The Counterfeit Peacemakers: Atomic Freeze
Isaac, RaelJean & Isaac, Erich
THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL. 15, NO. 6 / JUNE 1982 RaelJean Isaac and Erich Isaac THE COUNTERFEIT PEACEMAKERS: ATOMIC FREEZE Who's behind the politics of nuclear neurosis ? The Crabshell-Kremlin...
...On the whole, however, the conference simply passed resolutions conforming to major Soviet objectives: support for Third World liberation movements and U.S...
...The older organizations are growing...
...Don Ebener of the Fellowship of Reconciliation says " t h e freeze is only the first step toward total disarmament and it's only to be used as a tool toward that end...
...poor housing, racism, and sexism are equally " v i o l e n t , " and the violence of unemployment is as real "as napalm falling on Vietnam...
...in that he is the vehicle of raw historical forces, whereas they are stuffed dummies, waxwork figures, living in unreality...
...The editor felt called upon to object, protesting that "taking goods surreptitiously" would imply they rightfully belonged to store-owners, "thereby continually paying homage to capitalist ideals of property...
...Indeed revolutionaries were to be preferred, for they merely respond to the prior violence of the established order and seek to achieve greater justice...
...the Mobilization for Survival combines anti-nuclear energy groups with disarmament and radical political groups...
...The International Secretariat of the Christian Peace Conference, the Soviet front that targets Western churches, declared at a meeting in Moscow in January" 1982 that "the principle task of the peace movement today is to support all eflbrts for a freeze on nuclear weapons as a first step toward disarmament...
...A delegation is coming from Europe, and from .Japan alone 1,000 demonstrators are being flown in...
...Thanks to preparations by various peace and church groups in the fifteen cities it visited, the delegation met with local and s t a t e officials, spoke at church meetings, campuses, even high schools (the delegation reported that following its presentation at University High School in Milwaukee many students asked if they could join the World Peace Council...
...Vermaat analyzes the extensive role the World Peace Council and a s i s t e r Soviet front, the Christian Peace Conference, have played since 1977 in the Dutch peace movement, that major t e s t i n g ground in the Soviet effort to promote Western disarmament initiatives...
...government by its citizens which in recent years has mounted to such an extent that for significant numbers the mere fact that the government states something is sufficient warrant to believe the opposite is true...
...We are left, finally, with an approach to peacemaking whose essence is the double standard...
...Peace Council has thrown itself into freeze work...
...lts executive committee has already adopted a resolution to lend "support for worldwide disarmament," a cautious entry to be sure, but one likely to lead to what, from the standpoint of the peace movement, are better things...
...Sidney I.ens writes in April's Progressive that the freeze was "organized on the initiative" of Terry Provance and Randall Forsberg...
...Peace Council has established a "Peace Education Foundation," which has received tax exempt status from the IRS...
...What explains the current runaway success of the disarmament movement...
...Savage, one of the pacifists to whom Orwell had pointed...
...On a national scale there is the effort of a group called Physicians for Social Responsibility to spell RaelJean Isaac is author, most recently, of Party and Politics in Israel (Longman...
...The nuclear age has been with us since 1945...
...What the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom has been able to add is some Hollywood stars--Joanne Woodward...
...Wherever possible, the- resolutions passed by the conference packaged Soviet foreign policy objectives to appeal to segments of American society...
...For many, more than sponsorship was involved...
...The Vietnam war produced a series of organizations, the most lasting of which has been Clergy and Laity Concerned about the Vietnam War (CALC...
...Boom...
...The U.S...
...In fact, they sharply opposed any U.S...
...Muste knew better than he spoke when he encouraged pacifists to enter into coalitions with Communists during the Vietnam era...
...The Fund is headed by Abe t:einglass, a World Peace Council Prestdtum member and secretary-treasurer of the Amalgamated Meatcutters Union...
...Insofar as they are influential, disarmament movements by their very nature serve to weaken Western defenses and inhibit the willingness of Western countries to project their forces beyond their 10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR .JUNE 1982 borders...
...The election of Ronald Reagan was a galvanizing experience for those in the adversary c u l t u r e - - a t the same time a shattering defeat and a proof that their worst fears were on the verge of being realized...
...Physicians for Social Responsibility also dates to 1961 but became moribund until revived by pediatrician Helen Caldicott in 1979...
...Peace Council has begun to show up regularly at meetings of the various peace organizations...
...Since the missiles are mobile, however, they could be returned at the Soviet Union's convenience...
...Secretary of State Haig, however, calls it "not only bad defense and security policy . . . [but] bad arms control policy as well...
...This is being translated into such measures as the creation, by the United Church of Christ, of "Peace Advocacy" groups in every state to encourage people to "lobby for peace" in Washington...
...Muste's influence was again important...
...Caidicott suggested that this was really her own primary concern...
...Conscientious objectors, particularly those who chose prison over the forms of alternative service offered by the government, emerged with a new conception of nonviolent tactics as the way "to shake the present order to its foundations...
...As a result, the WPC delegation was able to meet with twenty members of Congress (several of whom hosted a luncheon for the delegation) and was welcomed at the Methodist Church Center by leading clergymen...
...In Germany the West German Communist Party has increasingly taken control of the peace move...
...CALC is now simply "Concerned," chiefly about the evils of the American Empire...
...The organizers, however, told her that there was "no time...
...The ads were officially sponsored by the Cooperative Committee for Peace and Security, the chief organization of the Danish peace movement, itself largely led by Communists...
...In New York City, Ambassador Angler Biddle Duke, on behalf of then mayor Abraham Beame, presented delegation members with Bicentennial Medals...
...In South Bend, Indiana, the delegation received keys to the city and a luncheon in its honor was given by the Chamber of Commerce...
...Those who gave their names as sponsors of this Call in effect en~torsed the U.S...
...The resolutions passed by these churches in the last decade reflect a view of American institutions as oppressive and of America's role in the world as one of global oppressor...
...After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the pacifist organizations, all of which make a strong point of their belief in resistance--nonviolent resistance-to aggression, might have been expected to support United States responses that stopped short of violence, including the Olympic boycott and the grain embargo...
...Peace Council now boasts forty chapters around the country...
