Thursday, April 06, 2006

 

Warnings Go Out To Chill Dissent

Two pieces in this posting. The first is a warning to an editor from the Capitol Police in D.C., about an editorial he wrote. It seemed the Capitol Police decided it was potentially subversive and wanted to let him know they didn’t like it. That he better be careful next time was the subtext. What he wished for Katherine Harris—and Ken Blackwell—was that they lose sleep over their ethically dubious actions in handing the elections over to George Bush.

Actually, I hope Dubya loses sleep over it, too. I hope he gets mental leprosy, whatever that is.

The second piece is on the gradual policing of academics. Kind of similar to what happened to the editor of OpEdNews, but played out out on a national scale. The word, it seems, is out: “Tell those goddam liberal teachers to shut up.”

There are plenty of people like, say, David Horowitz, who are willing to put up lists of “subversive” or “traitorous” teachers, and sit calmly back while various wannabe-patriots figure out what to do about them. Remember the wanted posters for abortion providers? What happened to some of them has become another one of those little grim sidelights of recent history. If that isn’t enough, think about how expensive it is to get through college and graduate school. A lot of that money comes from student loans that have to be paid off. If someone has a teaching job and is deeply in debt, they don’t want to think about having foreclosures and bill collectors hanging over them.

Nobody actually gets threatened, just, um, warned. In the last five or so years, we’ve seen a lot of careers and even lives ruined. People pay attention to warnings. Especially when you think of “another nut with a gun.”


http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_rob_kall_060404_opednews_editor_warn.htm

April 4, 2006

OpEdNews Editor Warned by Capitol Police For Article

By Rob Kall

I wrote an article the other day, Black November, in which I expressed my wish that Katherine Harris and Ken Blackwell were both losing sleep worrying about people after them for murdering democracy. I gave a detailed description of what they should worry about. Katherine Harris may actually be worrying about it.

I know because I got a call from a special agent of the Capitol Police checking with me on my article. She assured me that I hadn't broken any law, that this fell under free speech, that I'd been clear that I didn't want to harm her. But, she added, other people who might read my writing might be incited to action. I assured her that was not my intent. That seemed to reassure her a bit. But then she said that I was in a "grey area."

That roused a bit of a chill in my spine-- a "grey area."

So I said to her, "A grey area? What does that mean?"

She explained that if I kept doing this-- writing inflammatory stuff, then... and she wasn't very clear what... but definitely something, would happen or develop.

I asked, "Have I done anything illegal."

She said "No."

I asked her why she was calling me. She explained that she'd heard from Katherine Harris's office.

I asked her. "Is there anything I have to do?"

She said no, but her answer left me with the clear impression that it would be better if I took it down, that someone might think I wanted him or her to take action. I made it very clear to her. "I don't want anyone to DO anything. I don't want anyone hurt. I just wanted Katherine Harris to have trouble sleeping because of what she's done. I wrote about a possible scenario. (Hell, one guy tried to run over her with his car. It's not like I came up with the idea. I just wrote about it. I'll repeat again. I don't want anyone to run anyone over. I don't want anyone to hurt anyone else. I did tell the special agent that I'd like to see Harris in jail. I would like to see her arrested. I did say that given the delicious media roasting Harris has been getting lately, I'd rather see her suffering that way. I don't want her hurt.)

She replied, and I'm paraphrasing, that it's one thing to feel remorse about something political, it's another to feel threatened. I wonder. Who do you call when a political party tries to do all it can to make you afraid of terrorist attacks, no matter where you live, no matter how safe you really are? Do you call the capitol police?

Our conversation continued a few minutes more. Then the word warning slipped out.

"I've been warned?" I asked. "I thought I didn't do anything wrong."

The special agent replied, "If further things like this were written we'd have to look into it more." That's a verbatim quote.

So there you have it. After thinking it over, I'm pulling the offending verbiage. Here it is, taken from the original article.

actually, after reading this article to the special agent (yes I may be a wuss, but I will pick my battles and this isn’t one worth fighting for) I’ve edited the words out at the instruction of the special agent because “inciting violence is not free speech”. I disagree that it was an incitement to violence, but I wouldn’t sleep well if any violence came about because of what I wrote.

