Free Speech?

To the Editors of the Crimson:

President Bok's recent "Open Letter on Free Speech" deserves a reply since it has nothing to do with the question of Free speech. In fact, the only real democratic question posed here is Harvard's threat to students' legitimate exercise of their rights to protest. Bok's letter is aimed at squelching potential student protest against the presence on campus of such mass murderers as Secretary of War Weinberger '38 and Presidents' Botha of South Africa. Bok says students should sit quickly and listen politely to these butchers and then--maybe--ask few questions at the end. This comes in the wake of the statement made by some faculty Council members that Adolf Hitler himself would be welcome to come to Harvard and "speak freely in favor of anti-Semitism." (Crimson. 5 April 1983). Harvard's idea of an "oasis of free speech" is nothing but a cesspool for the "Who's Who in Mass Murder," the architects of death squads, racist terror and gas ovens. We in the Spartacus Youth I cague were among the 600 students who shouted down Weinberger last November. But odious though Weinberger's views may be, we were there to protest his deeds. We protested on behalf of the thousands of Weinberger's victims whose corpses are piled in mass graves from H. Salvador to Lebanon. There are plenty of right-wing professors at Harvard who act as "distinguished" apologists for death squad "democracies" or argue openly for anti-Soviet nuclear war. But Jeane Kirkpatrick. Caspar Weinberger. Henry Kissinger, Jose Napoleon Duarte, P.W. Botha, ad nauseuin are war criminals, not academics! Kirkpatrick and Weinberger's concept of "academic freedom" is crystal clear in San Salvador where their puppets shut down the National University at gunpoint. And Botha's apartheid regime exists by enslaving the country's black majority through a regin of terror, stripping them of their birthright and land, and transforming South African black workers into a migratory labor force with prison camp-like compounds and onerous pass laws.

In his open letter, Bok tries to paint himself as a "good gay" by denouncing the sexism of Pi Eta while saying not a word about the deeds of Weinberger and Botha and claiming that Harvard University stands above politics. What a sick joke! This in the home of the Kennedy School, where they draw up plans for a nuclear first strike and for the starvation of Central American peasants. This is the place where Vietnam war criminal Henry Kissinger received his training. This is the campus, where napalm was invented.

While the Harvard administration would welcome. Weinberger. Botha and Hitler with open arms in the name of "free speech" the rest of us are muzzled. Left-wing and minority faculty are routinely purged ("denied tenure") and even Ec 10's "radical sections" were evaporated. Meanwhile, Bok's underling Dean Epps does his bit for "free speech" by censoring the Harvard Hand's halftime shows. Preventing the Greatful Dead from performing on campus, and threatening two SYI ers with expulsion for participating in the protest of Weinberger. The simple statement "Behold, our butter stinketh!" was all it took for an undergraduate to be expelled for insubordination in 1766. But although the food may have improved in the last two hundred years, the men who rule Harvard have not. If you dare declare "Weinberger stinketh..." or "Duarte recketh.." with the pungent odor of burning flesh, you may be tossed out of school.

Like their big brothers in Washington, the Harvard administration doesn't care at all about "free speech." They try to crush students who mobilize against the architects of an anticommunist bloodbath in Central America because when they look at EI Salvador and Nicaragua, they see the possibility of the Russian Revolution happening all over again. They see the overthrow of capitalism, the ripping away of their markets, their profits, an end to the despotic rule of the landlords, bosses, military, and the specter of workers and peasants taking power--as was done in 1917 in Russia under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party. Despite the bureaucratic degeneration led by Stalin, the economic gains of the Russian Revolution remain and must be defended against imperialist counter-revolution.

Here at home we fight to win students to the side of the working class. From Sharpeville to. San Salvador to Detroit, the lines are drawn. And while Harvard continues to drape its butchers in academic robes and make mass murder "respectable." we will continue to mobilize students to take a side with workers and peasants throughout the world. Military Victory to Salvadoran Leftists! Defend, Complete, Extend the Nicaraguan Revolution! Smash Apartheid--For Workers Revolution! For Unconditional Military Defense of the USSR and Cuba! keep the Butchers on the Run! Thomas N. Crean '86   Spartacus Youth League