No relation to the fat golfer of the same name
College probes teacher who urged fragging by GIs – Nation/Politics – The Washington Times, America’s Newspaper — Well, this should get this Daly character the Ward Churchill chair at the University of Colorado. Someone needs to find a picture of this guy. What a jerk.
The foundation sponsored the appearance by Army Lt. Col. Scott Rutter, a Medal of Honor recipient, at the college Thursday night.
Miss Beach said she was “very shocked” at the message she received from Mr. Daly. He told her he would ask students and others to boycott the event. He also charged that signs her group had posted about Col. Rutter’s appearance “looked like fascist propaganda.”
Mr. Daly also charged that “capitalism has killed many more people” than communism and that the “poor and working-class people” are recruited to “fight and die for Exxon and other corporations.”
“I will continue to expose your right-wing, anti-people politics until groups like yours won’t dare show their face on college campuses,” Mr. Daly wrote.
He added: “Real freedom will come when [U.S.] soldiers in Iraq turn their guns on their superiors.”
I have long thought that the reason why most academics think the way they do is because academia provides a sort of insulation from the real world that everybody else lives in. It is very easy to advocate theory when you don’t have to worry about consequences of those theories when they fail.
Look ..it’s a community college and the bozo is an adjunct professor. I doubt that you will see him on next year’s class schedule. Academics are generally more liberal than the average citizen, but lumping me (also an adjunct, but I have a day job) plus other teachers in with this guy is plain wrong. Also the media is giving this guy more coverage than he is truly worth.
Don’t pick on my man Big John Daily.
We dont need more large coprations, no more nutso right wingers amd mo more pinko commies whyy arent their any normal political thinkers in america anymore
I’m a flaming liberal, and I’d like to say that this guy does not speak for me.
But I hardly think he’s indicative of “academia” or any sort of consensus view, although that’s certainly how this will be portrayed.
It took a while searching for his picture and I found a reference (on the http://www.freerepublic.com website – link: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1524380/posts?q=1&&page=51) Those Freepers are very thorough in their scouring of the web, IMO.
John Daly is a 2000 graduate of CSU Northridge. Here is an interesting quote [and photo] from student John Daly in the fall of 1997.
( link: http://sundial.csun.edu/sun/97f/97f/111997op04.htm )
I can’t get past the fact that Mr. Daly’s freedom was purchased and is secured by citizens who volunteered to serve in our nation’s armed forces.
Who HAS killed more? Communistic governments or capitalist?
I’m pretty sure that most historians put Stalin at the top, then Hitler (capitalist, right? Despite the party name.), then Mao and so forth.
I’m thinking communism wins as the most deadly. But I suppose this guy is talking about the much harder to measure effects of resources going to the richer countries causing death in the poorer countries. That _is_ a huge number.
A friendly disagreement, Greg. Most historians would disagree with the framing of your question.
If it was accepted, then, you must start with mercantile capitalism — more than a couple of centuries back. Work your way through all the imperialist wars for territory and markets — from Europe through the colonial Third World — through the two terrible wars of the 20th Century. Don’t skip over the several major civil wars including the US. Stalinism doesn’t begin to compare.
Sadly, most Americans have learned their history from TV talking heads and Walt Disney. Economic systems set the stage for any number of political systems — and I presume the latter is what you wished to examine.
Who’s responsible? The short answer is The Greedy Bastards in charge!
Of course soldiers shouldn’t turn their guns on their superiors. They should turn there fingers toward voting machine (and only ones with paper audit trails) and help elect guys who have been there like Eisenhower, Kerry, McCain or Cleland, and not oil pimps and “rapture” advocates who could give a rats ass less about what happens to them.
On the pic subject… there should be a John Daly statue on every golf course and possibly in front of every rehab center. He’s a classic in a world over flowing with clones. A friend who was an official for a PGA tour event a few years ago told me he happened by as JD returned his courtesy car for the event. So what, you say? Well, this time there was shrubbery in the grill and the airbag had been deployed. Yeah, I know, I wouldn’t let him babysit my kids either, but what a character.
Woah! Stalinism can’t compare to the US Civil War? What drugs have YOU smoking Eideard??? Stalin starved tens of millions of people to death under the forced collectivism, executed millions more. As far as historical revisionism goes, let us not forget that it was Hitler AND Stalin who kicked off World War II – the bloodiest global war in history by invading Poland.
I’ll acknowledge that the West has collectively had it’s shares of atrocities, but I think that most Historians would concur that Communist regimes have been the most murderous of all political regimes. Then you have the Fascists. This doesn’t excuse Western atrocities, but to say otherwise is to ignore the Truth.
Like, capitalism has been around in one form or another for almost five centuries. There’s a lot of wars and a lot of dead to add up.
I got your point. I just don’t think it’s accurate given the assumptions you’ve made. Not all of the wars were Economic wars. Thats the sort of limited thinking that Marx, Engels and Lenin were postulating in order to justify their half baked political theories. A lot of the wars were fought for ethnic and religious reasons. You only have to look (in supposedly civilized Europe) to the former Yugoslavian states and see that they were still fighting over Ethnic and Religious differences as recently as a decade ago. Or the Pakistani-India problem. Or in Darfour, Sudan. These are not economic problems.
