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Pacifists and Communists
| Article
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14433 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1988 |
11,280 Words |
| Author
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Guenter Lewy
Guenter Lewy is the author of America in Vietnam. This article
is adapted from his new book Peace and Revolution: The Moral
Crisis of American Pacifism, published by William B. Eerdmans.
Used by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. |
Does it matter politically if four obscure pacifist organizations embark on a search for "communism with a human face," march with the American Communist Party and its fronts in demonstrations against U.S. foreign policy, and become cheerleaders for Marxist-Leninist guerrillas and regimes from Vietnam to Nicaragua?
It probably does matter a great deal. The American pacifist community is numerically small, but its political influence reaches well beyond its own membership. The four major pacifist organizations in this country--the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), the War Resisters League (WRL), and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF)--play a prominent role in the larger peace movement and supply much of its organizational talent. The AFSC, for example, with its large headquarters in Philadelphia, aided by ninety full-time staff members in thirty offices nationwide, was the driving force behind the movement for a nuclear freeze that for a time appeared to sweep the country. Pacifist ideas have become influential in the political thinking of the mainline Christian churches. The Roman Catholic bishops of the United States have questioned the moral acceptability of the doctrine of nuclear deterrence, the cornerstone of the West's defense posture; the United Methodist Council of Bishops has rejected it completely. The so-called religious Left, to which most pacifist groups belong, today has considerable leverage with Congress in regard to our Central American policy in particular. A better understanding of who these groups and their leaders are and what constitutes their ideology and political agenda is therefore of more than academic and historical interest.
Early Years
Until the 1960s practically all American pacifists showed a healthy scepticism about the sincerity of communist-led peace movements and the political utility of collaborating with them. They also made a point of affirming their opposition to totalitarianism of all kinds and stressed their anticommunist values.
One of the secretaries of the FOR--organized in 1915 and committed to a religiously based pacifism--was the Protestant minister J.B. Matthews. When in 1933 Matthews agreed to become chairman of the communist-dominated American League Against War and Fascism, he was relieved of his FOR post. An editorial in FOR's unofficial organ, The World Tomorrow, explained that the League Against War and Fascism was primarily a supporter of Soviet Russia's foreign policy, as well as its agent,
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