Si vis Pacem, Para Bellum (To maintain Peace, Prepare For War)
This is a phrase I use a lot. Yes, the Latin, although I have a fondness for my own "Practice Peace, Train Chaos" simply because it is mine.
I was thinking about it again today and wondering how many (or perhaps, how few) of us actually understand it.

As I sit here at my desk, somewhere in an old ranch house in the High Desert, it is a quiet and cold night. Very few things are stirring inside or out, the rythmic tap-tap-tap of my fingers doing their own peculiar dance (I never learned to type and can still do about 100 WPM my way) and the slight hum of the aging CPU about all I can hear.
Immediately ahead of my fingers on the key-board, to the left of the monitor, are knives, yawara sticks and several issues of SWAT and Soldier of Fortune magazines. To my right and slightly behind is a small stainless-steel rolling shelf on which are more of the same magazines, more knives and several books on knives, firearms and hand-to-hand combat. I have knives in my pockets, and a few strides away are long-guns and handguns, loaded of course.
Am I an anti-government white supremecist militia wacko? Far from it, were any of the three-letter agencies to send a Lesbian, Jewish, Black woman to offer me a job this evening I would jump at it and shake her hand with a big grin.
Am I paranoid? Not really. I dont fear black helicopters, aliens, or any such thing. Dont feel I have enemies. Looking at my life I can honestly, and happily, say I have no real enemies who would kill me.
Those who read my blog know I believe strongly in self reliance and self preservation. I can, and will, take care of myself and my loved ones - better living through not getting killed by hunger, cold, or predators. And that is it in a nutshell.
Si vis Pacem, Para Bellum/Practice Peace, Train Chaos - what this means is that while you are peaceful, others are not. While you are restful, others are not. While you are happy, others are not. Those who are not resting, not happy and most of all not peaceful, will try and take yourpeace, rest and happiness away from you. Whether they try to rape you (its never about sex, its about control - taking your freedom, your peace), steal from you (invading your home, your person, taking your comfort, your peace) or kill you or your family (taking your life, taking your everything), those are are not peaceful, do not rest and are not happy, are predators upon everyone else.
Predators, of any kind, do not respond to cries for mercy. Have you ever set on the earth, on some cold moonlit night, and listened to the wails of a rabbit floating over the sage brush and cedar trees, as it was being killed by a coyote? I have. I have heard the cries for help as they filtered across trash cans, filthy streets and dissapeared into the uncaring night of the city. Predators are predators, and none of them understand mercy, it is not their way.
Preparing for war is preparing for predators. Training chaos is making ready to protect your peace.
Man is as man is... the human animal is bestial as the next, brutal as the lions of Tsavo, and quicker to prey on its own kind than any other. This will not change, as long as there are people in the world who want what others have and will use force to take it, this will not change - and for as long as there has been man, there have been those who would take by force. To expect man to change, to expect that our predators can be convinced to be peaceful, to be reasoned with to do good works and earn their way (brutality is so much easier), is a fallicy and a grave mistake.
This is preparing for war - not to invade countries, but to keep back the savagery, the bestiality, the evil and violence of predatory man.
6+ billion people on the planet... so much room for predators to be born and to grow. You cannot expect to not be touched by them. They are as prevalent as any other social disease. We all use condoms. We like clean needles, for our flu shots and our junkies. This is preparing for another kind of fight, against sickness of the body.
Why do so few understand preparing, and if need be carrying out, the fight against the greater sickness of predatory violence?
Why are there so many fools who fail to understand these simple principles of life?

Be Trained, or Be Chained... the choice is yours. I have made mine.
Si vis Pacem, Para Bellum!