Nominees 2003

Today's D op/ed spread was good, comparatively to most days here at the College. The best articles by far were Chris Curran's and Nathan Hedges. Maybe we should invite them to speak on our student panel. I am debating whether COSO will let us start the Curran Fan Society (CFS) at Dartmouth and publish binded collections of his op.eds for ridicously high prices (similar to course readers) at Wheelock Books.

Tom Sowell award nominees: "The anti-war crowd on campus has been busy. In their spirited attempt to find as many facts, figures and statistics to convince other students and faculty members of the dangers of President Bush's policy on Iraq, certain individuals have resorted to more extreme and utterly callous methods.

Late last term several students bearing hand-made signs estimating the number of casualties caused by a hypothetical war against Iraq held a demonstration in Food Court. While I have enjoyed and profited from the many debates on this campus (I consider myself one of the few remaining individuals on this campus who still favors genuine open debate) this demonstration angered me. In a desperate attempt to gain political legitimacy, students in the anti-war crowd in general and specifically those I saw in Food Court have used and continue to use the suffering of the Iraqi people to forward their own political aims and then shed these very same people aside." -Nathan Hughes

"It is imprudent because it eschews the potential for armed conflict from the outset. Peace is a great endpoint for which negotiators should strive. It is not a great starting point, assuming one party wishes the other to modify its behavior, because there is no incentive for the recalcitrant party to change... The problem with pacifism is that it is objectively pro-dictator. Insofar as no one is willing to challenge an oppressive government, with violence if necessary, change is impossible. The strongest will stay in power, not because they are more legitimate or more just than their competitors, but because they are willing to act violently to hold power while their pacifist opponents are unwilling to act violently to seize it...Indeed, so long as the United States is there to counter the threat, pacifism is fairly costless from the European perspective. It may make for a good strategy for Europe, but it would make for feckless U.S. foreign policy, as it would leave us defenseless against those who refuse reasonable overtures to disarm.
-Chris Curran

The second half of Graham Roth's article was better than the first half but the first has been nominated for the Hemant Joshi award.

"But repeatedly President Bush has ignored the doctrine of good stewardship in favor of his own blind political ideology and dogma. This pattern was evident in his rejection of the Kyoto Protocol and his broken promise to provide a serious alternative, as well as by his decision to contradict the State Department's findings and pull U.S. monetary support from the U.N. Population Fund last summer. This malicious decision, based more on pandering to the religious right than anything else, has caused countless preventable deaths all across Africa and Asia due to a lack of properly trained midwives, effective condom distribution or sensible disease prevention education. All of those things could have been attained with moderate U.S. support. President Bush picked politics over humanity and appeased his pro-life supporters by cutting funding to a program that, among other things, helped rape victims get safe abortions. So when Bush calls for a pre-emptive strike against Iraq, I can't help but think about his callous attitude towards humanity."

Last but not least a letter to the editor.
Shimon Peres award nominee AND the Noam Chomsky nominee:
"Last Tuesday's editorial concerning the pro-Israel petition circulated on the Dartmouth campus ("Standing Up in Support," The Dartmouth, Jan. 21) gives the mistaken impression that Israel is a democratic state similar in disposition to "Western" countries like the U.S., France, Germany and Canada. This is sadly far from the truth. Israel is run by an expansionist, intolerant regime dominated by a military elite. Israel remains the only country in the world that has never declared its frontiers. It maintains a brutal, humiliating occupation of foreign, sovereign territories, discriminates on the basis of race and religion, refuses international peacekeepers under U.N. mandate to mitigate or monitor its draconian rule over those who do not belong to its dominant ethnicity, and -- most frighteningly of all -- commands a potent nuclear arsenal for which it declines to disavow first use. The international journalists organization Reporters Without Borders, in its most recent ranking of press freedom throughout the world, placed Israel 92nd among the 139 states and territories surveyed (by way of comparison, the areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority placed 82nd)."

Posted by John Stevenson at 8:56 AM |