...peace group representatives that the first UN Special Session on Disarmament (which started as a WPC project in 1975), scheduled for May 1978, was of "historic importance" and it was up to American peace groups to make sure it had maximum public impact...
...One dramatic example of the gap between pacifist rhetoric and reality is the attitude of these groups toward the Palestine Liberation Organization...
...The World Peace Council's publications also inveigh against the evils of imperialism, militarism, sexism, racism, all of which they too define as the peculiar property of the United States and its "puppets...
...defense capabilities...
...It centers on something known as the Nuclear Freeze petition, which calls for a mutual freeze by the United States and the Soviet Union on the testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems...
...Although it is difficult to know to what extent modern pacifists respond to a sense that Yassir Ararat represents "raw historical forces" in contrast to the "waxwork figures" cut by Western statesmen, there may well be a psychological component of this sort in the attraction men who live by violence exert upon those who have renounced it...
...Head of the MFS International Task Force is Terry Provance, who also heads the AFSC's Disarmament Task Force and was one of the sponsors of the U.S...
...He is, however, 'realter' than Chamberlain, Churchill, Cripps etc...
...sandr Berkov and since then by Igor Belyayev, both representing the Soviet Communist Party...
...In an article in Ons Leger in October 1981, Dutch journalist J.A.E...
...For the generation of World War II the Soviet threat was real, as wag belief in the need for American strength to contain it...
...weapons systems...
...The greater sophistication of some of the postwar peace fronts also played a role...
...Erich Isaac is Professor of Geography at the Ctty College of New York...
...Lawrence Scott, an executive of the American Friends Service Committee who initiated SANE as an attempt to reach out to nonpacifists, acknowledged the problem of Communist infiltration over twenty years ago...
...Environmental groups see new propaganda potentialities for their long-standing fight against nuclear power...
...But by far the most important factor in facilitating the transformation of the peace organizations into channels that, for all practical purposes, serve Soviet interests has been a common View of the world all the peace groups discussed here have come to share: the vision of the United States as the greatest threat to world peace and the chief agent of militarism, imperialism, racism, and economic exploitation...
...The Christian Peace Conference, for instance, which gives Soviet policies a theological aura, convinced many organizations--and c h u r c h e s - t h a t there are independent peace movements behind the Iron Curtain...
...There seems every prospect of its passage, since polls show that Americans would vote for a freeze on local ballots by a margin of 3 to 2. Mass demonstrations are on the way, scheduled to coincide with the UN Special Session on Disarmament beginning J une 9. Some of their footpower will come from the campuses, energized by April's week-long teach-in campaign...
...Does the Soviet Union want a freeze on nuclear weapons beyond F.urope...
...military industrial machine...
...Those directing MFS activities wear a variety of hats...
...For the Soviet Union the ideal situation is prolonged negotiations over the content (and method of verification) of a freeze, during which the United States would be restrained by public opinion from deploying new systems or even increasing defense expenditures while the Soviet Union methodically continued to build up its arsenal...
...brought a World Peace Council delegation to address the rally, including Werner Rumpel, head of the East German Peace Council and Nicholas Schouten, a leader of the Communist Party of the Netherlands, who played a key role in organizing the antineutron bomb campaign there...
...Another former winner of the JoliotCurie Gold Medal for Peace is Leonid Brezhnev.t On its thirtieth anniversary the World Peace Council celebrated ever new "victories for peace" in "Ethiopia, Afghanistan, I r a n . " Presumably to help celebrate one of these Soviet "victories for peace," the WPC has scheduled its next meeting in Afghanistan...
...But, as we have seen, with the Vietnam war SANE was again radicalized...
...If the United States did not give the PLO what it wanted, the PLO had no " a l t e r n a t i v e " except violence...
...Pacifist organizations, of course, want to eliminate our war-making potential altogether...
...So well did a socialistpacifist like Norman Thomas learn this lesson that, shortly before America's entry into World War II,~in his last ditch effort to keep America out: of the war, he cooperated with the America First movement, which he d e t e s t e d , but refused to coo p e r a t e with the Communists (then opposed to e n t e r i n g t h e war because the Stalin-Hitler pact was in effect...
...There are signs some peace organizations are aware of what lies down the road...
...The Riverside Church Disarmament Program minimizes the Soviet "threat" which its publications put in quotation marks...
...Communist Party, announced at the conference that "the main threat to world peace is the U.S...
...Under the heading of"Biography" one would expect to find books describing the lives of great pacifists...
...Far from urging rational civil defense measures, which the Soviets have taken, a film produced by the Physicians for Social Responsibility includes a statement that it is a breach of medical ethics for a physician to participate in planning for emergency medical services in the event of nuclear attack...
...A 1979 MFS demonstration in Washington, D.C...
...An "Abolitionist Covenant" is circulating through the churches which affirms willingness to live without nuclear weapons as a religious commitment and calls for a freeze as a first step...
...There is small cause for wonder that the Soviet Union encourages the freeze campaign...
...Peace Council sponsors Jackie Vaughan III and Perry Bullard worked for it in the Michigan legislature...
...In 1975 the Council gave its highest award, the Frederic Joliot-Curie Gold Medal for Peace, to Yassir Arafat...
...Other organizations are rediscovering the bomb...
...After World War II, Muste's doctrines became pacifist orthodoxy...
...tions have been mushrooming--there are now sixty sizable ones...
...With a double constituency of a n t i - nuclear energy and a n t i - n u c l e a r weapons groups, the Mobilization has worked on both fronts, using such slogans as "Zero Nuclear Weapons" and "Ban Nuclear Power...
...Nonpacifist peace organizations, including SANE and Women Strike for Peace, were equally affected...
...The process is furthest advanced in Europe...
...Instead, the attitude of the pacifist organizations toward the PLO is one of warmth, even admiration...
...From the Soviet standpoint, the fervor over the freeze offers the opportunity to revert to earlier proposals and call them a freeze: Brezhnev has proposed that in exchange for a U.S...
...David McReynolds of the War Resisters League says frankly that the only "politically realistic" approach is bold unilateral initiatives and the League is in fact circulating a statement calling for unilateral nuclear disarmament...
...By March 10, 129 congressmen had announced they would seek a resolution of both houses asking the President to negotiate an atomic-weapons freeze...
...Marlo Thomas, Vinie Burrows, and Polly Bergen are participating in this latest World Peace Council propaganda triumph...
