Editors and Professors might be terrorists

As we all know, with perhaps the exception of Congress, one of the constants in fascism and despotic takeovers is the censorship and persecution of academics.

Juan Cole has a detailed post on the insanity that is our government's fascistic drive disguised as war on terror.

Excerpts:

Some of you know that some unsavory political forces have convinced the House of Representatives to create a Big Brother committee to police the thought of university professors who write about world affairs. The bill is HR 3077. The main goal of this legislation is to impose an ideological agenda on university teaching, research and writing about issues like the Middle East. The point of the committee is to warp academic study and ensure that independent researchers are not allowed to be heard. But it was precisely the imposition of such ideological litmus tests in Washington that led to the case of the missing Weapons of Mass Destruction and the conviction that Iraq was 3 years away from having a nuclear bomb, both propositions completely false. It would not be doing the United States any favors to muzzle the academics, as well. I plead with all the thousands of you who have expressed interest in this site and read it frequently, to FAX your senator, or the senate generally, expressing your conviction that this advisory committee be excised from the final bill. The contact information is below. An email is better than nothing, but the FAX is what would get the job done. ...As Stanley Fish has said, university teaching and research is not about "balance." Our cancer institute isn't required to hire at least a few biologists who believe smoking is good for your health. In research, it is all right to be partisan for the evidence. It is in fact one of the things wrong with journalism and political discourse that there is so much emphasis on "telling both sides of the story." This is a bad approach because many stories have many more than two sides, and some stories only have one true side. Appointing a professor at each major university who would have insisted in early 2003 that Iraq was only 3-5 years away from having a nuclear bomb would not have been an academic advance, but it is the sort of thing the framers of HR 3077 had in mind when they urged "balance." ...I teach a course on War in the 20th Century Middle East at the University of Michigan, and as a historian I have to admit that it is a biased course, especially when we get to the 1990s. It is biased because I despise the Taliban and al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, and I certainly do not properly give their side of the story. If what the Senate wants is "balance," then we shall have to hire some of those unemployed ex-Baathists to teach Iraqi history at the University of Michigan, to offset my jingoistic pro-American approach. "Reflecting" "the full range of views" would also require us to have more Communist, Nazi, Holocaust-denying and Hamas professors. The Senate should be very careful about putting into statute this language about "balance," because although the committee's supporters want to use it mainly as affirmative action for Republican academics, there are lots of extremist groups in US society that may find ways to use the language perniciously. (Contrary to the hype, there are plenty of Republican academics, and try to find a leftist in any major Economics Department or Business School in the country). ...B. The people who argue for the Advisory Board charge "anti-Americanism" in the classroom. But actually what they mean by that if you pin them down is ambivalence about the Iraq war, or dislike of Israeli colonization of the West Bank, or recognition that the US government has sometimes in the past been in bed with present enemies like al-Qaeda or Saddam. None of these positions is "anti-American," and any attempt by a congressionally-appointed body to tell university professors they cannot say these things (or that if they say them they must hire someone else who will say the opposite) is a contravention of the First Amendment of the US Constitution. ...c. The "Advisory Committee" that HR 3077 sets up is unneeded. The Department of Education already does oversight of the area studies centers, and gives or withholds money according to whether they meet government goals. Funding a whole extra committee is a waste of taxpayer money and a clear duplication of effort. The Committee explicitly has "investigatory" powers, which it is hard to see as anything other than McCarthyism. Given Republican dominance of all three branches of government, the committee is going to be highly politicized, and some ideologues will probably be shoe-horned onto it. Most troubling of all, the "advisory board" will have "investigative" powers. These powers are clearly meant to intimidate US academics and administrators, and some institutions are already talking of turning down Federal money rather than submit to such tactics. You decide if the country would be well served by a law that made it impossible for the best universities to even take Federal funds for international studies.

Alos, read Juan's post about the Treasury Department's threat to imprison anyone who edits scholarly essays from certain Arab country writers.