Thursday, December 30, 2010

Another academic candidate worthy of being bound, gagged and dropped by air into Waziristan to explain the concept of "peace studies" to Jihadis.


"ROTC and its warrior ethic taint the intellectual purity of a school, if by purity we mean trying to rise above the foul idea that nations can kill and destroy their way to peace."

23 comments:

Bad Cyborg said...

Nothing like biting the hand that holds the sword that lets you sleep peacefully in your bed at night.

Try as I might to find I cannot but I recall a quote to people who became so civilized that they were conquered by someone less civilized. Benjamin Franklin sagely wrote, "Those who beat their swords into plowshares usually end up plowing for those who kept their swords."

Bad Cyborg X

Anonymous said...

When people are shot in war it is a treatment of the symptom.

The jihadis screaming "Death to america" mean - "Death to Halliburton,Monsanto, Texaco,Exxon, Shell, United Technologies, Boeing, Pfizer, etc, etc, etc". In turn they mean the highly compensated representatives of those companies, which in turn means the Americans that keep electing aforementioned highly paid representatives to office.


No one sees a conflict when the same people making the money off energy and security scares are the same ones declaring the energy and security scares?

the public debate about this and other subjects relative today has monied corporate masters on both sides. That is the problem which crosses cultural, ethnic and social divides.

Anonymous said...

It is also interesting to see how much warmongering comes from the mouths of those that have never served.

Semper Fi, 0321

Anonymous said...

"A nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its laws made by cowards and its wars fought by fools."

-Thucydides, 5th c. BC

Colman McCarthy is a fool.

Michael Gilson said...

The pacifist helps give war its point, to make the exercise worthwhile, by allowing you to enslave him, to take his wife to serve yours, his daughters to warm your bed, and his sons as machine gun fodder, safe in the knowledge that he will not lift a hand to stop you, lest he risk compromising his "principles.
This quotation is by Tom Kratman and Robert Cruz Jr, with Lt. Col. (ret.) Kratman writing the first part that ends with "machine gun fodder" and Cruz adding the part that begins "safe in the knowledge"

Defender said...

He's speaking and writing in English, not German or Japanese or Russian. That would be a clue about the effectiveness and need for the ability to counter aggression with aggression.

Kipling wrote:

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
And go to your Gawd like a soldier.

The WOMEN.
A 12-year-old girl -- a civilian -- was captured along with other children being trained as suicide bombers in one of those Middle East dumps. She was eager to get on with killing infidels and go to paradise.
Reporter Daniel Pearl went to the Middle East to get the Arab Muslim side of the story and share it with the world. They accused him of spying and cut his f---ing head off.
And this pseudointellectual objects to OUR warlike nature?
I hope to hear about his meeting with the goddess Irony.

Happy D said...

And they expect the military to unquestioningly defend them from us?

Sean said...

The eastern US and it's "professors" taint the moral purity of a free country, if by purity we mean trying to rise above the foul idea that nations can achieve peace by talking about it a lot.

Capt45 said...

You are so right, Bad Cyborg. Just ask the Romans (after Brennus or Alaric or Odoacer) or the Chinese after a few generations of the 'scholar-gentry' emasculated the Chinese armies in favor of bureaucratic control.

Anonymous said...

I asked if he actually believed there could be a Christian method of slaughtering people in combat, or a Christian way of firebombing cities, or a way to kill civilians in the name of Jesus.--Colman McCarthy

The Pope! How many divisions has he got?--Joseph Stalin

No war has been directed by the church since the Peace of Westphalia was signed during the mid-17th century. The church did not firebomb Dresden. It did not orchestrate the 1915 Armenian massacre of civilians. It played no role in the slaughter of Saddam's Republican Guard in Mesopotamia.

Wars are directed by the state. Slaughter is the state's raison d'etre. Christianity, by way of contrast, has had a restraining influence on war's worst abuses.

At Notre Dame, on that 1989 visit and several following, I learned that the ROTC academics were laughably weak. They were softie courses.--Colman McCarthy

It is ironic to heard a journalist denounce less-than-rigorous academics. A *journalism* major is freighted with "softie courses." I cannot imagine it prepared Colman McCarthy to pass a course of study in Private Pilot Theory, such as was offered to ROTC majors when I was a student at Grove City College. ;^)

Anonymous said...

The first few paragraphs were very good. But I didn't realize that I was being set up for a sucker punch until . . .
"The interview quickly slid downhill."
After that sentence, so did the remainder of the article.

You're right, Mike. Drop these "peaceniks" into someplace, anyplace, far away from the US of A. Without their passports. Those that live to make it back to the shores and borders can re-apply for citizenship, and start at the beginning, just like any other furriner.

B Woodman
III-per

rexxhead said...

Putting the headline and the selected quote side-by-side, I come to the conclusion that some here may actually believe it possible for nations (ours in particular) to "kill and destroy their way to peace".

The only alternative explanation I can fit in here is that when U.S. foreign policy finally pushes a nutball over the edge, you think we should double-down on that policy.

