The Twisting Path to Peace

...By January 1973, when the United States formally signed an agreement to withdraw all of its troops, most of the peace movement had dissipated...

...Communist China seemed remote and alien to Westerners—and lost what luster it had during the decade-long excesses of the Cultural Revolution...

...Early this year, a national convention of freeze advocates, meeting in St...

...some of their utterances often irritate us...

...Button, and 'The Maginot Line Syndrome: America's Hopeless Foreign Policy," published last year by Ballinger/Harper & Row...

...Muste, some Quakers, the War Resisters League, the religious constituency around Dorothy Day and her Catholic Worker movement—retained a larger vision and expressed it in such formulations as Muste's "There is no way to peace...

...In 1953, aged sixty-eight, Muste "retired" on a small pension to devote his time to various pacifist and political causes, including Liberation magazine, the American Forum for Socialist Education, and the Committee for Nonviolent Action, which specialized in civil disobedience designed to arouse the American conscience against militarism...

...According to Nixon and Haldeman, such a nuclear attack might well have been undertaken in 1969 had it not been for fears that the reaction of the antiwar forces would prove uncontrollable...

...At the same time, it affords a new opportunity to formulate a more comprehensive political program— one that looks not only to the danger of war, but also to the economic and political structures of our society that constantly impel it to resort to force or the threat of force in international affairs...

...Public disenchantment with the war and public participation in antiwar activities and demonstrations increased inexorably, keeping step with the growing commitment of U.S...

...In the early 1960s, a number of organizationsmost notably the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), Women's Strike for Peace, and such traditional peace groups as the American Friends Service Committee—were mobilizing opposition to the arms race, and especially to the atmospheric nuclear tests then being systematically conducted by the two superpowers...

...It began as a mere "recommendation" to the President that would have no binding force even if it were approved by both houses of Congress...

...There can be no doubt that the peace activists in this country have helped build a substantial constituency...

...Though various organizations never ceased their antiwar activity, it took years after the end of the Vietnam war to reconstitute a visible peace movement in the United States...

...Others, including SDS and the Muste group, called for swift and unconditional U.S...

...European socialists and social democrats were virtually indistinguishable from the liberal establishment...

...In April 1965, SDS brought some 25,000 antiwar demonstrators to Washington—the largest protest held up to that point...

...And it resolved to mount a campaign of street demonstrations, including a series of "Freeze Fridays" and a national protest in October...

...Another force that helped fill the vacuum left by the Communist collapse centered around Muste, a charismatic figure whose life was a migration through many of the radical movements of his time...

...Haldeman, published their memoirs, was the thwarting of a contemplated nuclear strike against North Vietnam...

...It called on Congress to cut off all funds for nuclear weapons, provided the Soviet Union entered into a simultaneous agreement to halt testing, production, and deployment...

...Children collected photos of new heroes with strange foreign names—Lenin, Trotsky, Liebknecht, Luxemburg...

...Four and a half years later, 780,000 demonstrated in the capital under the auspices of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, and two years after that the National Peace Action Coalition brought a similar number to Washington...

...history—a gathering of almost a million demonstrators against the arms race in New York's Central Park...

...Among questions that arose almost from the beginning of the enlarged and revitalized peace movement were whether Communists and radicals should be allowed visible and prominent roles, and what specific program ought to be put forward to end the war...

...Tens of thousands who had never heard Lenin's name before November 1917 suddenly became Leninists...

...The freeze campaign, with its broad appeal to large numbers of middle-class Americans, has not begun to attract the kind of campus following that the antiwar movement of the 1960s had...

...in fact, they were a part of it...

...On the one hand, public opinion polls show massive support for such antiwar initiatives as the nuclear freeze...

...The Dutch-born minister had lost his Massachusetts church for opposing U.S...

...But the vigor and viability of the peace movement itself is subject to debate...

...Unfortunately, the absence of political substance in the peace movement is nowhere more obvious than in the nuclear freeze campaign...

...Another major factor was the campaign of political repression here at home that accompanied the initial stages of the Cold War...

...The dream dissolved slowly, over the course of several decades, as the world gradually learned about forced collectivization, mass arrests, labor camps, show trials, executions...

...Abraham Cahan, editor of the social democratic Jewish Daily Forward, spoke for many when he observed, "We have criticized them...

...Muste's supporters and the SDS contingent, on the other hand, followed a policy of nonexclusion, welcoming anyone who opposed the war...

...Few would dispute the proposition that the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was the most momentous event of the Twentieth Century...

...When the Russian Revolution was followed by the revolt of German sailors at Kiel, and then by the establishment of Soviet republics in Hungary and Bavaria, leaders of fledgling socialist parties in the United States concluded that they, too, would soon be caught up in the inexorable tides of history...

...The Mobilization's four-point program—eliminate nuclear weapons, ban nuclear power, stop the arm^race, fund human needs—was designed to appeal to a basic peace, environmental, and liberal constituency without raising complex and controversial questions about political goals...

...Though nominally socialist parties controlled the southern rim of the continent from Portugal to Greece, they made no perceptible progress in dismantling the structures of capitalism...

