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06 Sep 2007 05:58 pm

The Problem With "Peace Studies"

They're an ideology masquerading as scholarship. Bruce Bawer puts his finger on something:

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.

The New Criterion concurs:

"Peace Department"? Where is George Orwell when you need him? Why not just call it the "Ministry of Peace" (right next door to the Ministry of Love and down the street from the Ministry of Truth) and be done with it?

… For our part, we think Rudyard Kipling came closer to the truth in "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" (1919):

When the Cambrian measures were forming,
They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons,
that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us
and delivered us bound to our foe …

Somehow, we rather doubt that the works of Kipling feature on the syllabus of the peace studies racket.

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