Editor,
One of the many failings of our educational system is that it sends people out into the world who cannot tell rhetoric from reality.
Peace activists are among those who take advantage of this widespread inability. Few people even seem interested in the actual track record of so-called peace movements - that is whether such movements actually produce peace or war.
Take the Middle East: People called for a cease-fire in the interests of peace, but there have been more cease-fires in the Middle East than anywhere else. If cease-fires actually promoted peace, the Middle East would be the most peaceful region on the face of the earth instead of the most violent.
Was World War II ended by cease-fires or by annihilating much of Germany and Japan? There is a reason why General Sherman said "war is hell" more than a century ago, but he helped end the Civil War not by cease-fires or bowing to world opinion, but with his devastating march through Georgia. There were no corrupt busybodies like the United Nations to demand the substitution of military force with diplomacy.
There was a time when it would have been suicidal to threaten, much less attack, a nation with much stronger military power, because that would bring the prospect of annihilation. World opinion, the U.N. and peace movements have eliminated that deterrent. An aggressor today knows that if his aggression fails, he will still be protected from the full retaliatory power and fury of those he attacked because there will be hand-wringers demanding a cease-fire, negotiations and concessions.
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That has been a formula for never-ending attacks on Israel in the Middle East. The disastrous track record of that approach extends to other times and places - but who looks at track records?
Remember the Falkland Islands war, when Argentina sent troops into the Falklands to capture a little British colony in the South Atlantic? Before there were peace movements and the U.N., sending troops into those islands could easily have meant finding British troops or bombs in Buenos Aires.
The most catastrophic result of peace movements was World War II. While Hitler was arming Germany to the teeth, peace movements in Britain were advocating that their own country disarm as an example to others. The British Labour party voted consistently against military spending, and British college students publicly pledged never to fight for their country.
If peace movements brought peace, there would never have been World War II. Instead, the Western democracies lost virtually every battle the first two years of the war, because prewar peace movements had left them with inadequate military equipment, much of it obsolete. The Nazis and the Japanese knew that. That is why they launched the war.
Peace movements don't bring peace, but war.
Thomas Sowell
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