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Wednesday, October 10, 1973
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN comment Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Facades Gain Face
Patrick Buchanan, President Nixon's counselor, political tactician, speech writer and media observer, appeared before the Senate Watergate committee recently and presented his candid views on the state of political tactics. He used the 1972 Republican campaign, in which he had played an integral part, and previous Democratic campaigns as a basis for his theories.
If Buchanan's observations are accurate (and there is every reason to believe so, since he is one of the top practicing political strategists and observers), the following is also accurate:
—The placement by a citizen's group of an advertisement that was actually written and indirectly paid to you. The ad is currently politically legitimate.
—the submission of a "letter to the editor," which has been signed by a private citizen, though it has been written and prepared by a party worker, is currently politically legitimate.
—the indirect funding of a candidate trailing in an opponent's primary campaign for the purpose of defeating the legitimately leading candidate, thus slowing his momentum (or, in an extreme case, destroying his candidacy), is currently politically legitimate.
The planting of an informer within the ranks (and even the inner circle) of an opponent's politically organized organization is currently politically legitimate.
The minor disruption of speeches or appearances by the use of "pranks" is currently politically legitimate.
The planting of sign-carrying department stores is a party酵食店 an opening
pearance for the purpose of gaining press attention, thus deflating the opponent's potential press impact, is currently politically legitimate.
The stereotyping of a candidate for the purpose of polarization in opposition to a group of voters is currently largely legitimate.
What these practice represent is an accepted breakdown of honesty. Honesty is replaced by a more superficial appearance, and the more conscientious and informed voter as being just a superficial appearance.
Democrats point out these dishonest practices in Republican campaigns and Republicans respond with similar examples from Democratic campaigns. Though these practices are denounced by some members of both parties as deplorable, they are still employed and, because they have been passed on from campaign to campaign, they have obtained a certain legitimacy, as was clearly pointed out by Buchanan.
This has left the voter with an inability to judge. Stripped of his powers of observation, the voter must resort to an inadequate basis for decision, such as a "gut feeling" about the candidate or the attraction of the candidate's physical appearance.
What has happened is more than a loss of honesty in the political process of election, although in recent years a strong need for re-examination.
What has also been lost is an ability to observe, evaluate and then select on the basis of conscientious thought and judgement. And without this, is it really an election?
Joe Zanatta
Last summer the cartoonist Oliphant contributed a cover for the New York Times Magazine that portrayed a truculent, rifle-toting Anwar el Saitad seated backwards upon a camel while screening threats across the desert. The camel, meanwhile, was patiently plodding away from the canal back toward Cairo.
By JAMES ALLEN McHENRY JR.
The image seemed singularly appropriate. Sadat had acquired a reputation for gratious saber-rattling as one "year of decision" blended quietly into another. The group's defense against battle committees into action, built more air-raid shelters and reiterated his intention of eliminating "the consequences of aggression," the international community yawed, confident in the assumption that guiding out the old act for the home audience.
THE FOURTH ROUND is evidence of the fact that this time Sadat was not kidding. His unexpected expulsion of the Russians caused a disruption that he could act rapidly, even impulsively.
It isn't surprising that, with the stakes raised high enough, Sadat has turned gambler, reasoning that another defeat is inevitable and along the Suez Canal year after year.
At this point it is impossible to predict with any degree of confidence how the tracer will be received. The bulletfire is a blinding array of claims and counter-claims, which only the passage of time can clarify. Nor can one assess all the factors that cause the attack and Syria to coordinate stricken.
STILL, THERE ARE a few general themes that do shed some light upon the motivations behind the latest outbreak of fighting.
Israelis v. Arabs—The 4th Round
There is no doubt that Sadat's domestic position was rapidly deteriorating. Options as well as available scapegoats followed each other onto the policy scrap heap in dismal succession. Meanwhile, pressure from the society at large as strikes and protest demonstrations began occurring with nazism consistency.
Make-believe war was obviously wearing thin with a population tired of girding for a struggle that seemed increasingly remote and subject to perpetual postponement.
"THE MONSTER HAS DIED, and the ass has taken his place," was the cry that began to well up from an increasingly broad cross section of Egyptian society.
Added to potential domestic upheaval in Egret were the subtle but critical shifts
Britain's Irish Israel
By ARNOLD TOYNBEE
LONDON—Between the years 1917 and 1945, Britain enabled the Zionist movement in the Jewish Diaspora to plant an Israel in an Arab country, Palestine. Britain did this by issuing a mandate for the formation, or mandate for Palestine, and occupying Palestine for 30 years.