As far as Iraq goes… Saddam, his sons, his clan were a bunch of vicious, murderous, sadistic pigs. What really pulls my chain is this myopic view that Bush somehow lied about the WMD’s. I will admit that they pushed hard for getting into Iraq for those reasons and that given hindsight, we find that those assessments were possibly less then accurate. I’ll say ‘possibly’, because knowing Saddam’s history, I’m not totally convinced that he didn’t move the juicier parts of his weapons programs to Syria, but I digress.
I remember back in the late 90’s when Bill Clinton and friends were damn sure that Saddam was hiding WMD’s and the only thing that stopped him from going in is that Clinton lacked a spine. Now Bill is saying that going into Iraq was a mistake. Well maybe he’s right for the wrong reasons. It’s easy to analyze the fallout after someone else had made the hard choices.
I’ll say this tho. I’d rather that we hadn’t have gone into Iraq. I don’t think that Saddam really gave us a choice tho. He spent the better part of a decade obstructing the UN weapons inspectors. Now either the world (read: USA & Coalition forces) had to go in and enforce UN sanctions that the French, Germans and the Russians were covertly circumventing OR you admit that sanctions were mostly show and didn’t have any real consequences for the violaters. And for what? Saddam didn’t have any weapons? Either he didn’t have weapons and wanted everyone to think he had (given how he gassed the Kurds I wouldn’t have guessed Saddam was bluffing), OR he had weapons and cleverly hidden them. Either way, he miscalculated our resolve. We as sure as heck don’t want to see terrorists get Nukes or other WMD’s after 9/11. The sad fact is that Bush could have united the world behind us after 9/11 and we could have used that goodwill to go after Iraq, Iran and North Korea. We blew that chance. On the plus side tho, we booted the Taliban from power in Afghanistan and Saddam from Iraq so I’ll give Bush some credit. He kicked some major badass booty. 😀
ZOM, I don’t want to bore you with details; but — just as a minor example — the 16th Century alone witnessed 112 wars on the European continent. There were an additional 19 colonial wars from Hispaniola to Mombasa. If you can call them that. Slaughter of the indigenous peoples is more like it.
Religious and sectarian war exists, of course. It’s a drop in the bucket alongside good old-fashioned greed. The sort of numbers noted above — only get worse in terms of death and destruction — acquisition, power and profit — as you move to “modern” times.
Marxist analysis isn’t required to document any of these. Stodgy sources do quite well. Again, I’m not trying to dump on you. Just point out that reliance on popular sources doesn’t match what academics have produced. It’s what they do. The neat thing about the Web is that a lot of this is more accessible, nowadays.
I think trying to distill all the conflicts down to a matter of economics is a gross over simplification of history.
We probably need to examine several points:
If we are talking about colonialism, then you probably have a good case for economic motivations for warfare. You may also have political reasons for fighting a war such as the American revolution which I admit that economic factors (taxes) had a major component for fighting that war. Various colonies fought for various reasons being political (not liking the way that the Brits were running roughshod over the colonials – pressing Americans into the British fleets, requiring the quartering of British Troops, search and seizure laws, freedoms of speech, press assembly and petition) And then you have religous freedoms (freedom to worship your religion in a country were you are the religious majority)
If you have two groups in conflict and they are differing over religion, then you probably have a religious conflict. Serbians and Croats are basically the same except their religions. Same goes for the Hindi and Urdu
If you got multiple differences between the two groups in a conflict, then you have to determine whether it’s religion, ethnicity, economics or politics as the primary reasons. Considering when the Crusaders swore to free the holy land from the unbelievers, we’d probably want to take them at their word that this was for religious reasons then for economic plundering.
The same goes for Soviet attempts to eliminate religion in their respective countries. If religious conversion doesn’t save the victims (or disavowing the beliefs in something) from persecution, then the conflict is probably not religious in nature. Jews were killed in the Holocaust regardless of their religious conversions, which would make that an ethnic persecution instead. The Armenians on the other hand were forced to convert to Islam by the Turks or be killed, making that more of a religious conflict.
The Marxists thought they had discovered the keys to analyzing history through economic interpretation. But they totally ignored or underestimated one of the most powerful motivations in human conflict, that of hate.
ZEO — we’re getting closer and closer. Take it higher up the food chain, though. Hate is a powerful motivator. It gets you the cannon fodder. We see it around the world, every day. It doesn’t get the logistics of a Crusade together, though. That requires the creeps who see a way to profit from conflict.
My closest friend was the most decorated soldier from his home state in WW2. Everything but the Congressional Medal and he was niminated for that, too. He had 16 months in VA hospital after the war to reflect on everything he’d seen. Since he came from a well-known Republican family, he was asked to run for top state political offices as soon as he was back on the street. He said, “Fine. There’s only one plank I’d like in the platform. In case of war, I want business and industry to function under the same circumstances as the grunts do. Guaranteed NO profit to be derived from the war. Break even is OK. Put in a small cushion if needed; but, NO PROFIT.”
Needless to say, they withdrew the offer.
The Democrats asked him to run after that — not knowing why he wasn’t stumping for the Republicans. He made them the same offer. He got the same response.
ZOE and Ed
Great debate. My hats off to both of you.
I think ZOE’s last sentence in post #16, “…they totally ignored or underestimated one of the most powerful motivations in human conflict, that of hate.” is the true reason for almost all wars with the possible exception of wars of independence
All the European wars were almost all between different ethnic groups, ie the English and French, Slavs against the Turks and Germans, etc. The fact that there might have been economic gain at the conclusion was a bonus to the winner, not the driving force.
Again, great dialog guys.