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Page 2 Wednesday, May 4, 1966 Michael Hollis I (Eire BaUn (Tar tsi S Opinions of Tin- Daily Tar Ikcl an- rxjHOM-d in its editorials. All unsigned editorials are -written by the jS editor. Letters and columns reflect only the personal views of their contributors. FKF.D THOMAS. EDITOK SPU Goofs The Student Peace Union is defeating its own pur pose. When their Y-Court demonstrations were in full swing last fall, the majority of the student body here joined blindly against the SPU and in favor of U. S. military involvement in Southeast Asia. Then the peaceniks quietened. And while they rested, many average Joe Colleges began to consider seriously the possibility of the U. S. finding an equi table means of bowing out of the Vietnam conflict. When John Kenneth Galbraith suggested during the Carolina Symposium that we have no business in Vietnam, he was cheered by many students who would have thrown eggs at him for such a statement six months earlier. The idea of evening workshops and discussions in residence halls is a good one. Perhaps for the first time since the origination of the SPU on this campus, the tenor of student opinion recently has been such that a profitable exchange of ideas between the peace niks,' the militarists and those in the middle ground could have been conducted without the affair erupt ing into a name-calling sessions. But the members of the SPU have stabbed them selves in the back. An orange juice fast. Black arm bands. Daily meetings around the flagpole for "med itation and sustenance." Really people, you have to be kidding. This is exactly the type action that sets the blood to boiling in the veins of most of our students. What can you expect to accomplish after you have set your self and your cause up to be ridiculed. We remember the early days of demonstration when we were dead against the anti-war boys and all they had to say. Since that time, we and many others have given a little ground maybe a lot of ground in some areas. We really believe there are some good ideas within the group that wears the black and white chicken's foot button. But we suggest that if you intend to convert any one else to your viewpoint, you use your head . A little strategy cair go a long way much furtner than a gallon of orange juice. God's Candidate This morning the Alabama Democratic Primary is history. At least the first ballot is history. At the time we are writing this, we do not know who has tallied the most votes or if there will be a runoff. Of course it has been speculated that Lurleen Wal lace wife of the present governor, would easily cap ture "the party position on the November ballot. Al though it is too late now to change anyone's mind or primary vote if, indeed, any Alabama voters read the DTH we would like to share with you part of an article written for The Charlotte Observer by Charles McDowell Jr. These are the last paragraphs of an otherwise serious commentary on the Alabama primary race: "Waiting on the sidelines is Rep. James D. Mar tin, a conservative Republican segregationist, who currently is favored to beat any of the Democrats, including Mrs. Wallace, in November. "Pending the showdown, we have the feeling that not enough attention is being paid to a Democratic candidate named Eunice I. Gore. Eunice is at least as interesting a name as Lurleen, but there is the additional factor that Eunice I. Gore is a man, and says he is running because God asked him to. "Gore one of his campaign slogans is 'Call Me Mister' is traveling around the state, speaking from a motor boat. He tows the boat on a trailer behind his car. And to finance his inspired campaign, Mr. Gore is selling raffle tickets with the motor boat as the prize. "Sounds to us like a natural." Satly (Ear tifeel :: Fred Thomas, editor; Scott Goodfellow, managing editor; John Greenbacker, associate editor; Ron Shinn, news ed ji; itor; Barry Jacobs, sports editor; Ernest Robl, assistant :: news editor; Bill Hass, assistant sports editor; John Jenn ;!: rich, wire editor; Mike Wiggin, night editor; Jock Lauter :: er, Jerry Lambert, photographers; Chip Barnard, art ed :: itor; Andy Myers, Steve Bennett, Steve Lackey, Peytie :: Fearrington, Carol Gallant, Lytt Stamps, Alan Banov, BUI Amlong, staff writers; Bill Rollins, Sandy Treadwell, ft Drummond Bell, Jim Fields, sports writers; Jeff Mac :: Nelly, Bruce Strauch, cartoonists. Intervention In Viet Nam Unj notified I have spoken recently with several stu dents who support their country's war in Viet Nam. The arguments they put forth differ, but the gist is almost always the same, and boils down to something like this: "We are in Viet Nam to prevent the communist aggressors from taking over the country by force. If we don't stop com munism in Viet Nam, it will spread all over Asia." These arguments sound good on the sur face, but are based on a colossal miscon ception of the state of affairs in Viet Nam. A day after Dien Bien Phu, the repre sentatives of the French and the Viet Minh met in Switzerland and agreed on what have since been called the Geneva Accords of 1954. By these agreements, all of Viet Nam was temporarily divided into two parts, and universal elections were to be held throughout all of Viet Nam within two years in order that the country should be reunited. The reason for this provision should ba obvious. Viet Nam is not two, but one. The present boundary between North and South has no