...Now it is back with the bomb, organizing teachins on campuses around the country, a consciousness-raising tactic which proved effective in the Vietnam war period...
...Indeed the U.S...
...tensions, U.S...
...If they are, then pacifism itself was one of the casualties of Vietnam...
...The Fund has announced plans to explore the effects of the military budget on blacks and other minorities...
...moreover, even from behind the Urals they could devastate any European target...
...Another revealing glimpse into modern pacifism comes from the reading list compiled by the War Resisters League in response to requests for books on the meaning of pacifism and nonviolence today...
...6 / JUNE 1982 RaelJean Isaac and Erich Isaac THE COUNTERFEIT PEACEMAKERS: ATOMIC FREEZE Who's behind the politics of nuclear neurosis ? The Crabshell-Kremlin Alliance ? What the media have dubbed a "peace crusade" is sweeping the country...
...It is bad arms control policy because the Soviet Union would have no incentive to negotiate arms reduction--the goal of arms control policies--once its superiority were frozen...
...The groundwork for the U.S...
...No national environmental organizations joined, but a host of local groups did, their names ranging from Mississippi Alliance for the Environment to the more colorful Appletree, Dogwood, Jackrabbit and Crabshell Alliance...
...One writer suggested that "a mass invasion of A&P supermarkets by housewives with hungry families, for the express purpose of emptying shelves, would be a good way of keeping down the profits of the masters...
...The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom recently announced a new program called STAR, standing for Stop the Arms Race...
...The distinction between pacifist and nonpacifist peace organizations, indeed between most peace organizations and radical left-wing political groups, has become a distinction without a difference...
...Provance, as we just noted, is disarmament d i r e c t o r of the American Friends Service Committee, head of the MFS International Task Force, and was a sponsor of the U.S...
...He returned to pacifism, and the Fellowship, in 1937...
...The Environmental Policy Center now calculates the "warhead equivalent" of commercial reactors...
...On the other hand, resolutions called for U.S...
...He insisted that since 90 percent of the violence in the world was perpetrated by forces of the status quo, it was somewhat "ludicrous" that public concern centered on the 10 percent of violence used THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR .JUNE 1982 9 by rebels against repression...
...State legislatures have passed freeze resolutions with scarcely a demurring vote...
...The nuclear freeze proposal, with its evenhanded veneer, has served as a brilliant, even inspired lever by which to mobilize the public's inevitable anxieties about living in the nuclear age into a weapon to prevent achievement of the Reagan Administration's keystone effort: the restoration of U.S...
...The Fellowship doubled its membership last year...
...As the world's chief terror organization, the inspiration and actual training agency for the world's proliferating terror groups, from the Baader Meinhof to the Red Brigades to a host of groups in Latin America, the PLO should be especially abhorrent to pacifists...
...Whatever moral reservations were held regarding nuclear bombs, the right and even necessity of their being a component of the U.S...
...The third element in the MFS was anti-nuclear energy groups...
...In an interview in 1979 Jean de Muralt, then its director, said: "We help the small fry...
...George Orwell, writing during World War II, noted the attraction some leading pacifists felt toward Hitler...
...All governments, including democratic governments, were violent because they implicitly had the sanctions of violence behind them...
...efforts to counter the Soviet action...
...Sidney Peck, identified in a 1970 s t a f f study prepared for the Internal Security Committee of the House of Representatives as a member of the Wisconsin State Committee of the Communist Party, took the initiative in establishing the Mobilization for Survival which then organized demonstrations in connection with the 1978 UN Special Session on Disarmament...
...plans to modernize NATO's T h e a t e r Nuclear Forces with medium range Pershing II and cruise missiles and to upgrade NATO's antitank capabilities with neutron bombs...
...peace organizations to the WPC visit was revealing...
...During the war years, a number of U.S...
...Peace Council ad countered that "Vietnam now enjoys human rights as it has never known in history"), it was signed not only by assorted Communists and far leftists, but by the president and vice-president of Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and by several leaders of Clergy and Laity Concerned...
...For one thing, some of the earlier leaders had been burned by actual experience and their subsequent vigilance sheltered a newer-generation...
...Nonetheless, the Fellowship and the War Resisters League together with the other peace organizations have been working with the U.S...
...An article in WILPF's journal by then WILPF international president Kay Camp summed up the organization's view of the invasion of Afghanistan: "While military intervention is always regrettable, the Soviet interest in having close relations with a neighboring country with which it shares a 2000 mile border is understandable...
...Obviously pleased by the success of the Dutch movement and its spread throughout Western Europe, Boris Ponomarev, veteran head of the Communist Party's International Department, told a group of Soviet and foreign scientists in 1981 that even though the antiwar movement had reached "Not that Soviet efforts have been confined to Holland...
...Peace Council...
...The Mobilization for Survival (MFS) can serve as a model of how Communist and peace organizations have become intertwinedl Until recently, when the size of the crowds expected this June made it too much for one organization to handle, the MFS had primary responsibility for organizing the mass demonstrations planned for the Second UN Special Session on Disarmament...
...The very fact that such a phrase could be formulated says something about what has happened to American pacifism...
...It is presumably a principle equally applicable to coalitions with Communists outside of government...
...The AFSC maintains a Community Information and Legal Aid Center in East Jerusalem...
...Peace Council...
...The Physicians for Social Responsibility's Helen Caldicott, who recently called the nuclear arms race a case of "missile envy" stemming "from an inadequate male sexual complex on the part of world l e a d e r s , " has urged the Sierra Club to come in on the ground that nuclear war would destroy mammals, birds, and the ozone layer...
...An innocent enough sounding phrase, it was the slogan of the World Peace Council's 1975 Second Stockholm Appeal campaign, repeated as a litany in its documents: To Make D~tente Irreversible--Stop the Arms Race, To Defend the Peace and Build a New World --Stop the Arms Race...
...Stalin's death was immensely important, allowing the leaders of peace organizations to dclude themselves that...
...In the past, and for all their internal tAccordingtoa 1978 study of Soviet propaganda activities conducted by the CIA for the House Intelligence Committee, actual control of the WPC was exerted prior to 1977 by Alek...
