Fw- from David McR: Will the class please come to order

I have decided to expand the list a bit. By accident I had left off David Hartsough and one or two others. I won't reprise my original post (happy to send it on to any who want to see it). What I had urged, in brief, was that there is a lack of a serious American peace movement, or coalition of groups, which can respond to the danger of war.


I realize that in sending this out to my own Edgeleft list there will be both duplication and a lot of folks who really aren't interested will wonder why they are getting this. 


I've had some thoughtful responses to my post of yesterday and want to make it clear it was not written in anger, and that I do not dismiss the work of any who seek to abolish war. 


I found on the internet that in addition to David Swanson's efforts at a World Beyond War there is still active World Without War, located in Berkeley, which was started in the 1950's with a grant from War Resisters League and at that time headed by Robert Pickus. I gather it has morphed into a slightly different group. 


I am delighted that there is a renewed discussion about ending war and the danger of nuclear destruction. But the struggle against the institution of war began with World War I, when men in Germany, Britain, and the US went to prison for refusing military service. These courageous individuals organized international groups to resist - and abolish - war. Members of those groups were imprisoned in Britain and the US in World War II, and sent to camps in Germany, in some cases executed, or fled for their lives. So this is not a new discussion, rather it is a very serious one, bringing civil society into direct conflict with the state.


After Hiroshima and Nagasaki - and this I remember very well - there was a profound fear of nuclear war and agreement on the need for complete and universal disarmament, both conventional and nuclear.

Until the Cold War began, there was a powerful movement in the West for some form of world government.


So, while I welcome new groups, such as Campaign Nonviolence and 

World Beyond War, they are part of a renewal of a serious struggle that began nearly a century ago.


There are many other groups that could be listed but it would take up too much space. There are, as I admitted in my original post, such shifts in society that I've lost touch with who the key people are in existing groups and, worse than that, (not surprising for one in their 80's) I don't use skype, rarely use my cell phone, and am impressed with the ease that new groups can appear with well designed web pages. It is hard - perhaps impossible - to tell how real some of the groups are, so well designed are their web sites.


In my memo of yesterday I was NOT urging a merger of existing peace groups. I was urging those groups do a better job of the kind of loose coordination we saw in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. And I urged that this was not achieved by announcing a new group would be launched on a certain date - but rather by the painful process of putting together the building blocks of working coalitions.


In  "the old days" this could be done by finding the key person trusted by all, or the key groups that had real clout. One looked for someone like Norman Thomas, A. J. Muste,  or A. Philip Randolph around whom a really serious meeting of a small group could be called. In talking with Jim Barton today we discussed 1957, when both SANE and the Voyage of the Golden Rule emerge from a small meeting in Philadelphia (and out of that meeting eventually came the Committee for Nonviolent Action which played a key role in the sixties). We didn't have web pages, but the letterheads (which served somewhat the same purpose of "legitimizing" a group) came after the meetings, along with the list of supporters or endorsers. 


This could - historic note here, historians stand by with computer n hand - mean something like the way Bayard Rustin operated, putting together the great Madison Square Garden rallies and the Prayer Pilgrimages which paved the way for the great March on Washington. Bayard would first get A. Philip Randolph to sign on to the project, then he would approach Martin Luther King Jr., and then, with the two key folks in hand, he would go to Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and say "Roy, Martin and Mr. Randolph both think this project would be excellent but for it to work it really needs your support" which was a way of telling Roy that he was boxed in. (Wilkins preferred court battles to demonstrations and was never the first person Bayard would approach). And the trick was getting the support of those who had troops on the ground - not just names that the public would know. Rosa Parks had a great name, but it was Roy Wilkins and Martin Luther King Jr. who had the "troops". 


During the Vietnam War we counted on Stewart Meacham at AFSC. Many in the AFSC were not that happy with Stewart's work on the Vietnam movement but didn't know how to stop him - and Stewart could deliver most of the AFSC regional offices. In the 80's we looked to Terry Provance of the AFSC to play that role with Mobilization for Survival.  At the Fellowship of Reconciliation it wasn't Al Hassler, the Executive Secretary, but Allan Brick and Ron Young of the staff who brought FOR in.And during the Vietnam War it was Muste who had both old labor contacts and good church contacts that helped bring people in.


I don't want my comments in the first post to be seen as hostile to radicals (of which, in any case, I am one) - my reason for concern about groups such as ANSWER is that they are manipulative, and tend to view broader struggles as a way of recruiting new members to their own group behind the scene (the Party of Socialism and Liberation). We learned, early in the sixties (1965 to be precise) that SDS was right in demanding a non-exclusion policy. And the groups I listed yesterday should be invited to any broader coalition but not as the initiators. The pacifists can play a key role in this process - for the most part we put the goals of the movement above scoring points for our own groups. We will take some risks. (During the Vietnam War the West Coast folks n War Resisters League were fearful that those of us in New York were being duped by the Communist Party - we had a special two day meeting in New York City, with a full discussion, and a sense of trust was restored - not total agreement, but trust).


As I said, I no longer have those personal contacts, but I hope some of you do. It is not a matter of getting people to "sign onto" a statement but of knowing the statement had been vetted by reliable people. I used to draft a statement, get Muste to agree to it, then go to Paul Goodman, Dorothy Day or Norman Thomas or Dwight Macdonald to get them to sign (alas, some of those names are not known now!) and with those names people knew the project was sound, and we could get many other signers.


