Líbrary logístícs ín ideologícal warfare

DON'T KNOW who your favorite radio announcer is. Regularly, I I listen to Martin Agronsky at 8:00 every week-day morning. In one of his recent broadcasts he described the pattern for Communist conquest. If we may judge from the reports of the Korean war and of the Communist successes in China and elsewhere, the Russians are using three tangible weapons to support their military might. One of these, apparently, in Asia, consists of a sack of rice, the staple of Oriental food. The second tangible weapon is the land of the community, which is divided up among the people. The potency of these two weapons in making conquest permanent cannot be discounted. But, to my way of thinking, the third weapon has the most lasting possibilities of all. This third weapon appears to be a library, composed of materials suited to the reading, listening and viewing capabilities of the people. If the people cannot read at all, the library consists of pictures or motion pictures. If they can read a little, there are simple books and pamphlets which tell the story. If the people are intellectually equipped, there are documents and journals to challenge their equipment. For a long time we have suspected that the Russians have taken the American idea of libraries and carried it possibly one step further, just as they have done in a good many scientific fields and technological development, for which up until recently we have been unwilling to give them credit. We long have suspected that the Russians have extended our idea of library extension beyond the concepts of our most successful state programs

Active listening · Ancient history · Communism · CONQUEST · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Reading (process · Sociology · History · Intelligence, Security, War Strategy · Law · Library Science and Administration