Peace at any price has never appealed to me; that philosophy allowed Nazi Germany to roll into Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Lithuania unopposed and set the stage for World War II.   Peace at any price has permitted some leaders with nuclear arsenals, chemical weapons, and/or oil reserves to wantonly violate human rights and commit genocide in some cases.  Peace is preferable, but not if it means sacrificing human rights.

                I even believe that war is necessary when civilian populations are targets of military operations as they were in Bosnia during the 1990s, for example.  I hungered to read about vigilante justice when U.N. Peacekeepers stood by as Bosnian Serb forces massacred thousands of Bosnian Muslim men in 1995 at Srebrenica.

                The doctrine of peaceful nonviolence that Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. practiced does appeal to me, but only if I can use it to be a bully for peace.  I would rather see our leaders use their brains to outsmart their adversaries. I like to combine the doctrine of nonviolence with that of the strategy set forth in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, written in 400 B.C.E. in China. Sun Tzu writes that the best way to win a war is not to have to go to war.

                As a young woman reading Sun Tzu’s book, I thought Sun Tzu was advocating cultural imperialism to avoid war.   However, now I believe he was advocating a win-win situation; the best way to promote peace is to show everyone how beneficial it is to them.   The Art of War provides a further service by giving its readers the strategies to outmaneuver those individuals who would harm others.

                Is there a difference between a peace bully who likes The Art of War and Gandhi and a peace warrior? Perhaps not.  In either case, both peace bullies and peace warriors know that the doctrine of nonviolence is the means to winning a war of opening the heart. The problem is that while some hearts just require seeing human suffering to elicit compassion others need to have a stake driven through them.