REPLY TO PHILBRICK: 1

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The January 20th edition of the CRIMSON contains a comment by Herbert A. Philbrick on a petition circulated by the Harvard Fellowship of Reconciliation. For one thing, he misunderstands FOR's petition. He writes, "I will suggest that . . . they circulate the same petitions demanding that the surplus foods be circulated to South Viot Nam, where more than 350,000 homeless and hungry refugees, driven from their homes by the well fed Reds, are is dire need of subsistence." The Harvard FOR petition asked that the President send surplus food to all the needy, "regardless of political persuasion, particularly to Chins." The last three words would not have been added except for the insistence of the Dean's Office. No "homeless and hungry" people, including the refugees of South Viot Nam, wets excluded. The November Fellowship, the official magazine of the national F.O.R., mentioned the Brahmaputra valley of Pakistan as another area to which the U.S. might send its surplus food.

We are also somewhat disturbed by Mr. Philbrick's first sentence in which he speaks of "Chinese Communists who allegedly have lost crops due to a flood of the Yangtze River." Less than one percent of the Chinese people belong to the Communist party. Furthermore, the loss of crops need not be alleged; it can be demonstrated. The Yangtze inundated a large part of China's vital rice bowl. The Communists admitted the flooding of nearly 42,000 square miles of farm land. Western sources put the figure at over 267,000 square miles. In view of the Yangtze's record crest of 97 feet, the latter figure in probably the more accurate of the two.

The September 6 edition of Time reports that Chiang Kai-Shek, "appealed in the same of humanity to 'all Chinese', whatever their political persuasion, and to all 'foreign friends' to save the mainland from disaster." Time continues, "In doing so, Chiang, a practicing Christian, showed . . . magnanimity, good sense and imagination . . ."

Even granting that the Soviet "Utopia" has produced such mountains of food as Mr. Philbrick describes, is it logical to assume that these stocks will be distributed to China?

Beneath Mr. Philbrick's exultation of Soviet agriculture, we detect a note of gentle satire. Surely he does not believe that Soviet farms exceeded their quotas, "in some instances by as much as 303 per cent." He seems rather to be pointing out the differential between Communist propaganda and the hard facts of life. In this we applaud him, but we do not think that the exaggerations of the Soviet embassy excuses the well fed from feeding starving people. David L. Lively '58, Thomas W. Burrows '57, and John R. Butcher '57 for the Harvard FOR