War Is Peace

The world is filled with people who predict the future, some of these represent themselves appropriately as Fortune Tellers, Psychics, and Tarot Readers but others – especially those in the intelligentsia – represent themselves as strategic thinkers or Futurists. These Futurists are either self-anointed or appointed by society and the media. In either case their public record of accuracy leaves much to be desired. Their prognostications are a mixture of dreams, wishes, and current projections usually mixed with a liberal dose of personal biases. Just because a person has many letters after his name or figures prominently in academic circles or the media doesn’t make them any more of a futurist than the Fortune Teller or the average man-on-the-street. This raises several questions: Should we listen to a "futurist"? Should we act on what one of these self-anointed know-it-all says ? What makes one of these prognosticators more knowledgeable than anyone else ? Remember, Chicken Little wasn't totally wrong. SOMETHING, did indeed fall on his head.

Many of these Futurists are media stars or academics and virtually all are known anti-war advocates, so their dire predictions of the future and urgent demands for total disarmament to gain world peace represents a desire not a future. They base their forecasts on their belief that mankind would not survive World War III because it would be an atomic holocaust. However, this represents their personal bias, not rational thinking. In the 50 years since the Atomic Bomb was first used, it has not been used by any one else. Yet wars have been on-going during that entire time. In fact there has never been a period in world history when there has been world peace. IF there were to be another world war and the current Islamic based terrorism certainly falls into that category, there is no guarantee atomics won’t be used and if they were, I believe mankind is resilient enough to survive it.

Ever since the invention of the Atomic Bomb the anti-war peace at any cost community has been struggling to convince the United States to disarm or at the least to destroy all of our atomic weapons. The rationale appears to be that if the US were to disarm there would be no need for other nations to develop or maintain their atomic weapons and world peace would prevail. What goes unsaid is that the US is an imperial power run by jingoistic politicians bent on world domination – sort of cultural death by forced democracy. The idea seems to be that the Cubans, North Koreans, Indians, etc. are all happy where they are and would be peaceful if the US would just disarm. The naiveté of that is self-evident to everyone but the anti-war activists.

Atomic technology is simple (by today’s standards) and it is unlikely that these arms will ever go away. But having them, having the capability to have them, and using them are very different things. Weapons technology is REPLACED never ABANDONED. Remember, the invention of the crossbow doomed the mounted armored knight. This weapon, even today is formidable. At the time society and the church railed against the use of this "ungentlemanly" way of killing people. They did it anyway and the mounted Knight was doomed. Atomic weapons will be abandoned when there is a better weapon available.

This brings us to the current world situation specifically North Korea and Iran. Both of these countries are determined to become nuclear powers and both Russia and the EU are more than willing to help them. These governments want the revenues and jobs that come with providing this technology to these rogue states. Besides, they are not the ones at risk. It is highly unlikely that either Iran or North Korea would mount a pre-emptive strike on Europe or Russia while it is much more likely that if either of these countries would actually employ their atomic weapons it would be against the US and Israel. The destruction of Israel would not be viewed as any great loss by either the Europeans or Russia since both are highly anti-Semitic and would see this as a positive. A damaged or weakened US would bring these countries back on the stage as world powers both militarily and economically.

These are realities that academia and the political left simply ignore in their belief that the great threat to world peace is the United States and our military. These are people who want to belief and feel rather than think. They reject any fact or critical thinking that would conclude that a strong military is the path to peace and that sometimes war or the threat of war brings peace.