My "politics" in this matter, aside from being a democratic Marxist and a Gandhian, is knowing that no state can be trusted, that great changes never start at the top, whether it is FDR, JFK, or Obama. They start from below, from what I would call the civil society. A loose grouping that will NOT be that involved in the 2016 election whether or not Hillary Clinton is running (I don't care how people vote - I care about where their real energy is put).  The Civil Rights movement needed both very skillful leaders, such as Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr., and enormously courageous and dedicated people working in the neighborhoods, not just at the most dramatic level of the freedom rides (I never had the courage to join one of those rides) but at getting out the mailings, making the phone calls, talking to neighbors.


Some of the most important people in the peace movement were never widely known. Sid Peck was crucial to the great Vietnam rallies but worked behind the scene. Norma Becker was, n some ways, the most important and least known person in the Vietnam movement (and beyond - being one of the first in the Jewish community to think through the problems of Israel and the Palestinians, reaching out to set up informal discussions).


The task is much more complex that calling for folks to agree that war must be ended. It involves the complex balancing of issues - in the case of Mobilization for Survival it meant linking the nuclear weapons issue to the nuclear power plants. For us today it means including the environment, it includes some discussion of the economic roots of war (why do you think the US went into Vietnam and Iraq?), it includes an openness to a discussion of our own political system in which American oligarchs really dominate our "democracy". Tricky business, hard to handle - all the more reason for the peace groups to set up some kind of loose coalition or points of contact to work on strategy.



David McReynolds


(I see that in writing this, the original memo was already in the computer, so for those who wonder what I had written, I leave it here, others can ignore it)




On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 2:13 AM, David McReynolds <[email protected]> wrote:

  This will go to broader lists but there is a chance some of you will read this if your names are in the "to" column, human nature being what it is - and because you are really important.


  I write with some sense of despair, some hope, a clear sense of the problem and a small but useful bit of history.


  The despair is that at 84 I am so out of the loop that I don't know who the key folks are at AFSC, FOR, or probably even WRL (aside from Ali Issa). And I know that some of you are - almost - in my boat, retired or out of the loop (or even actually old). But my hope is you might know just the right younger contacts to send this to.
   

  My sense of the problem is that there is no peace movement today. UFPJ is not really more than a list serve (and very helpful it is), the "other" group, UNAC, is too heavily influenced by one or more small Trotskyist groups. And then we have the very well organized Marxist/Leninist groups, Party for Socialism and Liberation (which has ANSWER), and Workers World Party (which has the International Action Center), and the Revolutionary Communist Party (which has or had The World Can't Wait).


  I do not mean to attack those groups, but none of them are the "peace movement" (and sometimes when I get material from UNAC I am amused that it must somehow attack Israel, no matter what the issue, because it is trying to hold on to some contacts it has in the Palestinian community).


  What we need is not a new national office, a new name, or a new staff - what we need is some sense of coalition that can bring together those who can mobilize against ANY government we are likely to have. Remember, for those who think the "peace movement" folded because Obama was elected, that we had a powerful movement that began under Kennedy and grew under LBJ, both far more liberal than Obama is today.


  Yes, we had a draft, and yes we had the then new youth movement as the children of WW II folks suddenly came lurching into adolescent confusion and blessed idealism in the 1960's. It wasn't, of course, just here - there was Paris, there was Prague.


  Now with NSA and drones, and the constant drum beat for some military solution for Syria or Iran or Russia, we seem to have lost track of the need for a non-military solution for the US!!


  My one warning, based on fifty years of work, beware of the Marxist/Leninist sects - I might as easily say beware of the plague of Trotskyists, all of them with good intentions and correct lines. They aren't really the enemy, they can be part of broad coalitions (as they were for several years in the early Vietnam period) but they must not be allowed to carry their turf wars into what, of necessity, would be a broad movement drawing heavily on the religious community as well as student and labor contacts.


  The small but useful bit of history is Mobilization for Survival, which was organized after the Vietnam War. In the aftermath of that war we were all worn out, the movement scattered. Sid Lens, the old radical labor leader (and one time Trotskyist, and a co-worker with A.J. Muste), badgered Norma Becker about the need for SOME revival of the movement. Norma set in motion the first meetings of what became Mobilization for Survival. It was not anyone's front group but it was the joint project of the AFSC's disarmament program  and the War Resisters League.


  Mobe - and some of you getting this were in it - remember how it spread, providing a home for folks from the Vietnam movement, how it combined opposition to nuclear war and nuclear energy.

  It was Mobe which laid the basis for the great Central Park event on June 12th, 1982, which drew perhaps a million people.


  And it was Mobe which helped spark (and work with) things such as END (European Nuclear Disarmament) in Europe - and it was these citizen's movements, NOT DIRECTED by small political sects, which really did help shift us away from the greatest dangers of the Cold War and which had an impact on the thinking of Soviet leaders.


  The primary secret is that those who organize and spark such groups must not try to control them - in fact, the whole point is to set up things which take on a life of their own.


  These days I get steady reports of extremely courageous acts by folks close to the Catholic Worker and no one seems to notice. Every day I open the paper or turn on TV and see another round of bombings in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or the bleeding horror of Syria. I find Snowden forced to take shelter in Moscow, of all places. And all I see on our side of the fence are fairly meaningless front groups of very tiny and marginal left organizations.


  Age takes a toll. There is very little I can do but pass on a reminder of what did happen. It happened when the great energy of the Vietnam Movement was dissipated and people were depressed.

  And it was spurred into action not by a decision of some central committee but by the badgering of the old radical, Sid Lens, and Norma Becker at WRL and the staff at AFSC. (Terry Provance, whose name I could not recall yesterday).


  Do we have two, three, four people out there who can duplicate the role of those who revived a movement back in the 1970's?


  David McReynolds