It's Too Cold To Throw Frisbees For Peace Up Here

Inside a Conservative Teach-In By Scott W. Johnson

My presentation on Winston Churchill at St. Olaf College yesterday turned into an unexpectedly exhilarating experience. Rocket Man trekked down to Northfield with his son Eric to lend moral support. I'm grateful for Rocket Man's generous remarks below on the event and Eric's perceptive comments on it afterwards. Please indulge these additional notes.

I was originally invited to submit an application to lead one of 40 seminars to be given at the Nobel Peace Prize Forum hosted this year by St. Olaf College. The students inviting me to submit an application were looking for the expression of a point of view that they thought would be in short supply among the anticipated orgy of hate-America pacifism; Jimmy Carter was to be the keynote speaker and the theme of this year's Forum was announced as "Striving for Peace: Roots of Change." The seminars were to address "grassroots activism."

It occurred to me that Winston Churchill's comprehensive efforts to awaken his countrymen to the dangers posed by Hitler and Nazism while he was out of high office during the 1930's might work as a subject. It would respond to the assigned theme and provide an alternate view of how peace should be promoted. In part, I intended to discuss how Churchill had opposed the English peace movements that had helped bring on World War II.

If there is one thing I have certainly noticed, it is that pacifists in general have no objection to enjoying the benefits of civilization but are unwilling to take the measures necessary to defend it from foreign and domestic barbarians. Such as the National Socialists, the Soviet Socialists, and the home grown socialists of the Democratic Party.

Contrary to their general delusion of virtue, pacifists are in effect, moral and political parasites upon civilized society.

The day I received e-mail notice that the proposed seminar had been turned down I called to ask the program co-chair why it had been rejcted. He told me that the topic involved events so long ago that it would not be of interest to the students attending the Forum. It wasn't until later that I learned that several of the accepted seminars involved historical subjects, although in those cases the seminars rigorously hewed to an anti-American or pacifist line.

Among the seminars and programs scheduled for the weekend were the following:

"Being Peace," a dance seminar: "Understanding peacefulness requires, in part, having experienced it oneself. This session will explore a variety of body-mind activities geared toward generating an inner state of peace. We will work with the movement principle of 'yield,'… which propel adults toward physical, mental emotional and spiritual change."

Which raises the question: Yield to what or whom?

"Making Music, Making Peace: Common Purposes and Shared Skills," a choral workshop: "Many of the skills essential to peace-making are also essential to music-making: listening, envisioning, mutual trust, repair, cooperation, collaboration. People who build their capacities as music-makers are also building their capacities for grassroots peace-making."

Don't be good. Just feel good.

By the way, the term for one who performs an act of collaboration is still a perjorative.

"Peace and Change through Public Art": This project "imagines a fictitious and yet believable National Historic Site sparking both controversy and healing. Amid a massacre site it tells the 500-year story from the perspective of native peoples and culminates with an apology…."

What? Apologize for carrying out the lethal force actions necessary to protect our families and our society from a band of savages that were behaving like a pack of predatory animals?

No fucking way. That is simply insane.

Peace in the real world is simply the absence of those -- such as the socialists -- who seek to deprive you, I, and our fellow citizens of our own Life, Liberty, and Property. Real peace can only be achieved by the physical isolation or outright elimination of those who seek to subjugate, plunder and murder us. This can only be done through the use of physical force.

In short, true peace can only be achieved only through the possession of superior firepower and the moral will to use it.