U.S. must avoid foreign wars
Tom Seabaugh
sophomore
The campus is too liberal? It's hanging by a thread off the edge of the right wing, and it's those "bedwetting liberals" McCarthy and Fitzpatrick despise who have kept the rest of the campus from intellectual oblivion.
Once upon a time, I was in social studies class in eighth grade, and our teacher proposed to us the questions, "How could the everyday German citizen allow Nazism to happen? What was he or she thinking?" Today, I can finally answer the questions. "Check out this letter in The Observer." Nazi propagandists would be very proud of their American protégés.
The United States is preparing for an overtly colonial war with Iraq, and the flag-waving, goose-stepping American population has barely lifted a finger to object. Where it has objected it has done so on wimpy religious or reactionary grounds. Americans as a whole continue to fill their SUVs with the blood of Middle Eastern dead, drive around with their Wal-Mart-bought "God Bless America" stickers and watch Fox News cheerfully as the green blobs of incendiary munitions rain down on the poorest country in the world.
The civilian deaths abroad from the "war on terrorism," I will remind McCarthy and Fitzpatrick, have far exceeded the deaths of Sept. 11. Military analysts have predicted that war with Iraq could produce a Sept. 11 many times over in Baghdad alone.
Regarding the reference to the battle of Pearl Harbor, I will remind McCarthy and Fitzpatrick that American history is much different from the movies. In 1941, record numbers of labor strikes were occuring across the country, and our president Franklin Roosevelt, to fight his growing unpopularity, practically asked Japan to attack. After the battle, he was alleged to have said, "I knew they were going to hit us, but I didn't know they'd hit us that hard." He then jailed all political opposition and put all "un-Americans" into concentration camps. Much as Roosevelt used Pearl Harbor as a pretext for imperialist adventures in the Pacific and a war on democratic rights at home, Bush has used Sept. 11 to catapult the United States into an open-ended war with an ambiguous foe and to perpetrate a political coup-de-grace on what semblance of human rights remained at home.
It is interesting that McCarthy and Fitzpatrick mention John Stuart Mill's oft-repeated line about the intellectually cowardly nationalist. The way they have it, the contemporary patriotic warmonger is the one who has something for which he is "willing to fight" and those of us with the intellectual fortitude to throw a fist in the air and resist are the "miserable creatures." I'll let the reader decide on this one.
Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky once wrote, "Each man carries on his shoulders a small particle of the fate of mankind." I urge the students of Notre Dame to consider carefully what they do with their particles, and encourage them not to let people like McCarthy and Fitzpatrick coerce them into submission. America has engaged in 11 wars in the past decade with a catastrophic toll on innocent human lives. Do we really want a 12th? The first time the United States invaded Iraq, it imposed sanctions on the country which resulted in the deaths of 200,000 innocent children alone. Do we really want to let our government go in again? Nazi and Imperial-Japanese leaders at Nuremberg were convicted for less.
Tom Seabaugh
sophomore
off campus
Oct. 15
All Viewpoint Stories for Wednesday, October 16, 2002
