Letters to the Editor

Student responds to demonstrations

To the Editor:

I would like to respond to the anti-war demonstration held on the commons as reported in The Breeze's Nov. 12 issue in the article "Protesters beat missile to oppose war violence." There are several important points pertaining to the war debate that I feel should be put forth.

While the members of the anti-war movement certainly have every right to espouse the beliefs they hold, I am curious as to whether they truly are aware of what they are fighting for (or against). It concerns me that the antiwar movement in general seems to provide an inadequate explanation for the pacifist views that it promotes in relation to the war in Afghanistan.

Anti-war activists across the nation claim that they seek a peaceful solution to the horrible massacre that occurred on Sept. 11, but they provide virtually no explanation of that solution at all. At best, they suggest the increased use of international institutions to bring terrorists to justice. At worst, they make little or no effort to offer an alternative solution to the terrorist threat. They seem only to blindly follow a distorted doctrine of absolute pacifism without offering any truly workable solution.

If war is not the course to follow, what is the answer to the grave problem of organized global terrorism? If we simply attempt to make greater use of international organizations as terrorist tribunals, we will miss the bigger picture. We are not dealing merely with war criminals; what we are facing is a clear danger to the lives of thousands across the world. War was declared on us Sept. 11, and we must fight this war or suffer more terrible tragedies in the near future.

In the article, sophomore Peter Gelderloos claimed that he believes we only are waging war in Afghanistan because "there are trillions of dollars of oil there that the United States desires to acquire but cannot do so while Afghanistan is under the current rule of the Taliban." This notion could not be more incorrect.

Actually, Afghanistan hardly possesses any oil at all. According to the article "Pipe Dreams: Afghanistan's Coming Gas Booms," from worldinformation.com, Afghanistan is known to possess just under 100 million barrels of oil, which is a very small amount on the scale of international oil supplies. It certainly would not satisfy America's energy needs. Afghanistan's land is not rich with oil the way nations such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq are. Therefore, it does not make much sense to claim that America is motivated by greed for oil when there is little chance of acquiring a significant amount of oil from a nation like Afghanistan.

Junior Jenny Schockemoehl was quoted as saying, "We want to show that many people don't support this war, which is a terrorist act, just like any war."

Terrorist act? Is it possible that our campaign of justice can be compared to the horribly evil slaughtering of over 5,000 people? At least our military has made the effort to minimize Afghan civilian casualties, which are regrettable but inevitable. Also, our country has tried to provide food for the starving Afghan people, which is a lot more than Osama bin Laden's thugs would ever do for us.

I would advise the antiwar activists to examine the facts thoroughly before they arrive at their capricious conclusions. Perhaps they may eventually discover a coherent focus for their self-proclaimed campaign of peace and harmony.

Jonathan Kelly
freshman, political science

War is not the answer, student says

To the Editor:

It was disheartening to open The Breeze on Monday and to be greeted with a deluge of pro-war articles on the opinion page. Aside from the fact that there is something fundamentally wrong when an entire college campus takes much more offense at an anti-war protest than the war itself, Matthew McHale made some statements in The Breeze Reader's View column that I would like to respond to.

Perhaps the most inaccurate statement made in the article was the following: "These people tout their moral and intellectual superiority, yet they have no concept of the value of human life." How odd that pacifists be criticized for having no regard for human life when the pacifist movement is fundamentally based on the concern for human life.

McHale goes on to say "it's reassuring that the vast majority of college students support our war on terrorism, but I'm still disturbed by those who criticize it." All else aside, the ability to criticize and examine our lives and world is one of the only tools we have for understanding our existence as humans, and one of our few means of making progress (whatever that means). I urge McHale not to let this type of criticism disturb him any further.
Obviously, both sides claim to be concerned about human lives. The pro-war side seems to be saying that the best way to avoid more deaths is to kill those responsible. The pacifist side seems to be saying that the best way to avoid more deaths is not to kill anyone else and to seek a peaceful resolution. The pacifist solution is certainly more challenging, but that shouldn't be the reason it is discarded.

Finally, McHale closes his article with the phrase "God Bless America!" I took offense to this as I do not believe it is appropriate to attach the name of God to a column that exhorts its readers to support a war. If McHale does not believe in God, then he should not co-opt the name of the divine to gain support for his political views. If McHale does believe in God, I urge him to find scriptural support for his doctrines of war and violent retaliation.

Tim Westberg
sophomore, English

Editorial cartoon contested

To the Editor:

With regard to the derisive cartoon drawing on the Opinion page of the Nov. 12 edition of The Breeze, I would like to frame something amounting to a refutation of the "tree of deforestation" image intended to mock and invalidate the actions organized by the Young Democratic Socialists. The now infamous "missile of militarism" represented an action whose basis, at least to me, was entirely legitimate. It is my hope that this will help to dispel some of the existing misconceptions about the irony (apparently too high-level an abstract concept for those who submitted the articles appearing in Monday's Breeze) of the YDS action, a rational irony absent from the cartoon drawing — an image appealing to the lowest denominator of human understanding.

To begin with, a tree — or any other living system — cannot represent its own destruction, since that would be contrary to its very nature — to live, to grow, to reproduce. Hence, a "tree of deforestation" could not rightly be ascribed the requisite attributes that, along with determinate form and substance, qualifies a thing within space and time as a tree. A missile, however, is a tool of destruction, and hence, the use of force against such an object is entirely consistent with that object's nature, and furthermore consistent with the concept of militarism generally and its current manifestation specifically. Not only is the logic simple, but it is ironic. What sort of Grand Canyon leaps of reasoning and bankrupt logic was involved in arriving at your absurd analogy? Just curious.

I would further like to posit a Hierarchy of Violence — a conceptual scheme useful for measuring the violence of actions — in response to the uncritical analysis proffered by those who penned the articles appearing in Monday's Breeze, an analysis which is amounted to, essentially and verbatim, "protesting violence with violence is senseless." In this hierarchy, "constructive violence" would exist at the lowest stratum — if anywhere at all — many levels below state-sanctioned murder or heinous acts of terrorism. (Very briefly, constructive violence is anger or rage channeled into proper outlets, e.g., an oversized mock-up missile.) This scheme hopefully will help those who insist on discharging weak neural impulses onto an Opinion page to draw a clear distinction between hitting a mock-up missile with a whiffle bat and slaughtering innocent people and forcefully displacing populations in the name of freedom.

Paul Trawinski
sophomore, undeclared