Misrepresented?

To the Editors of The Crimson:

In your article "Friends of ROTC Club Gains Official Recognition" Crimson, 12 April you report that Dean Epps stationed two undercover cops outside the meeting of the Committee on College Life for fear that the Friends of the Spartacus Youth League would "disrupt" the meeting. You then go on to note the presence of a Spartacus Youth League member at the meeting and quote me as saying that the Friends of ROTC Club "should not be approved because many of its likely members were interested in promoting the use of military force."

What garbage! There appears to be a concerted campaign of willful and pernicious slander stemming from the Office of the Dean of Students to the pages of the Crimson. The cop stunt by Dean Epps was not only outrageous intimidation of the student observers of the meeting, but coupled with the Crimson's own deliberate falsification of the SYL's views, a direct attempt to set up the SYL.

Even the casual reader will note that the comments you falsely attribute to me are not in quotes, and in fact I did not say this. To be sure, the Harvard Administration and scores of professors are "friends" of ROTC and "are interested in promoting the use of military force." But the SYL does not protest ideologues for their views, but war criminals for their deeds. "Friends of ROTC," a collection of sick Cantabrigian sociopaths is not the question. In 1939, Hitler had the Wehrmacht, but who-ever heard of the Friends of the Wehrmacht--unless it was the German-American Bund?

The Spartacus Youth League is opposed to ROTC--the direct use of the university for the military training of the future butchers of workers and peasants around the world. Fully 70 percent of U.S. Army officers are recruited and trained by ROTC. Today their "adventures" include a Bay of Pigs II against Nicaragua, arming and training the bloody Salvadoran junta, dropping napalm (invented at Harvard) on Cambodia. Tomorrow they hope to annihilate the USSR.

However, the wet dreams of ROTC and its "friends" need not become our living nightmares. The Spartacus Youth League his initiated a united from, Enemies of ROTC, open to all opponents of the direct use of the university for military training.

Whether or not the Crimson's staff of novelists are intellectually capable of making the distinction between views and deeds, we are, and demand that you print this letter as a correction to your falsehoods. Alden Cavanagh, Special Student   Spartacus Youth League