[The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, whose leadership is pacifist and left Social Democratic, is attempting to launch a campaign against nuclear weapons in Europe. In its "Statement on a European Nuclear-Free Zone," the Russell Foundation does not take an anti-imperialist stance. It fails to address the most immediate threats to world peace that we are confronting today-that is, imperialism's drive to contain revolutions in Latin America, Afghanistan, Iran, and Southeast Asia, and its support for hated dictatorships, as in Saudi Arabia and South Korea.
[Instead, the Russell Foundation takes a "third-camp" position, placing the Soviet and East European workers states on the same plane as the imperialist powers led by Washington. "Both parties have adopted menacing postures and committed aggressive actions in different parts of the world," the statement claims.
[While the statement urges disarmament of both the United States and the USSR, it also calls for support to the SALT II accords, under which the Pentagon would actually be able to increase its nuclear arsenal.
[Signers of the statement include Tamara Deutscher; former East German dissident Rudolf Bahro; former Trotskyist leader Michel Rapits (Pablo); former Hungarian Prime Minister Andras Hegedus; Lucio Lombardo Radice, a member of the Central Committee of the Italian Communist Party; Noam Chomsky; Kurt Vonnegut; Soviet dissident Roy Medvedev; and numerous British members of Parliament (MPs).
[The following article, which takes up some of the questions raised by the Russell Foundation's initiative, appeared in the May 8 issue of the British weekly, Socialist Challenge.]
The growing international crisis is bringing home to people in Britain the danger of nuclear war. No wonder, then, that a campaign against nuclear weapons and nuclear alliances is being seriously discussed on the left.
Not only the international situation, but the siting of Cruise missiles in Britain, and the rise of the anti-nuclear movement has promoted this trend. Socialist Challenge has argued consistently that the threat of war arises not merely from the existence of nuclear weapons, but from the increasingly aggressive military posture of world
Nuclear Disarmament imperialism-and especially the United States.
A new campaign has just been launched which aims to focus the increasing alarm about the possibility of nuclear war. This campaign, "For a Nuclear Free Europe," has been launched by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation with the support of a number of leading Labour MPs. The prime movers of this campaign are Ken Coates of the Russell Foundation, and E.P. Thompson, well known historian and author of the recent CND [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament] pamphlet Protest and Survive.
There is absolutely no doubt that a campaign against the United States' war drive and the placing of Cruise missiles in Britain is vitally needed. The upsurge of imperialist militarism is being reflected in the increasing proportion of the British budget being spent on defence by the Thatcher government.
But the campaign proposed by the Russell Foundation is seriously misguided in its approach; it threatens to seriously demobilise any attempt to build a movement based on anti-imperialist opposition to militarism.
The statement circulated by the Russell Foundation says: "We do not wish to apportion guilt between the political and military leaders of East and West. Guilt lies squarely on both parties." In line with this, the statement appeals equally for disarmament of both the USSR and the USA, and appeals for a "united, neutral, and pacific Europe." This approach completely misunderstands the nature of the world crisis and how to fight the war threat.
In fact the campaign of the Russell Foundation is an attempt to resurrect the politics of the early CND; neutralism and pacifism. But in fact these politics are a regression from the political stance which many CND supporters came to adopt in the early sixties.
CND started in 1957 as a movement which concentrated on the intrinsic evil of a particular weapon. But in the early sixties, after the US blockade of Cuba, the US-backed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, the murder of Patrice Lumumba and the repression of the Congolese revolution by CIA-financed mercenaries, and the restarting of serious hostilities between the Americans and the liberation movement in Vietnam, large numbers of CND's supporters moved towards anti-imperialism.
This transformation was completed by the decline of CND and the rise of the
A U.S. cruise missile.
Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, which broke with the politics of appeals for "peace" and militantly identified itself with the Vietnamese struggle against US imperialism.
The equals sign that the Russell Foundation draws between the USSR and the USA is completely wrong. However much we oppose the ruling bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, the arms effort of the USSR is overwhelmingly defensive.
The revolutions in progress in Iran, Nicaragua and El Salvador threaten not the interests of the USSR but those of American imperialism. It is the United States, not the USSR which wants to resurrect its role as world cop, trampling on progressive movements the world over. The Russell Foundation appeal completely fails to register the differing social systems in Russia and America which lead to a completely different military posture on a world scale.
The campaign that needs to be built against the threat of war is not the one being launched by comrades Thompson and Coates. The threat to working people in Britain arises from Britain's membership of NATO; it arises from Britain's increasingly strident alliance with the major centre of imperialist militarism—the United States.
The fight we need is not one of appeals to the major powers to disarm, but a campaign which unites those in Britain prepared to fight for opposition to the placing of Cruise missiles; British withdrawal from NATO and complete hostility to the military adventurism of the United States.
These are the slogans, and not those of utopian pacifism and neutralism, which need to be raised on the Labour Party demonstration against the Cruise missiles taking place in London on 22 June.