By Bruce
Bawer *City Journal | 31/08/2007
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. 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.” Many primary
and secondary schools also teach peace studies in some form.
Peace studies initiatives may train students
to be social workers, to work in churches or community health organizations, or
to resolve family quarrels and neighborhood disputes. At the movement’s heart,
though, are programs whose purported emphasis is on international relations. Their
founding father is a 77-year-old Norwegian professor, Johan Galtung, who established
the International Peace Research Institute in 1959 and the /Journal of Peace
Research/ five years later. Invariably portrayed in the media as a charismatic
and (these days) grandfatherly champion of decency, Galtung is in fact a
lifelong enemy of freedom. In 1973, he thundered that “our time’s grotesque
reality” was—no, not the Gulag or the Cultural Revolution, but rather the
West’s “structural fascism.” He’s called America a “killer country,” accused it
of “neo-fascist state terrorism,” and gleefully prophesied that it will soon
follow Britain “into the graveyard of empires.”
No fan of Britain either, Galtung has faulted
“Anglo-Americans” for trying to “stop the wind from blowing.” If the U.S. and
the U.K. oppose a dangerous development, in his view, we’re causing
trouble—Miloševic, Saddam, and Osama are just the way the wind is blowing. Galtung’s
kind of thinking leads inexorably to the conclusion that one should never challenge
any tyrant. Fittingly, he urged Hungarians not to resist the Soviet Army in
1956, and his views on World War II suggest that he’d have preferred it if the
Allies had allowed Hitler to finish off the Jews and invade Britain.
Though Galtung has opined that the
annihilation of Washington, D.C., would be a fair punishment for America’s
arrogant view of itself as “a model for everyone else,” he’s long held up
certain countries as worthy of emulation—among them Stalin’s USSR, whose
economy, he predicted in 1953, would soon overtake the West’s. He’s also a fan
of Castro’s Cuba, which he praised in 1972 for “break[ing] free of
imperialism’s iron grip.” At least you can’t accuse Galtung of hiding his
prejudices. In 1973, explaining world politics in a children’s newspaper, he
described the U.S. and Western Europe as “rich, Western, Christian countries”
that make war to secure materials and markets: “Such an economic system is called
capitalism, and when it’s spread in this way to other countries it’s called
imperialism.” In 1974, he sneered at the West’s fixation on “persecuted elite
personages” such as Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov. Thirty years later, he compared
the U.S. to Nazi Germany for bombing Kosovo and invading Afghanistan and Iraq. For
Galtung, a war that liberates is no better than one that enslaves.
His all-time favorite nation? China during
the Cultural Revolution. Visiting his Xanadu, Galtung concluded that the Chinese
loved life under Mao: after all, they were all “nice and smiling.” While
“repressive in a certain liberal sense,” he wrote, Mao’s China was “endlessly
liberating when seen from many other perspectives that liberal theory has never
understood.” Why, China showed that “the whole theory about what an ‘open
society’ is must be rewritten, probably also the theory of ‘democracy’—and it
will take a long time before the West will be willing to view China as a master
teacher in such subjects.”
Nor has Galtung changed his tune over the
decades. Recently he gave a lecture that was a smorgasbord of wild accusations
about America’s refusing to negotiate with Saddam, America’s secret plans to
make war in Azerbaijan, Nazis in the State Department, the CIA’s responsibility
for 6 million covert murders, and so on. Galtung called for a Truth and Reconciliation
Committee in Iraq—to treat America’s crimes, not the Baathists’.
Galtung’s use of the word “peace” to
legitimize totalitarianism is an old Communist tradition. In August 1939, when
the Nazis and Soviets signed their nonaggression pact, the same Western
Stalinists who had been calling for war against Germany did an about-face and
began to praise peace. (After Hitler invaded Russia, the Stalinists reversed themselves
again, demanding that the West help Stalin crush the Third Reich.) The peace
talk, in short, was really about sympathizing with Communism, not peace. And it
continued after the war, when Stalin’s Western supporters whitewashed his
monstrous regime and denounced anti-Communists as warmongering crypto-fascists.
