‘Big Brother on Campus’

Your editorial named Reed Irvine and Les Csorba III as the leaders of a radical right-wing effort to stifle the free flow of information in the media and on college campuses.

It might startle Irvine and Csorba, both determined to protect us from the evils of Marxism, to be informed that it was Nikolai Lenin, who, on Feb. 16, 1919, wrote: “Why should freedom of speech and freedom of the press be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes is right allow itself to be criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns.”

There might be a difference between the kind of censorship practiced by the Soviet Union and the kind of censorship being promoted by Irvine and Csorba, but I’m damned if I see the difference. What Irvine and Csorba need, I think, is a crash course in the meaning of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

NORM PLISCOU

Holtville