COMES UNDER FIRE AT TORONTO TEACH-IN
Toronto
An estimated 155,000 students attending 80 U.S. and Canadian universities, through radio-telephone hookups, and another million citizens of the United States and Canada, through their radio and television sets, heard the International Teach-in held here October 8-10. Peak attendance at the teach-in was 6,000.
The University of Toronto faculty, who organized it, aimed to make it an educational teach-in as distinct from the protest teach-ins that have recently been held across the United States. This teach=in was to be “at the extreme of the educational pole of the spectrum," It was not to deal “merely with the Vietnam problem or the foreign policy of any single power," according to the statement of purpose, And it was to be strictly a dialogue,
It started out as such. But in the course of the three days, the teach=in evolved into a denunciation of U.S. aggression in Vietnam. Finally, particularly in the contribution of Yale University Professor Staughton Lynd, it became an appeal for action to stop the war in Vietnam,
The speakers were drawn from a wide political spectrum. There were authoritative spokesmen from the U.S. State Department in Adolf Berle, a longtime consultant to the U.S. Secretary of State on Latin America, Robert Scalapino, who was the stand-in for McGeorge Bundy at the Washington teach-in, and Z.K.Brzezinski, director of the Research Institute on Communist Affairs, Columbia University. They had their apologists in a spokesman for the Saigon regime, and the former British Labour party Foreign Secretary, Patrick Gordon Walker,
Brzezinski appeared in the opening session with Nekrasov, chief foreign editor of the Soviet daily Pravda. Other speakers included the deposed prime minister of British Guiana, Cheddi Jagan; Andres Lockward, a member of the executive committee of the Social Christian party, Dominican Republic; Roger Garaudy, of the French Communist party's political bureau; the prominent Afro-American journalist, William Worthy; and British Labour Lord Fenner Brockway.
Worthy, who presented the viewpoint of the Vietnam National Liberation Front, expressed his profound regret that the NLF had not seen fit to send a prominent spokesman, He informed the audience that the NLF had accepted an invitation but withdrew when, under the pressure of the Canadian government, the arrangements committee had agreed to present a spokesman for the Saigon regime. In fact no authentic voice of the socialist revolution was heard. There was no representative of the Cuban Revolution, the Peoples Republic of China, or any genuine exponent of revolutionary socialism from the working-class movement of any of the advanced capitalist countries.
Teach-in officials affirmed that both the Cuban and Chinese governments had been invited. From the reply of the Chinese People's Association for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries it would appear that they considered the teach=in to be a dialogue between world powers over the fate of the revolution in Vietnam -- rather than an opportunity to; confront mouthpieces of the U.S.State Department before the peoples of North America. Teach-in officials informed this reporter that they had a statement of refusal from Cuban officials but were not prepared to release it to the press at this time,
The first day's session, featuring the Pravda editor and the Columbia University expert was a dialogue all right -- with only one polite mention by Nekrasov of the war in Vietnam. Brzezinski's speech was conciliatory in the direction of establishing a policy of peaceful coexistence with the Soviet government. He attacked the Chinese, characterizing their outlook as “largely coinciding with that of the Trotskyists."" The Chinese have "the Trotskyite attitude," he said, “in their view that the main revolutionary thrust today comes from the colonial world. Berle followed this up in the next session when he characterized some comments by Jagan as “the Trotskyite theses of world revolution,"
. Over the Sunday and Monday full-day sessions the atmosphere gradually changed. The evidence of U.S. imperialist exploitation of
Latin America and aggression against the popular freedom struggle in Vietnam accumulated. The youthful audience began more and more to express its disagreement with Washington's spokesmen and its identity with the opposition tendencies, A recent Gallup poll revealed that less than 50% of the Canadian people support the U.S. war in Vietnam and 33% are definitely opposed. This teach-in demonstrated that among the youth the opposition is higher and can only increase,
The last session, "Revolution and the Citizen's Moral Respon-= sibility," brought the whole teach-in to a climax with the contribution by Staughton Lynd. Lynd ridiculed previous attempts to dismiss U.S. actions, like the rape of the peoples of the Dominican Republic, as errors, by comparing them to attempts by Soviet officials to dismiss events of the Stalin era as errors. Lynd dramatically sketched in "the pattern of errors," (a Quaker, he used the word "sins") that are Washington's policies against the peoples of the entire world,
‘Lynd ended his contribution with a powerful appeal for action against the war in Vietnam,
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