As anyone who reads blogs has likely seen by now, there are lots of people having a (justified) fit over an open letter by Martin Kozloff, a professor at University of North Carolina (Wilmington). Prof. Kozloff advocates a number of interesting political positions:
I've worked hard all my adult life to provide for my family, to be useful, and not go out of my way to injure anyone. Like most Americans, I knew little about arab-muslim culture and believed that the developed nations were partly responsible for the poverty and authoritarian regimes that infest the middle east.
Things changed on 9/11/01 when you ruined the lives of at least 10,000 Americans.
These people instantly became my countrymen and you became my mortal enemy.
Ordinary Americans are arming themselves for war with you. I and many of my friends have closets full of handguns, rifles, shotguns and thousands of cartridges. If we had enough ammunition and time, we would kill every last one of you.
[snip]
One day soon, our planes and missiles will begin turning your mosques, your madrasses, your hotels, your government offices, your hideouts, and your neighborhoods into rubble. And then our soldiers will enter your cities and begin the work of killing you, roaches, as you crawl from the debris.
[snip]
We will burn your mosques.
We will invade the offices of pro-arab-muslim organizations, destroy them, and drag their officers outside.
We will tell the chancellors of universities either to muzzle or remove anti American professors, whose hatred for their own country we have tolerated only because we place a higher value on freedom of speech. But we will no longer tolerate treason. We will muzzle and remove them.
We will transport arab-muslims to our deserts, where they can pray to scorpions under the blazing sun. You have fucked with the wrong people. We will rid the world of your foul breath. Your caliphate will be your grave.
Boy, I'll bet he's fun at parties. There has been lots written on other blogs to point out the boundless issues and problems with Prof. Kozloff's language and ideas. Go and read them. Given the original insanity of Kozloff's letter, it almost makes one heartened about the state of dissent in this country (almost).
I'll only pick out one point to harp on. Perhaps it is not a trait only of Americans, but I continue to be amazed at the number of people who do not credit people from other cultures and states as capable of having the same feelings and responses as we do. Kozloff reflects the vast well of anger that American's feel at an (undefined) "them" that have done us harm on September 11th. And, as Americans, we want to lash out and destroy or damage "them", and we seem relatively unimpressed and indifferent to the collateral damage and civilian casualties that amount over time (as many as 15,000 to date in Iraq). Yet we fail to consider what effect that has on the Iraqis. Shouldn't they, like we, get angry when attacked unreasonably? Shouldn't they, like we, act on that anger and strike out against those that are responsible? Unless we want to make the argument that they, as a people, feel and think vastly differently than we do (an argument that starts down the path to a racist end), why shouldn't we expect their basic instinctive reactions to violence and chaos to be similar to ours? Is it any wonder that we see escalating violence in Iraq as our own violent attempts to subdue the insurrection go on and on?
The vast majority of Muslims, while they don't particularly like us, are not actively opposed to the US or taking up arms against us. What does Prof. Kozloff expect to happen when his suggested strategy is implemented?
Posted by baltar at September 29, 2004 03:31 PM | TrackBack | Posted to PoliticsSome of the other bloggers are discussing whether or not he wrote the thing himself. A commenter over at obsidian wings seems to have written Kozloff asking if he himself wrote the open letter, which Kozloff denied. However, if you go over to the Horsefeathers site, and read down in the comments, you find this:
It's more than nice to know that my feelings are shared by so many other folks--most of whom have served their nation longer and better than I.For a long time I've become more and more alien to my (former) friends, and they to me. Unless there is something fundamentally different in how we make sense of things, I can only believe that they have never allowed themselves (never "lowered" themselves enough) to imagine what it would feel like to jump out of the Twin Towers to avoid being burned to death, and never listened to a man scream through his bleeding neck stump after being butchered before the camera.
Even my dear wife has begun to suspect that "Martin may be obsessing about this war and about combat." Why, she actually insists that I NOT have a loaded .45 at the dinner table! [So, I just carry it concealed.]
In a nutshell, thanks for making me feel less alone. And I am heartened to know that there are many other fellow hoplites in our country who are willing to defend our families, values, and freedoms.
But, for the record, I want to say that I did not write my Open Letter to Our Enemies to incite violence; and I do not advocate taking any illegal actions. [I'm sure you understand...]
I was writing to express the burning rage I feel every time another of our soldiers is killed and every time politicians, media heads, and academics discredit our nation and weaken our morale. I was writing what I believe will happen if our enemies attack us again.
Later,
MK
Posted by: Martin Kozloff at September 27, 2004 10:45 PM
http://doctor-horsefeathers.com/archives2/000298.php
Posted by: binky at September 29, 2004 04:13 PM | PERMALINKthat paltry disclaimer at the end reads like two things:
1) a (one hopes) feeble attempt to protect his position/tenure in his community/university.
2) a potentially effective attempt to shield himself against a future charge of some kind of incitation charge, should some seventeen-year-old go out and torch a mosque tomorrow and cite kozloff's letter to the investigating officers.
in any event, it's one thing to know, intellectually, that such individuals are out there, even in (gasp!) academe. it's something else, however, to see their reckless words made manifest, to breathe in their acrid stench.
i feel like i need a shower.
Posted by: joshua at September 29, 2004 04:24 PM | PERMALINKHe also said similar things, with more trashing of liberal academia and more gun fetishizing, and glorifying the Pioneer Myth of the Noble Redneck in a way that typically only foreigners do (qv Mel Gibson) not real rednecks in my experience, back in May. So if he's trolling then it's a long-running troll.
I'm saying CYA.
Posted by: bellatrys at September 30, 2004 10:13 AM | PERMALINKNice post over at your site. I'm not entirely suprised that Prof. Kozloff has had previous wingnut rants, but those do make it a bit harder for him to make the "I didn't mean it, I was just expressing a common meme" excuse really stick. I'm still frightened that such ignorance exists, though I think I'm more frightened that Kozloff gives out bullets to students in his class.
Posted by: baltar at September 30, 2004 11:44 AM | PERMALINK