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Growing A Radical Peace Movement
Milan Rai
Invited to take part in a discussion
about 'growing the radical peace movement' (in Britain), I turned
to my esteemed co-editor (of the London-based monthly Peace News),
who suggested that 'the radical peace movement' would to some
extent not be able to take part in the discussion because it was
out in Gaza, standing alongside Palestinians as they faced the
might of the Israeli state and then struggled to recover from
Operation Cast Lead. Another long-term activist objected to this
characterization, saying that many of those courageous people
who had gone out in Gaza were not 'peace movement' folk, but 'anti-war
activists' who would not identify themselves as part of the 'peace
movement'.
It may well be true that the international volunteers in Palestine
(who we were thinking of) do not identify themselves as part of
a 'peace movement', but that seemed to raise a lot of questions.
One being: should those who are comfortable identifying themselves
with 'the peace movement' exclude others as 'not peace movement
but anti-war'.
Another unavoidable question is whether discussing these matters,
and gathering together many fine people for reflection and discussion,
is morally justifiable as the smoke clears on the ruins of Gaza,
as the bombs go off in Baghdad, and thousands more Western troops
stand poised to add to the invasion of Afghanistan. What is the
real benefit (clearly not an immediate benefit, but perhaps a
solid benefit nevertheless) to the victims of Western power in
activists sharing and musing rather than acting and planning?
I'll come back to this.
I can't think of many things more urgent, at this point in time,
in this country (Britain), than creating a large, strong, confident,
committed, active, radical peace movement. The question is two-fold:
What does it mean to have a radical peace movement? How might
its growth be encouraged?
My own activist career only goes back 25 years or so, to the European
movement against US cruise and Pershing II ground-launched nuclear
missiles. 25 years or so earlier than that, the nuclear disarmament
movement was sharply divided between CND, a top-down, fairly authoritarian,
elite-oriented lobby-and-march group (which was reluctant to accept
individual membership and internal democratic structures), under
Canon John Collins; and the Committee of 100, a more anarchic
and anarchist direct action network committed to 'filling the
jails', with Bertrand Russell as its figurehead. (The Aldermaston
march was started by the direct actionists (first organizer Pat
Arrowsmith), and then handed over to CND.)
There was tremendous friction between the two approaches and the
two groups (and the two leaders, Collins and Russell). Which was
a great shame, as both approaches were equally unsuccessful in
their own terms.
Canon Collins hoped that a year of intense lobbying would, as
recently in the case of the death penalty, lead smoothly to abolition.
(In fact the 1956 bill to abolish capital punishment was overturned
by the House of Lords, but almost-complete abolition came in 1965.)
Present the right arguments to the right people (influential people),
and Parliament would shift and a law would be passed, and CND
could be dissolved. CND did some intense lobbying. It has been
putting the right arguments to influential people for 50 years,
but Parliament has not shifted, and the abolition law has not
been passed.
The Committee of 100 scorned the parliamentary route and 'the
normal channels', which were corrupt - or had become corrupted.
Power didn't listen to reasoned arguments unless they were backed
up by irresistible people power. If you filled the jails with
mass nonviolent civil disobedience, escalating all the while,
the system would shift, it would give way under the strain and
the government would capitulate. The Committee of 100 got thousands
of people arrested, it didn't quite fill the jails, and it did
manage to escalate the actions for a while. And since then, thousands
more people have engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience in the
cause of nuclear disarmament, but the system hasn't given way
under the strain, and the government has stubbornly refused to
capitulate.
When I came to political consciousness at the time of the second
wave of CND (also the era of the Falklands/Malvinas War (1982)
and the Miners' Strike (1983-84)), the two streams of the disarmament
movement had come together and flowed as one broad river. General
Secretaries of CND were elected for holding up bits of wire snipped
from the fence of a military base (albeit snipped by someone else).
Pat Arrowsmith became a Vice-President of CND. There was a sense
of urgency, of desperation, and, compared to the first wave of
CND, a sense of unity. There was something of a national convulsion
in the first half of the 1980s, with the women of Greenham Common
as the shining embodiment of the new movement. Feminism and grassroots
democracy were bedding down in the movement as disruptive but
core values.
The movement then suffered a significant blow with the signing
of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty between Ronald
Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. It was a significant victory to
force the two superpowers to withdraw ground-launched intermediate-range
nuclear weapons from Europe. However, the exercise was to a large
extent a publicity stunt designed to demobilized the European
peace movement - successfully. Not a single nuclear warhead was
destroyed under the INF. Nuclear warheads withdrawn with ground-launched
cruise missiles were returned to Britain on air-launched cruise
missiles. (My anger over this con trick led to my first arrestable
action at Upper Heyford, where US F-111s were due to carry the
refitted warheads, on the anniversary of the INF Treaty, 8 December
1988.)
