4
University Daily Kansan
Opinion
Thursday, April 24, 1986
Legalized terrorism
A bill that would authorize the assassination of foreign leaders involved in terrorist acts against U.S. citizens was introduced to Congress last week.
The bill would permit the President to respond to acts of terrorism or threats of terrorism without having to consult with Congress before sending out forces.
dung out for ice.
If the bills pass, it would exempt such actions from the War Powers Act that was passed in 1973 requiring the President to consult with Congress before moving U.S. forces into hostile areas.
hostile areas.
If Congress passes the anti-terrorism bill, it would put the United States on record as condoning assassination. The United States would become a terrorist nation itself if it actively sought to destroy foreign leaders who might be on the United States' bad side at the
time.
Many already think that the United States plays dirty international games and goes underever from time to time to kill or attempt to kill foreign leaders. What is worse is that this bill would legalize those actions and further smear the U.S. reputation in the eyes of other world leaders.
other world Easir, Hammany's leader, Easir Honecke, already called the U.S. raid on Libya barbarism and said theraid would stiffen the tension between the East and the West.
It's certain that such a bill condoning assassination of foreign leaders would have negative effects on the rest of the world and would stifle some dialogue the United States has with other nations.
The bill would legalize and perpetuate terrorism, the very action the United States wants to eliminate.
Speeches aren't enough
This week is Organ Tissue Donor Awareness Week. It also should be National Government Hypocrisy Week.
The Reagan administration is giving it a big buildup.
"Americans are a caring and giving people, so it is fitting that we as a nation should encourage organ and tissue donation and increase public awareness of the possibilities and the need," Reagan said in a proclamation.
Unfortunately, Reagan seems to be unaware of the primary need for successful transplant programs federal dollars.
A federal task force says the price tag for successful transplants for the elderly poor comes to about $21 million.
The Reagan administration has shown little support for organ transplant policies. The
staggering costs or giving transplants to all who need them appear even more so in the face of a budget crisis. A liver transplant can cost as much as $250,000.
"There is hardly any area of public policy where the administration has been more hypcritical and less helpful than with transplants," said Sen. Albert Gore, D-Tenn.
Sen. Congress last year appropriated $3 million for federal programs to assist organ transplants. Reagan asked Congress to take back $2.47 million.
$2.47 Million:
For Reagan to propose such cutbacks while touting the importance of organ and tissue donation awareness reeks of hypocrisy.
poverty.
The need for donors for organ transplants is a serious one, and deserves more than empty, self-serving speeches by politicians.
Troubles with the basics
Ask any gunslinger. A gun is no protection if you can't get it out of the holster.
payloads into an aircraft. Military officials and aerospace experts dubbed it a crippling blow to the nation's ability to keep tabs on the Soviets.
A Titan rocket believed to be carrying a secret spy satellite exploded last week in California. It was the second straight failure of a Titan 34D, which is supposed to be the military's workhorse for getting heavy payloads into orbit.
More than that, it should be seen as a crippling blow to any may be putting stock in the United States' ability to devise President Reagan's proposed Strategic Defense Initiative, otherwise known as Star Wars.
Reagan essentially is asking the best minds of our country to create a defense system that will protect the United States from missile attack. The idea is that a space-based system will shoot down the missiles before they get here.
Unfortunately, as the Titan
incident and the shuttle disaster prove, our best minds don't seem capable of getting things consistently into space in the first place. The Titan program probably will now be grounded, as the shuttle program was, leaving the United States with no way to put large military satellites into orbit.
How can the United States possibly expect to build an in-describably advanced, 100 percent reliable defense system and reliable it must be — if we still can't build the rockets to put the thing into space in the first place?
One can just picture the happy day of the Star Wars system's debut, with government and military leaders' smiles turning to gasps of shock as the defense system is turned into a multibillion-dollar fireworks display because the rockets carrying it blew up.
It would appear that even if Star Wars was more than so much science fiction, our best minds have a ways to go yet.
News staff
Michael Totty ... Editor
Laurie McMillen ... Managing editor
Christa Barber ... Editorial editor
Cindy McCurry ... Campus editor
David Giles ... Sports editor
Wilfred Lee ... Photo editor
Susanne Shaw ... General manager, news adviser
Business staff
Brett McCabe ... Business manager
David Nixon ... Retail sales manager
Jim Williamson ... Campus manager
Lori Eckart ... Classified manager
Caroline Innes ... Production manager
Pallen Lee ... National manager
John Oberzan ... Sales and marketing adviser
Letters should be typed, double-spaced, fewer than 200 words and should include the writer's name, address and telephone number. If the writer is affiliated with the University, include class and hometown, or faculty or staff position.
Guest shots should be typed, double-spaced and fewer than 200 words. The water will be photographed.
writer will be photographed.
