University of Virginia Library

Letters To The Editor:

Ogden, Chertoff Clarify Cadre Philosophy

In reply to your article of Dec.
5, "Cadre Protesters Challenged:"
The for the Immediate
Seizure of the Means of Production
is a disciplined democratic-centralist
underground organization
with political ties to the USSR and
official adherence to the literary
minions of that glorious republic.

Our leadership is bound to a
strict theory and practice of vanguardism
and integration into the
struggles of the masses, so that we
can move easily between the back
rooms of analysis and the front
lines of Communist Revolution.
Therefore, by making reference to
"Alan Ogden, leader of the Cadre,"
you played directly into our hands.

The function of the female
comrades in our organization is to react
the masses by using to fullest advantages
their physical assets. Therefore,
although the name of Nina
Chertoff was as well known to your
reporter as was the name of Alan
Ogden, and although she addressed
the students assembled in front of
Minor Hall with as much zeal and
intelligence as our male public
speakers, the fact that her strip
tease overshadowed her verbal polemics
and was given exclusive coverage
in your lackey press also vindicates
our strategy. The bourgeois
media always plays imbecilically
into the hands of the People!!!

It is a policy of the University
of Virginia to welcome recruiting
agents from Dow Chemical, from
hundreds of other profit-oriented
companies with vested interests in
the status quo of imperialism, and
from the CIA and the military. It is
the stated policy of the University
of Virginia to work hand in hand
with the government and with the
business community to miseducate
and channel students into a kind of
career world that supports and
takes its life from the international
American system of manipulation
and exploitation of people for private
profit. During our hassle last
week with Mr. Simpson of the
Placement Office over whether we
would be allowed, as an outside
organization offering ideas for students'
futures, to apply to have a
recruiting office alongside Dow
Chemical in Minor Hall, we got to
look at a copy of the standard
statement of policy on "Recruitment
and Demonstrations" that all
companies which recruit students
sign and which the University explicitly
adheres to. This statement
makes it clear that the University
has a political commitment to and a
stake in the University-big business-government
complex. One section
of this document opposes the
right of students to disrupt recruiting
(even of the Dow napalmers)
on the grounds that
interferes with the of
others." That is, the University of
Virginia officially believes that it
has a duty to protect the "right" of
any company, of any government
intelligence agency - no matter
how disgusting, destructive, or reactionary
the affairs of those institutions
may be - to recruit on
university property against the anticipated
actions of its own students.

All this (and the contracts for
such things as biological and chemical
warfare research that the University
has with the National
Government could be mentioned
here) belies the liberal rhetoric of
the academical village dedicated to
a free exchange of ideas and the
pursuit of truth.

The welfare of students and
their Constitutional rights to free
assembly and free speech do not
come off well under this political
power arrangement. First of all,
they are "protected" against recruitment
by such organizations as
the "Cadre," because we are slightly
freaky and because the Cadre is
unable with integrity to agree with
the political test organizations are
required to meet to prove their
legitimacy. And, just as significant,
the University, through the Student
Council, takes pains to control and
neutralize demonstrations and rallies
which might challenge existing
power relationships. The University
is no better than a police state on
this score. Permission in advance
must be obtained for all rallies and
demonstrations. When Mr. Simpson
broke faith with the people of the
"cadre" last Tuesday, a group of
disgusted students and non-students
decided that a rally with music,
speeches, and creative street theater
was called for on the next day.
Certain points about the social re-
of U. Va. and its imperialist
commitments would have
been made at this rally.

However, the rally was effectively
broken up by the president
and vice president of the Student
Council, functioning as spokesmen
for the administration, as they had
decided that the rally was a "demonstration"
and therefore controllable
under the regist ration-beforehand
rule. Students were
threatened with suspension and arrest,
non-students with arrest. We
were informed that the state
troopers had been alerted and that
there were contingency plans calling
for two cops per attender of
the rally. A plainclothes federal
agent with a camera was in evidence,
and a cameraman who said
he was working for the U. Va. administration
was also busy snapping
pictures. The electricity for our
P.A. setup was cut off inside the
building. The majority of the
people who had stayed up late the
night before planning the street
theater event were intimidated by
Mr. Evan's threats and decided to
postpone their creativity 'till
another day. The Academical Village
lost the decision on a K.O.; the
spontaneous expressions of students
and their non-student friends
were suppressed, and imperialism
was upheld.

Liberation Theatre

Thursday night (December 12)
at Gilmer Hall (7-9-11 p.m.) the
Liberation Theatre will continue its
pursuit of "a cultural alternative."

A film, "Bike Boy" (105 minutes)
starring non-actress Viva by
non-director Andy Warhol. The
film was released after, Warhol's
classic "Chelsea Girls;" it was made
in 1967.

- "Warhol is America's most
prolific film-maker."

E. Stoller

Art Voices.

