Sic pacem, para bellum.
Peace needs strength. You cannot maintain peace through weakness. Those who are most likely to violate the peace do not respect goodwill, cooperation, kindness, compromise, or compassion. In fact, they see these things as a form of weakness, which will cause them to attack. This is a basic truth which most of the people on this site fail to understand. I am constantly frustrated by the mawkish hippy peacenik bullshit promulgated by so many people on Fluther, since people fall all over themselves in their haste to mash the “Great Answer” button. There should be some kind of Gandhi equivalent to Godwin’s Law, where liberal pantywaists and milquetoasts who haven’t actually read anything Gandhi wrote – and are blissfully unaware that he stated that he was utilitarian, and would support violence in places where violence works, and peace in places where peace works – would automatically lose the argument when they bring up Gandhi’s name like a magic talisman.
A while back I watched a video of an anti-war rally at a university in California. A couple of organizers with megaphones were talking to a group of about a hundred hippies and peaceniks when police arrived. The cops waded into the middle of the crowd, tackled the organizers to the ground, and literally dragged them away in handcuffs. The crowd did nothing except chant “shame shame” and demand badge numbers.
I can absolutely 100% guarantee than no sane cop would walk into the middle of a hundred masked anarchists and begin beating up organizers. It just doesn’t happen. The willingness of anarchists to use force – to protect the peace through strength – means that there is less violence, not more.
You ask what peace needs? Peace needs people willing to use whatever amount of force is necessary to create and protect it.