Deadline for April Issue Orders is on Sunday!

The April issue is awesome, and there are only two days left to order it. It’s on foreign policy. The contents are as follows:

• Elan Jouro: “Death to ‘Diplomacy’ with Iran”

• Felipe Sediles: “Domestic Security Secures our Demise”
• Kelly Cadenas: “Campus Commentary: The Self-Censorship Epidemic on College Campuses”
• Audra Hilse: “World Peace Requires World Freedom”
• Ray Girn: “News from the Objectivst Movement: A Businessman Stands for Principle and Property Rights”
• Gena Gorlin: “Google China vs. Google Profit”
• John Lewis: “The Moral Goodness of the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima”
• Rebecca Knapp: “The Backward Strategy of Democracy”
• Corinne Bloch: “The Roots of the Hamas Victory”

Our last issue was distributed on over 30 campuses, and we’d like to keep the numbers up! If you haven’t distributed yet, now is the time to start. To order, click the “distribute” link at the top of the page.

April Issue!!

We are now accepting orders for the April issue of the paper, which goes to press in a week. Please click the “distribute” link at the top of the page to place your order.

The April issue is on foreign policy. It covers everything from Hamas and Iran, to domestic spying, to the morality of war.

Write to mail@the-undercurrent.com with any questions.

TU Flyer at Yale

Our flyer offers a different perspective for the school currently educating a former spokesman for the Taliban:

If you have cool pictures (or any pictures) of people reading the flyer (or TU in general), write us–we’d love to see them.

Update: Incidentally, that is a statue of Nathan Hale, the American executed by the British for treason in 1776. Famously, before his execution, he wrote letters to his family, which were destroyed by the British on the grounds that they showed that the rebels had too much courage. His last words, inscribed on the base of the statue, were: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”

Pretty stark contrast to our media and politicians, who, by refusing to assert any convictions, make it unnecessary for Muslims to bother evading their courage.

Exciting Cartoon Events

ARI’s crusade continues tonight with a cartoon-unveiling at Johns Hopkins. The panel includes Yaron Brook and Onkar Ghate of the Ayn Rand Institute, and Charles Mitchell of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

USC follows on April 11th. Check their website for updates.

Flyer Distribution Guidelines

Please note that you should adhere to university policies when distributing the flyer around your campus. Also we request that you distribute it as is, without modification. (For example, please don’t add your name or other personal information to the flyer.) Email us if you have any questions about this.

The Battle Continues

1. In case you’ve missed our recent announcements, thanks to the generosity of donors, we have stacks of our flyer available to ship to you free of charge. Please contact us to request copies and join the fight for free speech.

2. The Ayn Rand Institute has announced a campaign for free speech centering around the Danish cartoons:

In light of the recent violent outrage in the Islamic world over the “Danish Cartoon” controversy, and the anemic response to this outburst in Europe and America, the Ayn Rand Institute is pleased to announce a campaign to bring the Danish cartoons to the widest possible audience–and to arrange a series of panel discussions to discuss the vital need to defend free speech.

More information is available at aynrand.org/freespeech.

3. As extra motivation, here are some pictures from an enthusiastic distributor who blanketed Columbia with over 1,000 copies of our flyer today–including their school of journalism.

Update: For those of you coming from LGF who want to see the flyer, web and PDF versions are available on the front page. Here’s a direct link to the PDF.

Flyers for Free

If you’re interested in receiving free copies of our free-speech flyer, email mail@the-undercurrent.com.

The Flyer

First, all of us at TU want to thank the Ayn Rand Institute for their financial support in making this flyer possible. They covered the fees for printing a reproduction of the cartoon.

Second, as a reminder: if you are printing and distributing the flyer, we request that you write us at mail [at] the-undercurrent [dot] com. and let us know where and how. Just a quick note is fine.

Third, two important notes to those who want to distribute.

1. Be wary of distributing in private businesses. You could bring a lot of trouble down on their heads, and/or get TU banned from an establishment forever. This would include coffee shops, laundromats, and many other usual spots for TU. If you want to distribute in such places then get explicit permission first.

