The `Good Germans'

To the Editors of The Crimson:

When I was at Harvard, class of '64, I worked with the embryonic anti-apartheid and divestment movements of that time. It's sad to say that nothing has changed, either in South Africa or in Harvard's willingness indirectly to do business with that country.

After leaving Harvard, I visited Rhodesia and South Africa as a journalist and was thrown out of the latter country for interviewing Albert Luthuli, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, who had been banned by the South African government. Then as now, the South African government was hell-bent on destroying every African leader who showed his head. The system there will not reform itself from within.

Is the brain trust represented by Harvard, one of the fine learning institutions on the globe, truly not up to finding ways of making money without doing so hand-in-hand with the Afrikaaners of South Africa?

Is the lesson for the undergraduates then that money and morality are emphatically divorced--does it have to be that way? Before the Civil War in this country those not necessarily in favor of slavery, but sympathetic to the slave interests, defended their inactivity by pointing to the obvious and apparently telling fact that there was simply too damn much money tied up in it. The sacred, almighty dollar once again! Our own comfort before everything!

Those who refuse to understand how we support one of the truly evil systems in the world today in South Africa are the "good Germans" of our time. Peter de Lissovoy '64