Rewriting the History of the Little Red Hoax

Who else but former Communist Party archivist and ALA Councilor Mark Rosenzweig would try to rewrite the history of the Little Red Hoax (link courtesy of Jack Stephens and Walter Skold):

To the credit of the liberal and left press, the story of the interdiction of the Inter-library loan request for "Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse Tung" by Homeland Security was treated with justified, appropriate skepticism.

Despite the fact that we know from investigating the student's claims that the technical,organizational and political premises for such an action by the government exists and such things happening remains very much a possibility, to my knowledge nobody of any repute in the opposition to Bush simply took the student's story at face value.


Contrary to Rosenzweig's claim, Jack Stephens has pointed out numerous examples of left of center bloggers, commentators, and even newspapers who treated this story with anything but "justified, appropriate skepticism." To this list I would add Professor Juan Cole, Senator Ted Kennedy, and the online publication Inside Higher Ed. This is undoubtedly just a small sample of those on the left who "took the student's story at face value."

(Inside Higher Ed has pulled the original piece from its archive, though you can download it as a PDF. In that article, the author, Rob Capriccioso, reported the allegation as fact, and even posted a response to a skeptical commenter in which he stood by the story.)


As to Rosenzweig's second point that "we know from investigating the student's claims that the technical,organizational and political premises for such an action by the government exists and such things happening remains very much a possibility", this is nonsense.

As usual, Rosenzweig presents not the slightest shred of evidence in support of his assertion. On the contrary, the available evidence is overwhelming that any kind of widespread federal monitoring of library users is highly unlikely. There has been only one proven instance of the government using Patriot Act powers to obtain library-related information, hardly the onslaught on patron privacy that some of the law's more hysterical opponents have claimed. Unfortunately, for many on the left, the existence of the "Bushist Police State" is an article of faith, impervious to empirical evidence or lack thereof.


Fittingly, Rosenzweig ends with a call to break out the tinfoil hats and wade straight into the fever swamp:

If the intelligence community wanted to create a scenario which could be used to de-legitimize protest against domestic surveillance, it couldn't have done better than this student who made up the Little Red Book story and then confessed to lying.


Or maybe the so-called "protest against domestic surveillance" has done such a wonderful job of spreading such black helicopter-type paranoia that it has delegitimized itself. It is both necessary and proper that America have a credible debate over where to draw the line between privacy and security in a time of war. Unfortunately, such ridiculous, paranoid rhetoric makes having such a discussion extremely difficult. Of course, considering Rosenzweig's long record of support for regimes and political movements that really do suppress intellectual freedom, I suspect that fostering such a debate is the last thing on his mind.