The Kansan reserves the right reject or edit letters and guest shots. They can be mailed or brought to the Kansan newsroom, 111 Stauffer-Flint Hall.
University Daily Kansan (USPS 650-640) is published at the University of Kansas, 118 Staffel-First Hall, Lawrence, Kan. 66045, daily during the regular school year, including Saturday, Sunday, holiday periods, and periods, as well as during the summer session. Second-class postage paid on Lawrence, Kan. 66044. Subscriptions by mail for $15 for six months or $27 a year in Douglas County and $18 for six months or $34 a year outside the county. Student subscriptions are $3 and are paid through the student activity fee. Changes to the University Daily Kansan can be
POSTMASTER: Send address changes to the University Daily Kansan, 118 Stauffer-Flint Hall, Lawrence, Kan. 66045
Fascism label for right is illogical
Excuse me for resorting to ideological labels, but several left-wing people seem to be suffering from certain poor logic or hallucination. Certain members of the left know their adversaries by one simple word, fascist, no doubt because of a few bad apples on the right.
I can find no better phrase to describe this narrow-minded aberration than reversed McCarthyism, than principle is the same but the sides reversed. In both cases, the name-callers follow the same formula: If someone disagrees to a certain extent, he is a fasist or a pinko
The diversity of ideology alone should ruin the credibility of such a function. Liberals per se aren't communists. Conservatives per se aren't fascists.
On the left are socialists, social democrats, Galbraiths, militant leftists, pacifists, Marxists, Lennians, Trotskyists, Stalinists and Maoists.
fascists.
Naming fascism as the main characteristic of the right is fallacious. Fascism is a specific political structure in which the central government rules and owns everything of society. A fascist is more or less totalitarian than a communist and both are more so than liberals and conservatives.
On the right are isolationist conservatives, militant conservatives, New Right conservatives, neoconservatives, libertarian conservatives, and liberal conservatives, gentry conservatives, agrarian conservatives, industrial conservatives and fascists.
Satri Bonto Mussolini, a fascist dictator. "Fascism combats the whole complex system of democratic ideology, and repudiates it
Liberalism," William F. Buckley wrote that "conservatives are bound together for the most part by
Evan Walter
Fascism denies that the majority, by the simple fact that it is a majority, can direct human society. Fascism has taken up an attitude of complete opposition to the doctrine of Liberalism, both in the political field and the field of economics."
field and the idea of Liberalism in such context means freedom as liberty. Hence, a fascist is opposed to political and economic freedom, as are communist societies. As Solzhenitsen pointed out in "Gulag Archipelago," communist regimes sustain the absoluteness of
Staff columnist
negative responses to liberalism. Negative action is not necessarily of
Conservatives aren't anti-democratic or fascists. They are necessary interlocutors in democratic debates.
their control by functioning as police states, like fascist regimes.
states, like fascist regimes.
Fascists and communities are unified by characteristics — in generalization, radical reforms promised, racial or class prejudice or hatred and uncompromising patriotism.
patriotism.
To refer to contemporary conservatism in America as fascism would deny the conservative commitment to limited government, economic freedom, the preservation of the Constitution and democratic structure, and the struggle against the prime totalitarian threat to the free world, which isn't fascist.
This, however, is too generalized to encompass all that conservatives believe in.
negative character ... Our challenge is to restore principles to public affairs ... Freedom and order and community and justice in an age of technology; That is the contemporary challenge of political conservatism."
In his book ''Up From
By these characteristics, the conservatives have had a reputation as being intellectually backward. For decades, the intellectual community turned its back on conservatism, which it viewed as the stupid and ignorant party.
In 1950, the German politician test T.W. Adorno wrote a book called "The Authoritarian Personality." This book, using psychiatry analysis and stereotypes, proposed that conservatives were by nature authoritarian, raised in strict, brute and repressive households, and that they instigated totalitarianism. For decades, this was accepted.
decades, as this recent 1977, psychologist Donn Byrne wrote in a textbook, "Adherence to right-wing or conservative politics should be related to democratic beliefs because fascism is the most extreme right-wing political and economic structure and ideology."
With such a simplistic logical scheme, one could conclude that Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand (right-wing extremists) are anti-democratic.
Conservatives aren't antidemocratic or fascists. They are necessary interlocutors in democratic debates. As James Madison wrote in the Federalist Paper No. 10: "As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different options will be formed."
"The protection of these faculties is the first object of Government and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties."
When the liberals plan for their Great Society of the future, the modern conservative's job is to reiterate the founding principles of the United States — mainly those of Adam Smith, John Locke, Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson — and the importance of individual freedom in this society.
