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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Vol 35 no. 18. 27th July 1972

More Letters

page 4

More Letters

Right to Decide

Sir,

Last Tuesday I had helped to buy a package of bandages to dress wounds of people in a certain Asian country. The amount of money was trivial. I had paid bigger sums to the Vietnam Medical Appeal Fund before. But this time I objected to paying. This time it was not a contribution from me as an individual who had decided himself that the cause is a good one and should be given money to. "I" had given merely by virtue of having paid - for entirely different purposes than the one above - membership fees of a certain organisation.

As I think the cause is a worthy one I do not object to paying this money, but I do object to having been made to pay it. For majority of those who voted for the motion it was a matter of conscience. But conscience is a private thing. It cannot be substituted by governmental decrees or the Collective Conscience of VUWSA - rather a doubtful phenomenon anyway - or anything else.

And the argument heard at the SGM, that the Association can spend money as it pleases because it has the support of majority of students is in essence exactly the same one as that saying that the National Government can use tax money - including mine - on killing people in Vietnam, because it has the support of the majority of New Zealanders. Most of those who voted for the donation would support OHMS too. If they can consider the private principles of those who oppose military service as more important than the mandatory regulations and laws of this country, then they should afford the same right to decide individually to those students in this university whose political and moral convictions differ from theirs.

Vladimir Halama

[A donation of $2 for the Medical Aid Appeal was received with this letter)

Who to Support

Sir,

As I expected the recent SGM on the motion that "no money be sent to the Vietnam Aid Appeal" turned into an emotional affair.

What a great shame Peter Cullen ended debate on the motion when he did. At a time when people's emotions had been aroused and at a time when a few had made it into an affair whereby if you supported Stubb's motion you were a right-wing fascist. I feel sure with further debate the real issue would have been revealed.

What people should have been discussing was whether or not $2,000 should be given to any charity by our union. The issue of whether charity shoud be restricted to a personal basis is the most relevant here.

For instance - should 790 people have the right to tell 6,000 that the Vietnam Aid Appeal is the most worthy cause to give our money to - should they have the right to tell 6,000 that Corso is the most worthy cause? I think not.

My argument is that charity is something that can only be realistically given (In the form of money to appeals) on a personal basis. There are many reasons why I have come to this conclusion.

Firstly, Alick Shaw and the other 789 people who believe that $2,000 should be sent to the Vietnam Aid Appeal have good grounds for such a decision. I personally agree with them that the Vietnam Aid Appeal is extremely worthy of our money. However there may be, next week, 800 people that believe that $2,000 should be sent to Bangladesh, or Biafra or to some other poverty stricken and disease ridden upturned area of the world. It is unlikely that our union could afford to give away to charity more than about $6,000 a year, at the very most. How then do we decide which charities to support? At least, how do we, as a collective body of 6,000 people, decide which charity we will support. People have differing consciences, differing motives, and differing senses of what is suffering and what is misery.

A person can decide what is more deserving of his charity for himself only.

This principle has wider applications. For instance what if the N.Z. taxpayer found that the N.Z. govt was donating large amounts of the taxpayer's money to charity organisations which had been set up to improve the position of the negro in America! A hypothetical illustration I admit but this is virtually the same principle as donating $2,000 of union funds to the Vietnam Aid Appeal. [Quite different I would think.— Ed.]

Again the point I am trying to make is that a large organisation is treading on dangerous ground when it starts using a compulsory fee for donations to charities because it is too difficult for that large organisation, especially in the case of VUWSA whose funds are already very limited, to draw the line and say one charity will receive support at the expense of numerous other worthwhile charities. It is too difficult for such a large body to choose what is deserving. As I have already stated, suffering, starvation, pain and agony are no different whether you're in Africa or Vietnam. We have the same responsibility to any human being on this earth who is not as fortunate as we are. Therefore why send $2,000 to Vietnam? [Because we sent our military there to help destroy them]

Drawing of someone being stabbed in the back

Many of us think the Vietnam Aid Appeal is as worthwhile as any cause. We have that right but we do not have the right to force that opinion on others. Other people have a right to want to give their money to Corso or to a cause such as the foundation for the blind. This is why nearly every charity that has ever been organised has appealed on a house to house or street corner basis! Only a few would quibble over 30cents -But many will quibble over which charity to receive the benefit of our financial support.

Charity begins in your own backyard, someone said — How bout a good long look at the Varsity Creche — Housing in the vicinity of Varsity, a good long look at the many students who have so much difficulty devoting enough time to their studies because they have to do a lot of part-time work in order to survive.

If anybody who supported the motion to send $2,000 to Vietnam would care to organise a Vietnam Aid Appeal on campus i.e. advertising, appeal box in the foyer etc. I personally will start if off with $1.00 because I personally think those suffering in Vietnam need help, [how sweet] many will disagree with me and I would personally like to argue with them over it but if they don't want to give $1.00 or even 30cents then that's their right.

G.A. Keene [Abridged and annotated — Ed.]

Democracy Castrated—Smear on Shaw

Sir,

I have been rendered sick to the stomach by the latest copious cascade of bullshit to flood this campus. I refer of course to the S.G.M. held to consider whether Henry Stubbs would get his rugby balls or whether Alick Shaw would be able to boost his already towering ego by giving the proverbial fingers to Jack and the boys.

