The Radical Voice

The rhetoric of today's young radicals is often as outrageously critical of American society as the latest communique from Peking. And few radical voices manage to convey this impassioned style better than Boston's Old Mole,*the small, revolutionary biweekly in Boston that published the confidential files "liberated" from Harvard's University Hall last week, under the triumphant headline "Reading the Mail of the Ruling Class." Some of these letters reveal close ties between Harvard faculty men and the CIA, the State Department and the Defense Department. Old Mole's comments on these documents and other issues are wildly oversimplified, deliberately provocative, and seeded with occasional grains of truth. Excerpts:

THEY provide proof that Harvard is first and finally an institution of the higher classes, a plaything of the interlocking Government-Pentagon-foundation world which makes American foreign policy. It is an exclusive club, employment agency and training center for the jet-setting intellectual elite who swing deals for the fates of the starved nations in just the way businessmen and generals do. The common style of corporate chieftains, warmakers and Harvard's elite is no accident: many prestigious Harvard professors and administrators are deacons of the church of American empire. Their hands are bloody. The work they do ends in the murder of millions and the looting of the resources of the world. Official Harvard is a dynamo in the imperialist machine.

On the university's support of the Viet Nam war through campus military training programs:

We can no longer pretend that this war results from a lack of educated Army officers; we must recognize that its roots lie in all institutions of our society, including the university. ROTC trains 70% of the Army's junior officers, men who are sent to battle against the Vietnamese and other liberation movements all over the world. ROTC is only the least subtle of the university's many contributions to the U.S. foreign policy of domination, but our fight against ROTC threatens the status quo in courses, admissions, research, investments arid disciplines as well.

*Old Mole derives from an old bit of radical lore, often attributed to Marx: "We recognize our old friend, our old mole, who knows so well how to work underground, suddenly to appear: the revolution."

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