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Wednesday, September 24, 1986 / University Daily Kansan
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Solution is in the waiting
Common sense and fiscal responsibility are virtues that are most often not associated with politicians. Judging by the actions of some state legislators last week, concerning a new repositionment plan for the state, it's not difficult to figure out why.
So, some legislators are proposing that a multimillion dollar state census be conducted to base the reapportionment on. The result: KU students would be counted as residents of their home towns, not Lawrence, essentially eliminating a block of 20,000 voters from Douglas County.
The legislators are bound by the state constitution to set up a plan for redrawing voting districts by 1989. They will be forced to use census figures that will be nine years old. No judge in the land would approve any plan based on such outdated statistics.
The proponents of this new census forget that students pay taxes in Lawrence, live here for most of the year and usual-
lv vote in this district.
Besides the damage to our influence on state politics, this plan also would cause state and federal human services funds to be cut and would probably mean the loss of one of our four representatives in Topeka. Is there an alternative?
Our own Wint Winter Jr. has a solution that would solve our problems and save the state those precious millions. He would simply have the reapportionment put off until 1991 — a year after the U.S. Census Bureau finishes its national head count.
The state would then be able to base its reapportionment on the latest, most inexpensive figures available. Lawrence would keep its standing in the halls of state government, students would get the representation they deserve and the legislators would be able to spend the millions they would have spent on a census in a more prudent manner.
See, wasn't that easy?
Take teens off the streets
Teenagers in Lawrence need a place to hang out.
With the gradual increase in the Kansas drinking age, teenagers are finding fewer and fewer places they can go to have fun on weekends. Dances sponsored by Lawrence High School are a good idea but aren't held very often. What should high school students do the rest of the time?
Parents complain that their children have nowhere to go in Lawrence because most of the nightlife in the city caters to college students. Lawrence High administrators also see a need for more social life for the city's youth. True, very few places in town are legally or financially feasible for teens to frequent.
A sound alternative, then, would be a non-alcoholic teen club. With the increase in the legal drinking age, more and more of these establishments are popping up in Kansas cities. And with success.
A teen club in Lawrence certainly would be worth the investment. Not all teens would be attracted by such a place. Some still will find a way to get alcohol illegally. And some still will cruise the streets. But for those who don't drink and for those on the legal age borderline, the club would provide an ideal atmosphere for dancing and socializing.
Parents of Lawrence teenagers need to quit complaining and start acting. They need to concentrate on raising money and encouraging local businesspeople to take a chance and construct a place for their children to go on weekends.
For the parents, talk is cheap, but action is the only way to lure the teenagers out of their cars and off of the streets. It's worth the time, effort and investment to give local youth an alternative that they would enjoy.
Aquino shows her savvy
Philippine president Corazon Aquino's visit to the United States this past week has been a successful one so far in terms of public and financial support she obtained for her government.
The Reagan administration has also promised $20 million in medical supplies to aid Philippine soldiers in their fight against the communist guerrillas in that country.
In addition to warm receptions by the public in Washington, New York and Boston, the 434 commercial banks that have covered $14 billion of the Philippine's $26 billion foreign debt are working on a plan to lower the country's annual payments. These payments now average $2 billion a year, half of the country's annual foreign exchange earnings.
Cheers for a courageous lady, as the saying goes. Surely, only a cynic could find something in all these optimistic proceedings to carp about, right?
Under all the media hype are some basic facts, often overlooked. Fact number one is that the United States will always support the Philippine administration in power, as long as it's an anti-communist government. Remember, the Reagan administration supported the Marcos regime up until the last moment, and the deposed leader now has sanctuary in Hawaii.
Without belittling Aquino's success in pulling her country back together, fact number two is that she is also a member of the Philippines' elite, like Marcos.
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Opinions
Documentary reveals a hidden holocaust
Put yourself in this situation.
You're a foreign correspondent for the New York Times. You learn that the government you are covering has starved 10 million of its own people.
What do you do? For most people, the answer is obvious — print the story. But that's not what a New York Times reporter did.
