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?