{World Citizenship}[13th January 1971]

[Redbook1:191][19710113]{World Citizenship}[13th January 1971]

13.1.71.

            I've just been to the Rudi Dutschke* meeting at the C[ambridge] S[tudents] U[nion].

            An awful lot of balls was talked, of course, but I have come out changed: before I was uncertain, though I knew which way the public opinion lay.  Now I am certain that Dutschke ought not to have gone, though I think he may well have been ‘dangerous’.  It's just that, believing as I do that a man should not be discriminated against on the grounds of his political nationality any more than on the grounds of his race, I think Dutschke should have been treated in the same way as an ordinary citizen.

            Above all, he should have been presumed innocent until found guilty, not deported (the equivalent of imprisonment of an English citizen?) in order to stop him doing something he hadn't yet done.

            This principle of world citizenship is something that the average politician -- and the average citizen -- will find very hard to accept.

*[Rudi Dutschke (March 7, 1940 – December 24, 1979) was the most prominent spokesperson of the German student movement of the 1960s....  On April 11, 1968, Dutschke was shot in the head by a young anti-communist, Josef Bachmann. Dutschke survived the assassination attempt, and he and his family went to the United Kingdom in the hope that he could recuperate there.  He was accepted at Cambridge University to finish his degree in 1969, but in 1971 the Conservative government under Edward Heath expelled him and his family as an "undesirable alien" who had engaged in "subversive activity", causing a political storm in London. (Wikepaedia, Rudi Dutschke’ at 12/05/2013)]

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