Some background;
Some debriefers After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Josef Stalin had a tough time incorporating the rest of the country under his control. One example was the Ukranian Soviet Socialist Republic. The people there continued to work their land and fight to keep it.
This is the story that New York Times reporter, Walter Duranty, suppressed. While categorically denying in his dispatches that such a famine was taking place, he admitted to his colleagues that he knew Stalin was deliberately starving millions of Ukrainians.
Stain round a way to end an orchid Between 1923 and 1933, he sealed off the Ukraine from the rest of the Soviet Union. Then he sent in his secret police to destroy all crops and livestock, including dogs and cats. It was famine on command. Nothing went in; no one came out.
Moscow correspondent for the Manchester Guardian at the time, called Duranty the biggest liar he had met in fifty years of journalism.
The famine killed 10 million Ukrainians.
One of those colleagues, British author Malcolm Muggeridge, a
Meanwhile, Stalin awarded Duranty the Order of Lenin praising Duranty for his excellence in reporting on the Soviet Union.
Victor Goodpasture
Columnist
The New York Times is a newspaper of record and its failure to report on the Ukrainian genocide was a serious blow to the public's right to know. Its refusal to print a correction, even after all of this time, is a serious breach of journalistic ethics. Its story doesn't end here.
In 1983, Canada's National Film Board and Harvard University's Ukrainian Institute helped produce a documentary on Stalin's Ukrainian genocide called "Harvest of Despair."
In 1985, at New York's 8th International Film and TV Festival, "Harvest of Despair" received the gold medal in the TV documentary category and the Grand Award
Trophy, against more than 5.000 entries.
Now you'd think the networks would be scrambling to get their hands on something that received such prestigious awards, wouldn't you?
Nope, all three networks. Home Box Office and Turner Broadcasting System refused to air the documentary.
But the networks show little reluctance in airing a documentary on the Holocaust against the Jews by the Nazis. Hitler murdered six million Jews in little more than seven years. Stalin murdered 10 million Ukrainians in a little less than two years.
Both horrors must never be forgotten, but shouldn't the public know as much about the Ukrainian Holocaust as the Jewish Holocaust?
Especially because the media constantly bombards us about the public's right to know.
Public Broadcasting Service, at first, refused to air the documentary. Finally, to get around the PBS block, columnist F. William F. Buckley Jr. decided to show the documentation on his program, "Firing Line."
The documentary, entitled "Firing Line Special Edition: Harvest of
Despair, " will air tonight at 8 p.m. on PBS.
Following the documentary, Buckley will lead a discussion with several journalists, including Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times. In the past, Salisbury has defended Duranty's lies. The discussion ought to prove very interesting. Please visit our one-day event!
Do you know I'm just spouting amo-
commist rhetoric? Do you think
my conservative passions have got
ten the best of me?
Are you sick and tired of my outbursts and complaints against the media? Are you disgusted with my accusations that the media has a liberal bias, doesn't tell the whole truth and is soft on communism?
Then watch this program tonight. Watch it, think about it, and then make up your own mind.
If after watching it you are still unconvinced that between 1832 and 1933 Stalin murdered 10 million Ukrainians, then write me and tell me that I'm full of it.
But watch the documentary first
I sincerely believe that after watching it, you'll have a totally different perspective about the kind of oppressive regime under which the Soviet people must endure.
Distributed by King Features Syndicate
Right wing feeds on farmers in crisis
While driving through the Midwest this summer, I was delighted and astonished by the sight of bountiful crops growing in the fields. At the time, it was inconceivable to me that behind the tall corn and wheat, desperation and crisis were mounting.
Despite the productive success of the farmer, a crisis looms over farming communities. Low prices, debts, and increasing government foreclosures are endangering rural America.
Increasingly, small family farms and communities are becoming an anachronism. As a result, the days of concentrated corporate control of agriculture, which leads to high prices and exploitation of the land, are not far off.
The uprooting of families from their homes, their land and their way of life is a tragedy. Even more distressring is the increase of suicide, alcoholism, divorce and domestic violence among those who remain.
to the propaganda of the far right. Numerous groups, such as the Aryan Nations, Posse Comitatus, Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations are spreading their influence among farmers.