“Peace conferences” and “friendship committees” drew hordes of liberal dupes,
who didn’t grasp that their new “friends” were not ordinary Russians but the
jailers of ordinary Russians—and that the committees were about not
“friendship” but deception, exploitation, and espionage.
The people running today’s peace studies
programs give a good idea of the movement’s illiberal, anti-American
inclinations. The director of Purdue’s program is coeditor of /Marxism Today/,
a collection of essays extolling socialism; Brandeis’s peace studies chairman
has justified suicide bombings; the program director at the University of
Missouri authorized a mass e-mail urging students and faculty to boycott
classes to protest the Iraq invasion; 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.” (Such New
Age babble often mixes with the Marxism in peace studies jargon.)
What these people teach remains faithful to
Galtung’s anti-Western inspiration. First and foremost, they emphasize that the
world’s great evil is capitalism—because it leads to imperialism, which in turn
leads to war. The account of capitalism in David Barash and Charles Webel’s widely
used 2002 textbook /Peace and Conflict Studies/ leans heavily on Lenin, who
“maintained that only revolution—not reform—could undo capitalism’s tendency
toward imperialism and thence to war,” and on Galtung, who helpfully revised
Lenin’s theories to account for America’s “indirect” imperialism. Students
acquire a zero-sum picture of the world economy: if some countries and people
are poor, it’s because others are rich. They’re taught that American wealth
derives entirely from exploitation and that Americans, accordingly, are
responsible for world poverty.
If the image of tenured professors pushing
such anticapitalist nonsense on privileged suburban kids sounds like a classic
case of liberals’ throwing stones at their own houses, get a load of this:
America’s leading Peace Racket institution is probably the University of Notre Dame’s
Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies—endowed by and named for
the widow of Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s, the ultimate symbol of evil
corporate America. It was the Kroc Institute, by the way, that in 2004 invited
Islamist scholar Tariq Ramadan to join its faculty, only to see him denied a
U.S. visa on the grounds that he had defended terrorism.
Peace studies students also discover how to
think in terms of “deep culture.” How to prevent war between, say, the U.S. and
Saddam’s Iraq? Answer: examine each country’s deep culture—its key psychosocial
traits, good and bad—to understand its motives. Americans, according to this bestiary,
are warlike and money-obsessed; Iraqis are intensely religious and proud. Not
surprisingly, the Peace Racket’s summations of deep cultures skew against the
West. The deep-culture approach also avoids calling tyrants or terrorists
“evil”—for behind every atrocity, in this view, lies a legitimate grievance,
which the peacemaker should locate so that all parties can meet at the
negotiating table as moral equals. SUNY Binghamton, for instance, offers a
peace studies course that seeks to “arrive at an understanding of contemporary
violence in its ideological, cultural, and structural dimensions in a bid to
move away from ‘evil,’ ‘inhuman,’ and ‘uncivilized’ as analytical categories.”
For the Peace Racket, to kill innocents in
cold blood is to buy the right to dialogue, negotiation, concessions—and power.
So students learn to identify “insurgent” or “militant” groups with the
populations they purport to represent. A few years ago, a peace organization
called Transcend equated the demands of the Basque terrorist group ETA with “the
desires of the Basque people”—as if a “people” were a monolithic group for whom
a band of murderous thugs could presume to speak. The complaints that Transcend
made about the Spanish government’s “blockade positions”—its refusal to cave to
terrorist demands—and the Spanish media’s lack of “objectivity”—their refusal
to take a middle position between Spanish society and ETA terrorists—are
standard Peace Racket fare. Similarly, during Saddam’s dictatorship, “peace
scholars” wrote as if Iraq were equivalent to Saddam and the Baath party,
entirely removing from the picture the Shiites and Kurds whom Saddam’s regime
subjugated, tortured, and slaughtered.
