The peace racket--the killer anti war movements

Bruce Bawer:

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.”

This 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 the cold war, or of any war. For the cold war’s real lesson is the same one that Sun Tzu and Vegetius taught: conflict happens; power matters. It’s better to be strong than to be weak; you’re safer if others know that you’re ready to stand up for yourself than if you’re proudly outspoken about your defenselessness or your unwillingness to fight. There’s nothing mysterious about this truth. Yet it’s denied not only by the Peace Center film but also by the fast-growing, troubling movement that the center symbolizes and promotes.

Call it the Peace Racket.

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....

...

There is much more. Like the Victor Davis Hanson article below, this was published in City Journal and both articles should be required reading.

The Democrats have one declared candidate, Dennis Kocinich, who embraces the peace racket and the others are unduly influenced by this dangerous movement. How is a "peace" movement dangerous? They are the useful idiots of the mass murderers of the world. They blame resistance to aggression rather than the aggressor for wars and the killing.

They try to conflate total casualties in wars as if both sides are equally responsible. When it comes to wars they really are only against our side of the war, while pretending to be against war itself.

One way you can tell the people in this racket is the application of the Geneva Conventions. In the peace racket our side is the only one bound by them. Now one in the peace racket condemns the enemy's failure to wear uniforms which endangers all civilians. They don't condemn the enemies use of human shields either, but they are eager to blame our side for civilian casualties. They never complain about the enemies deliberate targeting of non combatants, becasue they blame us for his bad conduct.

These people are unworthy of respect.