Rep. Dennis Kucinich, (D-Ohio), whose spaceship should be landing any day now to take him back to the planet Zaxxon, called for a federal “Department of Peace” in the aftermath of the Newtown, Connecticut massacre.
Kucinich blathered that there is a “cultural matrix” in the United States that is the progenitor of violence:
On a global level, this type of thinking justified war and brings the slaughter of innocents. Nationally, it sows seeds for murder. Yet war abroad and violence at home are not inevitable. We have it within our power to recreate America today. Let us create an organized, structured approach to become architects of a new culture of peace in our homes and our schools and our workplaces. This is what the Department of Peace is about. Let us establish in America, where national security and peace at home includes jobs, housing, physical and mental healthcare, education, retirement security for all.
Kucinich has called for a Department of Peace before; his bill has more than 60 Democrats who co-sponsor such a monstrosity. The calls for a Peace Department, which are related to Peace Studies curricula in universities, have ominous overtones.
Norwegian professor Johan Galtung established the International Peace Research Institute in 1959 and the Journal of Peace Research five years later. He is the recognized founder of Peace Studies as a field for academics to pursue. He is openly pro-communist, anti-capitalist, and anti-American. He visited the mass murderer Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution and gave him high marks for his work as well as praising Fidel Castro for “break[ing] free of imperialism’s iron grip.”
On the other hand, he stated that the “structural fascism” of the West is “our time’s grotesque reality” and called the United States a “killer country” of “exploiters” and “dominators” guilty of “neo-fascist state terrorism” that has caused “unbearable suffering and resentment” around the world.
Galtung’s coreligionists include Harry Targ, head of Peace Studies at Purdue University, coeditor of Marxism Today, whose essays s praise socialism as an economic system; Cornell’s Matthew Evangelista, who bloviated “the United States intends to continue its military domination of the world”; and Gordon Fellman of Brandeis University, who cried: “If [the War on Terror] is about terrorism and terrorism is the killing of innocent civilians, then the United States is also a terrorist.”
David Barash and Charles Webel’s Peace and Conflict Studies, a widely used textbook for peace studies programs, twists the Cold War by intimating that the Soviet Union was a sponsor of peace movements while the United States was the militaristic, imperialist power that peace movements have to block. The book approves of Osama bin Laden‘s claim that in the eyes of many “disempowered” people, “Americans are the worst terrorists in the world.”
Kucinich may be dismissed as being one brick short of a load, but the calls for a Peace Department are quite real and quite dangerous.
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