Word: wessell
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...agree with Andrew Jamison's remarks on etiquette in Saturday's Crimson: hissing is bad manners; though if Herr Wessel is a member of the German SDS, he cannot be much concerned with manners or the "liberalistic" rules of fair debate...
Andrew Jamison seems to think that the Harvard community should be chastised for not submitting docilely to the spectacle of boredom and inarticulateness presented by Dietrich Wessel. It seems to me that Mr. Wessel's "history of German SDS" could have been better rendered by Michael Walzer in twenty minutes, or by a competent poet or film-maker in ten. Mr. Wessel was a failure as a rhetorician and as a disseminator of radical thought: that was the overriding reality of the Sept. 27 fiasco in Lowell Lec. He was simply out of touch with the mainstream spirit...
...hard to believe that Mr. Jamison is not putting us on: does he really feel that the tedious, humorless thought purveyed by Dietrich Wessel and by the more calcified thinkers of the radical left is worth an hour and more of our Friday evenings? It is even harder to believe that Mr. Jamison could be "embarrassed to go to Harvard" because of the audience's reactions: I felt, with every burst of laughter and derision that night, that we were a healthy body defending itself against strangulation. May our laughter and derision be stronger for the next Dietrich Wessel. John...
...German SDS. But the rudeness and closed-mindedness that was displayed Friday night is representative of a mood at Harvard, a feeling among many Harvard students that they know all they want to know, that nobody can tell them anything. But, perhaps even more significantly--and this is what Wessel undoubtedly found so hard to believe--what happened Friday night showed that many people at Harvard like to consider themselves "radical" without doing anything about it. They like to be against the war, to talk about "radicalizing" people and confronting the University, without truly committing themselves to their politics...
...radicals merely talk about the system and the war. Perhaps it takes people on all levels of commitment to bring about a truly radical movement. But it's hard for me to believe that radicalism is at all helped or strengthened by the kind of people who hissed Dietrich Wessel on Friday night. --ANDREW JAMISON...