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Professor advocates blood and fire

Wilfredo Gutiérrez | 27.05.2004 19:33 | Education | World

To avoid dismissal, the professor should take a test on the subject of why “the prophet and the demagogue do not belong on the academic platform.”

Of all the initiatives and suggestions of which I have knowledge on how Washington can win the "war against terrorism," the most imprudent and clumsiest is the one that recommends more blood and fire. And its futility must be noteworthy when it comes from those minds supposedly balanced whose work is to educate.

I would not express my outrage about that if were not because of the irresponsibility and fanaticism implicated in the initiative. Above all, because of the human disaster that this could cause to millions of people if other irresponsible ones were to take its words seriously.

Bruce Herschensohn, professor of foreign policy in Pepperdine University School of Public Policy, claims that in order “to win the war against terrorism” the U.S. government must use a strategy like the one of World War II when "WE BOMBED OUR ENEMIES TO SUBMISSION WITH ALL THE POWER AND WEAPONRY WE HAD AVAILABLE." See his text, "If victory be the only goal," in the following website:  http://www.gulfnews.com/Articles/Opinion2.asp?ArticleID=121421

The professor seems to enjoy remembering the Americans of the 1940s as "the Greatest Generation" apparently because of their warlike achievements: "WE USED [THE ATOMIC BOMB] ON JAPAN" and DEMANDED "ABSOLUTE AND UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER OF OUR ENEMIES."

How can this man be a professor of political sciences with a state of mind so fanatically oriented to the cruelty of the war?

Perhaps I should not be surprised. This is basically the intellectual competence that satisfies the appetites of aggression and domination of the empire. As I said in another text, the most indecent and dearest objective of the imperialists is that "the people and the leaders of the Iraqi resistance surrender, hand over their arms, and make a promise of obedience to the orders of the invaders; and, if possible, put themselves on knees and to swear that they will never return to spoil the project of ‘democracy’ that Washington has designed to their country."

If there is no “ABSOLUTE SURRENDER," then the Iraqis should confront the consequences of the atomic bombs. That is to say, those disastrous consequences derived from the infamy of an initiative that the professor has endorsed because he thinks it is "without politically correct detours." Herschensohn has all the right to express his opinion and to think as he wishes outside the classroom. However, because his passion for STATE TERRORISM is too evident, one would think that what he teaches as political sciences in Pepperdine University is nothing different from propaganda disguised of patriotism and fanaticism.

If that is the case, the president of the university would have to intervene in the affair. But, to avoid committing an injustice dismissing the professor from his work, the president must first to assign him a test on the subject of what the German sociologist Max Weber meant when he wrote: "the prophet and the demagogue do not belong on the academic platform."

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Wilfredo Gutiérrez