Page 2
University Daily Kansan
Monday, Jan. 8, 1962
Castroism in Brazil
There are increasing signs that another Castro-style revolution may be in the making for Latin America. The specific country is Brazil, and the Communist revolutionary threatening an uprising is Francisco Juliao.
Juliao's admission that he is a Communist came last December 7. At the same time he said that if the government did not press through effective reforms to ease the plight of the peasants in the stricken Northeast area of Brazil where he operates, his followers would have no choice but "to let their beards grow and use their guns."
IF JULIAO decides on revolution, he has a substantial number of followers to back him. His basic strength comes from an estimated 3,000 hard-core radicals, but their influence extends to tens of thousands of peasants.
Juliao's followers have fertile ground to work on. The depressed Northeast of Brazil is an area larger than the state of Texas and containing nearly 20 million people. The vast majority of those 20 millions are peasants with so little opportunity or sources of help that they are tenant farmers without land or any other possessions of their own. They live on the edge of hunger and when the chronic droughts that strike much of the area come, some of them die of starvation. Even when the area is not suffering from drought, the mortality rate is high due to disease and a lack of doctors to cover the huge area.
THE PLIGHT of the peasants is an old story. They have suffered this way for many generations. But they are restless now and no longer willing to accept the poverty and despair they are faced with.
One of the reasons they are restless is because of men like Juliao. But he is not the only element working for change in the Brazilian Northeast. Another man, less dramatic, but aware of the dangers in the situation, is working for reform rather than revolution. He is the director of the Brazilian government's Northeast Development Agency, Celso Furtado. Under his direction, the agency has prepared a five year plan for basic reforms and development of the area. It is to take effect this year.
THE AGENCY'S reform plan is the result of a recognition by the political leaders of the area that a revolutionary situation exists and that reform is necessary. It is not a paper plan that the government has no intention of carrying out. But it faces serious opposition from conservative landholders who oppose any change. The five year plan would bring land reform, industry and health and education programs to the area.
The problem is beginning to take the form of a race between revolutionaries like Juliao and men of evolutionary reform like Furtado. Juliao is reportedly arming his most trusted followers, so his threat of force is not any empty one. It might also be noted that Juliao visited Cuba last year as the personal guest of Fidel Castro. He is known as an admirer of the Cuban dictator.
FURTADO HAS the support of men in the Brazilian government (and in Washington) who recognize the need for reform and are prepared to act to meet that need.
The question that will be answered in the next few years (or sooner) is whether Furtado and the men working with him can overcome the opposition of the conservative landholders to reform and reach the peasants with some benefits of the program before an explosive situation flares into violence. If this proves impossible, Brazil may have a bloody social revolution to deal with.
—William H. Mullins
the took world
By W. D. Paden
Professor of English
SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, by Jane Austen, Washington Square Press. 45 cents.
Of all Miss Austen's novels, this one seems most particularly written for young women, to the most complete exclusion of men. Elinor and Marianne Dashwood have been brought up in pleasant security, but on the sudden death of their father find themselves, and their impractical mother, with barely enough money to live as gentlewomen. Their difficulties begin when they are nineteen and seventeen and naturally anxious to get married.
Their poverty is not their only disadvantage. They are girls of high principles and a delicate taste in conduct, and they wish to solve their problem in accord with their self-respect and within the conventions of society. Any bachelor they meet they anxiously appraise as a possible husband, and they are too apt to interpret his casual remarks and actions as deliberate attentions indicating a possible suitor. As they have led sheltered lives and know very little about men, they tend to judge their masculine acquaintances by criteria more suitable for women, and those they approve are rather passive and hesitant. The one handsome and vigorous young man they meet, whom no woman can dislike for long, they learn to have been involved with less scrupulous women; he has compromised his future, and they draw back in horror. The novel ends happily for them both, but meanwhile there have been many bursts of tears, and mornings spent brooding and weeping over letters, and melancholy walks in the shrubbery in the gathering dusk
Their view of life is natural and only too often agonizing for young women. Older women may remember it with sympathy; but men will not find it either intelligible or convincing until they themselves have daughters of nineteen.
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, by Erich Maria Remarque. Crest (Fawcett), 50 cents.
★★★
Perhaps the very symbol of the anti-war novel is this famous work which first appeared in the late 1920s. It was the basis of a brilliant motion picture, the first of many films that were pacifist in mood and plot.
Remarque's story, as is well known by now, is that of German boys fighting in the First World War. They are mere babes, but the brutality of war cannot be spared them. They love, they fight, they drink, they go home on leave, they become dissillusioned, they die.
