Word: sasc
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While dismantling the shanties, then, SASC members would do well to recognize student self-absorption and try to come up with new ways to gain student involvement...
...Still, SASC is itself the source of many of its frustrations. The inconsistency and stridency of much of its rhetoric surely confuses and alientates at least as many students as it convinces...
...FIRST, SASC tends to overstate its case for divestment. Although the Botha regime is a target ripe for caricature, SASC's frequent comparisons between South Africa and Nazi Germany are ridiculous. Until South Africa begins to round up entire Black families and villages and cart them off to gas chambers and ovens--and gets the crazy idea of trying to do the same in the rest of the world--such analogies are absurd and can only confuse those not yet among the ranks of the committed...
...Second, SASC doesn't seem to be able to decide whether it supports divestment more for economic or for moral reasons. It's natural for them to equate Harvard's divestment with practical, positive change in South Africa. It would be difficult to maintain commitment to a cause without the hope of it achieving some great and just result. But when questions are raised concerning the possibility that withdrawal of Harvard's "investment" in South Africa might have only a minimal economic impact on conditions there--or perhaps even a negative one--divestment activists are quick to respond that divestment...
Finally, even SASC's purely moral arguments for divestment are often weak and inconsistent. The activists push it on the premise that it is intrinsically immoral for Harvard to invest in a nation whose regime is based upon so fundamentally wrong a premise as that of South Africa. That may very well be so. Yet, when asked why they do not also favor and agitate for divestment from other despicable regimes--the Soviet Union, Chile, etc.--the typical response is that divestment from South Africa is more attainable and holds out greater prospect for change than divestment from other regimes...