From: utzoo!decvax!yale-com!glaser
Newsgroups: net.college
Title: Re: J. Kirkpatrick at U.C. Berkeley - (nf)
Article-I.D.: yale-com.924
Posted: Sat Feb 19 01:22:41 1983
Received: Sun Feb 20 09:26:06 1983
References: ucbcad.612

Some important issues have been raised in the net discussion of Jean
Kirkpatrick's aborted speech at U.C. Berkeley.  My $.02:

Andy Tannenbaum:
		      I dare (DARE!) someone out there to give me one good
	reason why someone at a talk like Jean Kirkpatrick's UCB talk should
	heckle.  What possible gain is there for the heckler?

What does Jeane [the right spelling] Kirkpatrick mean to you?
To the hecklers (and, to a lesser degree, to me as well) she stands for
a stupid and despotic foreign policy that condones butchery, if done in
the name of anti-communism, and refuses to see any international problem
as anything more than a manifestation of a global east-west struggle.

Should such a person be heckled?  I would say no, but can
understand why some would say yes.  The reasons for heckling:

(1)     In our society, criminals are not accorded full free speech.  If
	you do not believe that this is so, then tell me how someone serving
	a life sentence for murder has the freedom to come to UCB and speak?

(2)     Given (1), we are left to determine who the criminals are.  Normally,
	one might accept U.S. criminal proceedings as an appropriate deter-
	minant, but there are exceptions to this.  If a Hitler or a Stalin
	were to visit my campus, I would do everything in my powers to prevent
	them from speaking, whether or not my government considered them
	criminals.  Jim Johnson would disagree; he suggests that we

		    Suppose for a minute that the person was trying to set up
		some perspective for her beliefs and actions.  Suppose further
		that the lecture wouldn't make sense until you heard about her
		experience, which is, after all, greater than yours.

	I don't buy it, at least not a priori.  There is NOTHING that Hitler
	could tell me that would convince me that it was right to kill N (N>15)
	million people, even though his experience is "greater than mine."

Given those reasons for heckling, I would still, in this instance, have
refrained from heckling.  Why?

(1)     To my mind, Jeane Kirkpatrick is not a criminal of the same proportions
	as a Hitler or a Stalin.  I understand the moral arguments that
	would equate her with them (e.g. complicity is as bad as action),
	but I don't agree with them.

(2)     Even in those cases where heckling is morally defensible, it is
	tactically inadvisable 98% of the time.  Why?  consider Johnson's
	reaction:

		Frankly, booing someone off the stage (also chanting them off,
	threatening them off, etc) is repulsive to me, simply because the hecklers
	are demonstrating that they do NOT want to hear a discussion, they want
	to be bullies.


Zigurd R. Mednieks
	What is it about leftists that makes them blind to reason?