John Dixon
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Opinions of The Daily Tar Hevl are x pressed on its editorial psge- All
unsigned editorials are the opinions of the editor and tht stiff. Letters and
columns represent only the opinions of the individual contributors.
Friday, February 12, 1971
Tom Gooding, hdttor
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The Student Stores, working
with the University attorney, has
instituted a policy of issuing
warrants for bad checks.
The warrants have resulted in
several students spending the night
in jail because they couldn't raise
$100 bail.
There certainly can be no
question of legality concerning the
action. In fact, we would hope
those who knowingly and
persistently pass bad checks would
be called into account for their
action.
However, we feel the manner in
Sfie Satin GJar tftd
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Richard Nixon owns the war now.
It all belongs to him-South Vietnam,
Cambodia, Laos and whatever is next on
his list.
America, it seems, is still holding on to
her dream. She is the way, the truth and
the light.
The world needs to be saved, and
Richard Nixon and his America are the
new messiah.
In this new religion we will be content
to play the role of Judas.
A scant two weeks ago we were told
the combat role of the Green Berets in
Vietnam was over. They were all bein
brought back home to Ft. Bragg.
Well, according to CBS News, all
Green Beret units are out of Vietnam.
which the policy was begun is
indeed unfortunate.
The policy does break
precedent. Student Stores manager
Tom Shetley said this is the first
time he knows of warrants issued
against students for writing bad
checks.
Mr. Shetley points out that there
has been a rash of bad checks
passed recently.
Unfortunately, in an effort to
correct the situation Shetley went
to "the proper administrative
officials" rather than carrying the
problem to the Faculty Student
Stores Committee.
The administration has long
praised the factor of student
involvement in policy decisions. As
recently as Thursday Assistant to
the Chancellor Claiborne Jones
spoke in favor of increasing the
students' role in the decision
making process.
If we are to believe the
administration is sincere we must
question why the decision was
made without any student input.
J.A. Branch, executive director
of University enterprises and
services, said the issuing of the
warrants was a management
decision and advice was not called
for by the committee.
If the advice had been to follow
an existing University policy of
holding grades or diplomas for
overdue accounts we would agree.
However, this was a serious
departure from previous policies.
We feel the decision was a
drastic overreaction that could have
been prevented if the University
had honored their promises about
student involvement.
fa mm nct
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ENOUGH
They are fighting in Laos.
And they are wearing South
Vietnamese uniforms.
For some reason we find it a bit hard
to believe that all of the Green Berets
who were in Vietnam suddenly "decided
to change their citizenship.
For some reason, the longer we listen
to any of the politicians the harder we
find it to believe anything they say.
And our disbelief has lulled us to
sleep. We've stopped listening to anyone.
The war has become so hated that it is
hard to read or listen to news reports.
We tried to end it by working for
Gene, but we lost in the streets of
Chicago.
(Editor's note: The writer. John
Dixon, is a professor of religion and art at
UNC.)
Last Spring I issued a challenge to the
faculty. The challenge was not taken. I
now make another.
At that time I proposed that the
faculty seek appropriate political action
to try to bring the Indo-China war to an
end. There was eloquent opposition to.
this kind of act. My challenge was this:
the students need and deserve our
leadership; if what I proposed was
unacceptable, the faculty was morraily
responsible to produce something better.
The proposal was judged unacceptable.
The faculty then passed a motion that
was little more than an affirmation of
approval of what the students were doing.
After that nothing. Nothing whatsoever.
The crisis is on us again. It is perhaps
not so immediate and dramatic this time
but it is all the more imperative that the
presumed gifts of intellectuals-reflective
thought-be applied to the situation
before it gets again to the point it reached
last spring.
It is now clear both by act and official
statement that the Nixon administration
intends no end to the Indo-China War
other than military victory.
