But anyway, Capt. Stoneback got the following letter published in that Sioux Falls paper* a couple weeks ago. I am happy to reprint it here as a yet another fine product of the Lake Herman Brain Trust (that's Lake Herman for you: seat of elitist radicalism that might save the world).
House Bill HR 808 would create a Department of Peace and Nonviolence. The primary function will be to research, articulate and facilitate nonviolent solutions to domestic and international conflict. This bill to date has 68 cosponsors but unfortunately our Rep Herseth-Sandlin is not among them.
Although I am a retired U. S, Navy Captain who has spent many years in the submarine launched ballistic missile program I have become convinced in later years that neither war or the spending on our vast military industrial complex have made us a safer or richer nation. Our Civil War left a half million combatants dead but it wasn’t until the active nonviolent movement of Martin Luther King that our black citizens achieved a degree of equality. World War I was to end all wars but severe war reparations on Germany led to the rise of Hitler and an even deadlier war. The power of active nonviolence was proven most effective in two other post World War II situations. The first was Gandhi”s active nonviolent march in removing the British from India. The second was active nonviolence by Polish shipyard workers as well as citizens of East Berlin and Czechoslovakia and finally Russia in ending the Cold War. We claimed it was a just war in Viet Nam to save the world from Communism and another just war in Iraq to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. In Viet Nam our defeat resulted in a nationalistic independent nation and I suspect the same will happen in Iraq. Unfortunately we leave hundreds of thousands of collateral dead in addition to precious blood of our youth and trillions of dollars in debt to burden future generations.
Is it not worth spending a small portion of our defense budget to explore nonviolent solutions to conflict? If you agree, ask Rep. Herseth-Sandlin to sign on to the Department of Peace bill and to ask Senators Thune and Johnson to introduce a similar bill in the Senate.
Seems to me peace and nonviolence are pro-life issues. Maybe if South Dakotans would stop obsessing over sex and making women second-class citizens, we could make some real progress toward making life better (and longer!) for our soldiers and for people around the world.
Just a question, Cory. How can you feel so passionately for a Department of Peace when you don't oppose abortion which is definitely a form of violence against unborn humans? Where is there a "Department of Justice" for them?
ReplyDeleteI'll admit that wars shouldn't be the solution to problems, but unfortunately given human nature of free will to choose good vs evil, there will always be some people who cannot be dealt with without war. Even the Bible says there will always be wars and rumors of wars. I believe in the goodness of most people, and that most people just want to live in peace, but unfortunately there are some who will take advantage of that (Hitler, Pol Pot, Iran's leader, Saddam, etc etc etc). If diplomacy would work, that would be great, and it should definitely be the first line of defense, but sometimes this just won't work. In an ideal world, yes, but in reality, no.
Actually, I feel less passionately about a Department of Peace than I do about opposing bad laws that would strip women of their constitutional rights to satisfy the political agenda of sex-obsessed theocrats.
ReplyDeleteI agree with much of your second paragraph, Anon. I agree that sometimes we may have to march off to war to survive. But Kucinich's legislation makes the point that our country hasn't even been using diplomacy as the first line of defense you refer to. The legislation doesn't call for diarming the military; it calls for strengthening the values of peace and nonviolence in our foreign policy.