Now remember, this was a discussion of a nightmare, and my thoughts on how these vote rigging criminals should be worrying about retribution. But on second thought, these are rich, spoiled millionaires. I'd much rather see them rotting in a jail, even a posh one like Martha Stewart spent her time in. I never wanted to see them hurt, just anxious. I never threatened them, and let me say it one more time, would not want to see them hurt in any way-- better to see them indicted, incarcerated and subjected to whatever penalties the law prescribes.

Based on my recent call from the capitol police, I want to make it clear that OpEdNews does not allow publication of any articles that advocate illegal activity or violence of any kind. We also do not permit any racist, racial, discriminatory or hateful statements.

Talking the truth about right wingers and Republicans is not racist, racial or hateful. But the rules against incitement to illegal or violent activity applies to them too.

Since it seems that it may be that Katherine Harris reads her media coverage, I’ll spell my feelings out a little more clearly. If I could see her face to face, I'd say, "I hope you never have a good day's sleep for the rest of your life, that you worry about facing the consequences of the misdeeds you've perpetrated. I hope you spend your life worrying, looking over your shoulder, worrying that any legal letter coming to you, every phone call from an unknown caller is news that you are being indicted. I hope, that when you are walking in the dark, when you hear footsteps, your heart races and your palms sweat and you worry—it may be a team of police, coming to arrest you.” "

This article was read to the special agent. It was changed, with the original offensive working removed from this article too. The agent told me that it is capitol hill policy to notify the police of any sort of mention of violence, so it may or may not mean that Harris is actually aware of the original article.

Before publishing the original article, I asked two people to read it, wanting to make sure it was clear that I was not advocating, threatening or inciting violence. When both told me they thought it did not, I went ahead and published the original article.

Authors Bio: Rob Kall is editor of OpEdNews.com, President of Futurehealth, Inc, and organizer of several conferences, including StoryCon, the Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story and The Winter Brain Meeting on neurofeedback, biofeedback, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology.


And here’s the second piece:


Silence In Class

University professors denounced for anti-Americanism;
schoolteachers suspended for their politics; students
encouraged to report on their tutors. Are US campuses
in the grip of a witch-hunt of progressives, or is
academic life just too liberal?

By Gary Younge
Guardian (UK)
April 4, 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1746227,00.html

After the screenwriter Walter Bernstein was placed on
the blacklist during the McCarthyite era he said his
life "seemed to move in ever-decreasing circles". "Few
of my friends dropped away but the list of
acquaintances diminished," he wrote in Inside Out, a
memoir of the blacklist. "I appeared contaminated and
they did not want to risk infection. They avoided me,
not calling as they had in the past, not responding to
my calls, being nervously distant if we met in public
places."

As chair of African American studies in Yale, Paul
Gilroy had a similar experience recently after he spoke
at a university-sponsored teach-in on the Iraq war. "I
think the morality of cluster bombs, of uranium-tipped
bombs, [of] daisy cutters are shaped by an imperial
double standard that values American lives more," he
said. "[The war seems motivated by] a desire to enact
revenge for the attacks on the World Trade Centre and
the Pentagon ... [It's important] to speculate about
the relation between this war and the geopolitical
interests of Israel."

"I thought I was being extremely mealy-mouthed, but I
was accused of advocating conspiracy theories," says
Gilroy, who is now the Anthony Giddens professor of
Social Theory at the London School of Economics.

Scot Silverstein, who was once on the faculty at Yale,
saw a piece in the student paper about Gilroy's
contribution. He wrote to the Wall Street Journal
comparing Gilroy to Hitler and claiming his words
illustrated the "moral psychosis and perhaps
psychological sadism that appears to have infected
leftist academia". The Journal published the letter.
Gilroy found himself posted on Discoverthenetworks.org,
a website dedicated to exposing radical professors. The
principle accusation was that he "believes the US
fabricated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein".

Then the emails started coming to him and his
colleagues, denouncing him. "Only one person said
anything," says Gilroy. "Otherwise, nobody looked me in
the eye. There was something about the way it never
came up that made me realise how nervous and
apprehensive they were."

Few would argue there are direct parallels between the
current assaults on liberals in academe and
McCarthyism. Unlike the McCarthy era, most threats to
academic freedom - real or perceived - do not, yet,
involve the state. Nor are they buttressed by
widespread popular support, as anticommunism was during
the 50s. But in other ways, argues Ellen Schrecker,
author of Many Are the Crimes - McCarthyism in America,
comparisons are apt.