Crackdown on theater jabberers
I wish I could predict that it's the beginning of a national trend, but it probably isn't. Nevertheless, we still can savor this one isolated incident.
can savor this one.
It happened on a recent Saturday night in a movie theater in Chattanooga, Tenn.
Five teenagers were sitting together and loudly jabbering. That's what many young people do when they go to movies. They jabber.
they go to movies. They've never understood why people want to pay money to get into a movie house in order to jabber. There are so many other places to jabber. On street corners, in school yards, on back porches, in hamburger joints.
larger joints.
But for some strange reason, thousands of people like to jabber in movie theaters.
And there is one of the biggest reasons why hundreds of thousands of their victims have stopped going to the movies.
movies.
Anyway, they were jabbing. And other members of the audience sitting nearby were making the usual responses, turning and glaring, saying "shhhh," sighing loudly, squirming in their seats.
ing in their setting.
But these gestures are seldom
dismissed. Their donors don't care if they
disturb others. If anything, they enjoy it. It gives them a sense of power.
So, all a person can do is suffer through the jabber, move to a different part of the theater, or leave entirely.
If the system were not in place would be fully within his rights to give a jabberer a warning. Then, if the warning was ignored, he could seize the jabberer by the throat and squeeze until the nuisance was unconscious or deceased.
That's unfair, but it's a result of a glaring defect in our legal system.
A few well-publicized strangula-
Mike Royko
Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune
tions of jabberers, and instances of rudeness in movie theaters would be sharply reduced.
sharply reduced.
But the law protects jabbers. Strangle one and you'll probably wind up in prison instead of being treated to a ticker tape parade, which would be your due.
Anyway, the five teenagers were sitting there jabbering. And every few minutes, they would fling some popcorn in the direction of the screen.
screen.
There was a time, in the pre-TV days, when this wouldn't have been tolerated. Ushers would have swooped down the aisles, shone their highlights in their faces and told them to knock it off. If they didn't, they would have been shown the door.
And if they resisted? When I was an usher at a theater on the West Side of Chicago, we were issued big, heavy-duty industrial flashlights. The sweet sound of a flashlight against skull was like a melon being thumped for ripeness
But today's theater owners are too cheap or timid to hire ushers. If you find the lobby to complain, all you'll find is some wimp of a ticket-taker who will go hide in a stall in the men's room.
opened.
A man came from the lobby and told them to stop jabbering and throwing popcorn.
This night in Chattanooga, though, something rare and wonderful happened.
Naturally, they giggled. And in a few minutes, they were jabbering
Then the man again appeared. And this time he told them that they were being ejected.
They refused to go, so he grabbed the nearest one — a female creature — and hauled her bodily from the auditorium.
auctionform.
Even better, when he had her and her friends in the lobby, he informed them that he was an duty-copy working for the theater and that the little obscesses were under arrest.
And they were. They were bundled off to the police station and charged with disorderly conduct, and in the case of the girl, with resistin' arrest.
Unfortunately, they didn't try to escape, so he couldn't shoot them. But you can't have everything.
As evidence that jerkism isn't necessarily the result of social conditioning but might be genetic, the girl's family has been raising a terrible howl.
Both demands have been denied, as they should be. If anything, the policeman should be promoted and a street named in his honor.
Brimming with indignation, they've gone to City Hall in Chatanoga and demanded that the policeman be suspended and that the theater be closed down.
I know what the proper punishment should be. But it probably won't be imposed. Some wimpy appeals court would probably rule that it's cruel and unusual punishment to order the removal of five tongues.
Some time soon, the crew of jabberers will appear in juvenile court and a trial will be held, if they can shut up long enough for anyone to be heard.
Mailbox
Applause from WSU
On behalf of the student body of Wichita State University, I would like to congratulate the Kansas Jayhawk football team for its outstanding performance in this year's NCAA tournament.
Kansans everywhere can be proud of the fine job that Larry Brown and his team did in representing the great state of Kansas. We, at Wichita State, were all rooting your team on to victory and were proud to do so.
We wish you continued good luck in the future and look forward to another challenge between our two teams in the fall.
Jeff Kansa student body president Wichita State University
Jaime Preto's letter in Monday's Kaanan concerning the test policy in the physics department is worthy of consideration.
Memory aids in tests
One further point: Whatever justification that may have existed for closed-note, closed-book tests disappeared with the wide availability of programmable, alpha-numeric calculators. Using a Hewlett Packard 41-CV or equivalent, one can pre-program scores of formulas and recall them at test time.
The only differences between a calculator used this way and a hand-written crb sheet are the programming knowledge required and the $150-plus purchase price. Neither has much to do with learning physics.
Either alpha-numeric calculators should be banned or all students should be allowed equivalent memory aids. David Gilman
1
Kurt Sigmon
Lawrence senior
1