Letter to the editor

Debate reporting not accurate

Recently I was involved in the campus debate between the College Republicans, College Democrats and Socialist Alternative. I, along with member Brett Hoven, represented Socialist Alternative. When I picked up last week’s issue of the Student Voice, I was very pleased to find that the staff had not only covered the debate, but the article took up more than half the back page.

Unfortunately, the recent article on our debate was filled with many inaccuracies and misquotations. Not only did the writer misspell my name, but she also cited paraphrases as direct quotations. Furthermore, there was at least one case where a quote by a member of one group was attributed to a member of another group.

Because I have limited space for this reply, I will focus on one single issue. The quote “Everybody voted for this war to start,” was actually said by a member of the College Republicans, who went on to say “they [intelligence agencies] all agreed that he [Saddam Hussein] had weapons of mass destruction. We all turned out to be wrong.”

The fact that Brett Hoven did not say this brings up a very important fact. Socialist Alternative was opposed to the war from the beginning. Socialist Alternative saw through Washington’s lies, as can be seen in the article “No to Bush’s War for Oil,” (http://socialistalternative.org/lit erature/war/), printed by our organization in February 2003.

As Marxists we were able to accurately predict many of the events that have taken place in Iraq a month before they even began. We understood that a dominating outside invasion would likely lead to the quagmire that U.S. forces face in present-day Iraq. The fact is, Marxist analysis of the forces within society, and at play in global economics/politics, has proven to be the most accurate perspective of these issues.

Nick Shillingford
Student