Another alarming effect of the farm crisis is the rise of the radical views among farmers. In their desperation, farmers are susceptible
The right-wing campaign involves
Christian Colbert
Columnist
a variety of approaches and methods to gain influence. But according to The Monitor Center for Democratic Renewal, "the common element among them all is that they dress their anti-Jewish and racist message in the clothes of concern for family farms."
"Amid talk of the grain surplus, depressed market prices and farm bankruptcies, mention is made of an
Lenore Bradley of the Kansas City Star wrote about discussions that are frequently occurring in the Farm Belt because of the far-right influence:
international conspiracy . . . The theory has it that farmers are victims of a conspiracy of international Jewish bankers with ties to Moscow who function through the Trilateral Commission."
Simplistic notions offered by demagogues of the far right about who is behind the farm crisis are a harmful distraction to farmers.
"Chasing after mythical Jewish conspiracies prevents farmers and others from organizing themselves into the powerful political force necessary to change public policy," said the MCDR.
In an article in the Guardian, Terry Pugh wrote, "While far right rural groups are fairly few in number and composed of no more than a few thousand adherents, their influence is wide-reaching. Their influence overlaps significantly with those of the Ku Klux Klan, new Nazi groups and the John Birch Society."
In addition to diverting farmers from real solutions, the far right is taking money from them by selling them counterfeit legal advice. According to Pugh, the legal advice is based on non-existent laws.
"Farmers who try to use the 'advice' are often fined $200 for needlessly delaying the courts," he said.
The farmers should not be blamed for their troubles. They are victims of a system that is unwilling to pay a fair price for food.
For too long we have taken the farmer for granted. He has supplied us with inexpensive food that has bolstered this nation and the world, And now, when he is in need of bolstering, we callously ignore his plight. The extinction of the farmer may be an ominous sign of the decay in our system.
Daniel Webster was right when he said, "Let us never forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. Unstable is the future of that country which has lost its taste for agriculture. If there is one lesson in history which is unmistakable, it is that the national strength lies very near the soil."
Washington, D.C., a kingdom in itself
In many ways, the capital is a real city, not unlike others in this country.
But people in the rest of the country, at least those few who may give it a thought, fail to realize that their capital is also unlike any other city.
City of Albany, N.Y.
Washington, District of Columbia,
has buildings and streets, trees and
laws, statues and monuments,
policemen and firemen, theaters and
movies and rush hour traffic.
It is a feudal state ruled collectively by 535 kings and queens of Congress, who, in their largesse, permit one delegate to sit, but, of course, not vote with them.
The kings and queens, possibly knowing the eventual outcome, did some years back approve a constitutional amendment granting
statehood to the District of Columbia. The thought raised an amazing lack of interest in the states, and its ratification is now considered a dead issue.
As a result, the district operates on something called limited home rule. Loosely translated, this means that the citizens can elect a mayor and
Steve Gerstel
UPI commentary
council and run the city - up to a point
Although the subject of dispute, Congress controls the purse strings.
all the way according to some, part of the way in the thinking of others.
the way in the church. There are those who say that money the city itself generates is subject to the whims of the kings and queens, in addition to the money provided by the federal government.
But come to light it does, as it did last week when the Senate had to act on the fiscal 1987 appropriations bill for the District of Columbia. Given its standing among priorities, the
The realization to what degree the District of Columbia is a chattel of Congress comes to light rarely, most senators and congressmen finding more rewards in weightier (a tax reform bill) or political (a public works project for their state) matters.
deed was undertaken at night and the bill passed by voice vote.
But the committee's report outlined some matters the Senate would like the city to attend to, which is awfully close to an order.
For instance, the Senate gave the city a gentle nudge to increase the minimum drinking age to 21, thereby calling what the report calls the "blood borders" with Virginia and Maryland where the thirst-quenching age has already been increased.
But the bill provided one more clue that the kings and queens would just as soon set the people free. Included was $100,000 to keep alive the process by which the District of Columbia would become the 51st state should the states ever grant that privilege.