Walesa

To The Editors of the Crimson:

Some hard questions have to be asked in the wake of Harvard's invitation to speak at its commencement exercises extended to Lech Walesa.

The Harvard choice was not based on any profound contribution by Walesa to education, science or world peace, but a reward for his role as so-called leader of Solidarity. Harvard does not seek to honor Walesa's unionism but-only his anticommunism and his dedication to the counterrevolutionary movement in Poland represented by KOR.

Had the true purpose of the Walesa choice been a championing of the right of workers to unionize, would not a more likely candidate been a leader of PATCO, brutally busted by the subtle tyranny of government regulations? Or perhaps, more appropriately, should Harvard not have invited one of the harried workers of Iowa Beef, who were savagely attacked by police and national guardsmen while the company was free to bring in scab labor? Couldn't some of these people tell a more significant story of lost freedom, black-listing, tyranny and oppression?

Somehow, when it happens in Poland, the workers are a courageous lot of human beings but when it happens here to American workers, they are described as ungrateful, radical, and unpatriotic. The double standards are dramatically portrayed when a university like Harvard can turn its back on Americans struggling for some mild strand of security and insists it is honoring Walesa for the same reasons.

Moreover, isn't it possible that Harvard could care less about any worker? After all if Walesa's heroism is in standing up for workers' rights, how is it that Harvard heavily invested all these years in apartheid nations, making its profits from the misery and genocide of Black Africa.

True to form, as with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Lech Walesa's only claim to fame and his only achievement is his contribution to the Cold War anticommunist prop, aganda will, had for this alone is he attractive to Harvard, which needs to present its face at least once a year.

This Walesa is depicted as a savior of unionism is an affront to every American worker and certainly to the millions of unemployed. Mary Ann F. McArdle