Falsehoods

To the Editors of the Crimson:

The Harvard Republican Club obviously demonstrates the same casual attitude to facts as their error-prone party leader. Professor Womack has already corrected them about his role in a recent demonstration. Their assertions about Professor Stanley Hoffmann--who is away on leave this year and thus spared the task of correcting the Harvard Republicans' puerile inaccuracies--are equally false. First, Professor Hoffmann is not Chairman of the Government Department, as a glance at the course catalogue would have established. Secondly, he is not a "unremitting pacifist," as his recent book Duties Beyond Borders (p.10) explicitly states:

"...my formative experience was in the thirties and World War II, particularly the years when the Nazi stain spread over Europe, and when the Nazis occupied France. This has kept me with a lifelong, perverse preoccupation with world wars; and again, to make my biases very clear. I do not like them. So while I am not a pacifist, Christian or otherwise--the experience of the Thirties, so perfectly distilled in Ionesco's Rhinoceros, rules this out--I have a very strong belief that no war is very often better than war (indeed, a world war was avoidable as late as September 1938). It would be a mistake to make you believe that I have for actual, real-life military battles the enthusiasm that some of my friends and colleagues seem to feel."

Perhaps the Harvard Republicans' doctrinaire enthusiasm explains their sad misrepresentations--misrepresentations which would be malicious if they weren't so pathetically jejune. Michael Joseph Smith '73   Assistant Professor of Government and Social Studies