The protests of the spring had effect:
it forced the aborting of the Cambodian
invasion and compelled the President to
commit himself irrevocably to the
withdrawal of ground troops. But the
President has now made it plain that the
prestige and resources of this country are
committed to the present regimes in
Indo-China, that he feels free to keep, up
to 100,000 air and support troops in
Vietnam as long as necessary to ensure
the victory of the South Vietnamese. ;
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The President has offered ;the
American people a devil's bargain. "I will
stop killing Americans if you will leave
me free to kill as many Asians as I think
necessary." The hell of it, the literal,
damnable hell of it, is that the American
people show every sign of accepting'the
bargain. ?J
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Air wars only kill people. No war was
ever won by air power; after years of
ferocious pounding German aircraft
production was increasing. Air power can
only destroy and kill; it cannot win. To
accept the President's bargain is rfo
condemn thousands, perhaps millions' of
people to misery, mutilation and death.
Back when there was a sense of
morality, especially about other people's
conduct, the conscience of the world was
outraged by the destruction of Lidice by
the Nazis. The American Army and Air
Force have destroyed so many people
that it is past classifying with simple
barbarities like Lidice; it is approaching
the class of the Nazi extermination of the
Jews. ''
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We tried to end it by marching to
Washington in November, 1969, but we
lost out to a football game.
We tried again last spring, and we lost
because they only said they heard us.
Fight it through the system they keep
saying. The system is made to respond to
the needs of the people.
To that, we say this: The system is
made only for those who hold the power.
The system is corrupt. It perpetuates
the corruption and does nothing to
cleanse itself.
The system still believes it must have a
New Frontier to survive, and it is the
frontier which is destroying life while
keeping the system alive.
There are no options left. Everything
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It is no good sayir.g that each
individual is free to make his personal
protest as a citizen: the forces committed
to this killing, those who profit in pride
or cash, are so many, so strong, so
skillfully devious that only the strongest
institutional action can hope to do the
job. Except under pressure, the Congress
clearly will not. The churches, with afew
shining individual exceptions, are either
supine or actively in support of the war,
in the voice of cardinals and evangelists.
Business and labor are helplessly divided,
the judiciary evades the issue. If the'
universities do not act there will be no
one, no institution, to stop the killing and
return us to something like moral
integrity.
We are not equipped, by precedent,
training or disposition, to act either as
conscience or as leaders of a nation. But
if we don't, no one else will. If we don't,
we make a mockery of all our professed
ideals.
It is no good saying the university
must remain non-political. I would be
happy to debate this in academic terms
but this occasion does not permit such
luxury, so I will simply assert: universities
were founded to serve a political and
social function. They are saturated with
politics. They are indispensable agents of
the political order.
This is not something bad. I would not
have it different. Indeed, I do not know
of any other way to have a university. We
can pretend it is not so because we are
such willing supporters of the existing
order that we don't get into trouble for
our political acts. We have eased our
conscience for this subservience to the
existing order because that order has been
as just and decent and humane as is
reasonable to expect from political
systems managed by men and certainly
within limits that permit orderly
disagreement without institutional unity.
That luxury is now denied us. The
administration of our government is now
committed to a policy so murderous, so
destructive, so subversive of every ideal
the country professes, that to refuse to
stand against it is to be guilty of
complicity with it.
Let us not delude ourselves about our
political involvement. It is our techniques
they use, our ideas they exploit. We have
trained the people who run that machine.
It is everywhere our facilities they have
used. We have for generations taught
approval of the system that has produced
this war.
Let us not delude ourselves about our
responsibility. What meaning is there in
our professed dedication to abstract
truth, when truth, is defined for the
American people by a presidential press
conference? Who can be impressed by our
affirmations of intellectual ideals when
our chief instrument words is debased
as the Secretary of Defense debases it?
What weight should be given to our
professions of allegiance to the purity and
Letters to the editor
Proctor argument fallacious
To The Editor:
I would like to comment briefly upon
what I consider a fallacious argument in
Mr. Grover Proctor's February 3 editorial
entitled "Dogmatism May Be Downfall of
America." Grover contends that for
whatever the Nixon Administration "can
be accused of doing or not doing ... no
one can in any sense say that Nixon or his
staff has been responsible for the
widening rift we are finding in America.
It started long before Nixon and unless
checked it will last long after his term(s)
in office. A President cannot serve nor
should he be expected to, the interests of
all groups and factions 100 per cent of
the time. Right or wrong, our system
allows for the choice of the largest group
of people to head the government."
Yes, Grover, the division in our
country started long before President
Nixon took office. But when Mr. Nixon
assumed that office, he entered on the
theme of "Bring Us Together."
