War is Peace

Bruce Bawer over at City Journal has an uncompromising look at the so-called Peace Movement and sums up its more unbalanced fringe once stripped of its Marxist double talk:

In other words, if you want to ensure peace, worry less about freedom. Appease tyranny, accept it, embrace it—and there’ll be no more war.

This reminds me of something I read in one of Robert Conquest's books where he points out that this attitude is rank nonsense even on its own terms. Using the Communists as his example, Conquest notes that once a tyranny becomes secure in itself the result is not a perpetual albeit repressive peace, but that the tyrants instantly split into competing factions ala the Bolsheviks and the Menesheviks, Hitler and Stalin, or the Soviets and the Maoists and war against one another forever.

Want to find the road to Oceania? Start at your local Peace Institute.