Then came the fall of the Berlin Wall, the liberation of Eastern
Europe and the gradual disintegration of the Soviet Union. Advances
for human freedom, no doubt (though qualified by the loss of substantial
social, economic and gender rights). The disarmament movement,
and the wider peace movement, suffered further demobilization
as the threat of nuclear devastation appeared to recede. Nevertheless,
the movement held together to an unprecedented degree after the
fading of Reagan-Thatcher emergency conditions. For example, CND
membership declined did not collapse after the second wave/INF
Treaty, in the way it collapsed after the first wave/Partial Test
Ban Treaty.
How did the disarmament movement (only part of the 'peace movement',
but much the largest and strongest element of it) overcome the
divisions of the first wave? Why didn't CND membership collapse
completely after the INF Treaty/Berlin Wall? My guess is that
part of the explanation is that the peace movement (and general
population) developed a higher level of knowledge and awareness
in the 1960s and 1970s, so that when the movement caught fire
again the in the 1980s it did so with a general appreciation of
the limits of parliamentary action and a little bit more humility
about what could be achieved by civil disobedience (though escalating
mass actions were tried again with the Snowball campaign).
And perhaps the experiences of the 1980s, the cruelty of the Thatcher
years, the experience of repression, welded the 1980s generation
to CND with more enduring bonds than seen before. It was another
learning experience. While the energy of the time came from masses
of young people throwing themselves into struggle, I can't help
feeling the backbone of the movement was slightly older, middle-class
and tending towards middle age. People who committed to CND in
the way they committed to family, to a mortgage, to work. People
who felt their values and feelings articulated by Bruce Kent,
Joan Ruddock, EP Thompson, Rebecca Johnson. What can we learn
from the later lives of these spokespeople? Rebecca Johnson is
still an activist, but now also an international lobbyist and
world-renowned researcher on nuclear matters; EP Thompson kept
producing elegant academic radicalism until he died; Joan Ruddock
became a junior minister under New Labour; Bruce Kent remains
unalterably Bruce Kent.
The final straw for the first wave of CND was the Vietnam War,
which captured much of the youth and the energy of the movement.
For a variety of reasons, Marxist-Leninist groups became very
influential. There was something you could call a peace movement
- its central demand was peace (with justice) - but a significant
part of it was mobilizing for victory to the NLF (the Communist-led
National Liberation Front of South Vietnam). Many of the most
committed activists went beyond opposing the US assault to actively
supporting armed insurgent groups (and a beleaguered state system
in North Vietnam). This was considered to be 'more radical' at
the time.
For CND's second wave, the analogue was perhaps the 1991 Gulf
War, which became the central focus for CND as a national organization.
CND was a key part of the Committee to Stop War in the Gulf. (A
small Trotskyite group had a wholly disproportionate influence
in the workings of the Committee - outstripping the much larger
Socialist Workers Party.) But the stresses and strains of the
1991 war did not finish off CND. A large core membership stuck
with CND and it retained a broad range of specialist sections,
regional and local groups and programmes of activity.
Where the Vietnam War had dragged on for years and descended into
a grinding end game after most US ground troops had been withdrawn,
the 1991 war was six weeks of shock and awe. The two London demonstrations
before the war were the biggest foreign policy demonstrations
ever seen in the capital - 200,000 people. The biggest demonstrations
ever to take place before a war had even started.
With both the anti-cruise mobilization in the 1980s and the anti-war
mobilization of 1990-91, there was a strong sense of existing
norms being violated, of a stable, reasonably benign situation
being disrupted and destabilized - by aggressive US policies.
This perception, this sense of discontinuity, was a sign that
though the peace movement had developed in understanding since
1958, we were to a large extent still prey to official propaganda
and mystique as to both nuclear weapons policy and foreign policy
in general.
In the 1980s, the movement campaigned against cruise and Pershing
on the basis that they were First Strike weapons, designed to
fight and win a nuclear war. Their accuracy and explosive power
meant that they appeared to be designed to attack the military
chain of command and control, and Soviet nuclear missile silos.
They seemed to be parts of a First Strike capability, giving the
US the notional ability to destroy the USSR's capacity to launch
a nuclear attack in a disarming pre-emptive attack.
