Peace:  Making Our World A Better Place, by Faces

For some reason that I cannot entirely understand, my library shelved this short magazine aimed at preteens to help indoctrinate them into antiwar leftwing politics as a book, even though it is clear a magazine.  It is also clear that this is not a very good magazine, whether one looks at the “spot the identical hippie antiwar protesters” on the back cover, or the way that the book simultaneously wishes to attack the U.S. military while simultaneously promoting peacekeeping for the UN to be desirable, even if the UN has been complicit in a great many genocidal incidents that it has simply been too weak or cowardly to prevent, such as in Bosnia.  Admittedly, the children who are the audience of this book cannot be expected to know better, but the adults who are responsible for editing this work and for framing it are certainly responsible and they do know better that they are pushing an agenda that is neither an honest one nor a beneficial one.  No matter how much people may fervently desire peace, magazines like this only promote internal conflict as well as external weakness, all in the name of high-minded ideals but a lack of understanding of the consequences of how those ideals are followed.

The contents of this particular magazine are not very impressive, it must be admitted.  This particular magazine is divided between articles and regular features.  The articles themselves include one on puppies for peace as well as the efforts by one Connecticut school to publish pages for peace.  There are discussions of peace in different languages and the call to make more noise on behalf of peace, not seeing the contradiction between desiring peace and being willing to create conflict on behalf of that goal.  Likewise, there are articles here that promote working for the Peace Corps as well as promoting the efforts of UN peacekeepers as an alternative to soldiers even if they do not do a good job at protecting people from violence.  There are likewise articles here on various peace prizes that the editors wish to support, and people describing how they have been growing up for peace thanks to the failures of parents and/or teachers to equip them for the real world, at least as it exists now.  Overall, this magazine is the sort that tends to make one even more aware of the way that children are manipulated into misguided positions by adults who should know better.