REMARQUE WROTE HIS NOVEL IN A GERMANY THAT had become bitter and pessimistic and ready for the coming of Hitler, though not for another war. His message was one of disillusionment "... the generation that grew up before us, though it has passed these years with us here, already had a home and a calling; now it will return to its old occupations, and the war will be forgotten. . . ." —Calder M. Pickett, Professor of Journalism
Short Ones
The greatest achievements in history are not the products of group minds. As has been said, nearly everything that has been done for the good of mankind, has been accomplished by a human being working alone in the dark and the cold.-Western Graphic, Colorado Woman's College, Denver,
In a period in which symbolism and fantasy have become more and more important, in which any beginner can talk about levels of meaning, he (John O'Hara) has come as close to pure realism as a serious writer can. —Granville Hicks
--some to create (earn) more wealth than others.
It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound—that he will never get over it.—Robert Frost
Everything is funny as long as it is happening to someone else. — Will Rogers
Dailu Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became bweekly 1904,
triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16. 1912.
Telephone Viking 3-2700
Extension 711, news room
Extension 376, business office
Member Inland Daily Press Association. Associated Collegiate Press. Represented by National Advertising Service and News service. N.Y.W. News service: United Press International. Mail subscription rates: $3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon and the late morning on Saturdays and Sundays. University holidays and examination periods. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kansas.
Ton Turner DINTS DEFINE
Tom Turner
Managing Editor
Linda Swander, Fred Zimmerman,
Assistant Managing Editor
Barbara Sheldon, Sports Editor
Barbara Howell, Society Editor.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Ron Gallagher ... Editorial Editor
Bill Mullins and Carrie Merryfield,
Assistant Editorial Editors.
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT.
Tom Brown, Advertising Manager
Dan Browne, Advertising Manager;
Bonnie McCullough, Circulation Manager;
David Wiens, National Advertiser;
Alan Lampin, Classified Advertising Manager; Hal Smith, Promotion Manager.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS by Dick Bibler
"HE'S HOST EVEN TEMPERED MEMBER OF TH' WHOLE FACULTY — HE'S IN A BAD MOOD."
Conservative Speaks Back
Editor:
letters to the editor
The article by Gore Vidal, "A Liberal Takes a Look at the Conservatives," in the Sunday. Dec. 31, 1961, Capital-Journal illustrates graphically the economic illiteracy that provides the foundation for contemporary liberalism.
His statements that "He (the conservative) wants complete freedom to GET (capitals mine) as such money as possible with no interference from the government" and that "The freedom to exploit others is the cornerstone of his (the conservative's) philosophy," are classical examples of the unintelligible pseudo-logic symptomatic of liberal discourse. What, indeed, do these statements mean: that conservatives want the freedom to thieve? Does it mean that they want the right to counterfeit? Absurd!
Perhaps Vidal means that conservatives want the right to EARN all the wealth they can. Is this evil? In a free exchange economy one can only earn wealth by creating it. Is this exploitation? Does Vidal object to the creation of wealth?
BECAUSE OF VIDAL'S FAILURE to communicate anything of rational significance, with the exception of his remarks about the inadequacy of the terms "conservative" and "liberal," one is forced to speculation. However, I think I am safe in assuming that he is condemning either the creation (earning) of wealth for personal satisfaction or the ability of
It might be thought that the alternative to creating wealth for personal satisfaction would be to earn it for the good of others: one's children, neighbors, charity, etc. However, if this is done willingly, it is ultimately done for personal satisfaction. The only alternative, then, is to create wealth for purposes which one does not approve under the threat of force, which is exactly the manner in which government compels action. Is this what Mr. Vidal desires?
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE for the liberals to deny that some can, through greater industry and/or ability, create more wealth than others, but they can deny the consequence of this oversight on the part of God or nature by forcing them, ultimately at the point of a policeman's gun, to relinquish part of this wealth. In doing so, however, they violate the two most important rights of man—his right to use and dispose of his time and labor as he desires and the corollary right to exchange this time and labor freely for the time and labor of others.
It is obvious that conservatism is the only philosophy that affords man the simple dignity of freedom and removes from him the constant threat of force and violence for seeking merely to maintain the most satisfactory existence possible on this earth while not denying others the same right.
Marick Payton
Lawrence junior
Worth Repeating
There is little doubt that the teacher-student ratio has been a sacred cow. The former president of Fisk University once observed that without a superior teacher, "The small class merely assures the transmission of mediocrity in an intimate environment." Available evidence suggests that mere size of class has little influence on educational efficiency.-David Boroff
The effectiveness of teaching varies inversely with the level. High school teachers are usually more skillful as teachers—not as scholars—than college teachers. Undergraduate instruction tends to be better than graduate teaching.David Boroff
On students: Educators in general do not realize the potentiality for work that exists in every pleasure-loving American boy with brains enough to deserve a college education. He may groan and weep and exercise ingenuity worthy of a better cause to avoid exerting himself. But if from the start he knows that the faculty means business . . . he ends up by "taking" twice as much education (nobody can "give" him an education) as one would expect.—Robert I. Gannon