The recipes for peace that flow from such
thinking seem designed not only to buttress oppression but to create more of
it. For if democracies consistently followed the Peace Racket’s
recommendations, what they’d eventually reap would be the kind of peace found
today in Havana or Pyongyang.
The Peace Racket maintains that the Western
world’s profound moral culpability, arising from its history of colonialism and
economic exploitation, deprives it of any right to judge non-Western countries
or individuals. Further, the non-West has suffered so much from exploitation
that whatever offenses it commits are legitimate attempts to recapture dignity,
obtain justice, and exact revenge. Have Third World terrorists taken Americans
hostage? Don’t call the hostages innocent victims. After all, as Americans,
they’re complicit in a system that has long inflicted “structural violence” (or
“structural terrorism”) upon the Third World poor. Donald Rothberg of San Francisco’s
Saybrook Institute explains: “In using the term ‘structural violence,’ we
identify phenomena as violent that are not usually seen as violent. For
example, Western economic domination.”
It is this mind-set that leads peace
professors to accuse the U.S. of “state terrorism,” to call George W. Bush “the
world’s worst terrorist,” and even to characterize those murdered in the Twin
Towers as oppressors who, by working at investment banks and brokerage houses,
were ultimately responsible for their own deaths. Barash and Webel, for instance,
write sympathetically of “frustrated, impoverished, infuriated people . . . who
view the United States as a terrorist country” and for whom “attacks on
American civilians were justified” because one shouldn’t distinguish “between a
‘terrorist state’ and the citizens who aid and abet that state.” They also
approvingly quote Osama bin Laden’s claim that for many “disempowered” people,
“Americans are the worst terrorists in the world”—thereby inviting students to
consider Osama a legitimate spokesperson for the “disempowered.” Speaking at a
memorial concert on the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks, George Wolfe
of Ball State University’s peace studies program suggested that we “reflect on
what we as Americans may have done or not done, to invoke such extreme hatred.”
The Kroc Institute’s David Cortright agrees: “We must ask ourselves . . . what
the United States has done to incur such wrath.”
In short, it’s America that is the wellspring
of the world’s problems. In the peace studies world, America’s role as the
beacon of opportunity for generations of immigrants is mocked, its defense of
freedom in World War II and the cold war is reinterpreted to its discredit, and
every major postwar atrocity (the Gulag, the Cultural Revolution, genocide in Cambodia,
Bosnia, Rwanda, and Sudan) is ignored, minimized, or—as with 9/11—blamed on the
U.S. itself.
One peace studies motif holds that the U.S.
intentionally preserves its enemies to justify military expenses. According to
a 2000 article by Michael Klare, professor of peace and world security studies
at Hampshire College, for instance, the Pentagon deplored the prospect of peace
between the Koreas because it “would erase the most menacing of our putative
‘rogue state’ adversaries” and thus “imperil . . . future military
appropriations.” (For Klare, North Korea is only “putatively” a rogue state.)
The director of Cornell’s peace studies program, Matthew Evangelista, blames
the cold war on the U.S. Defense Department and claims that it ended only
because a good-hearted, newly enlightened Gorbachev “heeded the advice of
transnational [peace] activists.” You might think that no one could fall for
such nonsense. But keep in mind that the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and that
students starting college in 2007 arrived in the world a year later. They don’t
remember the cold war—and are ripe targets for disinformation.
As for America’s response to terrorism,
Barash and Webel tidily sum up the view of many peace studies professors: “A
peace-oriented perspective condemns not only terrorist attacks but also any
violent response to them.” How /should/ democracies respond to aggression? Hold
dialogue. Make concessions. 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. The foundation of the
Peace Racket’s success lies in forgetting this lesson. Peace studies students
discover that the lesson of World War II is the evil of war itself and the need
to prevent it by all possible means—which, of course, is exactly what
Chamberlain thought he was doing in Munich. What they learn, in short, is the
opposite of the war’s real lesson.
