Free Speech: A Cruel Hoax?

To the Editors of The Crimson:

"Behold, our butter stinketh!" was all it took for an undergraduate to be expelled from Harvard for insubordination in 1776. Although the food may have improved in the last two hundred years, the men who rule Harvard have not. Declare "Weinberger stinketh..." or "Duarte reeketh..." with the pungent odor of burning flesh, and you may be tossed out of school. In the wake of the Weinberger protest the Faculty Council, Bok & Co, hope to enact a new gag rule and disciplinary code for political protestors.

The Orwellian Faculty Council's vision of the University as an "oasis of free speech" is one where Adolph Hitler can goose-step onto campus and "speak freely in favor of anti-Semitism" (Crimson, 5 April), while the victims and opponents of Nazi death camps and slaughter are tried for "political crimes" by a revived Draconian Committee on Rights and Responsibilities (CRR). That Harvard brands students and others who protest genocide as "enemies of free speech" while guaranteeing "academic freedom" to the war criminals who commit genocide is an outrageous provocation. The sick sociopaths who run this place have outdone in their own words any spoof we've ever written about them. Any decent human being shivers at the words "Auschwitz" and "Dachau," but not the men who rule Harvard, Apparently the extermination of millions of Jews, workers, communists, all non-Aryans is deemed an appropriate sacrificial offering on their perverse altar of "free speech."

To raise the issue of free speech in this context is a cruel hoax. The Harvard campus abounds with right-wing academics, "distinguished" apologists for death squad "democracies," the Pipes who argue for anti-Soviet nuclear war, the Mansfields who gripe "there's too many Jews..." the Klitgaards who argue "blacks should attend lesser institutions than Harvard." But student protest has been primarily aimed, not at ideologues, but at those who strategize for and direct U.S. imperialist forces and their puppets in campaigns of mass murder. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Caspar Weinberger, Henry Kissinger, Jose Napoleon Duarte, etc., ad nauseum are war criminals, not academics! The U.S. ruling class (including the Harvard elite) is on a campaign to drape these butchers in academic robes and shove them down the throats of students in order to make mass murder "respectable," overcome the "Vietnam syndrome" and whip up anti-Soviet war hysteria.

The New York Times (8 April) reports that plans ate being drawn up for the introduction of American combat forces in Latin America. There is bipartisan support to send a "message" via M16s that Marxist elements influenced by Cuba and the Soviet Union be eliminated from Central America." The CIA's mining of Nicaraguan harbors, the transformation of Honduras into an American military base, and the U.S. game of "nuclear chicken", ramming Soviet subs, are no "exercises" but war provocations. And Harvard is doing it's part for the anti-Soviet war drive by trying to crush students who mobilize against the architects of an anti-Communist bloodbath in Central America.

Harvard's idea of an "oasis of free speech" is a cesspool for the "Who's Who in Mass Murder. "Not that this is particularly new, but we are a little surprised that they're being so blatant about it. It lacks the effete liberalism Harvard usually packages its filth in. After Hitler, dare we ask, what next? A Torquemada scholarship in Jewish Affairs?. . . a P.W. Botha fellowship in Race Relations?...invite Charles Manson to lecture on the symbiosis of religions and murder?...grace the Business School with a bust of Robert Vesco?

The Crimson reports that a few souls on the Faculty Council were concerned about the image of the CRR (which has been boycotted by students since its inception as a Kangaroo Court to discipline student anti-war activists in the late 60s) as a "court for political crimes." They want to resolve the problem of the boycott by abolishing student representatives. By all means... if, in the name of "free speech" they want to intimidate students from speaking out, then all pretense to democratic rule must absolutely be done away with. We suggest they sink University Hall, creating an underground interrogation center, concealed by a pile of corpses where the building once stood. Dean Epps could really be let loose in the underground as the Queen Bee of a swarm of the little stingers, directing them in defecation flights and pelting recalcitrant students with "yellow rain" until they confess their guilt in "political crimes" against U.S. imperialism.

While Harvard works out the details of their tribute to the Third Reich, we will continue to mobilize students to take a side for Military Victory to Salvadoran Leftists. Defend, Complete, Extend the Nicaraguan Revolution! For Unconditional Military Defense fo the USSR and Cuba!...And, if Duarte does appear as scheduled on April 27, to NEEP THE BUTCHERS ON THE RUN!

Tom Crean '86, Spartacus Youth league Dean Wareham, '85, Spartacus Youth League.