Last Sunday, evidently, was the International Day of Peace. To celebrate, the Brandeis Buddhism Club made paper cranes. This seems to me a perfect metaphor for the uselessness of an International Day of Peace.The event was brought to campus by the Student Peace Alliance and cosponsored by the Buddhists. These two groups have a few things in common. First, both generally seem to get a disproportionate amount of support or interest from well-meaning liberals for no good reason.

Buddhism advocates withdrawal from this world to attain the highest state of being. Similarly, the Student Peace Alliance seems to advocate abandoning reality to solve the problems of this world. The event flyers talk about ending conflict, which calls to mind some nirvana or the oblivion of the human condition.

This brings me to the proposed cabinet-level Department of Peace that the Student Peace Alliance is always advocating. One problem with this theoretical department is what would happen under a Bush or McCain regime.

This is one of the more obvious problems, but also one of the more devastating. I see no reason why a hawkish president would pay any attention to this office, unless he wished to use it as a propaganda mouthpiece. It's another simple point, but these activists could have tried a little harder to come up with something less Orwellian.

The scope of this proposed department is similarly ridiculous. Its promoters wish to solve many of this country's problems. They wish for the department to (and I quote from a piece of legislature introduced into the House of Representatives) "develop policies that address domestic violence, including spousal abuse, child abuse, and mistreatment of the elderly"; "develop policies to address violence against animals"; and "provide ethical-based and value-based analyses to the Department of Defense." One might as well have handed Donald Rumsfeld a paper crane! What would anybody have expected the secretary of defense to have done with that kind of jargon?

Another goal is to "analyze existing policies, employ successful, field-tested programs, and develop new approaches for dealing with the implements of violence, including gun-related violence and the overwhelming presence of handguns." Ignoring the extremely weasely "dealing with," the scope of this goal is absurd, especially when considered in context with the copious other goals the organization has for the department.

I believe America needs stricter gun control laws, but as long as the Supreme Court and the Congress protect the rights of handgun owners, I'm not sure what exactly a secretary of the peace can do about them. It would be wonderful if Americans stopped shooting each other, but one cabinet department is unlikely to reverse an entire culture and tradition of misinterpreting the Second Amendment. If there were a campus group advocating for this-Students for Gun Control or something-I would applaud it but think it had an uphill struggle. That this is just one of the many, many things the Department of Peace would seek to "deal with" in our society shows how unrealistic an operation this is.

In the broader sense, "nonviolence" is a charming, if useless idea. Sometimes nonviolence is a good idea, and sometimes it's bad. Gandhi helped to end the occupation of India through nonviolence, but when faced with other situations, it should be clear how irrelevant he was. He advised the British people not to go to war in 1940. In the event of England's occupation, he told the British (not that they asked), "You will allow yourselves, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered."

Similarly, he told the Jews of Germany they "should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs," he said. "As it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions."

One of the many, many horribly offensive things about this quote is that the Jews of Europe weren't even free enough to find a cliff off of which to throw themselves.

I think there are few among us who can honestly argue the Jews of Europe (as well as Europe itself and, indeed, the world) would have been better off without Germany being destroyed militarily.

This brings me to the real problem of pacifism. The ferocious campaign of the United States, Great Britain and their allies that destroyed German forces brought more peace into the world than Gandhi's plan would have. There are a great many terrible things going on in the world right now. If America wishes to stop them, violence might have to be employed.

You can imagine, if you like, sitting down with a Janjaweed leader and teaching him the value of tolerance, as opposed to the value of slaughtering entire villages of non-Arabs.

You can imagine, similarly, talking to Vladimir Putin about his nakedly aggressive foreign policy and augmenting it with an "ethical-based and value-based analysis." I am not necessarily saying that America should involve itself militarily in all of these places but that we must weigh the relative merits of nonviolence with justice.

If we can solve things without resorting to violence, than by all means we should. Nonviolence, though, preferable, is not always a practicle option. If Obama wins, ensuring that we use violence as a last resort will largely be the function of a certain cabinet office known as the Department of State. If McCain wins, the Department of Peace would be as searingly irrelevant as a neatly folded paper crane.