But after the close of World War II, the Jewish settlers in Palestine made Britain drop its mandate like a hot brick. This brick was then nicked up by the United States.
Less than four centuries ago, Britain planted in Ireland a British Israel—a community of protestant Scottish and Irish settlers who controlled the government and people of the United Kingdom, these protestant British settlers despoiled and evicted the catholic native Irish, and they established, over the whole island, an overseas colony that was maintained until after World War I. 1
When this ascendancy was liquidated in what is now the Sovereign Independent Republic of Ireland, it was still maintained by an island colony and a be province of the United Kingdom. Within the last few years Britain has been trying, in good faith, in Northern Ireland too, to put an end to the protestant settlers' ascendance, by establishing a Catholic native province in this province.
BUT THIS NORTH-IRISH brick is proving more difficult for Britain to drop than either the southern part of Ireland or Palestine. Because of British acts in the reign of Elizabeth I and James I, and in the time of Oliver Cromwell's protectorate, British soldiers are being killed by bombs and bullets in Britain and civilians are the victims of letter-bombs in Britain and even in Washington, D.C., in 1973.
According to the author of the Book of Exodus, the infidness of the father is visited upon the children and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation. British experience in Ireland contrasts with that this is an understatement.
The present generation in Britain is now trying to liquidate its karma in Northern Ireland. We cannot tolerate whether we are going to succeed. In Northern Ireland in 1973, protestants and catholics are committing acts of violence against each other throughout the centuries and in the centuries ago. In both camps there are cold-blooded murders.
SO FAR THE BRITISH government hasn't been able to do more than to keep this violence within limits; it hasn't been able to bring the strike to an end. On both sides in Northern Ireland, there is a militant minority that is unwilling to make peace because it is unwilling to abandon its struggle for dominance over its opponents.
The truth is to be found in the Hindu concept of karma. A moral debt that has been incurred by iniquious acts remains in the mind of the person who has statute of limitations, unless and until the inheritors of this grim legacy succeed at their own blood and sweat and tears.
For the British government and people, the heritage of responsibility for Northern Ireland is grievous and shameful. But we know that it would be still more shameful to evacuate them, because we have a baggage with which we have been saddled by our ancestors' misdeeds.
The last four centuries of the history of British relations with Ireland offer some useful lessons for present day Americans and for others who have never encountered the United States and elsewhere. For four centuries the Irish were looked down upon by the British settlers in Ireland and by their kinsmen and backers in Britain as contemptuously as the Arabs are being looked down upon nowadays by Israelis and by many Arabists and by many American gentiles.
THE IRISH USED TO be written off as a culpably backward people who don't have human rights. They could be despoiled, evicted and exterminated legitimately, and the British and Irish governments centuries the Irish have been treated shockingly, but they have not been exterminated. They are still in the field and, even though the provisional IRA is only a small minority of the population from the British settlers in Northern Ireland and from British soldiers and civilians who are not inhabitants of Britain's Irish province. Anyone who studies this tragic piece of history and takes it seriously will light on the prospects in the Middle East.
Traditionally, the Americans have been sensitive to the Irish people's wrongs, so the present generation of Americans might be inclined to give the story a sympathetic tone. In addition, their American supporters believe that the Arabs are going to lose heart, and that then the Arabs will submit to whatever peace terms Israel may decide to dictate to them. Gen. Joseph K. McCarthy reported to have forecast recently that this is likely to happen within the next 10 years.
Here is a congenial job for Irish-Americans: to give their countrymen, and especially their Zionist countrymen, an intensive course of instruction in the history of the relations between the Irish and the British.
PRESIDENT NIXON HAS appointed Henry Kissinger to the key post of secretary of state. It is reported that Kissinger has already suggested to the Arabs a possible basis for a Middle Eastern settlement. We may guess that Kissinger welcomes this opportunity; he feels a concern for the Kurds, for example, for law, may take it for granted that his general concern includes a concern for Jews, both in the Diaspora and in Israel.
Kissinger's Jewishness is one of his strong cards for playing this particularly difficult game. Any effective settlement of the Middle Eastern immigroli would be bound to give each of the parties something less than its total demands. A gentle negotiator who didn't satisfy Israel's total demands would be accused of being an antisemitic. Kissinger could not be accused of using Jewishness as a tool in inducing the israelis as well as the Arabs to settle for less than their total demands, he would be doing the Jewish people a most valuable service on the long view, which the lesson of Irish history demands.
