Month: September 2004

After I read the letter Edward linked to below, I googled Professor Kozloff, and found his web page, with a link to this letter on it. I also read some of his other papers, and discovered that when he describes the version of education he seems to prefer, he repeatedly invokes philosophers to justify it. (He has the fascinating idea of basing an educational philosophy on Plato, Aristotle, and C.S. Peirce, who, last I checked, didn’t have a whole lot in common.) The philosopher he mentioned most often, in the works I read, was Plato, and in particular Plato’s myth of the cave. Thus he writes: “The classical role of teacher is to educate students—from the Latin word educare, to lead forth—out of the cave of ignorance and false belief and into the open air where students, using observation and reasoning strategies (inductive and deductive logic) can come to know how things are.  (See Plato, Republic, 29, 514a-521b.)”

I would ordinarily assume, out of courtesy, that Professor Kozloff is not just using Plato ornamentally — dressing up his pages with him, as though he were a sort of tony festoon — but that he has actually read the Republic. But I can’t, since the letter he has posted is so flatly at odds with Plato generally, and with the myth of the cave in particular, that no one who had actually read and tried to understand Plato, and who agreed with him enough to cite him approvingly, could possibly have written it.

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There’s a reprinted “Letter to Our Enemies” on the blog called Horsefeathers. I’ve only just discovered this blog and so don’t have a good sense of its reputation, but it looks like a LGF sort of place. The author of the letter is Martin Kozloff, Professor of Education at The University of North Carolina at Wilmington (or so Horsefeathers indicates).

Normally I would ignore this sort of thing, but this one is truly out there, or I would respond at the source, but I’m not at all certain I could control what I end up writing there—occassionally I’m a bit of a hot head—so I’m posting my response here, where I have some control over what gets written.

Here’s an excerpt from Professor Kozloff’s letter to a somewhat ill-defined group of Arab-Muslims (one has to assume all of them):

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.

As cowards, you will have your hands in the air and you will get on your knees begging for mercy. And we will instead give you justice. Your actions and your words long ago placed you far from any considerations of mercy. You are not men.

And if you come to this country and harm a child, shoot a mother, hijack a bus, or bomb a mall, we will do what we did in 1775. Millions of us will form militias.

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.

Congratulations Professor Kozloff. I am now officially and sincerely more afraid of you than I am the terrorists.

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As I’ve written before, one of my best friends has been covering the war in Iraq for the Chicago Tribune (here’s a letter to the editor about a recent story he wrote [registration required]…you can search for the stories themselves if you like….his name is Mike Dorning). He’s home safe again (thank God), so I don’t feel I’m tempting fate anymore by writing about him. I suspect his girlfriend and family and friends will testify to have him committed if he agrees to return again, for what would be an obnoxiously overachieving 5th stint.

Mike has covered wars before and been kidnapped or carjacked more times than I care to remember. He doesn’t always write stories about those parts of his job either, and he sees the fear and anger in our eyes when he tells us some of those adventures, so I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he was often in more danger than he admits to.

In Iraq he saw some of the worst of it. From being blindfolded and led off to the secret hideaway of the PKK to travelling embeded with troops fighting in the cities who he’d get to know and like and then have to describe their deaths, Mike has gone, as best he can, where the harder story is. He’s very smart, trained, and careful, but I’ve known him for 20 years and have been worried sick waiting for the KGB to release him in the Soviet Union when we went and, more harrowing perhaps, have been kicked out of Irish bars in New York with him (not an easy thing to achieve), so I know he’s not invincible.

I was thinking about Mike and what he’s seen in Iraq when I read this piece on photojournalists in the NYTimes today. The writer is arguing that the “defining photographic images of Iraq were taken by amateurs in the prison at Abu Ghraib” not the professional photojournalists (who in Vietnam captured the sort of images that inspired the belief that “all great war photography is essentially antiwar photography”) and tries to explains why he believes this is:

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Allawi gave a very good speech before Congress today. There are many things in it to praise, including his forceful commitment to holding elections in January and his spirited testament to the hope, pride, and faith of Iraqis:

Iraq is still a nation with an inspiring culture and the tradition and an educated and civilized people. And Iraq is still a land made strong by a faith which teaches us tolerance, love, respect and duty.

Kerry is already calling it “unrealistic” but that’s more or less because Allawi is painting with the same overly optimistic brush Bush uses, and Kerry’s not distinguishing between the two (for more or less the same critique, see his speech at NYU the other day).

For me (being easily swayed as I am), Allawi made a compelling case that patience and commitment could pay off. But, just as when President Bush insisted before the UN the other day—

Since the last meeting of this General Assembly, the people of Iraq have regained sovereignty.

—Allawi lost me with

They warned that there could be no successful handover of sovereignty by the end of June. We proved them wrong. A sovereign Iraqi government took over control two days early.

If anyone in the world knows just how false that last statement is, it’s Allawi. He’s not the leader of a sovereign government. He knows he’s not. He may have simply tried to put an optimistic spin on the fact that he’s less powerful than Negroponte at this point, but there’s a point when listening to someone who’s trying to persuade you at which you begin to mistrust everything they say. That point is often a statement they make you know they don’t believe.

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