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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Wednesday, May 1, 1968
Inside North Vietnam a primer with impact
The leading editorial of last Friday's Daily Kansan urged students to administer to themselves a primer course on Vietnam. Although it would be presumptuous to think the Kansan's exhortion was singularly compelling, 400 KU students and another 100 or so faculty members and non-students viewed at the Methodist Student Center Felix Greene's film "Inside North Vietnam."
Englishman Greene's personal report of his three-month tour of North Vietnam in 1966, commissioned by CBS and the San Francisco Chronicle and uncensored by the North Vietnamese, leaves American viewers ashamed. The same air-show spectators who marvel at the precision of the U.S. armed forces' aerobic teams are forced to feel a profound responsibility as Greene's camera catches an Air Force F-100 Supre Sabre dropping its payload and climbing away—dare we say magnificently?
"Inside North Vietnam" is not greatly educative in a rote sense. Like most good documentaries, its device is impact. For example, there is no longer any question that the bombing, now reduced in area, has taken a high toll of North Vietnamese civilians. But few Americans can feel great compassion until they see such scenes as that of a Vietnamese woman, herself minus an arm since the French-Indochinese war 15 years
ago, grieving over her bandage-enshrouded child.
"I cried, raged, cheered," Jessica Mitford said of her response to Greene's film. "This film if seen by enough Americans could stop the war."
That is too much to hope for, especially since the bombing cutback has stolen much of the film's thunder. But this brings us to an important question: how valid is the appeal to emotion in a discussion of war? Ordinarily, it is shunned by "reasonable men." But when the war is so clearly absurd, as manifested in the skies over North Vietnam, outrage—not the unblinking calm of a Dean Rusk—must be the guideline.
Felix Greene's documentary and such perceptive journalism as that of the New York Times' Harrison Salisbury have made outrage reputable by giving it fact for impetus. The bombing became an emotion-charged issue, and a unilateral "halt" became the logical and humane course of action.
Who now will wake us up to the absurdity of the war in the South, and who will help us see that unilateral withdrawal of our troops to a practical line of defense (e.g., Thailand and the Seventh Fleet) is also the logical and humane course of action?
Give us another Felix Greene.
Don Waker
Assistant Editorial Editor
Letters to the editor
Of injustice and inanity
To the Editor:
I read Mr. Lovett's editorial, "Only Guns Will Ever Stop Riot Looting" (UDK, April 24). He had a very interesting approach to solving the "problem."
Living in our great American society in 1968, I do not feel surprised at reading an article like that nor do I feel surprised to read about rioting and looting. Since we've decided to remove partially the blindfold of hypocrisy that we've always worn and to look at ourselves the way we have always been, racist and violent, we can take a more penetrating look.
We all realize that rioting and burning is wrong, almost as wrong as a society that has allowed a two-class citizenship based on skin color to be perpetrated. Regardless of one's viewpoint, a society is sad indeed when it starts measuring human life against the value of a building being burned or a television set being looted! (By the way, Mr. Lovett, did you read the recent article in the UDK about pilferage in the Kansas Union Bookstore? Are you in favor of shooting these thieves, too?)
It seems to me that Americans should try to break tradition a little and get to the roots of the problems that cause looting and burning instead of eliminating those that are doing it as a reaction to social injustice: Let's eliminate the syphilitic spirochete of racism instead of treating the skin chance of looting and burning.
It is quite clear that the acts of looting and burning are a direct and logical reaction to a society that didn't budge years ago when civil rights marchers were in the streets marching "peacefully" and being received by welcoming committees with police dogs, electric cattle prods and tear gas. In this era the rights petitioned for were simple and could have been more easily satisfied.
Perhaps as the majority of (white) Americans sit safely in their clean, comfortable homes in the suburbs from which their black brothers have been excluded, surrounding the ring of despair of the central city which has resulted, they will now use as much energy in trying to cure the sickness that covers our land as they do in ignoring it. If they expend half as much energy in acting constructively as they do in trying to subdue other Americans who must and will be heard, I am almost sure that our problems will be solved.
Jonas Walton Los Angeles, Calif., sophomore
\* \* \*
To the Editor:
I was thoroughly disappointed by Dr. Spock and his lecture. It seems that a man facing a five-year prison term, and who is encouraging others to face the same penalty, would be better informed on the war he is attacking and better able to state and support his position than Dr. Spock did Sunday night.
Robert Van Sickle
Topeka freshman
"NOW HEAR THIS! . . . GET THOSE F-111B'S OVERBOARD!"
New Paperbacks
Not exactly a hot commodity, but at least an interesting commodity, is a new paperback, Barrows Dunham's Heroes and Heretics: A Social History of Dissent (Delta, $2.45). The book appeared originally several years ago, and its new appearance in inexpensive form makes it available for both the so-called average reader and the teacher who now will find a way to assign it as a textbook.
Dunham, who wrote the delightful "Man Against Myth," treats historically in this work the great heretics of history, the people who elected to take unpopular opinions and, in some cases, suffered for it. He writes about Socrates, Jesus, Paul, Augustine, Spinoza, Voltaire, Darwin, Freud, Marx and Einstein.
Some writers would present such a work in style ponderous and dull. Not Barrows Dunham. His writing always seems to effervesce; his perceptions always seem profound and disturbing.
Another new volume of some significance and of likely interest to the student is Miguel Angel Asturias' Mulata (Dell, 95 cents). Asturias won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967, and his book is about primitive people in Latin America. It is steeped in mysticism and mythology of the Indians, and is likely to prove fascinating to many readers.
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I WOKE UP THIS MORNING — AND FOUND MYSELF IN A BOX.
AND I PANICKED BECAUSE I DIDN'T KNOW HOW TO GET OUT.
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