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The Present Peace Movement by Angelo Mike Exclusive to STR April 17, 2007 I
recently attended a peace conference at Yet,
underlying all the talk about peace was a disturbing undercurrent of
advocating violence, which sometimes explicitly came out. I
thought the peace conference was going to be wholly or mostly dedicated to
peace and non-violence. That would mean respect for the sanctity of
private property and voluntary, social power, whether the property right
to discriminate on your property, own guns, or raise your children how you
wish. The
speakers and moderators are to be commended for their outspoken opposition
to violence, so I wasn’t about to rub their faces in the contradictions
they proposed, which are massive increases in the use of force by the
state. One
woman, Barbara Wein, talked to a room full of us about careers in peace
and conflict resolution. I could tell something just seemed off with her
temperament, which seemed a little superficial and childish. While I
unqualifiedly support her efforts to stop wars, my feeling of uneasiness
about her was confirmed when she included in her resume helping labor
unions, apparently unaware that the main tool of labor unions is extortion. She
later talked about conditions in Libertarianism
has a funny way of shedding light on an entirely different chain of
reasoning than that which most people see. While she saw the gun ban as an
act of peace, I saw it as the most dangerous gang of people on earth
violently disarming hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Like
the war on drugs, the war on guns is futile. It creates black market
profits for gun sellers, who are people who are either dangerous or risky
enough to be willing to sell guns illegally and to enforce their own rules
of the trade without the possibility of legitimate legal recourse against
thieves and frauds. The people most threatened by the gun ban are those
who need cheap guns to defend themselves but don’t want to risk being
aggressed against by the most overwhelming gang of all, the state. It’s
not as if the police, in all their terrible presence in D.C., actually
defend you from murder. D.C. has laws and legislation protecting you from
all kinds of things: sexual harassment, bad business practices, job
discrimination, poverty, ignorance, traffic violations, and drugs. The
only thing they don’t protect you from is crime and the arbitrary power
of the police. The
other week I was walking through the district with a friend when I saw a
police car casually driving down the sidewalk in front of us, apparently
to avoid traffic. A few minutes later, we saw another police officer
giving a parking ticket to some poor guy, which is one of the most
lucrative practices for the police here. Both these policemen were armed.
That should tell you where the government’s priorities are. Wein
might say that the problem is while guns were illegal in D.C. until
recently, gun ownership is prevalent and legal in neighboring states.
It’s true that there are lots of guns surrounding D.C. But nothing short
of a Stalinist crackdown would solve the problem of violence with guns, in
which case I’d only point out the fact that there might be some other
problems with that. On
that matter, I have a favorite quote. There’s a t-shirt
with pictures of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Around the pictures it says,
“The experts agree. Gun control works!” It’s
awfully easy to blurt out such positions that seem like the only possible
sensible ones when you can’t conceive of the consequences of a policy
which extend beyond only the most immediate and obvious. I wonder what the
state can’t do if it can violently compel already violent, gun-loving
people to have peace. This
supposed peace activist also said that, since we need to stop fighting
wars for energy, we need to follow the model of the Europeans, who are
years ahead of us with their use of non-petroleum energy sources. She
really doesn’t intend on anyone using peace to get this end, but
violence. She made no mention of This
is Orwellian doublespeak, in which the meaning behind words is the
opposite of their actual definitions. It shouldn’t surprise Wein if
someone points out to her that when she says she wants peace, she can’t
be trusted to say
what she means. One
attendee to the conference has worked for decades against militarism and
war. Here’s another person who’s done invaluable work on one hand, and
with the other would undue his own efforts. He advocates an end to all
militarism and ostensibly, all war. He’s against military recruiters
coming to schools. Yet
in a discussion about the effect of violent movies on children, he says,
“I don’t believe in censorship, but it’s different for children.” And
where does the state get the power to legislate what children can or
can’t see, even if their parents approve, except with violence?
Presumably, he’s also for public education, in which the state can
extort parents to send their kids to state-funded and -approved schools,
but the line is drawn at military recruitment. He also advocates a return
to true democracy when we have a democracy that does exactly what
democracies do best. Try
as he might, there is virtually no chance of an end to militarism without
the apparatus of militarism. The
last discussion I went to was a roundtable discussion, and one man
attending truly summed up the situation presented throughout the day. In
discussing Latin American gangs, which I’ve learned that governments are
mishandling and magnifying their propensity for violence, this very kind
old man said that the problem for these gangs isn’t just economic. True,
these gang members don’t have many other prospects other than drug
dealing, and they can only join gangs if they want protection. But
according to him, the problem is also a lack of a popular sense of duty to
the downtrodden. To
illustrate his point, he pointed out the popular movements to help the
poor in the 1930s with the Public Works Administration and the Tennessee
Valley Authority. Again,
this is more doublespeak. These programs weren’t peaceful or voluntary.
They didn’t increase wealth or employment, nor were they even targeted
to those who might actually benefit the most from charitable help. They
coerced away resources and jobs from where they were needed the most when
the economy was in a recessionary downturn as a result of government
banking policy. Many acts of legislation of FDR’s New Deal still do
great damage to our economy and still invade our rights. Coincidentally
enough, the last book I’ve read is John T. Flynn’s excellent The
Roosevelt Myth, which explains how these programs were run by FDR
loyalists and targeted to get votes to enable FDR’s unprincipled,
fascist grabs for power. The
man explaining society’s charming sense of brotherhood during the Great
Depression ended by inadvertently summarizing perfectly what the choice
is. He said that these programs were make-work gangs, and that young,
violent gang members today should join these gangs. He
then said that it wasn’t as if they shouldn’t find some kind of gang
to have a feeling of acceptance and chance for a livelihood. He’s not
against all gangs. Then, for all the day’s talk of peace and
cooperation, he summed up the sentiments of everyone at the conference who
argued against one kind of coercive government and wanted another with one
sentence: “It’s the kind of gang we’re concerned about.” Angelo Mike is an economics and public policy major at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia.
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