A most ingenious paradox

Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. It’s been said so often, it’s hackneyed, but it deserves repeating in the face of the neo-peace movement. Those of us who remember the lead-up to WWII also remember that it was the peaceniks who gave Hitler the room he needed to build up his army and and his armory. And the peace movement notwithstanding, America got dragged willy-nilly into the war. Fortunately, in those days, when America fought, she fought to win, not to curry world favor. (Or, can you imagine President Roosevelt asking his military advisors whether we might be alienating German civilians if we fought the Battle of the Bulge as aggressively as possible?)

I’m all for peace — but I’m only for peace when peace is possible. The paradox of the peace movement, which demands peace no matter the cost is that it often sets the world up for infinitely greater conflagrations than would have occurred had there been a more aggressive response from the git-go. Anyway, Thomas Sowell says it better than I can:

One of the many failings of our educational system is that it sends out into the world people who cannot tell rhetoric from reality. They have learned no systematic way to analyze ideas, derive their implications and test those implications against hard facts.

“Peace” movements are among those who take advantage of this widespread inability to see beyond rhetoric to realities. 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 are calling 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? Make no mistake about it, innocent civilians died in the process. Indeed, American prisoners of war died when we bombed Germany.

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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.

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?

There’s more, of course, which you can read here.