tsujigiri

The editorial comments of Chris and James, covering the news, science, religion, politics and culture.

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Tuesday, January 14, 2003

From the irony dept: the University of California at Berkeley has censored Emma Goldman quotes from a fundraising mailer because they are worried about appearing "anti-war." According to this article in the New York Times, the administration felt that the following quotes sounded too much like a political statement and were therefore inappropriate:

In one of the quotations, from 1915, Goldman called on people "not yet overcome by war madness to raise their voice of protest, to call the attention of the people to the crime and outrage which are about to be perpetrated on them." In the other, from 1902, she warned that free-speech advocates "shall soon be obliged to meet in cellars, or in darkened rooms with closed doors, and speak in whispers lest our next-door neighbors should hear that free-born citizens dare not speak in the open." ***
   "I feel this is not the way the university either should or wants to operate," said Robert H. Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Project, another documentary editing project at Berkeley. "We just got through creating the Free Speech Cafe on campus, and we have a free speech archive. How many times does this have to happen at Berkeley before they learn?"
This story smells like California during the Reagan years... I wonder if there were sudden problems with "communist faculty" popping up at Universities in Texas while Bush was governor...

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