...Castro's Cuba seemed more attractive, and some admired Tito's Yugoslavia, but neither of those experiments came close to stirring the imagination as the Soviet Revolution had...

...K The peace pastoral letter issued last year by 350 American Catholic bishops—the most prominent manifestation of a widespread revival of antiwar commitment in many mainstream and even fundamentalist churches...

...But it was the Vietnam war, not the nuclear peril, that made the antiwar movement a major national force...

...Lincoln Steffens, the muckraking journalist, proclaimed on returning from a visit to the Soviet Union, "I have seen the future and it works...

...The Scandinavian socialists fashioned an improved version of the welfare statenot a social order that would summon people to a higher vision of human potential...

...And it was the precept that guided Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the New American Movement (NAM), and most other components of the revitalized youth movement that came into being in the 1960s under the general rubric of the New Left...

...Muste's most significant and durable contribution was his insistence that radical opponents of militarism and war must take an uncompromising "third camp" position, aligned neither with Washington nor with Moscow and emphatically independent of both...

...For that reason, among others, the freeze advocates tend to look toward electoral politics, while the abolitionists place their emphasis on the politics of protest...

...Disillusionment with the Soviet model was, of course, only one cause of demoralization and disarray on the Left and in its most visible component, the peace movement...

...When it came to devising a strategy for U.S...

...withdrawal from Vietnam, SANE's slogan was "negotiations"— urging President Johnson to enter into peace talks with North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front...

...Sidney Lens, The Progressive's Senior Editor, is a veteran peace activist...

...Most of the rest of the Left lived by the rule enunciated for the labor movement a century ago by Samuel Gompers: "We have no ultimate ends...

...Louis, agreed on a somewhat more vigorous stance...

...At one protest, a SANE leader distributed U.S...

...And the most important aspect of that victory, which did not come to light until years later when Richard Nixon and his former aide, H.R...

...If, on the other hand, the peace forces continue to improvise, reacting to the latest escalation, existing from day to day without ultimate ends, they may win an occasional small victory here and there from time to time, but they will achieve no lasting impact as the world quickens the pace toward Armageddon...

...In this century, we have witnessed the fulfillment of a great human dream and then its demolition, to the point where only a few fragments endure as the potential stuif on which to build a new crusade for a better world...

...But by the time a New Left began to take form in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s, the dream was destroyed, and so to all intents were the political entities that had subsisted on it—the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, and all their subsidiaries, affiliates, and allies...

...Rovitch, an American radical, predicted that "the days are not far off when we shall have a Council of Workmen and Soldiers on the same pattern as the one in operation in Russia...

...force levels in Vietnam...

...military intervention in Indochina, the movement could not render itself immune to the classic internal squabbles that tend to plague the Left...

...withdrawal from Vietnam is arguably the greatest victory ever won by the American peace movement—or, for that matter, by the American Left...

...Decimated by official repression, devastated by Nikita Khrushchev's revelations of Stalinist abuses, the Communists collapsed as an effective political force, leaving a void on the Left and in the peace movement...

...Even as the evidence of Stalin's crimes became irrefutable and overwhelming, many clung to the faith, pointing to the exaggerations of the capitalist press or attributing Soviet "mistakes" to inordinate outside pressures...

...If they can begin to fashion that kind of political analysis and program, the peace forces may, indeed, serve as the nucleus of the radical political revival that is now almost two generations overdue—the rebirth of a movement that envisions a better society and a better world, and that can attract broad popular support for such a movement...

...There was no socialist model anywhere in the world to which one could point in evoking an image of a beautiful, humane tomorrow...

...Only convinced pacifists—such as the Reverend A.J...

...but who can help rejoicing in their triumph...

...Inevitably, such differences in fundamental goals make for differences in constituency, strategy, and tactics...

...public opinion had begun to turn against involvement in Vietnam, and few civil rights activists were at the forefront of the peace movement...

...Since it lacked any long-range political goal or ideological focus, the antiwar movement began fading as soon as the Nixon Administration embarked on a systematic program of reducing U.S...

...We are witnessing the largest arms buildup in our nation's history, at a cost of more than two trillion dollars over a five-year period...

...The Twisting Path to Peace A movement tries to find its way BY SIDNEY LENS The peace movement may be the last significant remnant of what was once a vigorous and viable American Left...

...The social democratic parties that came to power in Britain, Germany, France, and the Netherlands concentrated on making capitalism function more smoothly, not on creating a new kind of society...

...Whatever other factors may contribute to the peace movement's obvious lack of clout in the United States—and there are many that deserve serious attention—the absence of a broad ideological base is certainly one important consideration...

...Most individuals and organizations engaged in active opposition to the Vietnam war were driven not by ideological commitment but by an immediate revulsion against a cruel and unjustifiable intervention...

...Still, the Mobilization was and is generally regarded as part of the movement's left wing, ideologically akin to the War Resisters League...

...That void was filled, at least in part, by the emerging civil rights struggle led by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr...

