August 21, 2007
Don't miss this one...
The Peace Racket, by Bruce Bawer
An anti-Western movement touts dictators, advocates appeasement—and gains momentum.
If you want peace, prepare for war.” Thus counseled Roman general Flavius Vegetius Renatus over 1,600 years ago. Nine centuries before that, Sun Tzu offered essentially the same advice, and it’s to him that Vegetius’s line is attributed at the beginning of a film that I saw recently at Oslo’s Nobel Peace Center. Yet the film cites this ancient wisdom only to reject it. After serving up a perverse potted history of the cold war, the thrust of which is that the peace movement brought down the Berlin Wall, the movie ends with words that turn Vegetius’s insight on its head: “If you want peace, prepare for peace.”..
....We need to make two points about this movement at the outset. First, it’s opposed to every value that the West stands for—liberty, free markets, individualism—and it despises America, the supreme symbol and defender of those values. Second, we’re talking not about a bunch of naive Quakers but about a movement of savvy, ambitious professionals that is already comfortably ensconced at the United Nations, in the European Union, and in many nongovernmental organizations. It is also waging an aggressive, under-the-media-radar campaign for a cabinet-level Peace Department in the United States. Sponsored by Ohio Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich (along with more than 60 cosponsors), House Resolution 808 would authorize a Secretary of Peace to “establish a Peace Academy,” “develop a peace education curriculum” for elementary and secondary schools, and provide “grants for peace studies departments” at campuses around the country. If passed, the measure would catapult the peace studies movement into a position of extraordinary national, even international, influence.
The Peace Racket’s boundaries aren’t easy to define. It embraces scores of “peace institutes” and “peace centers” in the U.S. and Europe, plus several hundred university peace studies programs. As Ian Harris, Larry Fisk, and Carol Rank point out in a sympathetic overview of these programs, it’s hard to say exactly how many exist—partly because they often go by other labels, such as “security studies” and “human rights education”; partly because many “professors who infuse peace material into courses do not offer special courses with the title peace in them”; and finally because “several small liberal arts colleges offer an introductory course requirement to all incoming students which infuses peace and justice themes.”....
"Peace studies" is just another scam to infiltrate socialism without a vote. It's bullshit, it's batshit, it's pure shit. A scam.
In the world, as in the city, you get peace and prosperity if the cops enforce the rule of law. If not, the crooks take over. If the cops went on strike in San Francisco, a thousand pony-tailed professors or "peace-activist" clergy gassing about negotiations would not stop the criminals. (And every one of those hippie-quaker frauds would be howling for the National Guard to show up with machine guns and protect them!)
On Planet Earth the cops are the United States Army and Navy, with some help from our Anglosphere allies. We are IT, we are peace. The only peace you will get from the "peace studies" commies will be "boiler suits and a long march to nowhere." (A great line from John le Carré.)
Posted by John Weidner at August 21, 2007 8:36 AM