UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN editorials
unsigned editors represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of only the writers.
February 8,1979
Cult backlash a threat
Sen. Robert Dole, R-Kan., probably was wondering what he had gotten himself into earlier this week during his informal hearings on religious cults.
Dole, who said the hearings were for informational purposes only, found himself presiding over a packed committee room dominated by supporters and opponents of the Unification Church and other fringe religious groups.
Emotions ran high during the hearings, which included testimony from clergy on both sides of the issue, as well as from religious deprogrammers and civil libertarians.
AT ONE point a rabbi from New York testified that he had come to protest religious cults that "pure children with candy-coated lies in order to rape their minds," and said that the characteristics common to all cults created "a formula that fits the Nazi Youth Movement as accurately as it describes the Unification Church or the People's Temple."
That testimony did not sit well with cult supporters in the audience, and one wonders if emotional trigger phrases such as "mind rape" and "Nazis" are really the stuff of which understandings are made.
WHAT, THEN, was Dole trying to accomplish during the hearings?
Of course, the cynical among us might remember that Dole has declared his candidacy for the presidency, and the hearings certainly did produce a lot of publicity for Dole.
But Dole also has expressed a desire to instigate formal hearings on the tax-exempt status of certain religious groups, and has admitted an interest in discovering how the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification
Church, managed to amass his rather considerable wealth.
UNFORTUNATELY, by taking on religious cuts Dole may be stumping in a no-win situation. The nightmare of Jonestown was ample evidence of what can happen in extreme cases of indoctrination and brainwashing, but, despite that example, there can be little justification for a general tightening of the noose around all religious cults.
OBVIOUSLY, that is too high a price to pay.
As the director of the American Civil Liberties Union told Dole's committee, the First Amendment, which forbids interference with religious liberty, does not make a distinction between religious and pusoed-religious groups.
If the government moved to restrict the liberties of so-called cults, it would infringe on all religious liberties.
As Sen. Mark Hatfield, R-Ore, remarked at the beginning of the hearings, the First Amendment must be "neither a shield for illegal or repressive activities nor a reason to hinder the free pursuit of religious philosophies, however unorthodox."
Indeed, in a country founded by those fleeing religious persecution, the recent backlash against religious cults is a dangerous sign that some lawmakers have abandoned their sense of history.
Of course, accusations of kidnapping, brainwashing and other illegal and illegitimate activities are a cause for concern, but those calling for intervention against religious cults are walking a fine line between protecting individual liberties and promoting religious oppression.
That is a line that Dole should be aware of during his investigation, and for the sake of all our liberties, it is a line that he must not cross.
International awareness needs to be expanded
To the editor:
Today, KU has about 1,500 students from 86 countries on its campus. But the level to which this group of students meaningfully interact with the rest of the community is, to say the least, disappointing. Most foreign students came abroad because of a wish to see and interact with the societies they came to. But these students find, with their hands in their pockets on show that the society not particularly pleased to have them around.
Closer examination of the society reveals that America is segregated and partitioned into its suburbs, ghettoes and barrios with unwritten rules guiding the behavior of people of different races. A case in point, that brings the problem nearer home, is that whereas all students live in the same schools, the different races gather in their own separate groups. The cafeterias of the different residence halls are no exception. Moreover, the news broadcast always reveal that no one except high court judges want to put children of different races in the same classroom. The foreign student is at a loss for what to do. The only way out is to group with others of his own nationality. That is how the problem arises.
But this is not as it should be. Now as no other time in the history of the world people of different nationalities have the opportunity to work and pursue learning together. For once we all have the opportunity to work and learn peculiarities. Few, and by this one must include the foreign students too, have taken hold of this opportunity. The era of solitary destinies is over. The world is now more tightly knit than ever before. We have not had the same past, but it becomes insatiable certain that we shall share the same future.
Americans are apt to complain that foreign students do too much pollicicking.
the rest of the student body, it should also be realized that grave and very fundamental decisions are being made in other lands that were made long ago in this country.
