To put it bluntly: It is despicable that The Diamondback would run Malcolm Harris’ column, “Book: A force that gives the campus meaning,” on the seventh anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001. His article is fraught with anti-military, anti-American rhetoric veiled behind his praise of this year’s first-year book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges. Harris’ article’s purpose is to indoctrinate freshmen with his political views, and on such a day, that’s inappropriate.
When Harris writes, “The university is not exempt from the long tentacles of the military-industrial complex. University logos adorn ROTC posters and military recruiters stalk the halls,” there are several objections that spring to mind. He conjures up images of the Kent State riots in 1970. For those who don’t know what happened, rioters protesting the Vietnam War burned down the Kent State ROTC center. A day later, several students were killed in a confrontation with National Guard troops. As horrifying as the shootings were, the students who cheered the firebombing of that building are contemptible. The ROTC deserves a representative place in this eclectic community. Harris disapproves of the “military-industrial complex” and associates ROTC with it, so what should we do? Remove ROTC from the campus? Remove recruiters from the campus because they “stalk” the halls waiting to prey on impressionable students? The parallels to Kent State are striking.
Harris’ next absurdity, “Anyone who walks into the engineering buildings need only look at the walls to see the companies that profit from bloodshed,” is an example of bleeding-heart propaganda. Of course we are seeking more effective means of killing our enemies. What we want is to avoid civilian casualties. This laudable goal makes war expensive. It requires missiles that can hit a specific window in a specific building in the middle of a city and minimize damage to the rest of the building’s occupants. Here is a definition that Harris is unable to understand: A better bomb is a specialized one. Making these weapons requires hard mathematics and engineering skills but most importantly, it requires money. Why should the private sector, the most creative, efficient producer in the economy, aid in developing better weapons if there is no money to be made? Should we return to the carpet bombing strategies of World War II and the Vietnam War? That would be cheaper.
In short, Harris belongs to the “blame America first” crowd. What this means is that any action taken against the United States, militarily, economically or in the form of terrorism, is justified because America is just as bad, or even worse. Al-Qaeda isn’t evil; they’re just responding to the oppression from Western civilization that actively seeks to undermine the stringent Muslim culture they want to preserve.
But where would the world be without the United States military? Who stopped Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Soviet Russia? Who is spilling their blood to spread freedom and liberty to an area of the world devoid of them? Who kicked al-Qaeda’s ass in Iraq and Afghanistan? Its is a righteous cause and should be celebrated. To publicly demean the worth of the military and its supporters on Sept. 11 is reprehensible.
Richard Garcia is a junior English major. He can be reached at rgarcia@umd.edu.