Warblogger Frank Martin described his visit
to the military cemetery at Arnhem, in the Netherlands, where a teenage guide
said that the Allied soldiers “were fighting for bridges; how silly that they
would all fight for something like that.” Martin was outraged: “I tried to
explain that they weren’t fighting for bridges, but for his and his families’ freedom.”
That teenager articulated precisely the kind of thinking that peace professors
seek to instill in their students—that freedom is at best an overvalued asset
that can hinder peacemaking, and at worst a lie, and that those who harp on it
are either American propagandists or dupes who’ve fallen for the propaganda. In
March, Yusra Moshtat, an associate of the Transnational Foundation for Peace
and Future Research, and Jan Oberg, director of the foundation, wrote that
“words like democracy and freedom are deceptive, cover-ups or Unspeak.” And in
a 1997 speech at a Texas peace foundation, Oscar Arias, ex-president of Costa
Rica and founder of his own peace foundation, described the American
preoccupation with freedom versus tyranny as “obsolete,” “oversimplified,” and
above all “dangerous,” because it could lead to war. In other words, if you
want to ensure peace, worry less about freedom. Appease tyranny, accept it,
embrace it—and there’ll be no more war.
That’s the Peace Racket’s message in a
nutshell—and students find themselves graded largely on their willingness to
echo it. For while the peace professor argues that terrorist positions deserve
respect at the negotiating table, he seldom tolerates alternative views in the classroom.
Real education exposes students to a range of ideas and trains them to think
critically about all orthodoxies. Peace studies, as a rule, rejects questioning
of its own guiding ideology.
Take the case of Brett Mock, who writes in
/FrontPage Magazine/ that a peace studies class he’d taken in 2004 at Ball
State University—“indoctrination rather than education,” as he puts it—had been
“designed entirely to delegitimize the use of the military in the defense of
our country.” The teacher, George Wolfe, “would not allow any serious study of
the reasons for the use of force in response to an attack,” and students were
expected to “parrot . . . back views we did not agree with.” To get full
credit, moreover, Mock reports, students had to “meditate at the Peace Studies
center,” “attend Interfaith Fellowship meetings,” or join Peace Workers—a group
that Wolfe founded and that, according to Sara Dogan of Students for Academic
Freedom, “is part of a coalition of radical groups that includes the Muslim
Students Association . . . and the Young Communist League.” Kyle Ellis, another
Ball State student, added that “Wolfe has required students to attend a screening
of the antiwar propaganda film /Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the War in
Iraq/, without material critical of the film and representing the other side.”
Then there’s Andrew Saraf, who in 2006
objected publicly to the one-sidedness of a peace studies course taught at his
Bethesda high school by /Washington Post/ columnist Colman McCarthy. “The
‘class,’ ” Saraf complained, “is headed by an individual with a political
agenda, who wants to teach students the ‘right’ way of thinking by giving them facts
that are skewed in one direction.” McCarthy shrugged off the criticism, having
long ago admitted his course’s bias: “Over the years, I’ve had suggestions from
other teachers to offer what they call ‘balance’ in my courses, that I should
give students ‘the other side.’ I’m never sure exactly what that means. After
assigning students to read Gandhi I should have them also read Carl von
Clausewitz? After Martin Luther King’s essay against the Vietnam War, Colin
Powell’s memoir favoring the Persian Gulf War? After Justice William Brennan
and Thurgood Marshall’s views opposing the death penalty, George W. Bush and Saddam
Hussein’s favoring it? After a woman’s account of her using a nonviolent
defense against a rapist, the thwarted rapist’s side?” (Note, by the way, the
facile juxtaposition of Bush and Saddam.)