2. Follow up on your distributions at universities. These flyers *will* get thrown away. You should be vigilant about spreading them such a way that makes this difficult. This means returning to locations where distributed and putting more there. It means covering a lot of surface area, and not just putting down big stacks. It means putting them on bulletin boards, not just newspaper racks. It means spreading them anywhere you go, one at a time, guerilla warfare style, as this distributor did for the last issue.

Ideally–though this can be time consuming and difficult–it even means standing somewhere and handing them out to people.

Please get in touch with us if you have any questions or need any advice.

Special Edition: In The Name of Justice and the Right to Speak

We at The Undercurrent are writing in defense of the freedom of speech. The violent response to the Jyllands-Posten Mohammad cartoons has placed that freedom under attack. The American media has surrendered to the pressure. We will not.

On this special edition flyer, we have printed a rendition of one of the cartoons that Muslims demand to see censored. We are including it in protest and defiance of that demand. If you are offended, we implore you to set your emotions aside and to consider the issue at stake: do individuals have the right to publish material that others find offensive, without fear of violence? We ourselves do not consider this cartoon to be offensive. We consider it to be an accurate view of the religion of Islam, whose followers make the news every day, all over the world, for mindlessly obeying Islam’s orders to murder heretics. It was originally intended to expose a widespread fear of criticizing the Islamic religion in Denmark. It has done its job.

Free speech has come under attack not just in Denmark, but worldwide. Tens of thousands of Muslims across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East have responded to the cartoons with violence: they have thrown rocks, set fire to flags and embassies, chanted death threats and declared Fatwa. They have driven into hiding those responsible for creating and publishing the cartoons. Their avowed purpose is to prevent, through censorship, the expression of opinions they deem offensive.

As American citizens and as human beings, we know that free speech includes the right to offend. Our right to speak is not erased the moment someone wants us silenced. We have that right always, undyingly, and in principle. If, at the very moment we are called to defend that right, we instead limit it, downplay it, and appease those who attack us for exercising it, then it won’t be long before its exercise will no longer be possible.

The media should respond by expressing solidarity with the persecuted editors: they should re-print the cartoons. There are too many American editors to kill. It’s easier to intimidate a few people than an entire nation.

Newspapers, most of all, ought to rise in defense of speech–their business, objectively reporting the news, depends on that right. If newspapers do not defend free speech, there will be no one to defend the newspapers when the call comes, as it certainly will, for them to be silenced.

Instead, though the danger in America is much less than in Europe, the media has surrendered. Few papers have printed the cartoons, or even unapologetically defended their right to do so. In the context of the Muslim attack, the media response is a betrayal of free speech. It is not merely an editorial preference, but self-imposed censorship. It is fear–fear of offending those self-righteously intent on being offended.

Let us be clear: it is not to “open a dialogue” that papers should publish. No rational dialogue is possible with those who have abandoned reason in favor of force; there can be no debate with an opponent who wants to shoot you dead. Even with those who have not responded violently, but nonetheless respond religiously, there can be no debate: what argument can one give for or against a dogma of faith? Papers should publish the cartoons not to discuss, but to assert their rights in the face of explicit attack.

The bravest of the American media have been the young editors of campus papers, who broke the silence of the national news. Two editors of the Daily Illini at the University of Illinois refused to apologize for publishing all twelve cartoons, though they were fired for doing so. Since their courageous act, student papers across the Midwest have published the cartoons, as has a Harvard paper. Meanwhile, the national media remains conspicuously silent.

If support for free speech will not come from our elders, then let it come from students. We at The Undercurrent implore student papers to publish the cartoons, support those who have already published, refuse intimidation, and stand on a principle that is the cornerstone of free society: the right to speak.

Most sincerely,
The Undercurrent Staff

The Twilight of Freedom of Speech

To fathom our government’s contemptible treatment of a handful of unbowed journalists, you must see the roots of that treatment in the moral ideal Christianity bequeathed the West.

