The Peace Movements of the 1950s
Italy.
tors of the SPD.
for unilateral disarmament.
By Jean-Louis Michel
On February 25, 1949, seventy-five internationally known figures called the first world congress of supporters of peace. uled for April 20 of that year in Paris. The development of this movement into a permanent organization was bound up with the personal role of the French scientist Frederic Jolio-Curie, who was to preside over the World Peace Council until his death in 1958.
The movement, which was made up of "peace activists" from both East and West, served as a special instrument for supporting Soviet diplomatic initiatives in the darkest days of the Cold War in particular.
At the Paris congress, the two thousand delegates unanimously declared: "We are for a ban on atomic weapons and the other means for mass destruction of human beings. We call for limitation of the armed forces of the great powers and the establishment of effective international inspection to assure that atomic power is used exclusively for signed by some 500 million persons throughout the world. Subsequently, it played an important part in the struggles in the 1950s and 1960s against German rearmament and the European Defense Community, as well as against the Algerian war, the various Indochina wars, and against the French force de frappe.
However, after 1968 the influence of the World Peace Council went into a marked decline in West Europe. There were two basic reasons for this. The first is the loss of credibility ensuing from a policy strongly tied to the USSR and which prevented the movement, for example, from taking positions of solidarity with the advances of the political revolution in the East European countries. The second reason is a result of the recomposition developing among the younger strata of the workers movement, in particular in the course of
*** *** the struggle for the victory of the Indochinese revolution. With its ties to the Soviet bureaucracy, the World Peace Council became the framework for an alliance between the bureaucracy and a number of neutralist and pacifist currents that in no way were working for a socialist revolution. In these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the youth turned their backs on the World Peace Council, despite its repeated attempts to attract them.
Finally, in accordance with the reactionary orientations of the bureau-! cracy, the World Peace Council fostered the illusion that peace could be guaranteed by a "negotiated genuine mutual disarmament" under the auspices of the United Nations, which is as much of a "den of thieves" as the League of Nations was in Lenin's time. For revolutionists, to the contrary, the fight for peace is inseparable from the fight for socialism and the world revolution, and it requires an unrelenting struggle for the unilateral disarmament of impeI rialism.
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