COMPARE AND CONTRAST THE SUCCESSES AND FAILURES OF THE DIFFERENT PEACE MOVEMENTS THIS CENTURY

Similarly to the intellectuals described by George Orwell in 1941 the peace movement has gone through many changes of attitude and focus in the Twentieth Century. Throughout the century peace movements have both revolutionary and pacifist aims. That is to say they have had groups and individual activists who simply wanted an end to war and those who wanted to stop or prevent war to enable revolution. Another glaring aspect of the peace movement has been its disunity and sectionalism even within these two frameworks . These vast differences of actual objectives make it difficult to asses the level of success or failure of the movement as a whole. This essay will look mainly at the peace movements set up as a reaction to World War One; the build up to World War Two and the beginnings of the independent British nuclear weapons programme.

From the dog end of a century of war it is tempting to look back at the peace movements thrown up as a result and their activists as heroic pacifists. It would be easy to say that they were doing their level best with meagre resources against the power mad and power hungry industrialised war machines of governments. They could be seen as having the totally selfless goal of achieving planetary peace for all with no other in mind. Well all this can, with justification be said about many of those involved but it is not the whole story. Peace activists have been motivated by individual reaction to the horrors of war, religion such as Quakers and revolution such as Trotskyists and Anarchists . This diversity of motivation has more often than not led to sectionalism and reduced the effectiveness of action. It would be hard to think of another heading which would put together pacifist Christians and Trotskyists, who would presumably agree with their guru that:

As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian, Priestly and vegetarian Quaker prattle about the 'sacredness of human life'. To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him and this problem can only be solved with blood and iron.

The prevailing situations which produced the different peace movements of the century were almost as diverse as the movements activists.

World War One with its senseless and massive loss of life produced an attitude that nothing was worth war. Hence the movement against it was an uncompromising total rejection of war. The No Conscription Fellowship (NCF) set up in 1914 by 24 year old editor of Labour Leader and Independent Labour Party (ILP) member Fenner Brockway was to set a mould for clear single issue groups in the peace movements of the coming century. Its stance and the stance of its biweekly newspaper "The Tribunal" was clearly against conscription. This was despite the attempts of government to provide get out clauses to appease Liberals . Many of its members went to gaol as a result of refusing alternative war work.. This refusal was due to the NCFs policy that this was killing by proxy, despite this nine tenths of conscientious objectors (COs) accepted alternative service many after a spell in prison. The NCF was a covert organisation according to Fenner Brockway and had to use coded telegraph messages and had a secret portable press which was housed at a different address each week. As a result of this organization it was published uninterrupted throughout the war despite its original press being dismantled by police . The NCF was by no means the only anti war organization operating in the First World War. The Union of Democratic Control, which was set up in 1914 with the aim of improvements after the war rather than to stop the war, became the largest anti-war organisation. It declared itself anti-war in a statement which talked about peace without victory in 1915. By 1915 it had fifty branches across the country and by 1917 it had grown to 100 branches with 100,000 members . On top of this it had a wide range of affiliated organisations including the National Association of Women's Suffrage, ILP, and Trade Unions . The mainstream trade union movement took no stance on universal conscription apart from action against individual union self interest.

Don't send me in the army, George, I'm in the A.S.E. Take all the bloody labourers, But don't take me!

The syndicalist shop stewards movement and rank and file activists of the various organisations opposed to war had other plans however. Despite the NCFs advocation of heroic sacrifice in voluntary imprisonment, many activists saw the folly of allowing the government to safely lock away all the revolutionaries and sought to evade capture. They had developed a shadowy underground network for concealing fugitives of the authorities. It would appear from the evidence of the continued slaughter of World War One and the very few resisters to conscription that the peace movement had been a failure. However, the NCF in their final issue of Tribunal said "The Tribunal has done magnificent work in exposing military tyranny" . The regime of the Second World War was far less harsh on COs than that of the First World War. Only three percent in the Second World War as opposed to thirty three percent in the First World War. This can be seen as a result of the attention and resistance shown during the First World War.

