WHAT IF IT HAD BEEN HITLER?'..

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Thank Warner Berthoff for his letter "Concerning the Events Last Friday." It's the first evidence of clear thinking I've encountered in the spate of hysterical response to an event which people don't even know what to call so they call it Last Friday. I wasn't there, but from various reports I've read it seems to me that what was going down had nothing to do with curtailment of freedom of speech. It was a political rally, and there were more people on one side of the issue shouting louder than the people on the other. To use the overworked Nazi parallel, what if it had been Hitler? Would sitting quietly and giving him the finger be an adequate expression of our revulsion and rage? In many of us, representatives of current American policy in Indochina, the Third World and in our own backyard arouse no less fury, anguish and despair than Adolph. No one was physically prevented from speaking, and the First Amendment, as far as I know, does not guarantee the right to be heard. At worst the anti-war people can be accused of allowing their emotions to lead them to a stupid tactic which might damage the cause in the liberal sector. It would have been much better if the heckling had been controlled and if an anti-war speaker had made it to the podium to denounce the YAF and their cronies. But all this moral outrage about freedom of speech is totally unjustified, and I can only see it as an attack on radical dissent launched defensively by a guilty university.