Does the present generation of Americans wish to save its descendants from being maintained by Arab letter-bombs in the year 2373? If it does, then it should give Kissinger the green light for peacemaking in the Middle East.
take place in Israeli policy toward the occupied territories. Israel's official bargaining position still involves a commitment to flexible about the location of villages.
The implication is that the more iron-crud the peace agreement, the more flexibility there will be for countries to fight.
(Arnold Toyneb, the noted historian,
(were occasionally for the London Observer)
Coupled with that official position is a policy course that in many respects unifies the organizations.
The Daily Kansas welcomes letters to the editor, but asks that letters be typewritten, double-spaced and no more than four lines. Subject to editing and condensation, according to space limitations and the editor's judgment, and must be signed. KU students must provide their name, year in school and hometown; faculty name and position; others must provide their name and address.
EUHEMISTICALLY TERMED "the policy of establishing new facts," this policy track encompasses such varied activities as the establishment of new kibbutzim in Sinai and on the West Bank, the conversion of Sharm el-Sheikh into a tourist spa, the construction of a major airport in connection with the Allon defense line), and changes in the character and demography of the Arab section of Jerusalem.
Specifically, the labor party's platform gives sanction to the principle that private Israeli citizens should be allowed to purchase land in occupied territories. The rival coalition of the party's electoral prospects, hews to an even more rigid anionistation list.
More recently, as the parliamentary elections due to be held at the end of this month drew near, pressures from public opinion obliqued the ruling labor party to embroider a new national policy in Arab territories advocated by Defense Minister Moshe Dayan.
THESE DEVELOPMENTS clearly didn't trigger the present conflict. But they do give
letters policy
Reader Responds
Messengers, Not Prophets
To The Editor:
Although Bill Gibson's "A Test Of Zeal" (Oct. 7) was as thoughtful an editorial about KU's open-air preachers as could have been wished, and contained many good points, there were two terms that he was rather disturbingly free with.
The first was "fanatic." "I must admit that I have never yet met a religious fanatic who brought me an closer to truth. . . . The best way to test a fanatic is to ask him unanticipated questions. . . ." Come now, Mr. Gibson, how do you define "fanatic"? Is a person a fanatic merely because he chooses what he feels to be the most direct way to reach hundreds of people. Particularly as he he, the more directly he can reach them, the sooner his doctrine may be able to make them happy? As far as students' individual religious beliefs are concerned, we don't have access to the editorial page of the Kansan.
A second word used in the editorial with disturbing looseness was "prophet." "But the modern prophet has acquired a tremendous capacity for the self-destruction of his teachings. . . . A prophet should never be rejected, however, just because he is unnatural or Sound observations, both of them, but are they necessarily applicable? If you asked any of these people, they'd probably say that they are only relaying what has been told to others—to the "true" prophets. Aren't you at once granting them too much importance, and forcing them to be aware that their abilities imply that they are the sole receivers of a revelation which they would insist is available to everyone?
"One day a wise man might be sifted from all the phonies" was the closing statement typical of this editorial, since it seemed to say that all of the open-air preachers are either one or the other. Surely these people could be looked upon as humanly fallible, almost certainly sincere, messengers. Perhale said Mr. Ghosh you would pay less attention to the importance of the people saying these things, and more attention to what they are saying. Who knows? One day a sincere belief might be sifted from all the editorial coolness.
Valerie J. Meyers Overland Park sophomore
Griff and the Unicorn
some notion as to the momentum behind the establishment of new facts that the Arabs have always interpreted as yet another instance of the same question of the return of captured lands.
Sasan may well have concluded that time was working against him, with new facts suggesting that he could be to a variety of creeping annexationism. Syrian Chief of State Hafez al Assad has known the Israeli position on the Golan has been an negotiable item. He has never been a negotiable item.
because your vital interests are at stake." There is a still more sinister dimension to the current conflict that cannot be ignored. The Israeli have placed in Sinai a complex of missiles that could serve as a delivery system for nuclear weapons.
In 1971, Sadat temporarily modified his position toward the United States in the belief that the United States could "deliver" Israel to the bargaining table, while modifying aspects of the Israeli position in the process.
When that hope failed to materialize, Sadat shifted ground, and together with Saud Arabia's King Faisal, whose gaze is toward economic sanctions to voice threats of economic sanctions.
