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9 February 2003  

U of T Ranks with Ivy League — in Left-Wing Bias

Last week, Andrew Sullivan linked to a Harvard course called "Globalization and Human Values: Envisioning World Community" and wondered whether it wasn't "indoctrination disguised as learning." Not that it will come as a surprise to anyone, Canadian universities are no laggards when it comes to leftist indoctrination. As part of my ongoing, if snail-paced, effort to get a degree of some kind before I die, I was browsing the University of Toronto's website yesterday in search of a course to take later this year. I found listed among the philosophy courses "War and Morality," which is described as follows:

PHL 278H1 S TR 10:30-12 J. Graff
As this is written, and probably when the course is given, Bush's "War against Terrorism" (a misnomer), is being waged and Canada is faithfully joining in the "joy of killing" those who, presumably, either deserve to be killed or at least, are human instruments of organizations which deserve to be destroyed. Of course it is a terrible thing to kill people, shred their limbs and burn them alive. But unless one adopts a principled pacifist stance, one must accept that it is sometimes morally legitimate to kill people en masse, to maim and injure them by the thousands, to turn their properties into rubble, and shatter their political institutions, i.e., to wage war. We will examine historical and contemporary theories bearing on justifications for waging war - just war paradigms and theories of war to end (gross or intolerable) systemic justice. So most of us must accept that waging war may be justified under certain conditions. But unless one is a psychopath, a moral cretin racist, nationalist fanatic or macho nitwit, however, one must also accept that even when waging war is morally legitimate, there are moral limits to who may be legitimately targeted, to the weaponry to be used, to the kinds of individual and cocommunal property which may be turned into rubble, and to what a victor may do once the killing stops. The limits constitute the substance of jus in bello norms whose violations count as war crimes and/or as acts of state or sub-state terrorism. We will take up these issues as well and will explore efforts to explain the kinds of reasons for which people wage war and the kinds of institutional restructuring, if any, which might lead to a world without war.

President Bush seems to be setting the stage for massive, repeated, U.S.-conducted, U.S.-orchestrated, U.S.-supported state terrorism, whose first victims will be the already stricken Afghani [sic] people, all in the name of a war against terrorism. It will be a war of terror against terror, in which super-powerful state terrorists will try to destroy whoever is prepared to attack or to resist them by "fair means or by foul." What looms before us is the threat of an age of techno-barbarism, whose scope and scale we cannot now predict.

02:08 PM |