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University Daily Kansan Wednesday. Sept. 28, 1960
It's Castro Again
Fidel Castro took bold new steps in his record four hour and 28 minute speech at the United Nations. The fiery orator, embracing his new-found friend Nikita Khrushchev with high praise, pulled out all the stops in lambasting the United States on all fronts.
Shoved in with the rest of his diatribe, Castro included a plea to all Latin American nations. He said that Cuba "would welcome a revolution (in other Latin American countries) which would force the American monopolists to give up their ill-gotten gains." But the most important statement the Cuban premier made concerned the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo in Eastern Cuba. Castro accused the "imperialist government of the United States" of maintaining the $70 million Guantanamo base as "a pretext for self-aggression . . . to justify its assault on my country." He said the base "has become a threat to the people of Cuba" because it makes Cuba "a possible victim of any international conflict." This was the first time that Castro has directly and openly coveted the huge American naval base.
In the past the United States has not officially said it would retaliate to any of the bearded man's moves as confiscating all private American property in Cuba. But this time Admiral Arleigh Burke, chief of naval operations, said that the United States would fight back "very fast" if Castro attempted to seize the base. The United States leased the base from the Cuban government when Batista was in power. The treaty and lease are still binding under the Castro regime according to international law. A United Press International report said that Castro has had lawyers working for months to determine if Cuba can legally force the United States out of the Guantanamo Naval Base through the World Court at The Hague. So far no results.
The immediate threat to the base does not seem to be too great. However, Castro has returned to Cuba. If he persists in continually blasting the United States and seeking new ways to question the presence of the base at Guantanamo, he may eventually feel he has the opportunity and right to seize it. First, it would take definite military action by the United States to prevent it, and second, Castro now has at least the lip service of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.
Castro isn't known for rationality of his moves. Guantanamo is the largest United States naval base in the Caribbean Sea and one of the largest on the East Coast. It would be a calamity if Castro could take the base away from the United States now regardless of the method. More likely it seems that Castro has picked on this base as one more target to use in down-grading the United States — a sort of scapegoat. The base is too important economically for Cuba to lose it considering the present Cuban economic conditions, which are none too steady.
- John Peterson
Opposition to Beatniks
Editor:
The lead editorial in Thursday's Kansas suggested that the "beats" have some real contributions to make to our society, if they could only perform some positive action without abandoning their goal of passivity.
From KU's modest collection of weirdos (I use this term in preference to beatnik since there is not much agreement as to what constitutes the essential features of a beatnik), I have seen nothing to indicate any evidence of a contribution coming from their oddly-clothed and unshaven ranks.
Admittedly, my viewpoint is pragmatic and materialistic.
It is my personal opinion that "beatism" is a means of escaping mediocrity by deliberately seeking failure in terms of the existing society's goals and expectations. A
self-made failure can attract as much attention as a self-made success.
A desire for attention is a normal human trait, but the means by which the so-called beats are getting their attention seems childish to me.
Allen Braunger,
Raytown, Mo., junior
How About This Proposal?
Editors:
No. to pay $5 in the spring instead of $10 this fall to the senior class is not a "losing proposition." Personally, rather than waste $5 on trivialities — breakfast, picnics, etc. — I prefer to give my $5 to help support America's great liberal monthly magazine — "The Progressive." Will others do the same?
Sincerely,
John L. Hodge
Kansas City senior
Short Ones
Religion has had a positive influence in mental health and rehabilitation; it is a scapel in the hands of a surgeon, or a switchblade in the hands of a zoot suiter.
The cigarette manufacturers have pulled a new one out of the hat: a cigarette with a tobacco filter. Now we can all have lung cancer and peace of mind at the same time.
--and, as in this example, even emotionally moving. The language of all the poems is handsome in itself, spare and untiresome to the ear. As for content, great leeway for interpretation exists, a good thing because the poems can be reread indefinitely and hint at something new each time.
Scientists say they can now make DNA, an acid which is the long-sought basis of life, in the laboratory. A few more advances in this area and we may be swamped with test tube copies of Brigitte Bardot. Horrible thought.
We have nothing to fear from Castro's "Hate America" campaign. We think a single minor concession to him would placate all Cuba; for Fidel, equal time with Jack Paar.
The difference between the pros and college basketball players is six inches. 25 pounds and 30 points. -Rex Harlenson.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
"TUITION WENT UP AGAIN THIS YEAR."