This was the complete opposite of what people
understood to be 'nuclear deterrence' or 'Mutual Assured Destruction',
which they regarded as a reasonably stable (if undesirable) status
quo. This was a misunderstanding of what 'deterrence' actually
meant. For nuclear policymakers, 'deterrence' doesn't just mean
'Mutual Assured Destruction', but has a wide variety of meanings,
including 'threatening weaker states to make them do things that
are desired or not do things that are not desired'.
Before CND arrived to put the pressure on,
British policymakers used to be open about this kind of thing.
Sir John Slessor, Marshal of the Royal Air Force, was one of the
most influential military theorists of his time (influencing the
Pentagon). Slessor wrote in The Great Deterrent (1957): 'In most
of the possible theatres of limited war... it must be accepted
that it is at least improbably that we should be able to meet
a major communist offensive in one of these areas without resorting
to tactical nuclear weapons.'
In 1956, Lord Montgomery stated that it was
'unlikely that a war as big as Korea could be fought again without
the use of nuclear weapons.' The term 'limited war' meant wars
like Korea - wars in the Third World.
The 1956 Defence White Paper said: 'we have
to be prepared for the outbreak of localised conflicts on a scale
short of global war. In such limited wars the possible use of
nuclear weapons cannot be excluded.'
Why? The Chiefs of Staff wrote in 1958 that:
'tactical nuclear weapons would be needed to offset adverse balances
of manpower and deter limited war'.
Strategic nuclear weapons were for 'deterring'
the Soviet Union. Tactical nuclear weapons were for 'deterring'
unruly Third World states. Of particular interest to Britain were
the colonies and the Commonwealth - states formerly subjugated
as part of the British Empire, now in some way dependent on Britain.
In 1959, Lord Home, Commonwealth Secretary, stated that the countries
of the British Commonwealth were 'rich and tempting prizes to
the Communists'. He observed that: 'to abandon the deterrent,
the only weapon with which we could come to their rescue and save
their freedom, would seem to me to be impossible.'
Performing the necessary decoding, we see
that the good lord was saying that to maintain the Commonwealth
of 'friendly' states ready to take their (subordinate) place in
the British economy, all military power should be at the ready,
including nuclear weapons.
The British Government was clear fifty years
ago that nuclear weapons were for use against
Third World states, and not merely for the protection of the homeland
(or the European landmass) from Soviet invasion. This is not a
desperate post-Cold War rationalization for nuclear weapons.
This was not merely a matter of theory. In
1963 alone, Britain's strategic nuclear bombers made 400 overseas
flights - to the Caribbean as well as stops on the way to Australia.
RAF historian Andrew Brookes comments in The History of Britain's
Airborne Deterrent: Force V that the 1960 non-stop flight of a
V-bomber from Norfolk to Canberra, Australia, was designed to:
'underline the point to anyone with designs on the further fringes
of the Commonwealth.'
Military historian Julian Lider points out
that 'deterrence' has had four principal meanings in the strategic
literature, including 'Deterrence against any hostile action including
blackmail [sic] concerning Western interests in the Third World.'
That was a long nuclear detour. The point
is that the massive mobilization of the 1980s was based on an
awakening about developing US nuclear strategy, along with, in
my view, a significant degree of misunderstanding about existing
British and US nuclear strategies. Of course, this 'misunderstanding'
has been carefully fostered by the Establishment, and the British
mass media in particular.
Similarly, the invasion of Iraq in 1991 was
not as aberrant as it felt for much of the peace movement. The
post-war history of British interventionism (Greece, Indonesia,
Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Oman and so on) had been forgotten or
never really noticed as it was going on, and the reality of British
brutality in the north of Ireland had never been fully digested.
The result, I think, was a degree of illusion about British foreign
policy.
So it's a mixed picture. From what I've read, I think the disarmament
movement developed greater understanding of the political system,
grew more tolerant or supportive of nonviolent civil disobedience,
and became more radical in its thinking, and that's why the movement
was more united in the 1980s and sustained a level of activity
even after the INF Treaty and the Gulf War I.
On the other hand, the peace movement in
general was (in my view) still suffering from some illusions about
nuclear policy and foreign policy in general, problems which persist.
And on the deeper questions of how to make change - how to ban
the bomb, for example - I think we still have a long way to go.
For a start, we could try to come to some common understanding
of why the early CND and Committee of 100 approaches both failed
so completely.
I'm not saying that a better understanding of the limits of previous
strategies will lead immediately to new ways of working and new
objectives that will bring about rapid break-throughs and an avalanche
of disarmament. What I am suggesting is that coming together to
try to understand past failures, current frustrations and future
opportunities can lead to better strategies and faster progress
towards common goals, towards the fulfilment of common values.
