Letters: False victims

John Bambenek's recent column, "The War On Free Speech," shouldn't have been much of a surprise. After all, knee-jerk reactionary propaganda seems to be his forte.

However, when Bambenek began to ramble about the "campus orthodoxies" that are turning the University into a "chamber of indoctrination," I had to struggle to keep my eyes from rolling into the back of my head.

As the convulsive spasms of laughter and vomiting subsided, I had to shake my head in disbelief. Since when was the University of Illinois an atheist, Marxist indoctrination chamber? Last time I checked, religious groups and Greek organizations were the largest visible organizations on campus. A very different type of chamber, if you ask me.

The reason CAS doesn't bring Limbaugh and Coulter in is because there are millions of opportunities to see them on networks like Fox, which enjoys the greatest viewership out of any other.

To Bambenek and others: please stop pretending that the right is under attack. The r'ight runs the country, quite literally. Stop whining about left-wing Gnostic ideologies, looming on the horizon like a Red Menace reborn. You have your President, you have your war(s), you have your Patriot Act, you have your Supreme Court justices, and you have Democrats desperately pushing themselves rightward to look just like you.

Fundamentalist Christianity and capitalism are quite intact, in the United States and abroad. Bambenek is blessed to have the privilege of being a graduate student in this country. He should use the time afforded by that privilege to carefully and methodically extract his head from his own rear.

Ranjit Bhagwat
University alumnus