After all the Je Suis Charlie sound and fury, the Sorbonne refused to
acquire a professional historian's book about the origins of the Cold
War, published by Yale Univ. Press. Here is the beginning of the protest
petition. Please use the link below it to add your name to the petition
protesting the blatant exclusion of factual but liberal scholarship.
Petition against McCarthyist censorship in French university libraries
A user of the Sorbonne University's Pierre Mendès France Library
recently proposed to a librarian that the library acquire the French
edition of Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War 1939-1953 by
Geoffrey Roberts, professor at the University of Cork in Ireland and
Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. The book was published in French
in 2014 by Editions Delga, and originally published in English in 2006
by Yale University Press. The proposal received the following response:
“The proposed work, although it was written by a university
professor, does not in principle seem to us to display the historical
and scientific neutrality required for it to be included on our shelves.
Nor do the other books published by the same publishing house.”
When the library directors were contacted about the incriminated book,
as well as about the prerequisite conditions for a publisher's books to
be admitted onto the library's shelves, a series of evasive answers was
given. A visit to the shelves in question, those devoted to the history
of Soviet Russia and the USSR, reveals that for over fifteen years,
books containing unprofessional journalism and anti-Soviet propaganda
have been systematically acquired, such as those by Bernard-Henri Lévy
and André Glucksmann, as well as outright holocaust-denying books, such
as those by Ernst Nolte. On the other hand, important scholarly works
published in French during the same period have not been acquired, such
as those by Arno Mayer, Michael Carley and Alexander Werth, whose famous
Russia at War 1941 to 1945, republished in French in 2011, remains absent.
Sign at
http://www.petitions24.net/petition_against_censorship_in_french_university_libraries
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