(Note Bene: the following fantasy satire has been superceded by the truth. Remarkable! Thanks to LGF)

Coming Soon to Speak at Columbia!

From a press release issued by the Columbia Press Office:

On August 1,1939, Columbia University's School for Public and International Affairs (SIPA) is sponsoring an appearance by Dr. Joeseph Goebbels, Germany's Reichminister for Propaganda and National Elightenment, to participate in a question and answer session with university faculty and students. SIPA is initiating a year-long series of lectures and events entitled "Germany: Six Years of National Socialism", which will include academic experts as well as officials and critics of the Third Reich.

The opportunity for faculty and students to engage Dr. Goebbels came about after German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop initated contact with Columbia through SIPA faculty members who are experts on German history and politics.

Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler emphasized that such events must allow ample time for students and faculty to pose questions that challenge the views expressed by the speakers. President Butler will introduce the event by challenging Dr. Goebbels on a number of his controversial statements and his government's policies, including his statements regarding undue Jewish influence in the Anglo-American democracies, and his call for the segregation and containment of the Jewish people in Europe. The US government has accused the German government of supporting violence and discrimination against Jews living in Germany, including last year's alleged wide-scale violence against German Jews (the so-called "Kristallnacht") and reports of imprisonment of Jews, intellectuals and political opponents.

President Butler further stated, "I would like to add a few comments on the principles that underlie this event. Columbia, as a community dedicated to learning and scholarship, is committed to confronting ideas—to understand the world as it is and as it might be. To fulfill this mission we must respect and defend the rights of our schools, our deans and our faculty to create programming for academic purposes. Necessarily, on occasion this will bring us into contact with beliefs many, most or even all of us will find offensive and even odious. We trust our community, including our students, to be fully capable of dealing with these occasions, through the powers of dialogue and reason."

After his appearance at Columbia, Dr. Goebbels will conclude his visit to the United States with a speech to the German-American Bund in Madison Square Garden on the night of August 2, 1939.

The Four Freedoms.

It is important to remember what the promise of freedom means to the people of the world. Here is a clear articulation of what this struggle is all about:

"In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world.

The second is Freedom of worship. That is, freedom of every person to worship whomever (be it God, or any other deity/deities) in his own way — everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called "new order" of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb."

— Franklin Delano Roosevelt, excerpted from the Annual Message to the Congress, January 6, 1941