In the face of the intimidation and murder of European authors, film makers and politicians by Islamic militants, a few European newspapers have the courage to defend their freedom of speech: they publish twelve cartoons to test whether it’s still possible to criticize Islam. They discover it isn’t. Muslims riot, burn embassies, and demand the censorship and death of infidels. The Danish cartoonists go into hiding; if they weren?t afraid to speak before, they are now.

How do our leaders respond? Do they declare that an individual’s freedom of speech is inviolable, no matter who screams offense at his ideas? No. Do they defend our right to life and pledge to hunt down anyone, anywhere, who abets the murder of a Westerner for having had the effrontery to speak? No–as they did not when the fatwa against Rushdie was issued or his translators were attacked and murdered.

Instead, the U.S. government announces that although free speech is important, the government shares “the offense that Muslims have taken at these images,” and even hints that it is disrespectful to publish them.
Why does a Muslim have a moral right to his dogmas, but we don’t to our rational principles? Why, when journalists uphold free speech and Muslims respond with death threats, does the State Department single out the journalists for moral censure? Why the vicious double standard? Why admonish the good to mollify evil?

The answer lies in the West?s conception of morality.

Morality, we are told incessantly, by secularists and religionists, the left and the right, means sacrifice; give up your values in selfless service to others. “Serve in a cause larger than your wants, larger than yourself,” Bush proclaims to a believing nation.

But when you surrender your values, are you to give them up for men you admire, for those you think have earned and deserve them? Obviously not–otherwise yours would be an act of trade, of justice, of self-assertiveness, not self-sacrifice.

You must give to that which you don’t admire, to that which you judge to be unworthy, undeserving, irrational. An employee, for instance, must give up his job for a competitor he deems inferior; a businessman must contribute to ideological causes he opposes; a taxpayer must fund modern, unemployed “artists” whose feces-covered works he loathes; the United States must finance the UN, which it knows to be a pack of America-hating dictatorships.

To uphold your rational convictions is the most selfish of acts. To renounce them, to surrender the world to that which you judge to be irrational and evil, is the epitome of sacrifice. When Jesus, the great preacher of self-sacrifice, commanded “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you,” he knew whereof he spoke.

In the left’s adaptation of this perverse ideal, selfless surrender to evil translates into a foreign policy of self-loathing and “sensitivity,” of spitting in America and the West’s face while showing respect for the barbarisms of every gang.

Bill Clinton, for instance, certainly no radical leftist, jumped into the recent fray to castigate us: “None of us are totally free of stereotypes about people of different races, different ethnic groups, and different religions…there was this appalling example in…Denmark…these totally outrageous cartoons against Islam.”

In the right?s version, selfless surrender to evil translates into a foreign policy of self-effacing service.

Our duty, Bush declares, is to bring the vote to Iraqis and Palestinians, but we dare not tell them what constitution to adopt, or ban the killers they want to vote for. We have no right to assert our principles, because they are rational and good. But the Iraqis and Palestinians have a right to enact their tribal and terrorist beliefs at our expense, because their beliefs are irrational and evil. In the present crisis, the State Department will not defend free speech, because this principle is rationally defensible; to unequivocally assert this value would be selfish. But the Department will suggest that we respectfully refrain from publishing cartoons that upset the mental lethargy of self-made slaves to authority; Muslims have a right to their mystical taboos, precisely because the beliefs are mystical.

Tonight, when you turn on the news and see hatred-seething hordes burning the West’s flags and torching its embassies, remember that this is the enemy your morality commands you to love and serve–and remember the lonely Danes hiding in fear for their lives.

And then, in the ultimate act of self-assertiveness, pledge to renounce the morality of sacrifice and learn its opposite: the morality of rational self-interest.

Though the West’s twilight has begun, the darkness of suicide has not yet engulfed us. We still have a chance.

Dr. Onkar Ghate is a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute.

This article is reproduced with permission from the Ayn Rand Institute. ? 1995-2006 Ayn Rand ? Institute (ARI). Its inclusion in The Undercurrent does not represent an endorsement of The Undercurrent by either the author or the Ayn Rand Institute.