Addressing Americans through Newsweek magazine, Sadat reiterated a sentiment explicitly stated by George Bannon: "Newsweek will be worse than Vietnam, my words—will be worse than Vietnam,
ONE CAN ONLY HOPE that the war does not escape to the point where Israel feels it necessary to exercise the nuclear option, which she doubledly possesses. To be sure, the great powers will be preoccupied with the prevention of just such a drift of events. Speaking last spring in Topeca, Israel asked an Israeli friend in view that "wars do change things." In a geographical sense, this has assuredly been true in the Middle East.
And yet as one reviews the tragic chronicle of the Arab-Israeli dispute one is overpowered not by what has changed, but how it has shaped and attitudes that still remain unaltered.
One round gives way to another and the emotional disengagement necessary for peace seems further removed at the completion of each cycle.
(James Allen McHenry Jr. is a teaching assistant in the history department.)
"This is another fine mess we've gotten ourselves into!"
Guilty Without Trial
Bv WILLIAM RASPBERRY
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON—Unless you are either totally devoid of feeling or totally convinced of his guilt, you have to have at least a little sympathy for Vice President Agnew.
The odds are against his having anything like a fair trial on the charges apparently about to be made against him. He is not going to survive the ordeal with his reputation and his honor intact—no matter if he never accepted a single bride, did a dishonest favor or took an alimony.
WHAT ISN'T FORGIVABLE, in the name of justice, is that so many unchecked and uncheckable particuliers of the allegations against him who leak his secrets leads to newsmen. For, as a result, there is no longer simply a suspicion of wronging hanging over his head; it has come to the point where many of them still much graft he took, not whether he it took.
Agnew the politician is dead already, and Agnew the human being is close to it. In both cases, the fate may be deserved. The point is, he's been hanged without a trial. No, that's a wrong figure; he's been drowned in a dambreak of leaks.
It is difficult for a politician to survive even the accusation of graft—especially a politician so high in the government. The natural assumption was that even the letter informing Agnew that he was under investigation at Alqawam there was fairly solid evidence against him. Maybe that's not fair, either, but it's forgivable.
He asserted that confidence last month when he made his decision to meet head-on charges against him. He said then that he expected to be vindicated in the courts. But that was before he was convicted in the streets. When that situation changed, Agnew's chances of any meaningful vindication, except, perhaps, for staying out of
And because he already stands condemned without a trial, it strikes me as particularly harsh to chide him, as some have, for backing away from his earlier statement of "confidence in the criminal justice system of the United States."
Thus it does not seem unreasonable for him to be asking now that the House of Representatives air the charges against him —even publicly, on television, if it wants to. It is inconsistent, to be sure, because there was no deformation of the Watergate hearings as complicating, not facilitating, the search for truth.
BECAUSE OF THE CHARGES already floating around, many of which have been accepted as fact by too many of us, acquittal in court has always had its meanings. It is Agnus Chrysostom is denied, unless he is able to prove beyond any doubt that all the charges are false. That seldom happens in any trial. What is more likely is that acquittal would come on a finding of insufficient evidence, or an unmissibility of evidence or some such.
The congressional investigation Agnew has begged for wouldn't guarantee fairness,
Any such outcome would keep him out of jail, but not much more. And the failure of the grand jury to indict him, for any reason, would make a difference in that case, we'd all "know" he was guilty.
As to the man himself, I personally don't care for him. And to be perfectly honest about it, I am not at all convinced that he is innocent of graff.
but it may offer the best possibility if it. The nature of the hearing is such that the public can get a clearer idea of what is going on and how to deal with it. Objective objections and citations and precedents.
ON TV YOU GET A better look at the accused and the accusers, and you're able to form more satisfactory opinions as to who is guilty. You've also said he could be convincing in such a forum—not that it would revive Agnew the politician; he's given up on that. But it might help him.
It shouldn't be necessary to say that this is neither an attack on the courts nor a brief for Spiri Agnew. An important aspect of the judicial system that Agnew once declared so much faith in it is its provisions for an orderly disclosure of evidence and cross-examination of witnesses, and challenges of witnesses' credibility.
the courts, in other words, are supposed to offer protection against what has already been taken.
By the same token, some of the black victims of old south lynch mobs may actually have forbribed raped white women. But guilt is no justification for lynching.
If Agwen is as guilty as many of us believe,
we shouldn't be afraid to have it come
out 91-124.
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