...The major pacifist organizations--the AFSC, the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), the War Resisters League (WRL), and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF)--are centers of radicalism whose relation to nonviolence is highly problematical, since in practice they condone violence to achieve the goals of what the Left defines as "liberation movements...
...There is, in other words, hardly any gap between the peace movement's perspective and that of the Soviet Union on how to create a more just global society...
...ment, to the public discomfiture of other radical groups, such as the environmentalist Green Party...
...peace movement...
...The conference came out for American Indian claims against the U.S...
...A graduate student in "Irish Liberation Theology" explained the sexism inherent in the neutron bomb which "would destroy all that was born of women or the earth, while preserving men's creative efforts...
...According to journalist P e t e r Pringle, writing in the New Republic, the nuclear freeze proposal had its origin in a meeting called by the American Friends Service Committee in the summer of 1979...
...And I reply, "The armed s t r u g g l e in t h e s e c o u n t r i e s ta t h e peace movcment . . . U.S...
...Several of the prominent peace organizations are coalitions: The Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy brings together many of the organizations active against the Vietnam war, especially the churches...
...Under "Socialism" seven books are offered, including the Communist Manifesto, German Communist Rosa Luxemburg's The Russian Revolution, and Carl Oglesby and Richard Shaull's Continuity and Change...
...WILPF passed a statement that ignored events in Poland but attacked Reagan's "political and economic sanctions" and called on him "to restore ties with Poland and the Soviet Union to their previous levels...
...Danish writer Anne Herlov Petersen last November was charged with having placed full-page ads at Soviet expense in Danish papers, urging opposition to NATO and support for Soviet peace proposals...
...Oglesby was a New Left organizer and Shaull is a liberation theologian who believes that only at the center of the revolution can man "perceive what God is doing...
...Local Peace Councils already existed in Los Angeles and Chicago...
...aid to Communist Vietnam, Laos, and Kampuchea...
...This pacifist lady described with obvious relish being "driven into town escorted by jeeps full of Palestine Liberation Army soldiers" who permitted nothing " t o break our line...
...In the end penetration continued unchecked...
...But even worse than their silence has been that virtually all of them have become involved with the U.S...
...According to the published accounts by MFS leaders, the organization was established in 1977 after Peggy Duff, a leader in the British disarmament movement long active in the World Peace Council, told U.S...
...TheU.S...
...peace organizations began to send delegations to participate in World Peace Council conferences which, under Soviet guidance, were designed to coordinate activities in opposition to the war...
...Does it then follow that the nuclear freeze is an example of successful Soviet manipulation...
...But there is little doubt that the primary interest of its leaders is in disarmament...
...pacifist organizations would have been wary of Communist manipulation...
...What is new is distrust of the U.S...
...unprecedented proportions, "the interests of p r e s e r v i n g peace call for f u r t h e r development of the anti-war movement...
...Is the specific proposal simply a target of opportunity, or is more involved...
...The Alliance notes happily that "people really respond to that...
...It is a mark of the peacemovement explosion about 250,000 demonstrators are now expected...
...Yet the sponsors included the president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the executtve director of SANE, the disarmament coordinator of the American Friends Service Committee, the director of the Washington office of Women Strike for Peace (who had coordinated the 1975 WPC visit), and a leader of Clergy and Laity Concerned...
...But he wears yet another hat...
...The campaign obtained almost 500 million signatures worldwide, over a million of them in the United States, where most of the signatories had no idea of the campaign's origin...
...Where do its initiators plan to take us...
...And the National Conferenc.e of Catholic Bishops is taking an active role, condemning any threat to use the American nuclear arsenal, even in response to Soviet prior use...
...An article in the Fellowship of Reconciliation's Fellowship claims that "where a woman is denied equal pay for equal w o r k . . , it is an example of violence...
...With the Bolshevik Revolution, many pacifists became attracted to revolutionary Marxism and its promise to eliminate injustice once and for all...
...In a recent year its journal, Peace and Freedom, ran ten articles on the Middle East, the purport always the need to involve the PLO...
...The members returned to praise the PLO officials with whom they had spoken, and were particularly enthusiastic about one whom they said "spoke in near pacifist terms about guerrilla violence...
...Resolutions were passed opposed to all new U.S...
...According to its own no doubt generous estimate, MFS was able to produce only 25,000 demonstrators for that first disarmament session...
...The League did send an observer to the 1979 U.S...
...These doctors will provide you with an entire bibliography explaining the horrible aftermath of nuclear war and their total inability as physicians to help any of the survivors...
...The big people have their own connections and don' t need our help...
...Nonetheless, the idea of the freeze has tremendous power...
...Under the heading of "Race" the League offers five books, two of them attacks on nonviolence: Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice and Frantz Fanon's extended paean to the therapeutic power of violence, IUretched of the Earth...
...Needless to say, what such developments as the founding and growing acceptance of the U.S...
...Thanks largely to the runaway success of the freeze, they are today transformed...
...8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR .JUNE 1982 Most Americans have a warm, if hazy, image of peace organizations, especially pacifist groups, whose dedication to nonviolence is seen as admirable, if impractical...
...Peace Council sponsor and U.S...
...A revealing reply to Orwell's charges came from D.S...
...A major turning point in making cooperation with Communists acceptable was the Vietnam war...
...Peace Council conference who was sufficiently disturbed by the proceedings--she noted that Communist Party literature was "everywhere" --to prepare a critical statement which she tried to read to those assembled...
...Here he expanded the definition of violence, declaring that "the basic fact is that the economic, social, political order in which we live was built up largely by violence, is now being extended by violence and is maintained only by violence...
...Such attitudes made the climate ripe for Soviet propaganda offensives conducted chiefly through the World Peace Council, which had been able to establish ties with elements of the adversary culture...
...bases from the Philippines and an end to all aid to that country...
...pacifist organizations whose fundamental principle, to use the words of an AFSC brochure, is that violence can never be right...
...so successful had the infiltration been that a fourth of the chapters had to be expelled from the organization...
...She said she had "come to terms with my own death" but "I just worship this earth . . . . So I really care immensely i f this earth is to be destroyed...
...You're dead...
...Answers to these questions are in order before the public throws itself headlong into a current whose direction it little understands...
...War Resisters League President Norma Becker believes all our institutions must be overturned "because unless these itlstitutions are eradicated," it doesn't seem likely that we "will be in a position to really practice nonviolence...