Mock and Saraf are the exceptions—students
who raise questions. One can begin to form a picture of the typical peace
studies student by reading the testimonials by students and graduates that many
of these programs have posted online. Essentially the same story occurs over
and over in these accounts: the privileged upbringing; the curiosity about
other cultures; the visit to the Third World, where the poverty shocks, even transforms,
the student (“I . . . would never be the same after experiencing what I did in
Honduras”); and, finally, the readiness to swallow the peace professors’
explanation for it all—namely, that it’s America’s fault—and to work for
revolutionary change. Many students make it clear that they’re ashamed to be
American; one of them, listing her aspirations, writes, “I envision myself
American, not needing to be embarrassed of it.” They view themselves instead as
“global citizens.”
The more one considers oneself a global citizen,
of course, the less one considers oneself an American citizen whose loyalty is
to the Constitution and its freedoms. Each new global citizen, in fact, transfers
his loyalty to the Peace Racket. No wonder these students often sound like
cultists: “I have pledged my passion, dedication, and undying energy to the
World Peace Program and the ongoing fight for a more peaceful world for all
people.” They may think that they’ve figured out the world (“Global Militarism
and Human Survival . . . has allowed me to analyze how the United States’
military agenda denies indigenous rights and crushes people’s hopes for social
justice all over the world”), but all they’re doing is regurgitating
ideological clichés.
Reading these personal accounts, I remembered
being 17. I’d never been outside North America, but I’d paid attention in
history class and, being curious about the world, had read /The Rise and Fall
of the Third Reich, Babi Yar, 1984/, John Gunther’s /Inside/ series, several
books about the USSR, and much else. I had an uncle who’d been in a Nazi POW camp,
a Polish-speaking grandmother who felt blessed to be an American citizen and
not a Soviet vassal, and a Cuban schoolmate whose father, a journalist, Castro
had tortured and blinded. I knew what totalitarianism was. The young people who
get taken in by the Peace Racket, though, seem not to have had much of a clue
about anything before visiting Haiti or Ghana or wherever. And their peace
studies classes and international adventures don’t exactly wise them up. A
peace studies student at McGill University, recounting her internship with a
“Cuban NGO” (as if there really were such a thing!), refers enthusiastically to
her participation in “the largest demonstration in Cuban history.” She doesn’t
elaborate, but the reference is clearly to a government-organized protest
against the U.S. trade embargo. This perilously naive young woman has no idea that
she was the tool of a dictatorship.
For Canadian Davis Aurini, who in a May 2007
e-mail described himself as “sorely disappointed” by his peace studies
experience, his naively socialist classmates were at least as problematic as
the professors. One prof consistently ridiculed Western “science and
knowledge”: every time he quoted a Western writer, he would mockingly add, “So
he told me,” then clap his hands, then repeat, “So he /tooooold/ me!” and clap
his hands again. “He thought he was some kind of native spiritualist,” explained
Aurini. The classes were “nothing but a disjointed ramble against anything
remotely military or Western. And the students loved it.”
George Orwell would have understood the
attraction of privileged young people to the Peace Racket. “Turn-the-other-cheek
pacifism,” he observed in 1941, “only flourishes among the more prosperous
classes, or among workers who have in some way escaped from their own class. The
real working class . . . are never really pacifist, because their life teaches
them something different. To abjure violence it is necessary to have no experience
of it.” If so many young Americans have grown up insulated from the realities
that Vegetius and Sun Tzu elucidated centuries ago, and are therefore easy
marks for the Peace Racket, it’s thanks to the success of the very things the
Peace Racket despises above all—American capitalism and American military
preparedness.
What’s alarming is that these students don’t
plan to spend their lives on some remote mountainside in Nepal contemplating
peace, harmony, and human oneness. They want to remake our world. They plan to
become politicians, diplomats, bureaucrats, journalists, lawyers, teachers, activists.
They’ll bring to these positions all the mangled history and misbegotten
ideology that their professors have handed down to them. Their careers will
advance; the Peace Racket’s influence will spread. And as it does, it will
weaken freedom’s foundations.