We must all, individually, make some more efforts to understand other peoples. If we cannot, as the trend seems to suggest, it is possible that those who now discuss in our schools have a hard time and eat together may some day be fighting one another. Education, if it has any use, must be to make us fewer, larger and more loving human beings. In an institution like this where the future leaders of the society are growing up, it should not understand more about one another.
Apelebrii Willabo
President of International Club
Apelebiri Willabo
Khomeini, students dispute death count To the editor:
The Jan. 29 University Daily Kansan had an article that said 121 people were killed in Tehran on Sept. 8. According to Khomeini and Moslem and non-Moslem Iranian students, more than 4,000 people were killed on Sept. 8.
Medicine Lodge junior
Mark Cline
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U.S should meet the cost of literacy
Jonathan Kozol, the outspoken American educational reformer, and Pope Paul John II, the soft-spoken spiritual leader of the 67 million Catholics, teaching up together?
Letters Policy
Not exactly. But Kozol and the pope are playing the same game these days, for both have announced a war on illiteracy. But, although the war has been a third-world countries of Latin America, and Kozol has transplanted his war from the fields of Cuba to the cities of the United States, both have taken notice of a problem that has been ignored for too long.
The pope, in a speech in Mexico City last week, called upon students and teachers to launch a campaign to combat illiteracy in Latin America.
"It is impossible to remain indifferent to the serious problem of illiteracy and semicolon use."
INDEED, it is also impossible to remain indifferent to the situation in the United States—a country that is thought to be an underclass. A book of illiteracy—the inability to read or write a simple message—has declined to near zero since 1970. In literacy—the inability to read or write well
Mary Ernst
enough to be a productive citizen—is growing every year.
"Fifty years ago, if you could sign your name you were considered functionally literate," says Thomas Sticht of the National Institute of Education. "But today, even jobs like cooking, especially in a modern kitchen, aren't simple-minded jobs."
Sicht estimates that a cook needs at least a seventh-grade education and a supply clerk needs at least a ninth-grade competency.
But Kozel is perhaps the person who has been most vocal about the problem in the United States. He has become the No. 1 enemy of his campaign by bizarre war on literacy in this country.
KOZOL WANTS to conduct a one-year campaign patterned after the 1961 "Great Campaign" in Cuba, in which 100,000 high school and college students conducted one-
on-one tutoring with illiterate adults. That campaign, Kozol says, reduced the Cuban adult illiteracy rate, in one year, from 25 percent to 5 percent.
"That 5 percent figure is much lower than in the United States, where 20 percent of adults are illiterate." Kozol said last November while speaking at the University of Hawaii Law School. He added 44 percent of black adults and 56 percent of Spanish-surnamed adults are illiterate."
But Kozol insists that such a campaign demands that the U.S. government decide, as the Government bonded to, to establish reading as the nation's No. 1 priority. If the U.S. Congress did so, he says, the reading in a year of the United States would be wiped out in a year.
AND KOZOL has some help in Congress.
Sen. George McGovern, D-S. Dak., has proposed a national commission on literacy to investigate the problem.
Kozol's plan would employ student volunteers and out-of-work teachers to instruct 25 to 40 million Americans in basic reading and writing. The U.S. government is already spending some $90 million a year for remedial training under the Adult Education Act of 1966—most of which is spent combating illiteracy.
But that $90 million is miniscule when compared to the social cost of illiteracy. Florida's Department of Education has estimated that the loss in state tax revenues in that state alone from adult illiteracy is some $700 million each year.
And McGovern has presented an ever worse figure. He estimates the annual national loss, from decreased productivity and welfare-costs, to be $6 billion.
THAT FIGURE seems terrible, and of course, it is.
There is a strong need for some type of program to handle functional literacy in the community.
Although Kozol may be incorrectly assuming that functional illiteracy in the United States will be as easy to decrease as simple illiteracy was in Cuba, he has both defined the illiteracy problem and has shown that there is a way to correct it.
It is a shame to waste $6 billion because millions cannot read. But it is an even bigger shame to waste the lives of those who find themselves lost in a world of print.
