Politics and Morality

To the Editors:

With what ease Andrew Kopkind, in his rhapsody on the riots, dismisses as “irrelevant” Martin Luther King and as confused or evil the 80 percent of the American people who are to the right of King. He does not tell us his alternative to the assimilation of Negroes into the American bourgeoisie. What alternatives are there but mass conversions or mass executions?

A gunbarrel morality, evidently, with social justice for the formerly oppressed, oppression for the formerly prosperous. Give every good man a gun and let him kill the wicked. Somehow I’ve heard that voice before, and no matter how righteous its indignation against immorality, its Fascist accent scares me.

George T. Wright

Knoxville, Tennessee