Stephen Mack wrote:
I read Dr. Ron Paul’s essay about President Trump’s proposal to rename the Department of Defense, the Department of War:
https://ronpaulinstitute.org/department-of-war/
His article includes this observation that supports the change:
“With that in mind, returning the Department of Defense to the Department of War, which is how it started, may not be such a bad idea after all – as long as we can be honest about the rest of the terms around our warmaking.”
That sentence is also an invitation to revisit the bracing essay, A Plan of a Peace-Office for the United States, written by Dr. Benjamin Rush, the brilliant Founding Father, Physician and great Christian Humanist.
Dr. Rush argues trenchantly for the creation of a Peace Office as a counter to the Department of War. His essay describes the governing philosophy of a Peace Office. He follows that with the recommendation that a sign be placed over the door of the War Office with this comparative inscription:
- An office for butchering the human species.
- A Widow and Orphan making office.
- A broken bone making office.
- A wooden leg making office.
- An office for the creating of public and private vices.
- An office for creating a public debt.
- An office for creating speculators, stock jobbers, and bankrupts.
- An office for creating famine.
- An office for creating pestilential diseases.
- An office for creating poverty, and the destruction of liberty and national happiness.
In the lobby of this office let there be painted representations of all the common military instruments of death, also human skulls, broken bones, unburied and putrefying dead bodies, hospitals crowded with sick and wounded soldiers, villages on fire, mothers in besieged towns eating the flesh of their children, ships sinking in the ocean, rivers dyed with blood, and extensive plains without a tree or fence or any object but the ruins of deserted farm houses.
Above this group of woeful figures, let the following words be inserted, in red characters to represent human blood:
NATIONAL GLORY