Daily Hansan
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904,
tridayweek 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
University of Kansas student newspaper
Telephone Vikting 3-2700
Extension 711, news room
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Member Inland Daily Press Association. Associated Collegiate Press. Represented by National Advertising Service. 18 East 50 St. New York 22, NY. represented United Press International. Mail subscription to semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the University year except Saturday and Sundays. University holidays during periods. Entered as second-class matter Nov. 17, 1910, at Lawrence, Kan., post office under act of March 3, 1879.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Ray Miller ... Managing Editor
Carol Heller, Jane Boyd and Priscilla Burton, Assistant Managing Editors;
Pat Sheley and Suzanne Shaw, City Editors; John Macdonald, Sports Editor; Peggy Kallos and Donna Engle, Society Editors.
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
John Peterson and
Bill Blundell ... Co-Editorial Editors
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Mark Dull ... Business Manager
Rudy Hoffman, Advertising Manager;
Marlin Zimmerman, Promotion Manager;
Milo Harris, National Advertising Manager; Mike McCarthy, Circulation Manager; Dorothy Boller, Classified Advertising Manager.
By Jon R. Rutherford
NEW POEMS—1960, by Witter Bynner. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, ($3.75).
In this book, the first volume entirely of new work that Mr. Bynner has published since 1947, he has, we are told on the jacket, assembled poems "written impetuously over a short period" and so "has created a volume that forms an entity." It is a decidedly weird entity, but after the initial shock wears off one can enjoy at least some of the very short poems — about 130 in all — which in large part are if not nonsensical, at least quite light-hearted, witty, and usually incomprehensible. Not that they were meant to be comprehended rationally. Sometimes one is inserted which is lucid, however:
The fleshy spires
Stood up
And gave sustenance
To the clouds above them
In a rising rain
From the crowds under them
IT IS POSSIBLE to follow a certain bewildering thread of connecting thought — or anti-thought — through the book. We are not told, but it seems an unavoidable conclusion that many of the poems are products of almost "automatic" writing. Some of them such as "To be alone with one person," especially when read repeatedly, seem to be saying something that lies just beyond the edge of the consciousness, a well-known fact of a dream, rather than of the daytime world. It is a teasing sensation that such poems create. This feeling may or may not be pleasant to every reader, but few will be apathetic to it. Regardless of one's personal reaction to the overall effect, it is perhaps best not to struggle against the poems Bynner sets before us, but rather to laugh when they seem funny (which is, thankfully, often) and to shrug our shoulders in the other instances — and try the next one.
From the Magazine Rack-
Execute the Nazis?
"... the reader today must constantly remind himself that Paul Blobel whose face was that of a storekeeper or a teacher, had led an SS unit which was involved in sixteen instances of mass murder, including the slaughter of 30,000 Jews in Kiev alone; that Georg Schallermair had beaten prisoners to death with his own hands at Dachau; that Otto Ohlendorf had been responsible for the massacre of 60,000 Jews and Gypsies.
"WHY IS THIS reminder necessary? Would it not be nobler to surrender to our spontaneous outrage and repulsion at the executions, to honor our impulses of charity and compassion above our wish to see vengeance done — especially now that so many years have passed and the desire for vengeance that would have been flaming and powerful in 1945 has lest its original sharpness and purity? This is not a question that can be answered lightly or dogmatically; in trying to answer it, we are carried straight to the limits of our moral capacity. My own view is that to a Jew the possibility that anything short of death should have been meted out to these men ought to be no less (and perhaps no more) outrageous than the spectacle of the hangings themselves. I believe that any Jew who so far permits himself to forget what the Nazis were and did as to condemn the executions altogether is committing a kind of violence against his own humanity that may be more deeply barbaric than the events described by Mr. Settel — barbaric in the way that the young father in Philadelphia was last year when he publicly trotted out all the clichés of liberal enlightenment to plead for 'understanding' of the boy who had assaulted and murdered his four-year-old daughter the day before. The Nazis dehumanized themselves in carrying out their mass slaughters; and any Jew who indulges the inclination to forgive and forget is countering that dehumanization with a species of his own — a species not at all comparable in kind or degree or quality, but one that can be called dehumanization nevertheless.
"YET CAPITAL PUNISHMENT is surley wrong, and one can argue that even where a man like Oswald Pohl is concerned, it achieves nothing — not even the satisfaction of the primitive desire for vengeance. But perhaps the same reasoning by which Camus has demonstrated the immorality of capital punishment — that society is employing absolute and irrevocable means in order to implement what can only in the nature of things be a relative and fallible judgment — justifies the hanging of the worst Nazi war criminals. Because the crimes they committed were on a scale that defies all our moral categories, and because no conceivable punishment could possibly have been adequate to these crimes, a cold-blooded execution performed years later by professionals who were not themselves personally involved somehow seems the one form of retribution that even begins to approach adequacy. The cold-bloodedness, the professionalism, the impersonality — these are the very factors that in ordinary criminal cases make capital punishment particularly repulsive and inhuman..."
(Excerpted from an editorial in the May, 1960, Commentary by its editor, Nathan Podhoretz.)