"In some respects it's more dangerous," she says.
"McCarthyism dealt mainly with off-campus political
activities. Now they focus on what is going on in the
classroom. It's very dangerous because it's reaching
into the core academic functions of the university,
particularly in Middle-Eastern studies."

Either way, a growing number of apparently isolated
incidents suggests a mood which is, if nothing else,
determined, relentless and aimed openly at progressives
in academe.

Earlier this year, Fox news commentator Sean Hannity
urged students to record "leftwing propaganda" by
professors so he could broadcast it on his show. On the
web there is Campus Watch, "monitoring Middle East
studies on campus"; Edwatch, "Education for a free
nation"; and Parents Against Bad Books in School.

In mid January, the Bruin Alumni association offered
students $100 to tape leftwing professors at the
University of California Los Angeles. The association
effectively had one dedicated member, 24-year-old
Republican Andrew Jones. It also had one dedicated aim:
"Exposing UCLA's most radical professors" who
"[proselytise] their extreme views in the classroom".

Shortly after the $100 offer was made, Jones mounted a
website, uclaprofs.com, which compiled the Dirty 30 - a
hit list of those he considered the most egregious,
leftwing offenders. Top of the list was Peter McLaren,
a professor at the UCLA's graduate school of education.
Jones branded McLaren a "monster". "Everything that
flows from Peter McLaren's mouth and pen is deeply,
inextricably radical," wrote Jones. "In keeping with
the left's identity politics he has been a friend to
the gay community."

McLaren was shocked. "I was away when the story broke
and when I came back there were 87 messages waiting for
me. I was surprised a list like that could be created
in these times. I thought, 'Wow, somebody's out there
reading my work fairly carefully.'" The main impact, he
says, was to try to insulate those close to him from
the fallout. "I had to take down lots of things from my
website - family pictures and contacts with other
people. I didn't want other people to pay the price."

Also among the Dirty 30 was history professor Ellen
DuBois. She was described as, "in every way the modern
female academic: militant, impatient, accusatory and
radical - very radical". DuBois told the Los Angeles
Times, "This is a totally abhorrent invitation to
students to participate in a witch hunt against their
professors."

McLaren, who describes himself as a marxist-humanist,
agrees. He believes the list was a McCarthyite attack
on academe, with the aim of softening up public
hostility for a more propitious moment: "This is a low-
intensity campaign that can be ratcheted up at a time
of crisis. When there is another crisis in this country
and this country is in an ontological hysteria, an
administration could use that to up the ante. I think
it represents a tendency towards fascism."

Six weeks after Jones released his list, two Los
Angeles county sheriffs arrived unannounced at
Professor Miguel Tinker-Salas's office at Pomona
College and started asking questions. Tinker-Salas, a
Latin American history professor, was born in Venezuela
and is a vocal critic of US policy in the region. The
sheriffs, part of a federal anti-terrorism task force,
told him that he was not the subject of an
investigation. Then, for the next 25 minutes they
quizzed him on whether he had been influenced in any
way by or had contact with the Venezuelan government,
on the leadership within the local Venezuelan
community, the consulate and the embassy. Then they
questioned his students about the content of his
classes, examined the cartoons on his door. "They cast
the Venezuelan community as a threat," says Tinker-
Salas. "I think they were fishing to see if I had any
information they could use."

Pomona's president, David Oxtoby, says he was
"extremely concerned about the chilling effect this
kind of intrusive government interest could have on
free scholarly and political discourse."

Last year, some students at the Department of Middle
Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia
University ran a campaign against alleged anti-Israeli
bias among professors, criticising the university as a
place where pro-Israeli students were intimidated and
faculty members were prejudiced. A faculty committee
appointed by Columbia concluded that there had been no
serious misconduct.

These issues are not confined to university campuses:
it is also happening in schools. Since February, the
normally sleepy, wealthy district of Upper St Clair in
Pennsylvania has been riven with arguments over its
curriculum after the local school board banned the
International Baccalaureate (IB), the global
educational programme, for being an "un-American"
marxist and anti-Christian. During their election
campaign, the Republicans of Upper St Clair referred to
the IB, which is offered in 122 countries and whose
student intake has risen by 73% worldwide in the past
five years, as though it was part of an international
communist conspiracy, suspicious of a curriculum that
had been "developed in a foreign country"
(Switzerland). "Our country was founded on Judeo-
Christian values and we have to be careful about what
values our children are taught," said one Republican
board member. Similar campaigns have also sprung up
recently at school boards in Minnesota and Virginia.