Unfortunately, I think the President for
the most part has ignored this theme
since assuming the duties of the Chief
Executive. In fact, in my opinion, Mr.
Nixon has pursued certain policies that
have insured further division in our
nation. A case in point is the 1970
Congressional elections. I personally, hold
the President responsible for the direction
has been tried, and everything has failed.
They refuse to count our votes.
They ignore our demonstrations.
They throw our petitions in the
wastebasket.
Our chants fall on deaf ears.
Peace is a word that to them does not
exist. Nixon and his Gestapo and his
Creighton Abrams and William
Westmoreland and John Mitchell and
Herbert Hoover and Spiro Agnew have no
idea what that word means.
Without the war, business would
slump, the military would be out of a job
and we could do something about the
starving people in the ghettoes of
Washington, D.C., and the delta of the
Mississippi River.
objectivity of scholarship when we sit
silently and let the facts be concealed or
distorted? Of what respect is a
scholarship that cots us nothing and
secures our comfort? Of what respect is
an objectivity applied only to the remote,
the esoteric and the inconsequential?
When the institutions of democracy
are being used to such purposes is it the
duty of the university to sit on the
sideline and keep the chronicle? Should it
comfort a Cambodian whose family is
buried in the rubble of his village that
someday he will be a foot-note in a Ph.D.
dessertation in the History Department?
Large areas of Laos are in ruins and
the survivors of American terror live in
caves. Can we really be content to know
that some day one of our historians will
record that on such a month 44 villages
were destroyed rather than 38 as the
press so dutifully reported? Our
anthropologists might regret the
destruction of ancient village culture;
should we rejoice that our psychologists
will have a rich harvest of psychic
disorder resulting from the violent
obliteration of all a people believe in?
The Religion Department might have a
dissertation topic such as "The
Consequences of Aerial Destruction on
Buddhism in Hue, 1968-69." Is this really
what devotion to truth is all about? Do
we honor Socrates by seminars on his
epistemology or by knowing in our gut,
not just in scholarly memory, that he
died rather than submit to tyrranical
purpose?
Is Erasmus honored by the presence of
his books on our reading list? Is Camus
no more than an interesting novelist and
essayist? Was Thomas Jefferson an item
for scholarly treatises or was he a serious
man?
Did Abraham Lincoln understand
American purposes, or does Spiro
Agnew? What was once the last, best
hope of earth is now the ally of dictators
and a machine for the systematic
destruction of Asians.
A reporter finally left Vietnam
because he couldn't stand it any longer.
He had gone into a Cambodian village
shortly after the American Air Force had
been over it. He saw, in the square of a
ruined village, five people, a man, a
woman, three children, "fused" into one
mass by American napalm. When such
things are done who can be silent? Is a
university a guardian of truth or a servant
of tyrants?
So my challenge is to answer these
things. That we must act I do not doubt.
That we are required by professional
honor to defend the ideals we have so
luxuriously claimed for ourselves I also
do not doubt. That the reprisal may be
savage is possible; we deal with cruel men.
(For comfort I might add that they are
also petty men and we might even
succeed in being faithful to our principles
without it costing very much.)
What we should and can effectively do
should be corporately determined and my
of a bitter and divisive campaign, a "law
and order" campaign that should have
been directed at organized crime rather
than college students, a "faction" which
the President and his staff have
frequently attacked.
No, Grover, "A President cannot
serve . . . the interests of all groups and
factions 100 per cent of the time."
Certainly a President and any other
politician makes many political promises
to many group interests which he cannot
always keep. I am quite aware that Mr.
Nixon is a politician and party leader as
well as the President of the United States.
But I am sure that no one will disagree
with the idea that the Presidency should
take precedence over any party position.
"Bring Us Together" is not a political
promise. It is a principle, a very noble
one, to which President Nixon
supposedly adhered during the 1968
campaign, but one which has apparently
suffered oblivion since Mr. Nixon
assumed office. Instead, ' Mr. Nixon
desecrated the Office of the Presidency
through his repulsive personal conduct
during the 1970 Congressional campaign.
