Harvard's Ties

To the Editors of The Crimson:

The controversy over the South Korean Trade Association's gift of $1 million to the East Asian Studies Department has sparked a chorus of denials, rationalizations, and hypocritical buck-passing from the Harvard administration, anxious to preserver its facade of liberal enlightenment. The KTA, closely tied to the Korean CIA, has been the conduit for funds from the right-wing Park dictatorship to influential policy-making institutions like Harvard in an attempt to buy further American economic and military aid. Park's regime has carried out massive executions and merciless tortures of those who dare to protest the miserably impoverished lives of the workers and peasants of South Korea.

The Harvard administration's attempt to clear itself of any tie with Park range from pious vows of ignorance to outright justification: "We would just be left extremely ethical but completely broke." (John Fairbank, Crimson, Nov. 22). Harvard's record is clear: on the same side as Henry Kissinger, Daniel Moynihan and the National Security Agency. The KTA's grant may not, in fact, be for actual political or military research in the service of General Park. But if it is, it is hardly news in Harvard's long history as a bulwark of U.S. imperialism.

The Spartacus Youth League is the only leftist organization at Harvard with the correct understanding of how to mobilize class conscious protest against right-wing dictatorships such as the Park regime. At a planning meeting for the demonstration last October against Kissinger, only the SYL argued for drawing the class line and inserting the word "right-wing" before "dictatorships" in the slogan "End U.S. Aid to Dictatorships!" There is a class distinction between the South Korean imperialist puppet regime and the Stalinist deformed workers state in the North.

While we place no faith in the North Korean Stalinist bureaucracy to extend social revolution to the South (or to anywhere else), we stand for unconditional military defense of the nationalized property forms in the North against imperialist attack. In North Korea, we call for political revolution against Kim Il Sung and his dynasty to establish the democratic rule of workers Soviets; in South Korea we understand that only a Trotskyist party with a revolutionary program of independent workers struggle against capitalism and its Stalinist collaborators can lead the way to socialist revolution.

We resolutely oppose the use of the University as a training ground for imperialist spies and as a center for imperialist research. We look forward to a day when elite institutions like Harvard, nationalized and under an American workers government, will contribute its knowledge not to imperialist butchery but to the building of an international socialist society. Robina Fraser   Spartacus Youth League