The Marketplace of Ideas in a Socialist Academics' Paradise

Abraham Lincoln (August 24, 1855):

When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty - to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."

Full quote here (2nd gray block, 4th quote).  Washington University, 2009.

The students set up a gulag complete with prisoners, guards and barb wire on the Wash U campus.

Students constructed a memorial to the victims of socialism as a stark reminder of the horrors of socialism, and of its victims.

“We’re hoping to elevate the thinking of students about the connection between socialism, tyranny, and murder. Too often, we tend to think about state control in the abstract. This event is an opportunity to show the student body what socialism really is,” said junior Dirk Doebler, student leader of Young Americans for Liberty and lead organizer of the event. “We’re just twenty years away from the collapse of the Soviet Union’s despotic enslavement of hundreds of millions of people, yet everyone seems to forget that socialism killed over 150,000,000 people in the 20th century. All that gets lost in the convenient narrative our professors would have us believe. With this event, we’re striking down false notions. We’re speaking truth to power.”

YAL leader John Burns reported on the event today.

The university shut it down… It was too offensive.

Full post with video here.  Via Glenn Reynolds.

I weep for the marketplace of ideas.