Frank's Column Is Irresponsible

As an alumnus of The Crimson editorial board, I am astonished and appalled by Stephen E. Frank's recent column, "Hitler's Russian Protege" (April 7, 1994), declaring that the Russian anti-Semitic politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky ought to be assassinated. Frank's shaded declaration that it would "be more prudent to nip [Zhirinovsky's] aspirations in the bud" is as sleazy a call for murder as one is likely to find in a publication that has pretensions to respectability. (And I wonder: after Zhirinovsky, whose is the next name on Frank's `hit list'--and the next?) Indeed, I am even more dismayed at the judgment of the editors of The Crimson. Have you been so benumbed by the cant of the Free Speech Absolutists that you think it's perfectly proper to allow the Opinion page to be used to advertise for someone's murder? Who is the next person you will allow to be marked on your pages as a `fit' target for assassination? Where is The Crimson's sense of responsibility and its commitment to a civil, moral discourse, without which the principle of free speech is but a hollow sham?

Perhaps I am being too sensitive. Perhaps in a future column, Frank will explain the moral difference between those who `simply' call for someone's murder and those who do the deed. Perhaps I don't see it Frank's way because I lead an Expository Writing study group on the life and career of John F. Kennedy '40--and so I know that in 1963 someone decided it would "be more prudent to nip his aspirations in the bud," too. But I don't think so. What I do think is that Frank's column is the ugliest violation of what is supposed to be the bedrock rule of membership in an academic community: a commitment to civil discourse. And I also think that there is no moral difference between those who `simply' call for someone's murder and those who do the actual killing: the former's hands are as bloodstained as the latter's.

Like many in this country and abroad, I loathe Zhirinovsky and other bigots of all kinds around the world, including here in the United States. But, as troubling, as dangerous as their existence is to us all, I would draw the line at murder. There is no alternative but to find another way of blunting the threat they present--unless we want to declare that `some people,' because of what they believe, or what they look like, or...can be summarily executed. Unfortunately for the world, that course has been pursued many times and in many places by many people who succumbed to the most evil impulses of humankind. How ironic that Frank would choose Holocaust Remembrance Day to declare that's the list he wants to be on. Lee A. Daniels '71   Fellow, W.E.B DuBois Institute