Please sign the open letter on-line
To the Students Against War at SFSU: I applaud your principled and courageous stand against U.S. military recruiting for an unjust war against innocent Iraqis. Your simple determination to speak the truth, and the University president’s sharp repression in response, are providing SFSU students and other Americans with lessons far more profound than most lectures given on the campus.
You are forcing the University, for once, to teach the truth about the rulers of the United States, who control the government and corporations and media and universities. You are making the University demonstrate, in the laboratory of real life, that these rulers fear genuine free expression; that they fear the truth; that they fear Americans acting in solidarity with ordinary people in nations like Iraq; that they fear democracy when it means more than just empty formalities–when it means ordinary people and their values of equality and solidarity truly shaping society.
You are forcing the rulers to reveal that their rule is illegitimate, and that a democratic revolution in the United States is the common sense course of action for Americans to take, to create a genuine democracy in this country, instead of our fake democracy which sends us to war against innocent people on the basis of one big lie after another. Bravo to you! Keep up the wonderful struggle!
John Spritzler
(former SDS member 1967-9, author of The People As Enemy: The Leaders’ Hidden Agenda in World War II, and co-author of On the Public Agenda: Essays for Change, and a Research Scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health)