. Kopkind making the now-fashionable third-person references to woolly-minded white liberals, as if he were not one himself. But to conclude that “Morality, like politics, starts at the barrel of a gun,” is blatant fascist nonsense, whether it comes from the New Left or the Underground Right. (And the recent display of anti-Semitism by SNCC only too sadly bears me out.) Politics and morality end at the barrel of a gun; they cannot begin there.

Peter L. Thorslev, Jr.

Department of English,

University of California,

Los Angeles, California.