A "peace racket"?

Neville Chamberlain: a specter that never leaves the necons' side

I've begun to think that with articles by neoconservatives criticizing someone else - The Liberals, sissies who oppose war, Appeasers (and there's never a shortage of Appeasers and Chamberlains for our brave Churchills to criticize) - you almost need to "reverse engineer" the thing to see what positive point they are trying to make before you can make any sense at all of the article.

I was especially reminded of this when I saw The Peace Racket by Bruce Bawer City Journal Summer 2007; an abridged version by the same title appeared in the Los Angeles Times 09/02/07. Mercifully, the latter is a much shorter version. The comments and quotes here are from the City Journal version.

Based on his article, Bawer sounds like a neoconservative, although fewer people are anxious to pigeonhole themselves into that slot as the Iraq War disaster continues to unfold. But he could be an "oldo"-conservative, too, from his McCarthyist brand of argument. His article is mostly about the academic "peace studies" courses that are found at a number of universities. These programs tend to focus on conflict-management and negotiating skills, although they also study the historical causes of war and social conflicts.

At least that's my impression of the "peace studies" academic niche, of which I first learned as follows. The San Francisco Rotary Club #2 (the second Rotary Club established after the original in Chicago) has sponsored a scholarship for students in the peace studies program at UC-Berkeley. I heard a couple of presentations at the Rotary Club about "peace studies", which is mainly how I got the impression I related above.

Rotary understandably has a rather stodgy image. But they are very much and international organization, and one of their main goals is to promote international understanding, particularly among businesspeople. For several years, I provided volunteer administrative support to a Rotary program that provides training for eye surgeons in Nicaragua, Chile, Armenia, Zimbabwe (before political conditions there deteriorated so badly) and Vietnam. Rotary is not known in any of those countries as a left-wing organization. Rotary International was a leading advocate of the United Nations during the Second World War. The San Francisco Rotary actively promoted the 50th anniversary observation in 1995 of the UN's founding.

So I was immediately skeptical to learn from Bawer's article that "peace studies" was basically a big ole Stalinist plot to assist the Islamunist world conspiracy. Because, you know, secular-minded Communist atheists put so much energy into promoting Islamic fundamentalism.

The first few paragraphs of Bawer's article reminded me of something Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., relates in his book A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (1965). When Kennedy first established the Peace Corps in 1961 under the leadership of Sargent Shriver, some critics "objected to the name 'Peace Corps' on the ground that the word 'peace' had been expropriated by the communists".

I knew the article was dubious-to-worthless by the end of the second page, though I did go on to read the whole thing. But I couldn't refute many of his particular assertions without at least a week's worth of research. So I found myself asking just what it was specifically that signalled to me the article was questionable.

Here's the short version:

• The first 10 paragraphs are largely devoted to insinuating that "peace studies", as well as Congressman Dennis Kucinich's proposal for a Peace Department, are all based on Stalinism and hatred of America.

• His polemics in paragraphs 5-10 against Johan Galtung, who he describes as the founder of the Journal of Peace Studies, are based on unsourced, very brief quotations that don't come close to bearing the burden of the accusations he tries to build on them.

• The article is full of sharp polemics, but at least in the version I've linked, it has no footnotes or hyperlinks or other clearly identifying references that would allow a reader to easily check his sources.

• It's no surprise to me that there are vast worlds of academic scholarship that are unknown or scarcely known to me. But reading this article, I didn't recall ever hearing of most of these people that he polemicizes against. I had only heard of Michael Klare, Tariq Ramadan and the columnist Colman McCarthy. (And I knew enough about Ramadan to know that his assertion about him was at best very questionable.) And since I've been following war critics from paleo-conservatives like Pat Buchanan and Justin Raimondo, to members of Congress like Robert Byrd and Nancy Pelosi, to "left" writers like Tom Hayden and Gabriel Kolko, it makes me wonder just how much influence these people he discusses have.

• He references David Horowitz's crackpot Web site FrontPage Magazine (though not specifically enough to directly check the reference). Horowitz and his Web site are known for promoting a highly dubious campaign to smear professors who deviate from the Republican Party line. And, in general, spews McCarthyite nonsense.

• The general tone and method of argument sounds like something written by and for octogenarian John Birchers.

Considering all these things, I'm confident that the article is junk. You don't need to have a ready-made objection to every line to judge an article like this.

And what have been the consequences of all the sinister "peace studies" conspiring and corrupting of the youth and undermining of the Will of the Nation?

Bower explains: Some guy you never heard of once said something positive about the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Some other guy you've never heard of who has some connection with "peace studies" co-edits a magazine you never heard of called Marxism Today (check it out on the magazine rack at Safeway). "Peace studies" attempt to understand factors that lead to terrorism (in today's Republican Party, trying to understand The Very Scary Terrorist Enemy is itself a sign of testosterone deficit). Some group you never heard of has made suggestions for ending the decades-old conflict between the Spanish government and the reactionary Basque separatist group ETA.

And that's not all! Yet another guy you've never heard of from a San Francisco institute you've never heard of thinks Western economies are dominant in the world (which I thought was a foundation assumption of neocon geopolitics, but what do I know?). Some blogger you've never heard of was disappointed in the teenage guide he had one time when he was touring a military cemetery in the Netherlands. The former president of Costa Rica once warned that Manichean definitions of countries into good and evil might not make for optimal foreign policy strategy. A couple of conservative students find it distressing to be required in college classes to think about ideas they don't commonly encounter at Instapundit or Michelle Malkin's blog. And some college graduates sound like that might be recent college graduates instead of brain-dead Bircher octogenarians.

God save the Empire! Because it's obvious the Stalinist Islmunodefeatocratists are about to swamp the Homeland!

But what is the reverse-engineered version of Bawer's article?

Basically, it's the core assumption of neoconservative foreign policy: It's always 1938 and the West is always on the verge of selling out Czechoslovakia to Hitler because of lack of testosterone. Compromising with bad guys is wrong. Diplomacy is for pussies.

Here's Bawer's version of Eternal 1938:

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. (my emphasis in bold)

Let's take him at his word that he thinks that the "real lesson" that our neocon Churchills know is the opposite of the Stalinist Defeatocrat one, which in his version is, "the lesson of World War II is the evil of war itself and the need to prevent it by all possible means".

Now, I know I'm not washed in the blood of Leo Strauss. But isn't the opposite of that, "war is good and there is no need to prevent it by all possible means"?

That's pretty much what neocon foreign policy comes down to, isn't it?

Tags: bruce bawer, peace studies, neoconservatives, rotary international, san francisco rotary club