The President has a responsibility to
all of the American people (an idea which
Mr. Nixon is fond of quoting), for the
Office of the Presidency is without doubt
one of the most powerful symbols of
Without the war this nation could
fulfill the American Dream as it should be
fulfilled.
But the Manifest Destiny of the Great
White Hope hasp-taken over our dream.
Nixon has taken our dream, the dream of
Jefferson, Lincoln, McCartney and
Robert Kennedy, and turned it into a
nightmare.
And the only way out of the
nightmare is to wake up and pop the
bubble.
To end a nightmare we only need
awaken, we only need realize that it is a
nightmare, that is destroying all of us.
Vietnam is the racism of America, the
pollution, the oppression, the persecution
of those who refuse to believe .the
aligning
sense of moral imperative to act does not
necessarily include an equal imperative to
act my way. I see certain things possible
to us.
We are under moral obligation to use
whatever professional talents we have.
Perhaps the central of these is less a talent
than a claim-the claim to devotion to
truth. We have our pretensions and our
flatulent speech and are not entitled to
reprove the ordinary' flatulence of
politicians. But this is beyond the
ordinary: official lies are concealing
ruthless killing and are no longer to be
borne on pain cf our impeachment.
Historians are concerned properly with
the intricate forces of human conduct.
The definition is not just past human
conduct. Should our political scientists
and our lawyers watch idly the
corruption of our institutions of a great
religion are debauched by the kind of
self-indulgent Christianity preached by
Billy Graham in the White House? Do our
sociologist have no responsibility when
agencies they have advised destroy the
social structure of an ancient people? Can
our anthropologists keep silent when they
see the systematic destruction of ancient
cultures?
The list could be longer. In truth,
barely any on this faculty are free from
direct responsibility; either their
disciplines are being used as a tool of
destruction or their discipline is itself a
tool of truth and to withhold its use from
the proclamation of truth is to be
accessory to falsehood. A decent humility
in awareness of our own limitations and a
decent tolerance of other men has kept us
heretofore in a humane balance of
relationship to the governing authorities
of the nation. We have provided them the
wse of our skills and trained their agents
(all for comfortable fees) without
claiming the right to speak corporately to
the use made of these things. That clam
indulgence is no longer available to us. We
can no longer face our students and claim
devotion to truth, to honor, to patriotism
so long as the country's power is being
used as it now is.
If we do not act we not only have
responsibility for complicity by consent
and cooperation with what is now being
done in Indo-China. We will bear
responsibility for leaving our students no
choice other than their present exhausted
and cynical apathy or violent rebellion.
Students have taken the only concerted
moral and patriotic stand against this war
but students are ill equipped to sustain a
long campaign, particularly against the
skilled and ruthless deviousness of the
administration. The burden of leadership
could have fallen on groups more skilled
and experienced than we are but I see no
one else laying claim to it. If we don't do
it, no one will. And if we don't do it, our
rhetoric of truth and honor is no more
than concealment for the killing of an
endless line of Asian peasants.
John W. Dixon, Jr.
Professor of Religion and Art
American democracy, a democracy based
upon majority rule and minority rights.
Since this office is such a symbol, the
President must in some sense be above
the influence of selfish interests. A
President must be a speaker for all
Americans who believe in the idea of
democracy, whether or not those
Americans voted for that President. In
this critical unifying aspect, I, unlike you,
Grover, believe President Nixon has failed
disastrously.
Fred Davenport
211 Ruffin
To the students:
don't you wish?
To the Editor:
To the student body, especially those
who are even dimly aware of the
existance of SG, Stupid Government:
Now don't you wish you'd elected me in
'69 and Daughtry last year?
Suckers. Heh, hen.
Tim Knowlton
269 Harvard Street
Cambridge, Mass.
Doublethink or listen to the
Doublespeak.
Richard Nixon has not ended the war.
He has expanded it. He has betrayed the
American people. He gave some of them a
dream, and he has taken it away.
Vietnamization of the war no longer
means letting the repressive Saigon
government fight its own
counter-revolution.
It now means putting American troops
in Vietnamese uniforms and calling that
Vietnamization.
Nixon has taken the war for bis own.
It is his toy now, and we don't want to
play with his toys anymore.
And his sandbox has become a
dungheap. .
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