Red-baiting

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Janno Lieber and Larry Baumgartner enjoy dwelling so much on oppression in the East that they conveniently forget that it exists in the West.

For a rich, white, elite Harvard student, American style capitalism naturally seems like a bed of roses. Lieber and Bumgartner are prosperous, they can look forward to a promising future, and they do not feel the need to say or do anything that would get them in trouble with the police. But what about an unemployed Black auto worker in Detroit, or a Chicano alien in a sweatshop in L.A.? Ask a priest in El Salvador, or a diamond miner in South Africa what they think of the freedoms that Lieber and Bumgartner enjoy, and they will not know what you are talking about.

It seems that Errol Louis cannot begin to write about systematic oppression under the "democratic" capitalism in the West without being labelled an apologist for authoritarian "socialism" in the East. But if Louis has argued for any world-view in his brillaint End-papers, it is that the U.S. and the USSR form an axis of repression. As long as we think that our political choices are limited to Calvin Coolidge or Josef Stalin, we will be paralyzed with fear and trembling.

Now, Lieber and Baumgartner are not especially afraid of anything, but then again, neither seems in any hurry to change the slavish life most people in the West are forced to settle for. Let us perform a single thought experiment. If Errol Louis had been born in the Eastern bloc, it is probable that he would have become exactly what he is now: a courageous dissenter, exposing the lies that oppression and privilege dress up in. If Lieber and Baumgartner had been born in the Eastern bloc, it is likely that they would have become exactly what they are in the West: complacent, privileged defenders of the status quo.

In the West, red-baiting makes for an easy and successful career. But if Western democracy does have any points of advantage over Eastern authoritarianism, it is because heroes like Errol Louis have fought to speak the truth, while yes-men like Lieber and Baumgartner have been content to repeat the slogans that other people have taught them.

If Errol Louis had been in Prague in 1968, he would have been throwing Molotov cocktails at Soviet tanks. If Lieber and Baumgartner had been bright young apparatchiks fresh out of Moscow University, would they have been draft resisters? I doubt it.

See you at the barricades, Janno and Larry. Michael T. Anderson '84