...Among the more important aspects of the resurgent peace movement are: H A revival of civil disobedience, sparked by such activists as Phil and Dan Berrigan and Jim Douglass, and such organizations as the various Ploughshares groups around the country, whose aim is to bear witness against the arms race by mounting nonviolent physical resistance to it...

...It was withdrawal, not negotiations, that became the rallying cry for most of the young people attracted to the peace movement, and the Mobe, to which they were drawn, practiced nonexclusion rather than Cold War anticommunism...

...On the other hand, the forces of peace have not made any meaningful progress toward achieving their most important goal—arresting the arms race...

...To this day, neither the peace movement nor the entire leftof- center portion of the political spectrum has fully recovered from the persecutions of the McCarthy era...

...Who can help going into ecstasy over the socialist spirit which they have enthroned in the country they now rule...

...entry into World War I, headed a national union of textile workers, organized a labor school at Katonah, New York, founded the Conference for Progressive Labor Action, and served as co-leader of the Trotskyist Workers' Party...

...Still, the U.S...

...The Mobe, as the major antiwar coalition was known, was a joint effort of scores of local, regional, and national peace organizations, church leaders, draft resisters, remnants of the Old Left, and representatives of the New...

...At one end of the spectrum, some advocates of a nuclear freeze argue that the United States must retain a sizable weapons stockpile as a "deterrent" against the Soviet Union...

...The Mobilization's work reached its peak in June 1982, when it helped coordinate the largest demonstration in U.S...

...SANE, the largest peace group in 1965, not only excluded Marxists from its leadership but shied away from permitting them to take part in meetings and demonstrations...

...His most recent books are "The Bomb, "published in 1982 by Lodestar/E.P...

...The abolitionists, though their number is increasing, are far from a mass movement...

...At the other end are the abolitionists—proponents of total disarmament—who assert that there can be no compromise on the nuclear issue...

...And the tensions that can lead to international conflict—even to nuclear war—have not been higher since the Cuban missile crisis brought the world to the brink of atomic annihilation in 1962...

...Their expectations rose still higher as French soldiers mutinied against their officers, Italian workers seized their factories, and British workers fashioned a radical shop-stewards movement...

...we exist from day to day...

...The American Communist Party, once an energetic political cadre with influence that far exceeded its numbers, declined from a peak of about 100,000 members and more than a million sympathizers to perhaps a tenth of those figures...

...Because of its timid formulations, the freeze attracted some hypocritical support from legislators who found it possible to vote for a freeze resolution one day and for the MX missile the next...

...withdrawal, arguing that there was nothing to negotiate since American troops had no business being in Vietnam in the first place...

...It was little more than a memory when the South Vietnamese government of Nguyen Van Thieu collapsed in 1975...

...that the possession of a single nuclear bomb is a criminal act under the principles established at Nuremburg by the United States and its allies after World War II...

...troops, which rose from a handful of "military advisers" at the outset of the Kennedy Administration to some 550,000 soldiers in 1968...

...King himself did not take a vigorous antiwar stand until the tide of U.S...

...It was celebrated not only by socialists of many persuasions but by liberals, moderates, and some who had little interest in politics...

...There was hardly a radical meeting, whether of socialists, anarchists, or IWW Wobblies, at which the mere mention of the Soviet Union did not bring forth thunderous applause...

...What was once a dynamic movement inspired by a comprehensive vision of a better world has been reduced to a rear-guard action against those whose reckless policies endanger the survival of the planet...

...Now the increasingly ominous prospect of fullscale military intervention in Central America confronts the peace movement with a new challenge...

...But the black liberation effort, with its emphasis on civil disobedience, helped restore an atmosphere in which dissent against U.S...

...For most of the American peace movement, that has been policy since Muste enunciated it...

...flags to participants to "prove" that the organization was patriotic and anticommunist...

...Clearly the end of capitalism, predicted by Karl Marx three-quarters of a century earlier, was finally at hand...

...In February 1976, The Progressive devoted most of an issue to my 20,000-word article, "The Doomsday Strategy," which proved instrumental in forging a new coalition opposed to the arms race, the Mobilization for Survival...

...peace is the way...

...In the absence of a model that could command devotion and respect, the New Left sought its inspiration in ephemeral cultures and countercultures, and sometimes in such fatuous notions as the Yippies' assumption that capitalism would fall if it were subjected to sharp ridicule...

...foreign and domestic policies was at least possible, even if it was not encouraged...

...11 The emergence of the nuclear freeze campaign as a broad-based effort receiving serious attention in Congress and supported by a substantial majority of the American people...

...In response to Reagan Administration missile-rattling, organized opposition to the nuclear arms race has reached an all-time high—in this country and abroad—within the past two years...

...It was made contingent on "mutual verification"—a precondition that virtually ensured its rejection by both superpowers...

...For the harassed and hounded American Left, the success of the Soviet Revolution held out the promise of ultimate triumph...

...As it looks to the likelihood of more intensive— and urgent—activity in the months and years ahead, the peace movement must resolve some sensitive but crucially important questions that are, in effect, echoes of the withdraw-versus-negotiate controversy of twenty years ago...

...But despite a determined effort to submerge all differences in a united struggle to end U.S...