That's the real benefit that the victims of Western power - present
victims and those at risk - could gain from activists gathering
to talk and share and not merely to plan.
How are we going to encourage the growth
of a radical peace movement? I'm afraid this is where I'm going
to have to turn to Chomsky.
Noam Chomsky wrote in Liberation in 1969
(re-printed in Radical Priorities): 'The best way to defend civil
liberties is to build a movement for social change with a positive
programme that has a broad-based appeal, that encourages free
and open discussion and offers a wide range of possibilities for
work and action.... in the long run, a movement of the left has
no chance of success, and deserves none, unless it develops an
understanding of contemporary society and a vision of a future
social order that is persuasive to a large majority of the population.
Its goals and organizational forms must take shape through their
active participation in political struggle and social reconstruction.
A genuine radical culture can be created only through the spiritual
transformation of great masses of people, the essential feature
of any social revolution that is to extend the possibilities for
human creativity and freedom.... In an advanced industrial society
it is, obviously, far from true that the mass of the population
have nothing to lose but their chains, and there is no point in
pretending otherwise. On the contrary, they have a considerable
stake in preserving the existing social order. Correspondingly,
the cultural and intellectual level of any serious radical movement
will have to be far higher than in the past, as Andre Gorz, for
one, has correctly emphasized. It will not be able to satisfy
itself with a litany of forms of oppression and injustice. It
will have to provide compelling answers to the question of how
these evils can be overcome by revolution or large-scale reform.
To accomplish this aim, the left will have to achieve and maintain
a position of honesty and commitment to libertarian values. It
must not succumb to the illusion that a "vanguard party,"
self-designated as the repository of all truth and virtue, can
take state power and miraculously bring about a revolution that
will establish decent values and truly democratic structures as
the framework of social life. If its only clearly expressed goals
are to smash and destroy, it will succeed only in smashing and
destroying itself. Furthermore, if a radical movement hopes to
be able to combat imperialism, or the kinds of repression, social
management and coercion that will be developed by the evolving
international economic institutions, it too will have to be international
in its organizational forms as well as in the cultural level it
seeks to attain. To construct a movement of this sort will be
no mean feat. It may well be true, however, that success in this
endeavour is the only alternative to tyranny and disaster.' ('Some
Tasks for the Left')
Chomsky suggested in a 1971 interview (also
re-published in Radical Priorities): 'it seems perhaps not unrealistic
to look forward to a mass political movement that will be devoted
to badly needed reforms, anti-imperialist and antimilitarist,
concerned with guaranteeing minimal standards of health, income,
education, industrial safety and conditions of work, and overcoming
urban decay and rural misery. Within it, or related to it, there
might develop a variety of more radical movements that explore
the possibility of dismantling the system of private and state
power and democratizing basic social and economic institutions
through cooperatives and community and workers' control. I would
hate to see the Left too well organized at this stage (not much
fear of this in any event), though one would hope that destructive
factional squabbling could be overcome in favour of sympathetic
and fraternal disagreement and, where possible, cooperation among
those who have rather different ideas about what are, after all,
rather obscure and poorly understood matters.' ('The New Radicalism')
If we take this as a rough model, the suggestion
here is that radical movements - including a radical peace movement
- only have a chance of really flourishing and developing as elements
of larger reform movements. The movement as a whole has to grow
if the radical fringe (or core) of it is to grow. That's the necessary
condition. The sufficient conditions are that the radical movements
have to be intellectually excellent, libertarian-democratic, honest,
persuasive and international.
Chomsky has written about the development
of the peace movement back in the 1980s: 'The threat of nuclear
war is real enough. There is much that can be done to reduce the
threat, and it would be wrong, even criminal, to fail to do what
can be done to constrain the military system and to reduce the
tensions and conflicts that may lead to its employment, terminating
history. Nevertheless, to concentrate all energies on delaying
an eventual catastrophe, while ignoring the causal factors that
lie behind it is simply to guarantee that sooner or later it will
occur. There are reasons why states devote their resources to
improving the technology of destruction, why they seek international
confrontation and undertake violent intervention. If these reasons
are not addressed, a terminal conflict is a likely eventuality;
only the timing is in doubt. It is suicidal to concentrate solely
on plugging holes in the dike without trying to stem the flood
at its source. For us, that means changing the structures of power
and dominance that impel the state to crush moves towards independence
and social justice within our vast domains and that constantly
drive it towards militarization of the economy....
