JAGO VS. NWAFOR

To the Editors of the Crimson:

Mr. Nwafor has great sport with my name. To invoke the street dialect, one can ask: nwafor, whafoah? Because he has been stung by my letter and with a flurry of auto-didact learning ("It is not that I believe with Tolstoy...") and some cheap polemic ("rigid cold war stance") he seeks to obscure the thrust of my query: What could you have learned in 10 days that was so extraordinary that you could share with your class on The Politics of Liberation.

I asked questions, says Mr. Nwafor. What questions, and of whom? And what were the answer? If Mr. Nwafor was on a ten days' State Department tour of the United States studying racism would he be content, say, with seeing only Roy Wilkins and not talking to Huey Newton and Angela Davis? He assumes that Mao is right? Has he talked to any of the followers of Lin Piao or Liu Shao Chi? Was there comradely debate? Did he ask to read their documents? Yet he has seen the truth and the light.

I suggested he read the account by Eric Gordon in Harper's, a Maoist who had returned from China. But he is disillusioned, says Mr. Nwafor. Precisely, but why? (After all, he spent four years working there (and knew the language: does Mr. Nwafor?), and while he did not receive a farewell banquet ("as reported in the major Peking daily..."--preening ass!) he did spend two years under house arrest.

Mr. Nwafor says that one does not have to have been a communist to write critically and, of all things cites Sartre. In the early 1950's, Camus broke with Sartre because Sartre did not want to print the truth about the Russian concentration camps in Temps Moderned because of the cold war. To shield a lie in order to fight another lie leads to moral bankruptcy.

You have been there ten days, Mr. Nwafor. When will come the Twelfth Night? Peter Jago