...In California, a drive to put the freeze on the ballot collected the requisite 350,000 signatures in two months and more than twice that number are expected to be collected by the deadline for submitting them...
...Given the international realities, it is all too obvious where the peace movement would lead us...
...The freeze quickly won the support of almost all the organizations that make up what in current jargon could be called "the peace community...
...Communist Party's central committee, whose major responsibility within the Party has been coordinating relations with peace organizations...
...He believed that pacifist organizations were better protected because of their refusal to separate ends and means...
...In 1962, Congress held THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1982 15 hearings on Communist infiltration of Women Strike for Peace...
...He wrote: The pacifists' championing of Hitler referred to by Orwell is simply a recognition by us that Hitler and Germany contain a real historical dynamic, whereas we do not . . . Personally I do not care for Hitler...
...the Communist workt had been transformed...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR IUNE 1982 11 The seeds planted by the delegation came to fruition in 1979 with the establishment of the United States Peace Council...
...Another resolution called for withdrawal of U.S...
...Major environmental organizations, long wary of becoming involved in defense issues, are beginning to man the peace barricades...
...It relies heavily on publications and speakers from the America-the-enemy think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies...
...The Riverside Church Disarmament Program is training Disciples of Christ ministers to become peace pastors...
...The AFSC meanwhile has done more...
...They stemmed from the conviction of pacifists that war would be eliminated only if the cause of war were eliminated, this cause being social injustice...
...Why were the organizations, under t h e i r initial leadership, so much more wary of Communism...
...The Soviet Union has a front organization, the World Peace Council (WPC), designed to identify the Soviet Union as the world's chief force for peace among Third World countries and to manipulate Western public opinion, especially Western peace movements, on issues the Soviet Union deems vital to its interests...
...En route the marchers were addressed by Yuri Kapralov, a counselor at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, who said that the Soviet Union had " a very favorable view of the idea of a weapons freeze...
...Communist Party with three of its fronts, and in 1979 the U.S...
...In Europe, now targeted by 300 Soviet mobile missiles equipped with 900 warheads, failure to deploy the Pershing II and cruise missiles would ensure its neutralization, eventually giving the Soviet Union the kind of dominant influence it exerts over Finland...
...Its activities in Israel, ostensibly "humanitarian," provoked the Israeli government to the point where it sought to remove the AFSC's Middle East representative for pro-PLO activities...
...That same year it gave a l e s s e r peace award to Lolita Lebron as an "outstanding Puerto Rican freedom fighter . . . who has been in U.S...
...A closer look, however, would produce some major surprises...
...delegate to the 1980 World Peace Council conference in Bulgaria Irving Stolberg, who is also a Connecticut state legislator, coordinated the campaign that passed the freeze proposal at the s t a t e level in Connecticut and Michigan state senators and U.S...
...Peace Council and its transparent effort to channel the desire for peace to serve Soviet purposes...
...Peace Council...
...But this is precisely its attraction...
...Using the tax exemption of one of them (the Council for a Liveable World Education Fund), the clearing house opened in St...
...It is difficult to distinguish between the foreign policy the World Peace Council, under Soviet guidance, would like the United States to pursue, and the policy the peace organizations would like it to pursue...
...The point is to help the Soviet Union project an image of itself as the major force for peace in the world, its initiatives thwarted by Western militarism...
...This time, however, none of them decried the delegation as a fraud and several in fact used their standing to give the delegation credibility among unsuspecting American political and religious leaders...
...Indeed, the reception accorded this delegation of the world's leading Communist front was nothing short of amazing...
...building of "weapons of mass destruction...
...David Dellinger, a member of the League's executive committee, published a paper called Direct Action whose first issue advocated "strikes, sabotage and seizure of public property now being held by private owners...
...Peace Council chairman Michael Myerson signed the initial "Call" for the 14 THL AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1982 freeze and the World Peace Council's Peace Courier in December 1981 praised the role the U.S...
...Whatever the case, it is clear that the Soviets want to see the freeze grow...
...In both Los Angeles and Milwaukee the delegation accepted mayoral proclamations in its honor...
...Indeed, given the identity of underlying views, is there any reason for peace organizations to resist Soviet infiltration and manipulation...
...Every effort is being made to galvanize the unimaginative...
...This is not to say that all the peace organizations are enamored of the freeze...
...Peace Council...
...Not that they want to improve their capacity to cope...
...The delegation's Washington visit, for instance, was coordinated by Edith Villastrigo, director of the Washington office of Women Strike for Peace...
...Much more important than the growth of the peace organizations themselves is the influence they are having on major institutions, especially the church...
...defense expenditures and "forming coalitions of peace groups...
...If disarmament leads to invasion, they are calling for "transarmament,".which means nonviolent resistance and noncooperation...
...In each commun i t y - a n d the delegation also visited Seattle, Cleveland, and San Francisco--the group left behind what it described as an "ongoing WPC committee...
...But of the eight biographies presented, only two are of pacifists...
...Nor are joint strategy sessions the only 12 THE ANIFRICAN SPb(.TATOR JUNE 1982 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR |UNE 1982 13 form cooperation takes...
...The conference appealed to the anti-nuclear energy movement by linking the need to shut down nuclear plants with "the recognition that nuclear arms production is even more dangerous and needs to be shut down also...
...out the physical suffering their audiences will experience following a nuclear explosion: the starvation, dehydration, radiation sickness, and infections...
...SANE was forced to purge i t s e l f of Communists in 1960, only three years after its formation...
...Muste, briefly left the Fellowship for a fling at Communism, becoming general secretary of the Communist League of America, a section of the Trotskyite Fourth International...
...Peace Council in a series of strategy groups set up to plan demonstrations for the UN Special Session on Disarmament scheduled to begin this June...
...It thus goes without saying that these movements are an obvious target for Soviet manipulation and penetration...
...The Administration's skepticism is warranted...
...offensive in the Middle East...
...The identification of pacifist organizations with the PLO is a particularly striking illustration of the breakdown of pacifist principles...
...International WILPF (for years headed by Americans, first Kay Camp, now Carol Pendell, wife of a Methodist minister in California) sent its journal's editor as the organization's delegate to a PLO conference in Lebanon...
