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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