University of Virginia Library

Taz Daughtrey

Give Peace A Chance

"All we are saying is give peace a
chance."

The voices are plaintive, the
sentiments deeply felt and sincere,
the vision noble. From all across
our great country — from Woodstock
to Berkeley, from Fort
Lauderdale to Toronto — the song
has been taken up. Peace, Peace
now, Peace at any price.

It is a plea for sanity. It is a cry
for the recognition of the true
brotherhood of all mankind. It is a
call to help usher in the kingdom of
heaven on earth. Lamb lying down
with the lion and all that stuff, you
know.

I must admit I agree with the
goal. The decade of the 60's, which
we have now thankfully escaped,
was one of unimaginably tragic
waste: wars, assassinations, riots.
How we do need peace. Yet,
however worthy the goal, these
most vocal and visible of my
generation are going at it all wrong.

The logic of many, it seems, is
that the absence of immediate
conflict is the first and only
requisite for a happier, healthier,
more hopeful life. But the secret in
the parable of the lamb and the lion
is that the lamb could not only lie
down to rest beside the lion but
also find the lion as gentle and
unaggressive.

The key today is not that we
have it in our power to divest
ourselves of all our nuclear, conventional,
chemical, and bacteriological
weapons, down to the very last
M-16 and slingshot. The key so
often overlooked — whether wistfully
or mischievously — is that we
are powerless to so disarm two
other great giants, similarly armed
with the means of vast destruction,
who are dedicated to the
forceful imposition of their societal
system on all other peoples.

There is no doubt the Judeo-Christian
ideal is strongly contrary
to our modern warfare state. The
traditional religious and moral
norms upon which Western civilization
has been built are quite
definite on this question. Thou
shalt not murder. War is technically.
— legitimated mass murder. Ergo,
thou shalt not war. What could be
clearer?

Nothing. Not even our own
experience is so wondrously clear.
We live in a world where men, their
relationships and institutions, are
far from perfect. We live in a world
of human cruelty, greed, and
depravity. We live in a world which
all too easily breeds Hitlers, Stalins,
Mao Tse-tung's. How can we expect
paradise amid the hell-machines so
many eagerly construct?

Peace now? The only peace we
can have overnight comes from
unilateral surrender, is to be bought
by our abdication from a role of
active concern for the fate of the
rest of the world. It may mean a
lack of direct hostilities for a short
while but ultimately comes the
final peace of subjection, the calm
relief in slavery. If you think peace
is an absolute good, then please
consider the peaceful past two
years Prague has enjoyed.

Have we orated such lofty
thoughts about popular sovereignty,
justice, and world order only to
have our words ring deathly hollow
when action is demanded? Are we
paralyzed so by feelings of doubt
and guilt that we cannot see the
lessons of history being rewritten
on our daily newspaper front
pages?

The infamy of the Nazi juggernaut
we can all now see so as to
justify our role in armed conflict of
opposition. A mournful but justified
role. Yet how can we ignore
the threat of today's would-be
world conquerors, so close upon us
and just as evil?

Our current dilemma is in South
East Asia. Not merely in the
artificially neat compartment of
South Viet Nam, or in Laos, or
even in Cambodia. We face an
Indochinese war, conceived and
coordinated as a single great thrust
against freedom.

Many experts can be marshaled
on either side to argue the tactical
advisability of military ventures, in
geopolitical terms. There is a much
more direct case to be stated. In
human terms, we are talking about
the further consolidation of a
totalitarian hold on fully one-quarter
of the world's population
and the possible expansion of this
enslavement to another one-quarter
living on the Asiatic rim of the
Pacific and Indian Oceans.

Has the myopic anti-military
crusade in this country gone so far
already as to fatally weaken our
resolve to stand for what we see is
right? Even if it means a fight?

The tragedy of life within
history — and not in some dream
world of boundless blind optimism
in human nature — is that good
men are at times called upon to
oppose evil in a struggle their
deepest, truest sensitivities would
passionately wish to avoid.

Such is our legacy as men. We
exist in this real world with very
sad but real departures from ideality.
Because of the hard fact of our
corrupted nature we cannot expect
merely to stand back and give peace
a chance.

The quest for true peace means
difficult work. It can mean conflict.
If we are to live without illusion,
we must admit that.