...The peace organizations are concerned almost wholly with U.S...
...Indeed, an article in the War Resisters League journal suggests that it is time for the United States to start thinking about the nonviolent defense of the country C] THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1982 17...
...9 "The World Peace Council s e n t a d e l e g a t i o n in 1981 to s u r v e y its handiwork...
...peace organizations have failed to denounce the U.S...
...arsenal was not generally challenged...
...Although the Fellowship initially resisted, the War Resisters League _9 ( a non-religiously based pacifist group that developed out of the Fellowship in 1923) resolved in 1947 to work for "political, economic and social revolution by nonviolent means...
...The co-chairman of Clergy and Laity Concerned, John Collins, quotes approvingly the words of another CALC official who said that corporate capitalism "needs a hungry world to enable it to operate 'efficiently.'" A 1981 conference held by the War Resisters League on Feminism and Militarism turned into a burlesque of these causes...
...In the words of this former member of the central committee of the Communist Party of India: People a~k me, "You are a peace movement Why do you s u p p o r t t h e armed s t r u g g l e s in N~catagua, P a l e s t i n e , Vietnam...
...For example, in 1975 the Fellowship of Reconciliation sent a group to PLO headquarters in Lebanon...
...The Sierra Club, whose ranks have been swollen to 300,000 members in 1982, a 44-percent increase in one year, shows every sign of indeed coming in...
...U.S...
...According to the annual report of the Office for the Defense of the Constitution of the West German Ministry of the Interior, Communists have leading positions in the national executive of the West German War Resisters League...
...Louis in January 1982...
...Deliberate Communist infiltration is yet another factor that has driven the peace movements leftward...
...In the United States the AFSC has organized lobbying efforts on behalf of the PLO and speaking tours for its propagandists...
...Why the sudden ferment, to the point that a Wall Street Journal front page headline reports "Town of Pella, Iowa talks of little other than nuclear attack...
...disarmament...
...Peace Council as a bona fide peace-seeking organization...
...and for Puerto Rican independence and opposed U.S...
...Other groups propose cutting military expenditures by 50-80 percent, cuts they say are feasible even if no further arms agreements are reached with the Soviets...
...In the first week of March, buildings, signs, office elevators, and windows at 17th and M Streets in Washington, just north of the White House, were plastered with two-inch circular gummed labels that said: Flash...
...members of the World Peace Council...
...Roger Molander, head of Ground Zero, which for a week in April r a i s e d consciousness by hypothesizing direct hits in several hundred cities and describing how they would look after an atomic bomb had hit them, says he does not like the freeze because it will not lead to arms reductions...
...While the Israeli authorities were told it would be a counselling center, it rapidly developed into a legal aid service for captured PLO terrorists...
...Now, organizing will be done by over a dozen groups making up the J u n e 12 Rally Committee, among them the U.S...
...The Fellowship of Reconciliation was the most influential pacifist organization in the interwar years, and it was repeatedly battered by conflicts between those who opposed all violence and those who were convinced that class warfare was necessary to prevent international warfare...
...Her only regret was that "more of us could not be there to come to-understand why the struggle of the Palestinian people must continue...
...These are both pacifist and nonpacifist groups devoted to reducing the prospects of war: The best established of those who signed the initial "Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race," as the freeze was originally titled, were Clergy and Laity Concerned and SANE (which have been the most active in procuring signatures for the freeze), Mobilization for Survival, Pax Christi (a Catholic organization), Riverside Church Disarmament Program, and Women's International Le~igue for Peace and Freedom...
...A world in which the democr a c i e s have renounced the means to defend themselves against a mightily armed totalitarianism is a world in which t h e r e will be no freedom and no peace...
...Labor organizer Sidney Lens, long active in the Chicago Peace Council, and sociology professor Dr...
...Intrinsic to pacifism, of course, is the view that means and ends cannot be separated, and all the pacifist organizations continue to pay lip service to this principle...
...The women achieved a publicity victory by packing the hearing room with their babies and handing flowers to each of the women called to testify...
...Peace Council was taking in collecting signatures for it...
...The d e l e g a t i o n added to what was becoming the World Peace Counc i l ' s i m p r e s s i v e collection o f keys to t h e city and mayoral p r o c l a m a t i o n s . Peace Council issued a "Call" which said: We who mittate this Call believe that t h e r e ts a peace majority in our country . . . . We seek to help orgamze our peace malorxty in its e n t i r e spectrum because o n l y t h e n c a n o u r p e o p l e compel peace...
...Two pacifist organizations were conspicuous by their absence as sponsors of the U.S...
...After the war was over, it dropped the last four-words in its title...
...A 1980 article in the Fellowship of Reconciliation's journal states the case as eloquently as ever: "Nonviolent activists dispute the assertion that the end justifies the means: they see means and ends as one and inseparable . . . . The means invariably become embodied in the end, however noble, and skew and distort that end--often beyond recognition...
...Peace groups have plenty of other proposals in the works, including tax resistance, initially in the "symbolic" form of withholding the federal tax on the telephone bill...
...One member of the Fellowship group criticized Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, then engaged in his famous "shuttle diplomacy" in the Middle East, for "inviting Palestinian militants to return to terrorist tactics in the absence of any peaceful alternative for justice...
...Why have peace organizations, both the traditional pacifist ones and the newer breed ofpost-World War II organizations, shown so little resistance to Soviet manipulation...
...The most famous American pacifist, A.J...
...The freeze appeals to the fears everyone shares of nuclear war and presents a measure that is simple, one the man in the s t r e e t feels he can fully grasp...
...jails for the last 20 years...
...In a by no means atypical article, a Women's International League for Peace and Freedom staffer writes that United States society is "an oligarchy composed of a very few wealthy people who have been able to spread considerable well-being among their supporters, agents, willing serfs and the general public by plundering the ignorant and weak here and in other parts of the world...
...Peace Council was laid in 1975 when a nine-member delegation from the WPC came to this country to publicize the WPC's Second Stockholm Peace Petition...
...Communist-inspired 'peace campaigns' are not genuine," announced the Fellowship of Reconciliation when the first Stockholm Peace Campaign was launched, and lead "to building up the Communist party rather than pacifism or peace...
...Peace Council "Call' ' - - t h e Fellowship for Reconciliation and the War Resisters League...