Despite any problems, Kozol seems to be drained down the right path. And that path殊途乃返.
Class svstem thrives in E. Germanv
By RICHARD J. WILLEY
N. Y. Times Feature
POUGHKEEPIE, N.Y.-Karl Marx defined the proletarian class in terms of its relationship to the means of production. Workers, owning no capital, had only their labor and were bound to a bourgeoisie. In the face of competition with other firms, the bourgeoisie could pay workers no more than a subsistence wage. Thus, the capitalist system ordained the existence of two classes, with the living class proletariat far below that of the bourgeoisie.
In "Marxist" East Germany, with the state owning the means of production, all citizens are in the same relationship to those means, and classes are no longer supposed to exist. Yet a new proletariat has come into being—a class with a lower standard of living than others, and a class defined by its relationships—or, by its lack of relationships.
Here's how the new economics works. The East German leadership badly wants hard Western currencies for purchases in world markets. The West German market is among those that have seen the currency has been earning West marks with its own version of traffic in human flesh: It has allowed Bonn to ransom at least 14,000 political prisoners since 1964, mainly people caught attempting to escape to the West, the current price of more than $15,000 a head.
THE DISTINCTIVE THING about the new proletariat is that it is not among the new bourgeoisie—that fortunate quarter of humans with relatives living in West Germany.
INTERSHOP imports Western consumer goods highly coveted by East Germans—coffee, chocolate, blue jeans, TV sets, French brand—goods unavailable or unmatched in quality in ordinary East German markets. At a rate that would make them valuable, brand marks up these goods for sale—but only if they are marked. The need hard money—about a quarter of a billion dollars a year—comes from the hefty markups.
But there have been only so many political prisoners, and prices in world markets have inflated rapidly since 1974. How to get more information about stores named listerhip became the device.
Who, then, are the lucky holders of West marks? Mainly those with relatives in West Germany who send money for birthdays and Christmas, or bring gifts of cash when they come home for a visit. There were over 8 million visits by West Germans in 1977.
And the fact that most are coming home highlights one of the many ironies of the German privileged class is the German privileged class is defined largely by having relatives who were disloyal enough to flee from East Germany—almost 4 million refugees before the Berlin Wall.
IMAGINE AN EAST German leadership having to allow a second currency to circulate freely—and that of its despised captain, Philippe Muller, with demands from envious workers with no outside relatives that they receive part of their wages in West marks. And since the state has not acceded to that captain's demands, an East German manages accumulate them.
The garment worker pilfers cloth at the state factory and naps on the job to save energy for moonlighting at home; there, high-quality clothes are hand sewn—for those who pay in West marks. The latter choose meals for those who tip in West marks.
The cabinmaker with wood filched from the state (it does belong to the people) will build fine bookshelves for someone's study. And so on, all through the system. A second, capitalist economy co-exists with the socialist one, but operates after dark.
OF COURSE, the leadership couldn't have its own elite join the new proletariat. Thus, there is a second chain of stores, Exquisit. There, one can purchase Western goods with East marks. The high-goods cost about $10 million and West marks in the Intersports, a recognition of real exchange rates instead of the official East German one-for-one.
But the high-salaried East German elite can pay the price, thus matching the consumption standards of the new bourgeois and maintaining their own upper-class status. Non-elites, however, cannot afford it. Hence, the new East German notariat.
THE WHOLE THING has become so disputing to the new proletariat that its name is becoming a term of endearment.
often behave like youth in the West. They drink too much, destroy property, throw bottles at police and chant "Russians out" at rallies that are supposed to serve a quite different purpose. Last November, the state tried to buy them off by importing 800,000 pairs of Levis from America for sale in Europe. The Equal Opportunity Services. But there are, after all, 16.7 million East Germans, with over two-thirds in the new proletariat.
The fourth largest city, formerly Chemnitz, has been renamed Karl Marx City by the regime. In the light of the Interships and Exquisit shops of the new bourgeoisie and the new proletariat, I'll be infart Karl had his say, he'd ask for Chemnitz back again.
Richard J. Willey is professor of political science at Vassar College.
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