There’s a lot on the internet about this fellow, Peter Makhlouf, who decided to write some barely comprehensible drivel on Brown University’s school rag. He doesn’t like the idea that there is an ROTC presence at his school. Looking at the Brown University website, it doesn’t look like Brown has much of an ROTC presence there. At the bottom of the page, there is a link to Providence College which tells me that Brown’s students travel to Providence for their military science classes, so in effect, young Peter is barking at the moon, but it’s as if there is no moon.
From the Washington Times;
“This is not science; this is the art of killing and torturing,” Peter Makhlouf wrote in a Feb. 5 column for The Brown Daily Herald, Fox News first reported. “It seems that ROTC’s attempt to recruit academically elite students is a calculated attempt to rope the best and brightest into the industry of state-sanctioned violence.”
Mr. Makhlouf argued that Brown is losing touch with its “rich, anti-military, anti-war history” and that students need to fight to protect its “proud tradition of resistance.”
“By outlawing ROTC and its byproducts on our campus, we have the opportunity to maintain and strengthen a tradition of refusing to capitulate to the increasing demands of military engagement in today’s global agenda,” he wrote. “At a time when we most need a brave intelligentsia to speak out against the craven acts of U.S. imperialism, the thought of extending the poisonous branches of the armed services to our campus should be wholly denounced.”
He sounds like an atheist railing against religion, doesn’t he? What young Peter doesn’t understand, as well as many of his peers, is that he is a student which means he’s attending Brown University to learn, not to preach or to set policy.
His whole screed reeks of his lack of an education, probably because, like many of his political ilk, he thinks that he already knows everything, based on his feelings. Having a military service doesn’t cause wars. Pete. Having people who want to kill you is the reason that we have a standing military. Since having a military is inevitable, wouldn’t you rather have leaders who have experienced the academics and social interaction at Brown among them?
Military science isn’t a study of creating weapons and techniques to torture and kill your enemy. When I was teaching ROTC in Vermont, I taught wilderness survival and rappelling (by the way, you’ll do more rappelling in ROTC than you will anywhere else in the Army). The other instructors taught things like leadership and military history. In fact, one of the other instructors from our battalion at UVM is in the audience here at TAH.
Yeah, we worked on marksmanship for a little bit each school year, but that’s about it. We taught patrolling, but mostly as a tool to teach leadership more than involving the students in warfighting techniques.
I really don’t think that Brown’s “rich, anti-military, anti-war history” is all that important in The Grand Scheme of Things, not compared to our national security needs. Brown University also has a proud and rich history of supporting the country. But some stank-ass hippies think that the anti-war and anti-military history is more important. It’s not as “rich” as Pete thinks.
Like I said, Petie sounds like an atheist who is frightened of being judged by religious people. Fortunately, Pete got beat up pretty good in the comments while they were open, so I think he’s pretty much all alone on Brown in thinking that the few ROTC cadets on Brown are criminals.