One would have thought that we, the smug self-satisfied bourgeois pricks wallowing in affluent apathy would have finally managed to make the band of student bureaucrats, would be revolutionaries and stentorian-voiced ego trippers who deign to lead us, love us for our enthusiastic and interested response to the S.G.M. At last we had beaten the cancer of student apathy, but there was no applause. Our leaders were too busy running for cover behind a curtain of the most outrageous hypocrisy ever seen at Vic.

Peter Cullen, after berating the gathering for its lack of interest in past S.G.M.'s lost control when a formerly apathetic sector voiced its fury at the whole bloody farce. Don't get me wrong, Peter is a nice guy but he is so busy pleasing everyone that he manages to please no-one. The most used President in Vic's history perhaps. But I digress. Everyone's favourite raving demagogue (with more than a hint of a maniacal gleam in his eye) and rabble-rouser extraordinaire Alick Shaw, was so overcome by the violence of his reception that he actually mumbled something about their destruction of democratic proceedure! Shaw, who has devoted much of his time to thwarting democratic proceedure in S.R.C. among other things in order to achieve his own ends criticising a lack of democratic proceedure was just too unreal!

Salient's prissy little article about wicked fascist students murdering democracy in cold blood was the sugar in this hypocritical shit. One thing must be made clear. The Shaw/Wilson/Campbell faction, supreme among others has devoted much of its energy in the past to stacking S.R.C, launching often vicious insults against exec, and those whose beliefs and opinions do not meet their sincerity in the area of personal belief, but how the fuck can they summon up the temerity to accuse 760 students of being guilty of sins they should have suffered for long ago.

Drawing of someone being stabbed in the back cont.

How can Salient accuse Mike McKinley and Mowbray of being dirty rabblerousers, when the noble art of rabblerousing has been smiled upon by Salient and looked upon as a saintly virtue. Could it be that Salient thinks their rabblerousing is politically unacceptable while the so-called radical lefts' is? [In that situation, yes it is unacceptable. Ed.]

What these worried would-be revolutionaries witnessed were their pigeons coming home to roost. As ye sow, so shall ye reap lads. Certainly S.G.M. was bloody chaotic and the defeated were poor losers, pissed off at the "Vietnam tax"being imposed upon them by the dubious legality of this farce. For once people lost their apathy and those who have ranted about it for so long were utterly shocked.

Democracy certainly played no great part in the proceedings but only because it has been castrated through countless S.R.C.'s by the very people who are bemoaning its loss now. Accept that democracy is dead on campus, accept that the people who killed it cannot drag it out of the grave at their convenience, and accept that so many people are spouting so much mealy-mouthed hypocritical drivel about it that it must be turning in its tomb. [Abridged—Ed.)

Geoff Honnor.

$2000 A Minute Amount — We're All Fools!

Sir,

What a bloody mickey mouse affair! Again the idiots who cling to the microphone like infants to a maternal nipple, successfully distorted the issue such that gullible students ended up voting on a motion, the obvious alternative to which was scarcely mentioned. The intellectual poverty of Mowbray's clique prevented them from presenting the real issue - which was to ensure the $2,000 wasn't financed out of union funds. Instead, they fluffed around, inarticulately - then with chronic pettiness -trying to salvage the situation they had lost for themselves. The sooner the campus reaction employ spokesmen who can speak the sense that so badly needs to be spoken the better. As long as McKinley's morons are allowed to speak on behalf of plausible people like Henry Stubbs (who must finally have felt embarrassed by his zealous right wing supporters), the possibility of the students true feelings on matters ever being expressed are less than minimal.

This being the case, even a 'reactionary' must admit that the leftists played it well once the anti-$2,000 proponents had sufficiently crapped in their own nests. But despite their successful political management their ideological credibility is even less than the right wingers, who can at least be dismissed on the grounds of their bone-headed ignorance. Its laughable that these aspiring Marxists can resort to coercive charity to appease their publically confessed, yet privately non-existent consciences, over the dead and dying Indo-Chinese. I suggest that these well-heeled fat cats, these establishment-sponsored senior scholars from the liberal arts departments, put their charitable moneys where their tiresomely vociferous mouths are. Even they must admit that 30 cents per student is trivial; when Russians and Americans spend $2,000 a millisecond in the same war. But the greater hypocrisy; is that 50% of the students didn't want the money sent from Union sources.

If in fact the leftists were sincerely motivated, rather than personally aspiring, they would have adopted the suggestion to take up a collection on the spot and put all the bullshit to the acid test. Even Mowbray admits he would have given a buck. That being the case think of how much those chronically concerned types like Alick Shaw would have donated.

If we were to prove the genuine nature of our charity (which I doubt we selfish, state-sponsored, 'enlightened' scholars would have done) we would have reached into our pocets at that very meeting and made $2,000 look like the minute amount it really is. At the same time the $2,000 would have remained available for the clubs and societies of the University in the way it was always designed.

Drawing of someone being stabbed in the back

But, I'm dreaming. The meeting wasn't designed to expose our selfishness, it was a genuine and generous manifestation of our solidarity and concern for the maimed Vietnamese. After all 30 cents is no small amount - a milkshake and a sandwich in the caf in fact.

R. A. Priest