- "Whatever you think of Warhol's
films, each of them presents a
challenge to its viewer, and all of
them demonstrate a love of the
medium so great that its potentials
can be reduced almost to nothing
and the result is still a movie.
Warhol spoofs everything we are
used to, as far as movies in America
are concerned, especially the sexual
neuroses of Americans; Hollywood
has utilized these so perversely that
the females of our nation are conditioned
to fall madly for guys who
unknowingly ape the absurd histrionics
of all-American-male roles
played by homosexual actors. It's
not quite that way in a Warhol epic,
to say the least."

-Miller Francis

Granted, Andy Warhol's view of
the world is probably not like yours
or mine, and it might even be
unrealistic. However, if any of us
intend to explain even a few of the
complexities of our society, let's do
it with all viewpoints represented
and not with fourth-hand myopic
opinions. We have felt that many
sides of life or shades of opinion
have been neglected in this environment.
We are trying to fill that gap,
knowing full well that the ultimate
analysis and opinion will be yours.

The Liberation Theatre

AFTER THOUGHT: The Liberation
Theatre will support the first candidate
for Student Council who
makes his presence known at our
presentation of Warhol's "Bike
Boy."

WASP Elite

The University of Virginia was
founded at a time when education
was the key to success; when it was
the exclusive prerogative of an aristocratic
class which used it to maintain
their prestige, authority, and
material well-being (i.e. "Knowledge
is Power"). For that reason,
blacks, women, and other low
status groups had to be excluded
from the University; for to give
them admittance would be to grant
them a share of the power held by a
culturally/ideologically homogeneous
WASP elite; and the last
thing any group in power has ever
wanted to do has been to share that
power. Their fundamental ethic was
Expansion: economic expansion at
home, imperial expansion abroad,
and ideological expansion within
the mind (i.e. the use of public
education and the mass media as a
form of melting "pot" which would
submerge and fuse all minds within
a monolithic theology of the Protestant
Ethic, Puritan Morality, and
the White Man's Burden). Education
allowed them to ride the crests
of these waves of expansion; to
exploit and enjoy the power,
wealth, and psychic self-satisfaction
generated by that expansion. Education
was functional - a means of
gaining and maintaining Power
("Study, Work, Get Ahead, Kill!").

Today, however, these waves of
expansion are being turned inward
as Marshall McLuban has suggested.
Such a high level of material wellbeing
has been attained in America
that farther participation in the
economic "rat race" seems futile,
sterile, self defeating (i.e. time and
energy can be used for more rewarding
activities - this presupposes
an inevitable redistribution
of wealth in expanded social
services and a guaranteed annual
income). The growing strength and
self consciousness of the nonwhite
"third world" has made imperial
expansion either impossible or prohibitively costly
in terms of military
effort, economic strain, and internal
divisiveness (as the Viet Nam
war has demonstrated; incidentally,
the same negative or counter-productive
phenomena have occurred in
the Soviet Union after the invasion
of Czechoslovakia). The spreading
influence of bureaucratically controlled
education and commercially
dominated mass media have had an
unanticipated impact on the public
mind: they have trained it to be
highly sensitive, alert, and critical
while simultaneously exposing it to
the most glaring flaws in and faults
of our society (i.e. televised riots or
combat scenes; journalistic coverage
of radical personalities, organizations,
and ideas which otherwise
would have languished in obscurity).
Because of these facts, the
"success" ethic is now increasingly
seen as meaningless; it no longer
works; it is irrelevant to modern
life. People now begin to demand
an education not because it will
lead to power and "success" but
because it is seen as a necessary part
of the "good life," of self fulfillment.
Education is no longer a tool
in the hands of a power elite; it is a
continuous process of self realization,
in which all groups want to
participate.

The power elite is losing its hold
upon the minds and actions of the
American people for the reasons
listed above. To the extent that is
subconsciously realizes this, it has
been making concessions to those
groups it had previously oppressed:
thus we now have civil rights laws,
token racial/sexual integration in
many institutions, and a climate of
fear and tension (dramatized by the
Wallace movement and the Chicago
police riot) which always accompanies
the collapse of one
WELTANSCHAUUNG and the
growth of another. These changes
will continue and the University is
being, and will be increasingly, affected
by them. Racial/sexual integration,
student/faculty power,
curricula reform, and other radical
changes are not only desirable but
inevitable as our social/cultural environment
continues to change at
an accelerating rate. The problem is
not whether these changes will occur
- but when. Will the University
begin instituting them now, sensibly
adjusting to changing conditions;
or will it repress, stymie, and
sublimate radical efforts so that
they eventually explode in a destructive
way? The University, as it
is presently constituted, is doomed
(!) - it will either creatively evolve,
reluctantly submit, or be violently
forced to accept a new role; a role
as a leader of society and a community
of educated individuals
rather than as an institute for training
and replacing specialized cogs at
the upper levels of the American
welfare/warfare machine (our now
obsolete and rapidly crumbling
WEHRMACHT).