Posted on 02/26/2003 4:55:07 PM PST by mikeb704
If a Korean War veterans group had wanted a softball presentation by a speaker they would find agreeable, they shouldn’t have called Peter Kirstein.
More than simply being anti-war, the St. Xavier University history professor
just might be the sharpest
and most outspoken critic
of the military within a
reasonable drive of the North Shore.
In a sometimes heated
exchange with a Wilmette-
based veterans’ roundtable recently, Kirstein debated the impending conflict with Iraq, but also blasted the military’s growing role in foreign policy and its conduct in all modern wars.
“We normally hear that it’s the military that is responsible for our freedom. I would like to argue the opposite. War frequently is a threat to freedom. When the United States participates in a war, there is actually a reduction,” Kirstein said, citing laws that led to the arrests of war protesters in World War I and the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II.
“During World War II, there were 120,000 U.S. citizens put in concentration camps. They lost their families, their businesses, their education,” he said.
Kirstein said the sense of patriotism that leads people to honor veterans and the military often encourages unquestioning obedience and paints dissenters as unpatriotic during wartime.
Job threatened
Finding those limits of free speech became more than an academic exercise for Kirstein last fall. He found himself under intense scrutiny after he fired off an angry e-mail to a cadet at the Air Force Academy.
In responding to a request to help advertise an annual academy assembly, Kirstein called on the cadet to resign and wrote he would not support the effort or “your aggressive baby killing tactics of collateral damage.”
Kirstein and the university quickly apologized to the academy and smoothed matters over, but the e-mail was widely circulated and led to thousands of angry responses, many calling for his firing.
He ultimately was suspended from teaching for the rest of the fall semester and is spending the spring semester on sabbatical. He intends to return in the fall.
“I should have been more respectful toward him,” Kirstein said.
But while he regrets his choice of words, he has not backed away from his core positions. And as a result of the incident, he has had more requests for appearances.
“I am trying to use this as a means to be part of the debate on war and peace,” Kirstein said.
Is war wrong?
“There is no doubt that many enter the military out of a perception of service and duty,” Kirstein said. “There is no doubt that many of them are not eager for war and do not desire combat, but in this country, we sanctify the military. We glorify the military.”
“The problem is we are so consumed with honoring those that serve that we avoid the root question. Why all this killing? Why all this war?” he added.
Kirstein said he is a pacifist who believes all war is wrong but believes each war should be examined on its own terms. He said a war against Iraq would be immoral and would not make America safer.
He noted the United States deterred a much stronger enemy, the Soviet Union, from using weapons of mass destruction, and Iraq also held off from using them previously to avoid the possibility of nuclear retaliation. He said inspections and cooperation with other countries should be pursued.
“It simply makes no difference whether he has weapons of mass destruction or not. He won’t use them. Also, I can understand his desire to develop them. North Korea is treated gingerly and Iraq is not,” Kirstein said in an interview following the meeting.
Kirstein said America is losing prestige and feeding resentment in many parts of the world because it holds its own actions and that of key allies to very different standards than others, especially Muslim nations.
Veterans respond
Kirstein’s audience found little agreement with his views, especially the notion that the second atomic bomb used in World War II amounted to genocide. The group had invited Fred Olivi, the co-pilot on the Nagasaki bombing mission. Olivi, who lives in the south suburbs, cancelled due to family reasons.
Bob Klein of Wilmette arrived with the Army in Japan shortly after the surrender in 1945 and has no regrets the bomb was used. Klein also teaches military history at Loyola University.
“If you could have seen the condition of the Americans held as prisoners, it would have turned your stomach. Our hatred of them was well deserved,” Klein said. “If for no other reason, we owed them retribution at Nagasaki.”
Others said Kirstein’s views came from a “blame America first” instinct.
Stuart Wilson, the moderator of the Korean War veterans group, said he didn’t regret bringing Kirstein to the group. He was the second speaker in recent meetings to bring a more extreme anti-war perspective. The group meets once a month at the David Meskill Senior Center of the Wilmette Park District’s Community Recreation Center.
“I thought, let’s get that guy up here to talk to these veterans, none of whom are baby killers. We obviously are going to have a difference of views. Kirstein is out in left field in a number of areas. Nobody changed his mind and he didn’t change our minds, but there was an exchange of ideas,” Wilson said.
Wilson left law school during the Korean War to co-pilot B-29s on photographic missions over Korea and the Russian coast. In many cases, he flew at night and used flash-bombs to light up the terrain.
Kirstein did find support on free speech issues. Several veterans said he deserved his lumps in the arena of public opinion, and they were willing to deal some of those blows, but they said he shouldn’t be punished for his views.
“They didn’t feel sorry for him, but they didn’t think he ought to lose his job for it,” Wilson said.
From what planet does this professor come?
Kirstein called on the cadet to resign and wrote he would not support the effort or “your aggressive baby killing tactics of collateral damage.”
Whew! He's not an alien afterall....
At many so-called institutions of higher learning, they live in their own little (anti-American) dream world.
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