Left's Response to Beijing Massacre
July 13, 1989

I do not wish to engage in an ad hominem exchange with William Kunstler and Noam Chomsky (letters, June 24), but I do wish to correct the record.

Chomsky claims that he "condemned" the massacre in an article he wrote for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (June 7). This is the totality of what Chomsky wrote about China in the Star-Tribune:

"Power struggles for democracy and human rights also regularly confront deadly force, as we have recently seen in Tiananmen Square, Tblisi, Kwangju, and San Salvador, among many other cases."

This antiseptic description is far from a condemnation, and by comparing it to "many other cases," Chomsky trivializes the enormity of the Chinese massacre.