Face Off: Syllabi should help students understand political realities

F or many people, the term “Ground Zero” was newly
added to our vocabularies that terrible September morning. However,
a couple of years earlier, I had learned about the first Ground
Zero. It wasn’t until I went to college that I learned about
the Wall of Shadows.

The Wall of Shadows, a site in Hiroshima that bears the vestiges
of those instantly incinerated when the United States dropped the
bomb, was never presented alongside the accounts of bravery our
forces put forth in order to defeat Hitler’s Germany in my
American history classes in high school. Once I got to college, I
finally had a history teacher who did not want to keep American
history shrouded in half-truths. He taught us about the effects of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a subject which was presented by most high
school teachers as something that could not have been avoided. We
were taught in high school that Truman made the very tough decision
to drop the atomic bomb on Japan to avoid mass causalities (is that
irony I smell?) and to finally end World War II.

College is the place where all of the preconceived ideas, which
we have either adopted ourselves or had burned into our
subconscious, are suddenly challenged. It is the very purpose of
higher learning to not only introduce us to a past ignored by many,
but to also educate us about the present and our future as well.
Therefore, in times such as these, it is a professor’s
responsibility to discuss the war in class.

Perhaps the most important reason why professors must include
the war in their syllabi and lectures is to help students form
their own opinions and to fight against propaganda. U.S. Senator
Hiram Johnson said in 1917 that “the first casualty when war
comes is Truth,” and nowhere is this more true than the
presentation of “facts” by the media. Much like my
ignorance of the Wall of Shadows, many Americans have murky ideas
concerning history and the role the United States has played in
world affairs. For instance, studies conducted in the 1980s on
Americans knowledge of Vietnam revealed that more than a third of
Americans could not say which side America had supported during the
war, and some believed that North Vietnam had been our allies. One
reason for this historical confusion is the news coverage during
the conflict, which was infused with propaganda. Phillip Knightley,
author of “The First Casualty,” (a history of war
reporting) and the conductor of a study of war correspondents,
described the reporting of the Vietnam War during the early 1960s
as “not questioning the American intervention itself, but
only its effectiveness. Most correspondents despite what Washington
thought about them, were just as interested in seeing the United
States win the as was the Pentagon.”

Vietnam proved the unreliability of the media and thus presents
college professors with a greater responsibility to help students
uncover the truth for themselves. In times of war, it is
understandable that the news must be censored on some level for
security reasons. Although, as we learned in the aftermath of
Vietnam, events that occurred there which posed no threat to
national security were ignored by the media. For instance, famous
atrocities such as the My Lai massacre only emerged after or toward
the end of the war.

Much like the atrocities of that conflict, the casualties of
Iraqis thus far have been underreported as well. As reported by
Harpers Magazine in November 2002, U.N. records concerning
sanctions against Iraq (which has resulted in the deaths of an
estimated 500,000 Iraqi children) remain confidential and hidden
from public scrutiny.

The nature of reporting is supposed to be one that is presented
without bias. This is an impossibility, however, as events are
always presented with a political slant, however slight that slant
might be. Because the media usually present news that does not
confront American policy, it is up to college professors to
encourage students to question what is going on.

Professors must include the war in their syllabi to direct
students toward the truth. Times have not changed much since
Vietnam. Because of the inconsistency of the media and the way
“facts” are presented, professors bare the brunt of
inspiring students to seek the truth.

Sizgorich is a fourth-year English student. E-mail her at
[email protected].