Editor’s Note: This letter is in response to the Nov. 1 letter “Cannibalism is answer for protesters problems” by James Burbank.
Editor,
Stay classy, Lobo. Nice job publishing a letter that endorses the murder of protesters, not just here on campus but nationwide. I supported the protesters’ right to rally on campus. I said that UNM administrators feigned concern for students’ safety, but after reading “Cannibalism is answer for protesters problems” I think maybe I was wrong.
Maybe it’s the protesters who are in danger.
I don’t know if the editor has completed Western Civ II yet, but I cannot believe that the Lobo would publish a letter in which the author suggests a “final solution” that involves the systematic murder of protesters. Was the letter written in jest? I sincerely hope so, because then it is just in bad taste. I even hope that the letter was a prank and not written by a UNM faculty member.
Just last week, someone posed as the GPSA president in the comments section of the Lobo, so there is some precedence for that kind of thing. But that aside, do you know where the phrase “final solution” comes from? Well, here it is in its full glory: the final solution of the Jewish question. And what, you ask, is the “Jewish question”? Well, for the Nazis it was how to kill the entire Jewish population of Europe and probably eventually the world. Yup, we get it from the Nazis, and there it is in the Daily Lobo; the punch line to a joke.
Free speech means we have to hear things we don’t like hearing.
That’s the price we pay for being able to voice our opinions. But it also comes with a responsibility. Mr. Burbank is free to believe that the best model for discipline in this country should be modeled on the Nazis. But the Lobo doesn’t have to print it.
But because they did, shouldn’t there be some editorial comment?
Maybe there is some message about the “opinions not necessarily being those of the Lobo” somewhere, but in the case where the paper decides it’s going to publish a letter where the author endorses Nazi tactics, I think the Lobo should have made a special effort to distance itself from the views of Mr. Burbank.
In other words, the implications of Mr. Burbank’s message, if indeed they are his and not those of some punk jokester, are too great not to go unanswered, and I hope that the Lobo will address this.
David Luna
UNM graduate student
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Post Note: Burbank’s letter was a work of satire.