relation to language, culture, custom, religion, or family ties. It is an ar tificial boundary, and to speak of the North Vietnamese as "foreigners" is absurd. They are Vietnamese, and many of them have brothers, sisters, fathers or mothers who live in the South. The Geneva Accords also contain other important provisions, all intended to keep foreigners out of the country. Articles 16, 17, 18, and 19 ban the introduction of fresh troops, military personnel, arms, munitions, military bases, and foreign military alli ances on the part of either zone. The United States did not permit the universal elections to take place. The rea son should be made clear by these as tounding words, which come from no less a person than Dwight D. Eisenhower (Man date For Change, p. 372): "I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held at the time of the fighting (1954), possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai." And no one who knows anything about Viet Nam will deny this: had we al lowed the people to decide their own des tiny, Ho would have been elected by a landslide margin. Little wonder that the communists were eagerly looking forward to the elections. Little wonder that they called the Geneva Accords a "great political victory won by a great military victory." They felt that they had all of Viet Nam in their hands," -and they were perturbed (to say the least) -when the United States: 1. co-operated with Diem to prevent the elections (the Dulles mentality of "rolling back" communism); 2. formed SEATO; 3. began sending troops into Viet Nam, albeit under the verbal camouflage of "ad visers"; 4. began building military bases in the South all in violation of the Geneva Ac cords. Well, as everyone knows, a war broke out. This country intervened massively to save the South Vietnamese government from collapse, and the situation has esca lated upwards from the point in a spiral which has blown to smithereens all the earlier foolish predictions of Pentagon of ficials that we would be out "by the end of 1965" or "by Christmas of 1966." We are there now, supposedly, to pre vent the communists from taking over the country. And what right do we have to do that if the communists there are native to Viet Nam and if they are in the majority? The only foreigners in Viet Nam are our selves. There are no Chinese or Russians there. There are only Vietnamese and about a quarter of a million Americans who have no business there. There could only be two justifications for our presence: 1. If there were other foreigners there Chinese or Russians as there were Chinese in Korea or Russians in Eastern Europe; 2. If the government that invites us is obviously representative of the vast ma jority of the people. The government in the South today is a farce, and represents no one except itself. It has alienated the Buddhists, the Catho lics, the students, the police, the soldiers, and even some of its own generals, and it loses control of nine tenths of the country side at night. By contrast, not only is there no guerilla war in the North, but from the few films We get, we see mostly large crowds with helmets on, cheering "Uncle Ho," as they call him. The point is this: you cannot stop com munists or anyone else if they are home grown. You have no right to do so. If you do, you are junking majority rule and the self-destiny of nations, and no little coun try on earth will have any sovereignty. It is as absurd to demand that the North Heelprints About those hoodlums riotine a?ain in California it's Watts happening, baby! Hollywood screen child discussing his elders: "Mother's not the type girl you'd want to bring home to mother." Now that Washington, D. C, is proba bly getting a subway system, it looks as if the newspaper people there can do a better job of getting under the surface of the na tion's problems. DAVID ROTHMAN Vietnamese should get out of the South as it is to claim that Federal troops should have gotten out of the South in the Ameri can Civil War. In Viet Nam, the so called "aggressors" live there, and they are tearing up their country (which they have every right to do), because they were cheated out of it before. The VC are willing to hold an elec tion this instant. Indeed, it is part of their platform, since they are confident of vic tory. Only our side speaks of the "imprac ticability" of elections now. It is easy to see why. If we lost, which we would inevi tably if all of Viet Nam could speak, it would prove to the world that this huge country had gone wrong, and that several thousand of its young men died in an un just cause. As regards our loss of pretige and the loss of confidence in us by other little na tions of the world to whom we are com mitted! both results, supposedly, of our im mediate withdrawal I reply only that you cannot lose what you have not got. No one in Latin America or Canada or Africa supports us. We have little support in Asia, and hardly any in Europe. "Sit-in, lie-in, sing-in, sleep-in, yes; but starve-in - Never!" The French spent millions of francs and thousands of lives in Algeria. No one sup ported them. One fine day De Gaulle pick ed up and pulled out completely. People have chosen to forget this incident. De Gaulle tcok a huge risk in pulling out: he impUcitlv admitted to the world that the whole mess was a blunder. Regardless of how much his actions since then have an gered us. we cannot take this from him: he saw U12 light and got out. Nor did his