Not Peace

I agree with Dorothy Thompson’s broadcast, including her definition of peace. When she says that “Peace is not the absence of war. Peace is a positive condition – the rule of law,” I think she is completely right. There are many examples of when there is not peace, but also no war. In any genocide, this is true. During the Holocaust, a war was not immediately declared, however Jews were still being slaughtered. This is not peace, and therefore peace is not simply the absence of war. I also agree with Thompson when she says that peace is the rule of law. To have something that is not peace, someone has to break the rules. Violence is not peace, and violence, in 99% of all cases, is against the law. Therefore, when Hitler took away the usual democratic laws and justice in creating the treaty, when “Czechoslovakia was disposed of by four men who in four hours made a judgment of the case in which the defendant was not even allowed to present a brief or be heard,” he made it okay for someone to do something that wasn’t peace. Creating this treaty is the same as just barging into the territory and threatening all the citizens that weren’t German with guns and bombs. There was not justice in making the treaty, as “This document provides no protection whatsoever for their lives, their properties or their existences,” so it amounts to the same thing as a violent evacuation. Hitler contradicts himself when he wrote the treaty. If he claimed to have made peace, but did not use justice or laws to do so, he is simply making not peace. Looking past what we already know about what Hitler did, we can see clearly that the treaty’s intent was not to create peace, but actually the start of a coup, as Thompson states at the beginning of her broadcast. The definition of peace doesn’t change from person to person, or from time period to time period. Hitler needs to get his definition straightened out.