Meanwhile, in January in Aurora, Colorado, social
studies teacher Jay Bennish answered questions in his
world geography class about President George Bush's
speech from his students at Overland High School.
Caricaturing Bush's speech, Bennish said, "'It's our
duty as Americans to use the military to go out into
the world and make the world like us.'" He then
continued: "Sounds a lot like the things Adolf Hitler
used to say: 'We're the only ones who are right,
everyone else is backwards and it's our job to conquer
the world and make sure they all live just like we want
them to.' Now I'm not saying that Bush and Hitler are
exactly the same. Obviously they're not, OK? But there
are some eerie similarities to the tones they use."

Unbeknown to him, one 16-year-old student, Sean Allen,
recorded part of the class on his MP3 player. When his
Republican father heard it he was so incensed that he
shopped it around to local conservative radio stations,
where it finally found a home with radio talk-show host
Mike Rosen.

Later in Bennish's class, the teacher had told his
students, "I am not in any way implying that you should
agree with me. I don't even know if I'm necessarily
taking a position. But what I'm trying to get you to do
is to think, all right, about these issues more in
depth, and not just take things from the surface. And
I'm glad you asked all your questions because they're
all very good, legitimate questions." Rosen only played
the first part of the tape on his programme. He also
put it on the internet.

The next day, the Cherry Creek school district
suspended Bennish, arguing that he had at least
breached a policy requiring teachers to be "as
objective as possible and to present fairly the several
sides of an issue" when dealing with religious,
political, economic or social issues.

The suspension sparked rival demonstrations at school.
Hundreds of students staged a walkout, a few wearing
duct tape over their mouths while some chanted,
"Freedom of speech, let him teach." A smaller
demonstration was staged against Bennish, with students
writing "Teach don't preach" on their shirts.

But it has primarily been universities that have been
on the frontline. And on the other side of the trenches
has been the rightwing firebrand David Horowitz.
Horowitz, who had Jones on his payroll but fired him
after the taping controversy, was raised by communist
parents and was himself a marxist as a teenager. He is
involved with Campus Watch, Jihad Watch, Professors
Watch and Media Watch; he was also connected to
discoverthenetworks.org, which targeted Gilroy. A few
years ago he founded a group, Students for Academic
Freedom, which boasts chapters promoting his agenda on
more than 150 campuses. The movement monitors slights
or insults that students say they have suffered and
provides an online complaint form. Students are advised
to write down "the date, class and name of the
professor", get witnesses, "accumulate a list of
incidents or quotes", and lodge a complaint. Over the
past three years Horowitz has led the call for an
academic bill of rights in several states. The bills
would allow students to opt out of any part of a course
they felt was "personally offensive" and force American
universities to adopt quotas for conservative
professors as well as monitor the political
inclinations of their staff.

The bill has been debated in 23 states, including six
this year. In July, Pennsylvania approved legislation
calling on 14 state-affiliated colleges to free their
campuses from the "imposition of ideological
orthodoxy". Meanwhile, House Republicans have included
a provision in the Higher Education Act which calls on
publicly funded colleges to ensure a diversity of ideas
in class - code for countering the alleged liberal bias
in classrooms.

"The aim of the movement isn't really to achieve
legislation," says Horowitz. "It's supposed to act as a
cattle prod, to make legislators and universities
aware. The ratio of leftwing professors in Berkeley and
Stanford is seven to one and nine to one. You can't get
hired if you're a conservative in American
universities."

Reliable empirical, as opposed to anecdotal, evidence
to back up Horowitz's claim of political imbalance is
patchy but rarely contested. The most detailed study,
conducted by California economist Daniel Klein and
Swedish scientist Charlotta Stern, did reveal a
significant Democratic bias which varied depending on
the course they taught. It showed that 30 times as many
anthropologists and sociologists voted Democrat as
Republican, while for those teaching economics the
ration plummeted to three to one.

But these results gave only a partial account of campus
life. Limiting their research to the social sciences
and the humanities excluded a substantial portion of
the university experience. According to the Princeton
Review, four of the top 10 most popular subjects -
business administration and management, biology,
nursing and computer science - are not in the social
sciences or humanities. Republicans are probably more
inclined to find a home in some of these disciplines.
In any case, most academics do not deny that there is a
progressive, liberal bias in academe. "Of course," says
Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at
the Columbia School of Journalism. "There's a lot of
conservatives in oil. But there aren't a lot of
conservatives planning on studying sociology."

