From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!CAD:ucbesvax!turner Newsgroups: net.college Title: J. Kirkpatrick at U.C. Berkeley - (nf) Article-I.D.: ucbcad.806 Posted: Thu Mar 10 01:35:35 1983 Received: Fri Mar 11 02:55:15 1983 #N:ucbesvax:2900002:000:4551 ucbesvax!turner Feb 15 20:06:00 1983 Today (Tuesday) at 4 PM the University of California at Berkeley hosted, as part of its Jefferson Lecture Series, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Jean Kirkpatrick. The campus chapter of Students Against Intervention in El Salvador had organized a demon- stration which started outside an hour before as a silent vigil, and which was carried into the auditorium, where the silence ended. Jean Kirkpatrick was heckled from the stage. She was smoothly introduced by a member of the Law faculty here, and proceeded to speak on her topic: Human Rights in U.S. Foreign Policy. Not very long afterward, the M.C. reappeared, almost shouldering Kirkpatrick aside, to ask for those in the audience "who have made their point" to quiet down. Kirkpatrick continued, and was again interrupted, first from the crowd, then by the M.C. again, who began to talk about how he was surprised that Berkeley, of all places, would be so intolerant of "free speech". (He never actually USED the phrase "free speech"; he built up to it rhetorically, but was never quite able to utter the name of an early 60's campus uprising of the same name.) Shortly after this, much of the crowd began to simply to chant ("U.S. Out of El Salvador!"); at some point someone either either shouted, or hoisted a placard which attempted, a comparison of Kirkpatrick to the Butcher of Lyon (Barbie?), the M.C. (or someone) ran up an aisle or two to physically confront some of the hecklers, and the lecture was halted. Some personal notes: I was not actually present, but in a nearby building with live video. Everything I have recounted here is camera's eye and microphone's ear, subject to the possible weakness of my memory and strength of my beliefs. In particular, I was unable to compare the strength of the applause with that of the heckling, for all that it matters. (Anyone who had a parallax view on this, spatially OR idealogically, is invited to respond.) Kirkpatrick spoke (quite interruptedly) for at most 15 minutes. During this whole time she gave NOT ONE concrete example of what she was talking about, while occasionally admonishing the demonstrators to take a course in History, or Philosophy. Perhaps one day, the Jefferson Lectures will be anthologized, and we can go searching for whatever concrete examples she may have had in store for the audience. I submit, however, that her talk was not even tending in that direction. The demonstrators, on the other hand, were overflowing with concrete examples. "What about South Africa?!" was a frequent one. My ideas about freedom of expression were given quite a jolt by this whole experience. While I do not much like chanting, or shouting slogans, or disrupting speeches, my sympathies were with the demonstrators, and not with Kirkpatrick or the sanctimonious M.C. Kirkpatrick has a WORLD forum: the U.N. She can (and does) hold press conferences to express her views. By contrast, Campesino farmers in El Salvador, Indian peasants in Guatemala, and underpaid factory workers in Thailand and in the Phillipines and in Indonesia do not have a forum. The last time that they did have a forum, the U.S. intervened and installed a "friendly, authoritarian" regime, blood flowed in the gutters (and still does, in some of those places) and everybody shut up again. I DO think however, that we could have some healthy discussion about such things HERE, since heckling is so easy to dispose of. My questions about this event concern not so much whether it was right or wrong to disrupt the lecture, but rather the effectiveness and motives of those who did so. Did it do any good? Was it a waste of energy? Will any media exposure that results from it do any good? If this event was reported in your local paper, or shown on television, how did the journalists handle it? Do you think that people who organize such demonstrations are less interested in drawing attention to the real problems than in drawing attention to themselves? And from the pro-Kirkpatrick side? Or those who might despise what she stands for, but who would defend to their deaths her right to U.C. Berkeley microphone? Let's hear that, too. And all this over the net, if you please. This is a REAL forum, even if Wheeler Auditorium wasn't on this particular evening. Michael Turner