...freeze" in not deploying any weapons systems to counter the SS20s, the Soviet Union will withdraw the l a t t e r beyond the Urals...
...Created shortly after World War If, the WPC sponsored the Stockholm Peace Petition Campaign of 1950 as its first major effort...
...While still a pacifist but undergoing the intellectual development that would make him, if only temporarily, a Communist, Muste developed a radical conception of pacifism outlined in his 1928 essay, "Pacifism and Class War...
...The head of its Labor Taskforce is Gil Green, a member of the U.S...
...The most important to develop prior to the Vietnam war were SANE in 1957 and Women Strike for Peace in 1961, both of which arose to protest nuclear atmospheric testing...
...Peace Council established a youth caucus, designed to reach out to junior high and high school youth with antidraft and antiwar themes, and announced development of a curriculum guide for courses on peace in public schools...
...Add to this the increasingly frequent references in peace group literature to joint local projects of peace and Peace Council groups and the picture is clear: The U.S...
...There then was no way of distinguishing between the violence of the status quo and the bombs and guns of the revolutionaries who challenge it...
...All this ferment left its mark...
...Among the others are Leon Trotsky, labor radical Eugene Debs, anarchist Emma Goldman, and black revolutionary Malcolm X. While pacifist identification of revolutionary socialism with " j u s t i c e " is the most obvious explanation for such reading lists, there may be deeper factors involved in the power violent revolutionaries have exercised over the imagination of modern pacifists...
...At the time of the Korean War, Muste wrote that Communists advocate coalition governments because the strictly disciplined Communist Party always dominates such coalitions and before long takes them over...
...Nuclear freeze petitions are on street corners, in front of supermarkets, in churches and synagogues...
...The World Peace Council, of course, is the most t r a n s p a r e n t of fronts, the "peace" in its title the purest Orwellian doublethink...
...Only two years ago a study of peace organizations commissioned by the Institute of World Order found them discouraged and demoralized...
...Pacifists thus have so extended the meaning of violence that it no longer even refers to the use of force, implicit or explicit...
...SANE reported an 88-percent increase...
...disarmament...
...If the Soviet Union can manipulate them to focus exclusively on Western disarmament and discount the existence of external threats - - o r better still to serve as apologists for aggressive Soviet actions--they are even more useful to the Soviets...
...The nuclear freeze was initially coordinated in early 1980 by two pacifist organizations: the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and the Fellowship of Reconciliation...
...Even the most ardent proponents of the freeze see it as just the beginning...
...Even A.J...
...And why should one expect the average person to think more carefully of the implications of the freeze when congressmen, with staffs hired to consider the ramifications of legislation, are piling on the f r e e z e bandwagon...
...The Fellowship of Reconciliation and the War Resisters League and other pacifist organizations became part of MFS upon its founding in 1977...
...Almost any Third World "liberation movement," provided it attacks the West, can count at the very least on full moral support from the U.S...
...Although the breakdown of American pacifism is a phenomenon only of the last fifteen years, the tensions that led to its disintegration are much older...
...Before its founding conference the U.S...
...The Presbyterian Church, the United Church of Christ, the Disciples of Christ, the Methodist Church, and the Episcopal Church have all voted to make "peace" their priority issue...
...The first is wealthier and better known, but both originated at the end of World War I as religiously based organizations committed to nonviolence...
...Contentions, the newsletter of the Committee for the Free World, whose executive director is writer Midge Decter, has put it succinctly: The people who claim to seek universal disarmament, to the ext~nt that their efforts will succeed, will bring about only the disarmament of the democracies...
...Long nurtured by the extreme Left, this attitude has spilled over to segments of the media, to the universities, to the leadership of mainline churches...
...F o r all their fraudulence, the American peace organizations have grounds to hope that they may find themselves at the center of a great mass movement for disarmament in the United States...
...Romesh Chandra said the presence of the WPC group in the United States, when prior to the McGovern amendment it would have been banned from entering the country, "proves that we can win...
...And that's where the Sierra Club comes in...
...In Detroit the delegation won a sheriff's escort and keys to the city...
...Peace Council or the unabashed fellow-travelling of the Mobilization for Survival coalition signify is that the Soviets do indeed have input into the U.S...
...I n reaching public opinion in the United States, the WPC has been aided since 1979 by the presence of an American affiliate, the United States Peace Council...
...He eased pacifist fears of cooperating with groups that endorsed revolutionary violence by suggesting that radical pacifists were equally compromised by cooperating with those who "in practice are aligned with Western nations and are less sensitive to factors of violence, suppression and evil in American and Western culture than in the non-Western w o r l d . " Critics within the pacifist movement charged that the end result of all the coalitions of peace groups and sectarian varieties of Communists was to destroy pacifism...
...Albert Hassler, a Fellowship of Reconciliation staffer for 32 years, and executive secretary from 1960 until his retirement in 1974, wrote: The question for pacifists, I think, is whether, in their proper sympathy for the exploited and oppressed of the world, they are willing to justify the use of killing violence to rectify the situation, when it is used by "liberation" movements...
...The umbrella National Council of Churches has already endorsed the freeze...
...The Union of Concerned Scientists, which began in 1969 as a 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 1UNE 1982 disarmament group, turned almost all its attention in the 1970s to the then more fashionable issue of nuclear power...
...We are even hearing Soviet slogans passed off as native American peace products...
...WILPF's 1979 resolution on the Middle East calls for negotiations with the PLO without any suggestion that the PLO abandon terrorism or recognize Israel's right to exist...
...Delegation members appeared on television and met with editorial boards of major daily newspapers...
...So did SANE and Clergy and Laity Concerned, the U.S...
...The freeze is bad security policy because the U.S...
...At its second national conference in 1981, the U.S...
...Of course, with the breakdown of their commitment to that principle, pacifist groups have become equally subject to infiltration and manipulation...
...Peace Council is fast becoming an accepted member of the "Peace Club...
...Once the freeze caught on, the Nuclear Freeze Weapons Campaign, consisting primarily of organizations which signed the initial " C a l l , " decided to establish a special clearing-house in the center of the country...
...Peace Council took out a full-page ad in the New York Times in June 1979 to attack Joan Baez and others who had criticized human rights violations in Vietnam (the U.S...
