The holy man of appeasement

Archbishop Welby's response to conflict would abandon justice and the innocent

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has published a book called The Power of Reconciliation. He is arguing that conflict should be replaced by negotiation and peace. 

He wrote in the Guardian last week:

The question of identity is core to any understanding of conflict. Identity can be inherited, it can be imposed — but most of all, when it comes to conflict, identity is about our relationships with others. When we fall into the trap of defining ourselves by who we are not, or we attempt to forcefully define the identities of others, we set ourselves up for serious ruptures in the fabric of our relationships.

That doesn’t mean that peace is unanimity, a shared conformist identity. No, peace is the ability to deal with discord by non-violent means. It is the transformation of violent conflict into non-violent disagreement.

Well, we should all want peace, to be sure.  But what Archbishop Welby doesn't seem to get is that to achieve it you may first have to use violence to defeat the bad guys. There’s a word for responding to aggression and war by “negotiation, dialogue, reconciliation” and that word is appeasement — or surrendering to evil.