And while liberals may be more numerous, argues
Schrecker, a professor of history at Yeshiva University
in New York, that does not necessarily mean they are
more powerful. "Progressive academe is like the ninth
ward of New Orleans before the levees break - neither
secure nor particularly safe. It's one of the few areas
left with some kind of progressive culture."

That, rather than protection of free expression on
campus, is precisely why it remains a target for the
right, they say.

In February, Horowitz published a book, The Professors:
the 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, in which
he lists, in alphabetical order, the radical academics
whom he believes are polluting academe with leftwing
propaganda. "Coming to a campus near you: terrorists,
racists, and communists - you know them as The
Professors," reads the blurb on the jacket. "Today's
radical academics aren't the exception - they're
legion. And far from being harmless, they spew violent
anti-Americanism, preach anti-semitism and cheer on the
killing of American soldiers and civilians - all the
while collecting tax dollars and tuition fees to
indoctrinate our children."

The book is a sloppy series of character
assassinations, relying more heavily on insinuation,
inference, suggestion and association than it does on
fact. Take Todd Gitlin, a journalism and sociology
professor at Columbia University. Gitlin was the leader
of Students for Democratic Society, a radical anti-war
movement in the 60s. Today, his politics could be
described as mainstream liberal. He supported the war
in Afghanistan but not in Iraq and hung out the Stars
and Stripes after the terrorist attacks on September
11. He has recently written a book, The Intellectuals
and the Flag, calling for progressives to embrace a
patriotic culture that distinguishes between allegiance
to one's country, which he supports, and loyalty to
one's government, which he does not.

None the less, Horowitz slams him for participating in
an anti-war teach-in in March 2003 at which his
colleague Nicholas de Genova called for "a million
Mogadishus" to be visited on American soldiers in Iraq
- referring to the murder of US military in Somalia.
But Gitlin has never met or spoken to Genova and was
not participating in the teach-in when Genova spoke.
Horowitz also slates Gitlin for "immersing students in
the obscurantist texts of leftists icons like Jürgen
Habermas", but omits to mention that Gitlin also
teaches from the works of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas,
Hobbes, Locke, Burke, Adam Smith and the gospels.

"Horowitz's idea of research is cherry-picking," says
Gitlin. "And he can't even be trusted to find cherries.
He comes up with bitter prunes."

Victor Navasky, the Delacorte professor of journalism
at Columbia University, is also on Horowitz's hit list.
Navasky, publisher emeritus of the leftwing magazine
The Nation and chairman of the Columbia Journalism
Review, is accused of "bankrolling" the review and
denounced for organising lectures by "prominent
leftists" such as Michael Tomasky of American Prospect
and Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker. Navasky points
out that he has also hosted a lecture by Fox news
anchor Bill O'Reilly and the editor of the rightwing
Weekly Standard at Columbia, and that the only cheque
he ever sent the Review was one he returned after the
magazine paid him for an article.

"Were it not for all the inaccuracies I would say that
I would be flattered to be on the list, but I don't
think I earned it," says Navasky. "I don't think anyone
seriously considers me a clear and present danger to
the republic."

Horowitz accuses those who accuse him of McCarthyism of
being McCarthyites themselves. "All they do is tar and
feather me with slanders," he says. "It's the politics
of Stalinism."

Evidence to back up his central argument - that these
political leanings are at all related to a teacher's
ability to be fair, balanced or competent in class -
are non-existent. Most of the criticisms of lecturers
on both the Dirty 30 list and in Horowitz's book are
levelled at comments professors have made outside the
classroom and rarely do they provide any evidence of
the accused actually criticising or ridiculing students
with rightwing ideas.

Nobody denies that bad leftwing lecturers exist. As
Russell Jacoby argued in The Nation, "Higher education
in America is a vast enterprise boasting roughly a
million professors. A certain portion of these teachers
are incompetents and frauds; some are rabid patriots
and fundamentalists - and some are ham-fisted leftists.
All should be upbraided if they violate scholarly or
teaching norms. At the same time, a certain portion of
the 15 million students they teach are fanatics and
crusaders." It is not their work as professors Horowitz
does not like; it is the ideologies they espouse,
whether in or outside the classroom.

