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. If a school such as Harvard does sell out to the military, let it at least be honest and add a sign at its Cambridge front portal: Harvard, a Pentagon Annex.
Yeah, the warrior ethic is completely incompatible with education.
The author of the anti-ROTC piece, Colman McCarthy, is an idiot, if by idiot you mean completely clueless about the reality of the world.
But what do you expect? McCarthy directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington.
War is a tool, and like any tool it can be misused or do great good (such as preventing a greater evil). Is a hammer evil? It can be used to build a home or school; or it can be used to bash a person's skull in. A sharp knife can be used to mug a woman late at night or carry out surgery to save a life. McCarthy's lack of nuance is disturbing for a man who poses as pro-education purist. He is purely idiotic. If we could actually ban war, his ideas would be fine. But in the end, that effort fails and people like McCarthy are content to simply ban Western nations from waging war. Aggressors aren't generally impressed with peace studies. McCarthy would disarm us, leave us a desert, and call it peace.
I have nothing but contempt for people like McCarthy. You don't teach peace--you defend it. If there was justice in this world, CENTCOM would be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
UPDATE: A more thorough fisking of the drivel. McCarthy may think highly of the Taliban, but our soldiers are better than their gunmen.
UPDATE: More reactions to the idiocy. Lord, McCarthy's bit about learning all he needed to know about ROTC in lefty kindergarten (the 1960s) is priceless by itself.
