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University Daily Kansan Wednesday, Feb. 12, 1964
Brainwashed?
Are you one of the poor, befuddled university students who is likely to be brainwashed by a campus speaker whose views tend to be less than 100 per cent All-American?
Does picketing strike you as being uncouth?
Do you close your eyes and hurry past the Kansas Union display of leftist and rightist publications glaring within sight of any naive, susceptible collegiate individual?
Do you cringe when someone such as Clark Mollenhoff, the Washington newspaper correspondent who was on campus the other day, tells you that your own government would actually hide some important information from you to suit its own ends? Do you wish people with thoughts such as that would leave well enough alone and stay in Iowa or wherever they come from?
Well, lickety-split!
Placards and picketers and Czechoslovakian theologians and displays of extremist literature and hard-nosed Washington reporters have as much place on this or any other campus as the American flag, a course in Western Civilization, or a first-aid station.
There may be students at KU who have never heard of Karl Marx, who can't spell Khrushchev, or who think the Birch Society was created to encourage preservation of the tree for which it was named; but to deny even these people the opportunity to question and listen and criticize at first hand the controversial figures whose ideas help to shape our own, even though in opposition, would be the most un-American thing imaginable.
Individuals who are exposed to only one side of a question cannot possibly make proper judgments concerning that issue. Being "for" something automatically requires being "against"
something else, and when you are denied knowledge of the opposition's point of view you lose what may be the better half of your own ideological defense.
Whether you shape your opinions from class lectures, bull sessions, visiting speakers such as Milan Opocensky from Prague or placard-carrying protesters makes little difference. The essential point is that common sense functions best when exposed to the total range of thought related to any given questions. That is one of the primary bases of democracy.
A perfect example of how hungry we are for information regarding the so-called "undesirable viewpoints is the nearly constant crowd of students clustered around the display case in the Union peering in at the weird assortment of publications. The usual reaction is one of humorous skepticism, hardly likely to end in revolution of the masses. And I dare say that display has drawn more attention in a week or two than the nearby scale model of the campus will attract in two years.
As for Mollenhoff's haranguing of government information policies, he has achieved the greater part of his goal if the reader learns to think at least once before believing everything his eyes allow to pass into the cranial cavity for evaluation.
And for my point of view, as long as you've read this far, there's a chance you've been stimulated to think about your right to know ALL of what's going on in this world; and my purpose in writing it has been achieved. If you're one of those who always reads the last paragraph first, I suggest you put your mind in gear and take it from the top.
Larry Schmidt
No Cure-All
We have no right to comfort ourselves with the belief that in our enlightened age confinement in a mental institution is really the same as any other kind of hospitalization. For even though we show more compassion and understanding toward the insane than some of our forebears, the fact is that the person diagnosed as mentally ill is stigmatized—particularly if he has been confined in a public mental hospital. These stigmata cannot be removed by mental-health "education," for the roots of the matter is our intolerance of certain kinds of behavior.
Most people who are considered mentally sick (especially those confined involuntarily) are so defined by their relatives, friends, employers, or perhaps the police — not by themselves. These people have upset the social order — by disregarding the conventions of polite society or by violating laws so we label them "mentally ill" and punish them by commitment to a mental institution.
The patient knows that he is deprived of freedom because he has annoyed others, not because he is sick. And in the mental hospital, he learns that until he alters his behavior, he will be segregated from society. But even if he changes and is permitted to leave, his record of confinement goes with him. And the practical consequences are more those of a prison than a hospital record.
The psychological and social damage thus incurred often far outweighs the benefits of any psychiatric therapy.
— Harper's, "What Psychiatry Can and Cannot Do"
'64 GOP Should Challenge LBJ on Foreign Grounds
By Lyle C. Wilson United Press International
The mirrors of politics are beginning to reflect in some detail the pattern of the campaign the Republicans must mount against President Johnson if they are to have any substantial chance to lick him next November.
The political mirrors also are beginning to reflect with some clarity and shape and hair-do of the candidate the Republicans need this year.
THE REPUBLICANS need a candidate experienced in foreign affairs. They need to mount against President Johnson a campaign based on the dangerous accumulation of crises in the relations of the United States with friend and foie alike; deterioration of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the permanence of communism in Cuba, the infiltration of communism in South America, Panama, Viet Nam; misunderstandings in SEATO, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization. There are others.
You name the crisis. The Democrats have it. Not the least of these crises is the fading prestige and effectiveness of the United Nations.
A PRETTY GOOD argument can be made for the proposition that the Kennedy-Johnson foreign relations record so far makes the performance in that area by Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower Look might good. Another factor in the presidential political situation is that Lyndon B. Johnson is more happily identified with domestic than foreign state craft.
There will be domestic issues handy for Republican emphasis in this year's presidential campaign. Unemployment, for example. The domestic fields, however, offer no such political harvest as do foreign
fields for the Republican party and its candidate.
THIS IDEA that the Republican campaign should be based on U.S. foreign relations is stoutly challenged by several elements in the Republican party. One of those elements doesn't like Richard M. Nixon; can't forgive him for the conduct of his losing 1960 campaign.
Another numerous Republican element panics, hollers "fire, fire" and leaps out the window at the mere suggestion that Boston's Henry Cabot Lodge might win the Republican presidential nomination. A third Republican element wants to challenge President Johnson's election on grounds that he is an unreformed new dealer, a big-time spender at heart, a captive of the non-communist left wing.
THIS THIRD element wants to base the Republican campaign on domestic issues. That would suit Johnson fine. He is plagued by unemployment but a noble affluence warms the nation. Business profits are the highest ever and wages are high for those who are working. On the stock market, the Johnson boom continues. Even congress seems to be doing Johnson's bidding after sitting out 1963 in protest against the policies of John F. Kennedy.
THERE IS TIME for the Johnson boom to deflate and bust before election day but there is no very solid reason to believe it will. There is even less cause to believe that the new President will have solved all or any of his problems in foreign relations before the November polls open. Under the circumstances existing, U.S. voters probably are ready to follow a leader who persuasively saves:
"I can clean up that mess in foreign relations."
Voters are wishful thinkers, always ready to buy a good promise.
Dailij Hänsan
UNiversity 4-3198, business office
University of Kansas student newspaper
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