prestige suffer; in fact the contrary was the C3S6 I don't think that bombing the North will solve any of our problems. The French did not need to bomb Hanoi or Haiphong: thev controlled the cities. The real war is in the countryside. To "win" you must des troy the VC, who are inextricably mixed with the native population. The whole idea of a guerilla war is that "supply lines," in a conventional sense, do not exist. The only real organization is local, and the average VC gets his small arms from those he is fighting. His food he carries on his back There is no front line in this type of war, and no over-all organization, direct ed from one headquarters. General Thomas S. Power, former head of SAC, already had said that bombimg of selected sites in the North would bring sur render within a few days, but years of this bombing has only consolidated support of the government in the North. Our own gue rilla forces in the Philippines never suf fered a casualty in three years of air strikes. "Operation Saturate" in Korea was a failure, as was the German Blitz on Bri tain. The Allies bombed Germany almost to ruin, but German war production rose steadily until the summer of 1944. Even supposing that a meteor came rushing out of space and obliterated the North completely, yet still the war would go on. The substantial majority of VC in the South now are native to South Viet Nam. Finally, I think the whole idea of "stop ping communism'' should be re-examined. If communists from other countries try to take over a neutral nation, then we have a right to stop (hem. But if they are native, we must let the country go as it will. If we are afraid to sit back and let the world choose, since it might not choose our sys tem, then it proves that our system is rot ten. We are not primarily defending capi talism. Capitalism does not work well in poor countries, and it is an open issue as to whether or not it is obsolete. But free dom and self destiny are always in vogue We should be concerned less with stopping communism, which has done some marve lous things in certain areas of the world, and more concerened with stopping totali tarianism. If we set ourselves to this goal, we will not support the "government" in Viet Nam another day. We will pull out and let them elect whomever they wish. David Rothman Southern Fundamentalists Use 'God Is Dead' To Cover Issues Harry Golden, editor of The Carolina Israelite, confirmed his reputation as "a man seeing the obvious before the rest of us can see it" when he related the "God Is Dead" concept to Southern Protestant guilt about segregation. Eager to avoid deal ing with this region's greatest social prob lem, the churches here for years have divert ed their flocks' atten tion to matters far less important. For years, preach ers have been vainly warning Southerners about the relatively mild evils of sex, liquor and, God help us, tobacco. Now, as shown by the recent resolution passed at church conventions, many South ern Protestants are beginning to realize that ttey have, in Golden's words, "back ed away from (the) great moral revolu tion" of civil rights. And moral revolutions, mind you, are supposed to be well within ., 1 i - - 1 the church's' realm. But what to do? One way out is simply to say that God is dead, that God the hallowed father figure who struck terror in to the hearts of the "God Is Dead" f-outh-erners before they "learned" he isn't alive really wasn't watching over their church during the time it tolerated the gross im morality of racial segregation. Isn't it con venient to exonerate yourself from your guilt by insisting there has been no one around to see your wrongdoings? "The God Is Dead" thinkers may not themselves be guilty of these evils, but their consciences compel them to answer for the entire South. Of course, if the Almighty has really passed away, there arises the question of when he died. For instance, was He alive in the days of slavery? Had God died by the time the Ku Klux Klan got started? Was He alive when the churches were sanctioning the doctrine of "Separate and Unequal"? Was God alive when Protestants bomb ed other Protestants churches? Quite likely, the "God Is Dead" Protes tants in the South fervently wish He had conveniently passed away before any of these things took place. Personlly, I believe He is still around to day, and if I'm right, many "God Is Dead" Southern Protestants will be awfully em barrassed upon reaching Heaven and dis covering that He was watching them all the time. And, should God still be alive, another group will also be embarrassed the Pro testant Fundamentalist preachers who, like the Rev. B. H. Ingle of Raleigh (a former Klan member), insist Negroes will ' not "enter the Kingdom of God until they are white." WTien these preachers reach Heaven and they'll make it only because they were preachers they will discover that the place was integrated long before the 1904 Civil Rights Act. Then, they will join the professors at Emory University in wishing that God, who witnessed their sins, has teen dead. I f THE GAIN I I I'M A PlTruPP DrrunuT A I I r A 11 vo 1 ir-r, i, t-r W Lr -.,.. . I .i uke A rasMw icE" J jl b! II COAL I b . ffflmtPf) I I lFirsmSAME IT MERCHANT tsX V fytf ( STUFF AS YffVF ) c Ebfl Ls Nttt r panic! ciwiS Z I I V S. .- . 1 - -inn "
Daily Tar Heel (Chapel Hill, N.C.)
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May 4, 1966, edition 1
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