In the years leading up to the Second World War, as alluded to in the opening quote of the essay, there was a mass of public opposition to any future war. This was caused by the popular revulsion to the horrific death, disease and injury caused by trench warfare and the massive increase in killing power of the engines of death created by the advances of new technology. There was real concern that any future world war would result in the end of civilisation through the power of bombing planes. The First organisations set up in opposition to future war were the No More War (NMW) organisation and the League of Nations Union (LNU). These were followed later by the peace Pledge Union (PPU) which swallowed up the No More War organization in 1937 . The biggest action of this time was the 1934/5 peace ballot. This was initiated by the LNU but the administration was taken on by the National Declaration Committee which was set up purely for this task. The Ballot was a truly massive event using 500,000 canvassers and balloting eleven million people at their doorstep. The canvassers included Labour, Liberal, TUC, Co-operative Movement, church and some Conservative activists. The result of this supposedly scientifically objective exercise were perhaps predictably in favour of the aims of the League. Over ninety percent for instance voted for Multilateral disarmament and only sixty percent voted for dealing with aggressor states with military means if necessary. Despite its obvious bias a survey of this size at a time when such things were unheard of must have had effect upon the government. The peace movement again was divided in the thirties with numerous local peace councils. For instance there were forty in Birmingham alone in 1936. One LNU branch commented on the practice of these organisations organizing national peace weeks, demonstrations and exhibitions: "half of those who participate in these activities want our government to do one thing the other half the exact contrary thing" . At this time the PPU initiated its postcard campaign asking individuals to pledge their renunciation of war, 140,000 did so. Two things changed the mood of the public in the latter half of the Thirties. Firstly, the increasing aggression of Hitler persuaded the general public bit by bit and secondly the Left who constituted many of the peace movement activists were persuaded of the need to oppose fascism by force of arms following the defeat of the Spanish Revolution by Franco's Fascists. This mood can be seen in this letter to Peace News:

No pacifist method has yet been perfected in this country to counter Hitler. If we do not oppose him by force then we must be willing to see all that we love and value go under for at least a generation.

During the war most former pacifists were convinced of the need for war against Hitler. Many of the anti war groups either folded or drifted into insignificance. Only the rump of these organizations and minority revolutionary organization such as the anarchists and Trotskyists continued an anti war position throughout the war with papers such as Socialist Leader (ILP), Socialist Standard (Socialist Party of Great Britain), Peace News (PPU) and War Commentary (Anarchist).

Following the war pacifism had become a dirty word to the majority of the British public. As a result post war peace movements concentrated on single issues again unlike the general pacifism of the inter war years. This resulted in the "Ban the Bomb" movement of the late 1950s. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was formed out of the National Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons Tests (NCANWT) which was set up in February 1957. It was launched in 1958 at Conway Hall to an inaugural meeting of 5,000. his was at a time when British people were coming to terms with the fact that they were no longer a major world power, following the Suez crisis. The idea was that Britain still had high moral standing to the people of the world due to Britain's former Empire and Imperial power. Therefore if Britain were to take the lead in abandoning nuclear weapons the rest of the world would follow. This pseudo-imperialist claptrap was summed up by George Orwell twenty years previously, "Scratch the average pacifist and you find a jingo". As can perhaps be guessed the activists in the peace movement were overwhelmingly middle class. As Parkin argues; working class radicalism tends towards economic or material reforms, middle class radicalism tends towards reforms of a mainly moral social kind. That's not to say that getting rid of nuclear weapons which could destroy the planet was not a good cause, it was just naive and arrogant believe that the leaders of the USA and USSR would take any notice of our poxy island if we did or didn't have them ourselves. The movement again split into the Direct Action Committee later to become the Committee of 100 which advocated non-violent direct action as a tool for publicity (and later Ralph Shoeman argued for world revolution!) and the mainstream CND headed by Cannon Collins (Christian Action, Bertrand Russell, veteran pacifist, Michael Foot, Labour Party executive but not MP, and Peggy Duff former Secretary of (NCANWT) which opposed direct action. CND in the Fifties would not support any kind of activity outside of lobbying government. After the success of this policy in winning the support of the Labour Party Conference in 1960 and many trade unions at that time for unilateral nuclear disarmament, the policy began to fail with the reversal of the Labour Party Conference in 1961. This followed Hugh Gaitskell's pledge to "fight, fight and fight again" to reverse the decision of 1960. After a period of marching (the Aldermaston Marches) and some tasty direct action such as sit down in Trafalgar Square of 17th September 1961. The movement ran out of steam with the Labour Party appearing to adopt a policy of scrapping the hugely expensive, American and totally useless Polaris programme ordered by the Tories. By the time Labour came to power in 1964 there was no mass movement to encourage them to maintain this policy.

In conclusion although there have been some notable successes of peace movements such as the liberalisation of the rules governing COs in conscription in World War 2 overall the peace movements of the Twentieth century can be seen to be united by one thing only. Heroic defeat.