...Last November, 29 Catholic bishops condemned the very possession of nuclear weapons as "immoral...
...Not if it is verifiable, i.e., with on-site inspection...
...Aware of this, freeze leaders say satellite inspection will be ample...
...It also accepted a"Spirit of Detroit Award" given to the WPC for its "substantial effort to achieve peace...
...Terry Provance is one of 40 official U.S...
...SANE and Women Strike for Peace have been Communist targets from t h e i r inception...
...South Carolina's anti-nuclear energy Palmetto Alliance argues that "every time you flick a switch and it's nuclear generated electricity, you're helping to make a bomb...
...While no one doubts the dreadful consequences of nuclear war and the need to avert it, this can scarcely explain the peace crusade...
...Peace Council in some way...
...This is scarcely surprising since the program is headed by Cora Weiss, daughter of Samuel Rubin, whose Samuel Rubin Foundation, directed by Cora and her husband Peter Weiss, has long served as the major f-under of IPS...
...The Fellowship came down on the side of nonviolence, and in the mid-thirties, the dissidents--who at one point included the organization's executive secretary, J.B...
...Lebron was one of four Puerto Rican ter, rorists who opened fire on the U.S...
...Moreover, it sounds even-handed for it calls upon the United States and Soviet Union to adopt a mutual freeze...
...When the U.S...
...The project dearest to the heart of the peace movement is "conversion," i.e., converting military industries to civilian production...
...In 1975 the WPC launched a second Stockholm Peace Petition, this time obtaining 700 million signatures...
...The reaction of established U.S...
...however, instances of pacifist support for terrorist groups could be multiplied...
...It passed a resolution, " I n Solidarity with the Arab People of Palestine and Their Central Issue: Palestine," which condemned the Camp David accords as "a cornerstone of a new U.S...
...And whenever well-intentioned people, who are not necessarily wise people, have tried to cooperate with Communists for what they are persuaded are common goals, the results have been disastrous to the well-intentioned...
...House of R e p r e s e n t a t i v e s from the v i s i t o r s ' gallery during the Truman Administration...
...Peace organiza...
...The Communist Daily World hailed its advent, saying the organization "may mean the difference between life and death for humanity...
...What happened when Muste's broadened definition of violence was accepted was that the distinction between violence and nonviolence disappeared...
...Similar passages could readily be produced from every pacifist publication...
...One organization, the War Resisters League, was initially lukewarm on the grounds that the freeze failed to make connections to "anti-racist, antisexist and a whole variety of other oppressed peoples' struggles...
...Peace Council executive director Michael Myerson, a long-time official of the U.S...
...They assure us it will make effective occupation of this country "impossible...
...WPC President Romesh Chandra showed up for the first national conference, echoing in his speech the WPC line that liberation struggles are the peace movements of their people...
...He was elected to this position at the WPC's 1977 meeting in Warsaw...
...It has been trying to block U.S...
...The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom seems almost obsessed with the PLO...
...Given the breakdown of pacifism in traditional pacifist organizations, it is hardly surprising that the formally nonpacifist peace organizations that have sprung up since World War II have also come to identify with violent movements...
...Where did the nuclear freeze come from...
...the U.S...
...land-based missile force is vulnerable to a Soviet first strike-and a nuclear freeze would freeze its vulnerability, ensuring the Soviet Union an enormous s t r a t e g i c advantage in any future negotiations...
...Matthews--were forced to resign...
...Last August, when the AFSC was trying to build momentum for the freeze, it staged a three-day march in New England...
...Peace Council literature tells the story: It is a dove shaped into a clenched f i s t . " I t is bad enough that established U.S...
...Fear of nuclear war, never far below the surface of public consciousness, has in the past been tempered by other fears and by confidence in public authorities...
...Other resolutions concentrated on cutting back US...
...Even the symbol at the top of U.S...
...Forsberg, formerly of the Stockholm Peace Researd~ Institute, has now established her own think tank, tim Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies...
...While the WPC has devoted much effort to extolling the Soviet Union, promoting Soviet-backed liberation movements, and attacking the United States and its "puppets," it has in the last few years assumed an even larger role mobilizing the Western disarmament protests...
...According to David McReynolds, a War Resisters League staffer, nonviolence is "most deeply violated" when it is confined to the area where "the state kills people...
...This t,me its tour was h o s t e d by t h e Peace Council groups it had e s t a b l i s h e d on i t s p r e v i o u s v i s i t , which a r - ranged meet,ngs with politicians, newspaper e d i t o r s , churchmen, etc...
...It appealed to distinctive American preoccupations by emphasizing the threat " t h e draft poses to human r i g h t s . " It resolved not only to work closely with existing anti-draft registration organizations but to form a GI and Veterans Committee "to organize the thirty million American veterans and two million GIs to fight for peace...
...Physicians for Social Responsibility increased its membership sevenfold...
...SANE experienced sharp .divisions, with its executive director, Donald Keys, and others on the s t a f f resigning after a number of chapters were captured by radicals...
...I: :l:ln t978 the WPC actually held a three-day conference in Washington, sponsored by, among others, Kay Camp, President of the ~'omen's International League for Peace and Freedom, and Edith Villastrigo of Women Strike for Peace...
...At the founding conference the executive director of SANE, the disarmament director of the AFSC, an official of the Women's International I.eague for Peace and Freedom, and a representative of Clergy and Laity Concerned conducted workshops...
...The article quotes a pithy phrase: "You can't grow a rose from a cactus seed...
...The d e l e g a t i o n ' s report mentioned that the Chicago Peace Council would continue " a s always to maintain contact with the WPC...
...A black lesbian organizer with the MarxistLeninist People's Anti-War Mobilization tore into capitalism and imperialism...
...Not only did Muste minimize the importance of revolutionary violence, but he argued that it is improper even to counsel nonviolence so long as we benefit from the existing "violent" order...
...Standing here, you have a 98 percent chance of dying immediately, from leveled buildings, intense heat, lethal radiation, or debris flying to 500 m.p.h...
...We have already noted the objections of the War Resisters League...
...The same thing happened after the repression of Solidarity in Poland...
...The presumably startled reader was enlightened by t h e small print: "A small nuclear bomb explodes over the White House...
Vol. 15 • June 1982 • No. 6
