Doug Ross @ Journal

Democrats' Latest Brainchild: a Department of Genocide

During the 2004 Presidential campaign, Dennis Kucinich had a brainstorm. Why not create a U.S. Department of Peace? Such an agency would be responsible for disarmament, consensus building, and the promotion of nonviolence worldwide.

Stunningly, Charlottesvillian reports that such a plan has now achieved party-wide currency with the introduction of a bill by Democrats. The bill would establish -- I'm serious here -- The Department of Peace and Nonviolence:

For those looking for a distillation, imagine a governmental agency responsible for advising on non-confrontational foreign policy options, establishing and enforcing new gun control measures, designing school curriculum, establishing and enforcing new legislation governing "hate crimes" and violence against animals, and my favorite, establishing a "Peace Academy," a four-year institution of higher learning modeled on our service academies. (Wait, doesn't the Ivy League already have like six of those?)

The bill -- H.R. 808 -- is a work of art. Idealistic, utopian, and nonsensical art, but art nonetheless.


Consider this snippet from Section 2 (Findings):

During the course of the 20th century, more than 100,000,000 people perished in wars, and now, at the dawn of the 21st century, violence seems to be an overarching theme in the world, encompassing personal, group, national, and international conflict, extending to the production of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons of mass destruction which have been developed for use on land, air, sea, and in space...

It would be hard to overstate the ignorance of the bill's authors as they blithely ignore the backdrop of one hundred million deaths.

A simple analysis would ask: how many of those deaths were caused by genocide incited by Nazis, Communists and Socialists who sought to suborn the rights of man to the rights of the state?


The answer would have been the vast majority: Stalin's pogroms, Hitler's genocide, Tojo's militaristic brand of Shintoism, Pol Pot's killing fields, etc.

This naive, guileless proposal suggests that Nazism, for instance, was an act of nature that a legal document with a Force majeure clause could somehow have remedied.


Only one approach could have and did stop the Nazi genocide: pure firepower backed by the will to use it. The free world marshalled a massive juggernaut of armed forces and leveraged a kill-or-be-killed mindset to obliterate the enemy.


Put simply, a thousand-year Reich would have been the result of a Department of Peace had it been in existence during the rise of Nazism.


Could a Department of Peace have stopped the Rape of Nanking, prevented the Nazis from fueling the ovens of Auschwitz with millions of innocents, or successfully negotiated with Pol Pot to halt the Khmer Rouge genocide?


The answer, for anyone other than a blithering idiot, is of course not.

The very real challenges of the 21st Century

If our current challenges were as simplistic and nebulous as H.R. 808 makes them out to be, such a bill might make sense. But, in fact, the threats facing the American brand of freedom are very real and very obvious.


In a 2006 post entitled An Unremarkable Declaration of War, I noted the de facto call to arms against the West by Iran's militaristic leadership:

"We have a strategy drawn up for the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization... ...Is it possible for us to witness a world without America and Zionism? ...you had best know that this... goal [is] attainable."

In a 2005 post entitled The Stockdale Paradox and the Modern Left, I described some of the uncomfortable realities facing the progressive left:

1: On show at [Iran's] annual military parade were thousands of troops and a range of hardware including six of Iran's Shahab-3 ballistic missiles, which sported banners saying "Death to America", "We will crush America under our feet" and "Israel must be wiped off the face of the earth".

2: In the first such statement by an Iranian president in nearly 20 years, Mahmood Ahmadinejad said his election would mark what he termed a new Islamic revolution. Ahmadinejad said such a revolution would spread throughout the world... "The era of oppression, hegemonic regimes, tyranny and injustice has reached its end."

3: [Al Qaeda] spokesman, Suleiman Abu Gheith, published an article on the alneda website that claimed: "We have the right to kill four million Americans - 2 million of them children..."

4: A university student from Egypt was ordered held without bond after prosecutors said they found a pilot's uniform, chart of Memphis International Airport and a DVD titled "How an Airline Captain Should Look and Act" in his apartment...

5: Four men, including the head of a radical Islamic prison gang, were indicted on federal charges of plotting terrorist attacks against military facilities, the Israeli Consulate and synagogues in Los Angeles...

6: Iran... resumed its work at the plant near Isfahan, where uranium oxide (called yellowcake) is converted to uranium hexafluoride gas... This gas is the feedstock for centrifuges that enrich uranium to varying degrees: 4 percent for power plants, 20 percent for research reactors and 90 percent or higher for weapons. This was a clear breach of Iran's agreement to suspend "all uranium enrichment related activities"...

'The Department of Misguided Naivete and World Genocide'

Perhaps a day will come when a Department of Peace will be a practical next step in the advancement of mankind. But so long as dedicated enemies of freedom circle about us, killing scores of innocents on a daily basis, and dedicating themselves to the acquisition of WMDs, pursuit of such a department is misguided at best and treasonous at worst.

If we were to properly name such an agency, it would be called the Department of Misguided Naivete and World Genocide.

I hesitate to call H.R. 808 brain flatulence (you know, because I'm too polite and civil), but that's precisely what it is.

Major hat tips: TigerHawk, Gateway Pundit, and Larwyn.
Also see: BlackFive, Castle Argghhh!, Daled Amos, Keith D. Milby, Say Anything, Solomonia, Sister Toldjah, War on Guns, WE Blog