Notes from HUM111

Today my Humanities class got off to an interesting start with the professor and one other student having a conversation that started with the oppression of women in ancient societies (which is at least relevant to the class) then moved into their personal experiences with marriage and ended with an healthy dollop of anti-war idiocy. After monopolizing the first 20 minutes of class they ended their talk and we as a class then moved onto Oedipus Rex.

Their first two topics I have nothing to comment, as for their views on the Terror War I was dumb founded. Here are their main points, of which they where in complete echo chamber agreement, in no particular order.

1) If the people in Afghanistan and Iraq had wanted to change their governments then they would have done so themselves through peaceful means. By not overthrowing the Taliban or Saddam the people of Iraq and Afghanistan were giving their complicit support to their “leaders” and it was wholly wrong of us to attempt any change.

To believe that one has to have a deep inability to step outside of a narrow jaded Western view were you either “vote the bums out” or shut up about it. As if the people in Iraq or Afghanistan ever (until now) had any say in choosing their form of government. And what of the Northern Alliance that was fighting the Taliban, and had been for years? I guess that comes from the “This fact doesn’t support my thesis so I’ll just ignore it” school of reasoning.

2) Here’s a quote, “More Iraqis are dying each day at the hands of gung-ho American GI’s than Saddam ever killed.” The student stated this and the professor merely nodded her agreement.

Saddam is estimated to have killed over 2 million of his own people during his reign in power. We currently have about 135,000 troops in Iraq. So that means each and every member of the US military is killing at least 15 Iraqis every day. Oh, and Iraq will be totally cleansed in less than a fortnight since the population is only 25 million.

3) The professor finished with the ever so sound logic that since we didn’t go after Stalin, or Pol Pot, or August Pinochet then we had no right to go after Saddam no matter how many people he killed, as long as he confined his murders to his own people.

Sigh.

To be fair the professor is quite old and I feel having a bout with creeping dementia. (she confused the Dardanelles with the Hellespont, pointed to a Thracian village hundreds of miles away from the Hellespont and declared it the site of Constantinople, constantly confuses Greek names – for example referring to Platonian Logic as Homerian Logic and just today stated that Greek theaters where built in “semi-squares”)

Her dementia and lefty thinking conspired to keep my mouth shut. She’s not evil, just old and confused, I shant breath fire on her… I have liberal friends for that.