Rep. Tammy Baldwin from Madison, Wisconsin, has been trying for more than 10 years to create a federal Department of Peace and Nonviolence. Since 2001, she has co-sponsored legislation four times (2001, 2005, 2007, and 20090 with wacko Dennis Kucinich legislation in order to promulgate an idea whose basic tenor is the decline of Americas. The effort has failed all four times, but Baldwin has remained determined.
The bill Baldwin has been obsessively determined to pass would create a Secretary of Peace appointed by the President and approved by the Senate who would:
(1) hold peace as an organizing principle;
(2) endeavor to promote justice and democratic principles to expand human rights; and
(3) develop policies that promote national and international conflict prevention, nonviolent intervention, mediation, peaceful resolution of conflict, and structured mediation of conflict.
Oh, we would also have a Peace Day where citizens would be urged “to observe and celebrate the blessings of peace and endeavor to create peace on such day.”
Can you say Neville Chamberlain?
Yes, you can. Baldwin tried four times to push for her Peace initiative but during the same period she voted against placing harsh sanctions on Iran four times. Her animus toward Israel may guide her; she refused to vote for a resolution condemning Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for denying the Holocaust and calling for the destruction of Israel.
Just as dangerously, she co-sponsored legislation that would allow taxpayers to opt out of funding the Defense Department. So if you’re a service member in combat, your life is in danger, and you can’t requisition equipment you need, blame Baldwin.
What does it mean that Baldwin keeps pushing the Peace Department? Let’s take a look at the founder of the movement called Peace Studies.
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.”
Baldwin is that radical, but that flies in Madison, home of the ultra-liberal University of Wisconsin and its plethora of gullible students. The question is whether Wisconsin can accept a Senator this radical.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.