"A government big enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take away everything you have."

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Thoughts on Peace

I wanted to do a follow-up to Some Dude's excellent post about the Nobel Prize. Some Dude pointed out the reality of evil in the world. In my view, the only way to have genuine peace and genuine freedom (which I think always go together) is for this evil to be confronted and either defeated or restrained in some way. Stated more clearly, sometimes war is the only way to achieve peace and freedom.

I think there are many examples in history of this. Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister of England during Hitler's rise to power in the 1930's, signed bogus treaties with the Nazis and returned to England saying "Peace in our time." Of course, there was no peace because appeasement of evil dictators does not lead to peace. The British prime minister who ultimately helped bring about peace and freedom to Europe was Winston Churchill, who was willing to confront and defeat the Nazi threat (with lots of help from the US). The reason South Koreans are able to live in peace and freedom right now is because we fought the Korean War to stop Communism from advancing. And more recently, Ronald Reagan's willingness to speak the truth about the evils of Communism and to stand up to it by means of military buildup, strategic military confrontation, and a refusal to sign unenforceable "peace" agreements resulted in the disintegration of the Soviet Union and collapse of the Berlin Wall. The legacy of Reagan's presidency is a significant period of global peace and a great rebirth of freedom in Eastern Europe. Remember these lessons from history next time you see a bumper sticker on a car that says "War is not the answer," or you hear Barack Obama trying to achieve peace through appeasement of Iran.

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