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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Vol. 37 No. 3. March 20, 1974

Rats!

Rats!

Dear Sir,

I wish to express strong objection to the inclusion in last week's edition of Salient of the 'article' entitled 'Rat Recipes'. It is a disgraceful yet inescapable fact, that in a society based on selfish and oppressive capitalism, people are compelled, through immediate physical need, to cat rat. An attempt to gain cheap, callous and bourgeois humour from such a situation reveals both a basic lack of sympathy and understanding with those who are oppressed and encourages a degree of scepticism in the expressed aims of the paper (i.e. to identify, and attempt to eradicate all forms of oppression). The faults of the article and consequently those of Salient in publishing it, are indeed exaggerated by the fact that on the front page of the same issue an article rightly condemns a society that forces people to live in vermin infested flats. 'Rat Recipes' was a disgraceful attempt to laugh, without hint of irony, at the squalor created by the ruling classes, and the publishing of such an article reveals an inconsistency in the ideological basis of Salient.

Duncan Campbell