What did I miss?

W W Woodward said...

Violence is not the answer to everything, but it's damn well the only answer to some things.

Gaviota said...

History is replete with examples of old, wealthy, effete, and impotent cultures being ravaged by barbarians incapable of understanding the benefits of Epicurianism.

In my desultory conversations with my liberal sister on this very subject, I pointed out to her that her use of the shepard motif as an icon of the ideology and philosophy of political peace movements was fatally flawed at it's inception.

Shepards carried weapons. The failure of a shepard to be armed, and proficient with his arms, inevitably resulted in horrific consequences to the sheep.

She still doesn't get it.

Anonymous said...

We should just all be sheep and let the elite do all our thinking for us and pay for it with all our money! There should only be one army, an international Marxist army, supporting world Marxist government! THEN, everything would be peaceful...!!

God forbid anyone should object to the plans of our betters. But objecting isn't going to be enough, is it?

Bad Cyborg said...

Anonymous December 30, 2010 9:34 AM wrote:
The jihadis screaming "Death to america" mean - "Death to Halliburton,Monsanto, Texaco,Exxon, Shell, United Technologies, Boeing, Pfizer, etc, etc, etc". In turn they mean the highly compensated representatives of those companies

Sorry, but you are an excellent example of Regan's maxim about the left not being ignorant but simply know so many things that aren't so. When the Jihadis scream "Death to America" they mean precisely that. They desire the utter extermination/elimination/eradication of our nation, our culture, our belief system and our very way of life. If that means death to every man, woman, child and suckling babe in the U.S then they are entirely willing to effect that end.

rexxhead wrotr;
Putting the headline and the selected quote side-by-side, I come to the conclusion that some here may actually believe it possible for nations (ours in particular) to "kill and destroy their way to peace".

I believe it to be no more possible than for a person to be mutilated to health. Oh, wait. They do that every day, don't they?

Violence is violence and it never solves anything, does it? Unless the problem to be solved is a home invader in my house at 0200. Then the violence of one or more 155 grain Speer Gold Dot jacketed hollow points inserted in his chest at just under the speed of sound is an excellent (possibly final/terminal) solution.

But that is why we serve. So that knotheads like McCarthy can spout his nonsense in safety.

Bad Cyborg X

Blue said...

I do not understand the thought process of Liberals. I am of the firm belief that they don't actually "think", rather, they "feel". They make me want to puke.

FBC said...

Violence is the continuation of politics by other means

(I can't remember who got that one out first, Machiavelli or Clausewitz)

Broadsword said...

Do academics and intellectuals never tire of their eternal cynicism? (Orwell, "You must be an intellectual. Only and intellectual could believe something so stupid".)

Anonymous said...

If one keeps their head in the sand and rear in the air, it is quite likely someone will stop by to take a poke at it...

Seriously, we're wasting our time with politicians and the media.

The Constitutional Revolution must recapture Academia...all else will follow. Its working for the Progressive Socialist Left - it'll work for the III%.

Anonymous said...

I asked if he actually believed there could be a Christian method of slaughtering people in combat, or a Christian way of firebombing cities, or a way to kill civilians in the name of Jesus. Did he think that if enough Notre Dame graduates became soldiers that the military would eventually embrace Christ's teaching of loving one's enemies?

The interview quickly slid downhill.


I like how he doesn't mention how it slid downhill. Absolutely fantastic journalistic slight-of-hand right here.

I'm going to go ahead and say that university presidents are by and large pretty smart people. This particular one in question is also a Priest, so he probably knows a thing or two, to say the least, about what the author is asking him.

"Sliding downhill" probably meant the Priest/president ever so kindly laying waste to these absurd non-thought questions, and the author getting in a hissy fit over being so easily outsmarted, carrying that horrible affront to his obvious genius with him since 1989, and then writing it into this article in such a way as to make it sound that the Priest/president was dumbfounded by his acute insight.

Simply stunning.

Anonymous said...

To oppose ROTC, as I have since my college days in the 1960s, when my school enticed too many of my classmates into joining, is not to be anti-soldier. I admire those who join armies, whether America's or the Taliban's: for their discipline, for their loyalty to their buddies and to their principles, for their sacrifices to be away from home.

Did anyone else catch that?

Brass said...

Bad Cyborg wrote:
"Nothing like biting the hand that holds the sword that lets you sleep peacefully in your bed at night."

Something tells me the Afghanis and Iraqis weren't about to invade and slit our throats in our beds, and impose Shariah law on everyone.

Peace comes from men living according to God's will. Not by the sword. Violence can be used to put down a real physical threat to physical people. (The kind of threat not posed by the Afghani or Iraqi bogeymen.) But the worst threat to peace cannot be put down with violence. And that threat is sin.

Stomp on as many hornet's nests as you want. You'll kill a bunch, I'm sure. But the rest will be, as they say, "mad as hornets" and come after you. It's called "blowback."