Political assaults on intellectuals are not new. Nor
are they specific to the US. At the dawn of western
civilisation, Socrates was executed for filling "young
people's heads with the wrong ideas". Mao targeted
professors for particular humiliation during the
cultural revolution.

Mark Smith, the director of government relations for
the professor's union, the American Association of
University Professors, says that these broadsides vary
according to the political climate. Shortly after world
war one, the litmus test was those who opposed
America's participation in the war or backed the
fledgling Russian revolution; during the 50s, it was
communists; during the 80s, it was leftwing professors
in Latin American studies departments. During the early
90s, Lynne Cheney, the wife of the current vice-
president, was chair of the National Endowment for the
Humanities, when she lead the bureaucratic charge
against "political correctness". In many humanities
faculties, she claimed, the common thinking is that
"there is no truth. Everything we think is true is
shaped by political interests ... Since there is no
truth ... faculty members are perfectly justified in
using the classroom to advance political agendas."

"These things go in cycles," says Smith. "Horowitz did
not invent this. He's capitalising on an ongoing anti-
intellectualism and fear of the other."

Many believe that this current cycle has intensified as
a result of the official response to 9/11. Two months
after the terrorist attacks, the conservative American
Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), founded by Lynne
Cheney in 1995, branded colleges and universities the
"weak link in America's response" to the terrorist
attacks and called on lecturers and professors to
defend western civilisation. In a report entitled
Defending Civilization: how our universities are
failing America and what can be done about it, ACTA
president Jerry Martin and vice-president Anne D Neal,
wrote: "While faculty should be passionately defended
in their right to academic freedom, that does not
exempt them from criticism. The fact is: academe is the
only section of American society that is distinctly
divided in its response to the attacks on America."

Regardless of their accuracy, integrity and provenance,
some believe that these assaults do have an effect.
"There is a cunning behind the battyness," says Gitlin.
"It's not just the self-aggrandisement. It's an assault
on one of the few social enclaves that the right
doesn't control. There is a scattershot bellicosity
whether the fortunes of the political right are up or
down. They find it useful for fundraising if nothing
else."

Others argue that while the individual accounts are
troubling, their ultimate effect on academe can be
exaggerated. The response to the recent article in the
London Review of Books by two prominent American
professors arguing that the pro-Israel lobby exerts a
dominant and damaging influence on US foreign policy
may be a case in point. Stephen Walt and John
Mearsheimer have been accused of being anti-semites and
bigots, prompting accusations of a McCarthyite witch-
hunt. Shortly after publication, it was announced that
one of the authors, Walt, was stepping down from his
job as academic dean at Harvard's Kennedy School of
Government and the school removed the piece from the
front page of its website. But the Kennedy School and
Walt's colleagues said that the move had long been
planned. Meanwhile, the school explained the website
change thus: "The only purpose of that removal was to
end public confusion; it was not intended, contrary to
some interpretations, to send any signal that the
school was also 'distancing' itself from one of its
senior professors."

"The University of Chicago and Harvard University have
behaved admirably in difficult circumstances. We have
had the full support of our respective institutions,"
Mearsheimer said. So all that is left are the
accusations which, given the nature of the original
article, not even the authors say surprised them.
People have a right to be offended. It is when that
offence is either based on flawed information or
mobilised into an institutional or legislative
clampdown that accusations of a witch-hunt truly come
into play.

"Clearly these things are disturbing," says Jon Wiener,
professor of history at UCLA. "But I don't think they
are happening because students are demanding it. The
Bruin Alumni Association [turned out] to be one
ambitious, well-funded guy. There are some frightening
moments, but then things seem to return to normal."

"It's not even clear this is much other than the ill-
considered action of a handful, if that, of
individuals," says DuBois.

But however many people are involved, the attacks do
make a difference, claims Gilroy. "Of course it has an
effect," he says. "There's a pre-written script you
have to follow and if you chose not to follow it, then
there are consequences, so you become very self-
conscious about what you say. To call it self-
censorship is much too crude. But everybody is looking
over their shoulder".

Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
_______________________________________________________

Comments:
Also see my interview of Peter in MRZine: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/fassbinder060406.html
 
correct link is now http://members.aol.com/scotsilv/reply.htm

"home.aol.com" has been discontinued by AOL.
 
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