Update: 12-24-05 - The student who reported this story has admitted it was a hoax. I am relieved that our federal agents are not wasting their time on such. Thanks to “anonymous” for alerting me to the hoax.
Book checked out of the library results in a visit from federal agents. What’s next, book burnings?
Feds Question Student, Frighten UM-Darmouth Faculty
“Why are You Reading that Little Red Book?”
By GARY LEUPP
Just when you think it can’t get crazier, it gets crazier. Aaron Nicodemus, a journalist with the southern Massachusetts newspaper The Standard-Times, reports that in October of this year a senior at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth was visited by federal agents and questioned about a book he had ordered through inter-library loan. Apparently U Mass librarians are cooperating with the USA-Patriot Act. You know, the one that’s all about Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism. The book was for a research paper he was doing for a course on fascism and totalitarianism taught by Professor Robert Pontbriand, a specialist in European intellectual and cultural history. The agents visited the student after he ordered a book that is, they informed him, on a “watch list.”
The book being watched? No, not some Islamist tome, al-Qaeda training manual or technical work on explosives, but a well-known book the whole text of which you can find online or order from amazon.com. It’s Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung, also known as the “Little Red Book,” a book once rivaling the Bible in circulation. To really monitor its readership would involve watching all internet access to the text, purchases of the book, and library loans of it. A formidable task and insane waste of FBI time, surely. But these are mad times.
4 Comments
December 21, 2005 at 8:50 am
apparently, the bastards running this country have studied quite thoroughly a number of texts on fascism and totalatarianism.
December 21, 2005 at 4:40 pm
Perhaps. But they obviously haven’t read the history of the invasion and subjugation of the Philippines, the invasion of Mexico or of Vietnam. Their Iraqi adventure, with the subsequent insurrection is a replay.
Nor have the read the history of Watergate and other such scandals because the dumb asses obviously don’t understand that the cover up is always worse than the crime.
December 24, 2005 at 12:58 pm
The kid admitted that the whole thing was a hoax. Check out http://www.southcoasttoday.com/daily/12-05/12-24-05/a01lo719.htm
The self-righteous comments on DailyKos in response to this revelation are absolutely priceless…
December 24, 2005 at 1:13 pm
Thanks for informing me of the hoax. I hadn’t run across the hoax report. I will post a correction at the head end of the post.
So many of the Daily Kos commenters had initially figured out it was a hoax. Or so they say.
Thanks again.