'As our society is constituted, public policy will be guided by
the imperatives on intervention and military Keynesianism; protests
against particular excrescences, however successful, will lead
to pursuit of the same objectives by similar means along other
paths, since the state - in the broad sense of earlier discussion
- relies on them for its survival in its present form. Alternatives
to existing forms of hierarchy, domination, private power and
social control certainly exist in principle, and are well-known,
and even supported by much of the population despite their remoteness
from the intellectual scene, as already briefly noted. But to
make them realistic will require a great deal of committed work,
including the work of articulating them clearly. Similarly, opposition
to slavery would have failed if no realistic alternative had been
advanced: rental rather than ownership of labour, in our own history,
not the end to which we should strive, but a major advance nonetheless.
Determined opposition to the latest lunacies and atrocities must
continue, for the sake of the victims as well as our own ultimate
survival. But it should be understood as a poor substitute for
a challenge to the deeper causes, a challenge that we are, unfortunately,
in no position to mount at present though the groundwork can and
must be laid. Protest over Star Wars, massacre in El Salvador,
and so on, is a sign of our weakness. A strong peace movement
would be challenging military-based capitalism and the world system
it dominates while seeking to support similar forces to the extent
that they can survive in the so-called "socialist world"....
'Unless the various strands of the movements for peace and social
justice can develop and sustain a vision of an attainable future
that expresses the felt needs of the overwhelming mass of the
population for freedom, justice, decency, solidarity and meaningful
democracy, and unless they can find a way to follow Bakunin's
advice to construct the "facts" of this future within
existing society, there will be no way to proceed beyond attempts
to mitigate the worst atrocities and to delay the final catastrophe.'
(Turning the Tide, pp. 249-250)
In other words, a 'strong peace movement'
would be a radical peace movement, an anti-capitalist peace movement
that was powerful enough to seriously challenge wage-slavery,
investor control and unaccountable management. A movement able
to abolish the transnational corporations that rule the world,
and to replace them with new democratic social and economic forms.
If we are talking about a radical peace movement,
this must be a key element of what we are talking about.
I suspect that one of the divergences between
many of the people who identify with 'the peace movement' and
those who would rather identify with 'the anti-war movement' might
revolve around their attitudes towards 'anti-capitalism' in the
sense just described.
Personally, I think the peace movement is
a loose melange of groups and individuals working on issues around
militarism and war, and contains the traditional peace organizations
such as CND, and newer forms such as the International Solidarity
Movement, members of which are under fire in Gaza as I write,
standing alongside Palestinian herb farmers struggling to maintain
a semblance of normality in what Israel describes as a 'ceasefire'.
Some final words from Chomsky:
'Prospects for freedom and justice are limitless.
The steps we should take depend on what we are trying to achieve.
There are, and can be, no general answers. The questions are wrongly
put. I am reminded of a nice slogan of the rural workers' movement
in Brazil (from which I have just returned): they say that they
must expand the floor of the cage, until the point when they can
break the bars. At times, that even requires defence of the cage
against even worse predators outside: defence of illegitimate
state power against predatory private tyranny in the United States
today, for example, a point that should be obvious to any person
committed to justice and freedom - anyone, for example, who thinks
that children should have food to eat - but that seems difficult
for many people who regard themselves as libertarians and anarchists
to comprehend. That is one of the self-destructive and irrational
impulses of decent people who consider themselves to be on the
left, in my opinion, separating them in practice from the lives
and legitimate aspirations of suffering people.
So it seems to me. I'm happy to discuss the point, and listen
to counter-argument, but only in a context that allows us to go
beyond shouting of slogans - which, I'm afraid, excludes a good
deal of what passes for debate on the left, more's the pity.'
(From this
website.)
'[A] general strategy for overcoming authoritarian
institutions, how could there be an answer to that question? There
isn't any. In fact, I think those questions are mostly asked by
people who don't want to become engaged. If you want to become
engaged and do it, there are plenty of problems around that you
can work on, whether it's what you started with, hungry children,
or the destruction of the environment, the breakdown of security
in the workplace, public subsidy to huge transnationals, we can
go on and on. But it's not going to happen by pushing a button.
It's going to happen by dedicated, concentrated work which will
slowly build up the understanding, the relationships among people,
the perceptions, the support systems, the alternative institutions
and so on. Then something can happen. But there's no general all-purpose
strategy for that.' (From this
website.)
'Separatism, subcultures or actions
that remain meaningless or offensive to much of the population,
lack of an articulated vision of the future, acceptance without
awareness of the doctrines of the state religion - these are among
the many reflections of the enormous power of the Western system
of fragmentation and ideological control, and of our inability,
so far, to combat it, except sporadically.' (Turning the Tide,
p. 250)
JNV
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