The peace racket

Some sage truths in an LA Times article called The peace racket. This will sound arrogant: I've been saying this for YEARS.

["Prepare for peace"] purports to be wise counsel, a motto for the millennium. In reality, it's wishful thinking that doesn't follow logically from the history of war, the real lesson of which is the one that Sun Tzu and Vegetius taught: Conflict happens, power matters, and it's better to be strong than to be weak. Human history has demonstrated repeatedly that you're safer if your enemies know you'll stand up for yourself than if you're proudly outspoken about your defenselessness or your unwillingness to fight. Yet this truth is denied not only by the Nobel Peace Center film but by the fast-growing, troubling movement that the center symbolizes and promotes.

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Decent people prefer peace to war, life to death, nonviolence to violence. But they also prefer freedom to tyranny -- and the peace studies movement, all too often, promotes a mentality that plays directly into the hands of despots.

Absolutely. The Koreans just vacated Afghanistan in exchange for some hostages. The Taliban have stated openly that they will pursue more kidnapping operations. Such idiots, the Koreans.

And if there was any doubt that the folks who prefer peace to their own goddamned freedom are socialist scum, enjoy these two nuggets of pure, unadulterated idiocy:

As for America's response to terrorism, David Barash and Charles Webel tidily sum up the view of many peace studies professors in "Peace and Conflict Studies," their widely used 2002 textbook: "A peace-oriented perspective condemns not only terrorist attacks but also any violent response to them." How, then, are democracies supposed to respond to aggression? Should we open an instant dialogue? Should we make endless concessions? Should we apologize? Neville Chamberlain's 1938 capitulation to Hitler at Munich taught -- or should have taught -- that appeasement just puts off a final reckoning, giving an enemy time to gain strength. But the foundation of the peace racket's success lies in forgetting this lesson. What its adherents learn is the opposite: If you want to ensure peace, appease tyranny -- and there will be no more war.

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The people running today's peace studies programs at American universities give a good sense of the movement's illiberal inclinations. Brandeis University's peace studies chairman has justified suicide bombings as "ways of inflicting revenge on an enemy that seems unable or unwilling to respond to rational pleas for discussion and justice." The director of Purdue University's program is the author of the book "International Relations in a World of Imperialism and Class Struggle." And the University of Maine's program director believes that "humans have been out of balance for centuries" and that "a unique opportunity of this new century is to engage in the creation of balance and harmony between yin and yang, masculine and feminine energies."