The Peace Movement’s Limited Agenda

John Bacher
Published in Canadian Dimension, October 1987

In Canada, the peace movement’s strength has been reduced by its limited agenda caused, for the most part, by a refusal to recognize the important value conflicts within it.

A significant example is the refusal of any peace coalition in English–speaking Canada to direct attention to the bloc system, and the persecution of the independent peace movement in eastern Europe. When Jan Kavan, an exiled voice for the Czechoslovakian Human Rights Organization Charter 77, came to Toronto to address the ACT for Disarmament East/West Peace Festival, he was stunned by the hostility of so many Czech exiles, and the indifference of much of the peace movement. Kavan indicated that this was the same situation that existed in Britain five years earlier, before E.P. Thompson and END began its work in promoting the East/West Dialogue.

The Canadian peace movement has a common goal of working for limited objectives such as the cancellation of Cruise missile testing and Canadian rejection of Star Wars. But fundamental divisions occur once the agenda goes beyond the development of new weapons systems. Indeed, the issues of basic Canadian foreign policy receive more discussion in circles such as left leaning supporters of the Liberal party, the NDP, churches, some trade unions, and general social reform movements, than in the Canadian peace movement.

Withdrawal from NATO and NORAD

Speaking to the Toronto Disarmament Network (TDN), NDP External Affairs Critic, Pauline Jewitt, surprised her audience with a call for immediate Canadian withdrawal from NORAD. Jewitt also expressed regret that the only peace organization to back the NDP during the parliamentary committee hearings on the NORAD renewal was Project Ploughshares.

Similarly, as regards Canadian membership in the NATO alliance, the NDP’s position for withdrawal is more radical than the peace movements. Montreal peace activist Dimitrios Roussopoulos has observed that this is “a paradox unknown elsewhere,” where the peace movement has served as moral conscience to social democratic parties.

To compound the paradox, the NDP’s anti–NATO position was attacked by one of its members who is most prominent as a peace activist and researcher, Simon Rosenblum. Rosenblum noted the absence of support for Canadian non–alignment in major peace organizations in his unsuccessful effort in 1985 to reverse NDP policy. What surprised both Rosenblum and the NDP leadership was the depth of commitment among ordinary NDP members to a non–aligned Canadian foreign policy. This position was upheld at the 1985 federal convention by an estimated 75 per cent of delegates. No significant role was played in this debate by any peace organization.

To compound the paradox further, Rosenblum was an author of the Ploughshares brief advocating Canadian withdrawal from NORAD, the most radical submission received by the parliamentary committee during its review of the pact. The Ploughshares brief, and Rosenblum’s own position reflects the prevailing view among Canadian experts in foreign policy, defense, and arms control, that NATO is more acceptable than NORAD because NATO is multi–lateral and respects national sovereignty, whereas NORAD is bi–lateral and integrates Canadian air defenses forces under an American dominated joint command. Ploughshares’ criticism of NORAD and silence on NATO is still a step ahead of most Canadian peace organizations. It reflects the strange state of how professional specialists in arms control are urging more advanced positions than most Canadian peace organizations.

The conservatism of the Canadian peace movement has its roots in the acceptance of a limited agenda. Attacking only cruise missiles, Star Wars, or other advances in nuclear technology, does not challenge Canada’s membership in NATO, nor change the absurd nuclear overkill capacity.

The Nuclear Fuel Cycle

The problem with a limited agenda for the peace movement is that it essentially directs debate on weapons systems to a technical argument of national security within the western alliance, which is favorable terrain for militaristic spokesmen who have been trained intensively to argue on those very terms. It ignores what E.P. Thompson has vividly termed the culture of “exterminism;” that something terribly wrong must have happened in the course of western civilization that humanity and perhaps the whole biosphere could be destroyed at the push of a button.

The aligned peace movement’s analysis ignores the connections between nuclear weapons and nuclear power and the whole uranium fuel cycle. It puts off the danger of nuclear war to some unknown nightmare in the future, rather than showing, as radiation expert Rosalie Bertell has done, that in terms of victims of nuclear technology, the Third World War is already there. Millions of people have already had their lives shortened by nuclear radiation from nuclear power tests, uranium mining and refining, power plant emissions, waste disposal and weapons manufacturing. It is not necessary to point to the morality of the unthinkable “day after”; often it is enough simply to point to the radioactive tailings unknowingly buried in your own or your neighbor’s basement. While such evidence of the side effects of militarism are most obvious with the nuclear fuel cycle, they apply to other areas of environmental health such as the production of hazardous wastes. Indeed, the dioxins leaking from the infamous Love Canal are the by–product of the manufacture of defoliants for use in the Vietnam war. This linking of the concerns of peace and ecology has been done most effectively in the European Green Movement.

Native people in Canada, struggling against the seizure of their aboriginal lands and the destruction of their way of life by uranium mining, have focused their energies on the whole nuclear fuel cycle. It has been aboriginal peoples who have given the most “atomic veterans” to the Third World War, be they Laplanders from Sweden losing their reindeer to the fallout from the Chernobyl disaster, or Bikini islanders exposed to atomic testing, or the Indians of Canada and the United States on whose land uranium has been mined. Indian activists have termed such statistics as Navajo children suffering from cancer rates up to 15 times the national average as evidence of “slow motion genocide” and has charged that “nuclear war has been waged for fifty years” on Indian reservations.

Native People and the Nuclear Fuel Cycle

Although the peace movement has been slow to respond, some Canadian environmentalists have pioneered in linking of the concerns of peace and ecology, most vividly symbolized in the international non–violent resistance movement, born in Canada, called Greenpeace. This is not, however, reflected in any campaign or program of an English Canadian peace coalition. The conflict with native people and ecological activists over this approach was best summed up by Tony Hal, past president of the Canadian Alliance in Solidarity with Native Peoples, who told the ACT for Disarmament East/West Peace Festival that he was “disgusted” upon seeing posters in Toronto for a “Nuclear Weapons Free Ontario.”

Value Conflict in German Green Movement

This conflict about a wholistic critique of “determinism,” or more conventionally put, the “military–industrial complex,” has been most developed in Germany where a strong Marxist tradition has had a fundamental value conflict with the emerging Green movement. The key issues separating the “red” and “fundi” Greens have been support for the independent peace movement in eastern Europe, and the degree of challenge to the basic structures of modern industry East and West. “Fundi” Green spokesperson Roland Yogt has commented that “The materialistic–leftist approach is destructive within the Greens. Whenever the visionary or spiritual people make a proposal, the Marxist–oriented Greens neutralize it as effectively as acid.” Petra Kelly has observed how the Red Greens “often deny that there is any such thing as nuclearism and imperialism on both sides. They say, ‘Petra all we need to think about is American arms, American capital, American industry and multinationals.’ ”

Greens and Charter 77

Kelly participated in a demonstration, held on the Alexanderplatz in East Berlin, to exhibit the Greens’ solidarity with the independent peace movement in East Germany. They raised the banner of the independent East German peace movement – Swords into Ploughshares – and issued “a declaration urging the governments of both German states to work for peace instead of increasing armaments.”

Among the Green parliamentarian demonstrators on the Alexanderplatz was Milan Horacek, who was exiled from his Czechoslovakian homeland because of his role in organizing non–violent resistance against the Warsaw Treaty invasion of his country. Horacek, despite being in charge of Green negotiations with Communist party governments in power, was for many years refused entry into Czechoslovakia. When he was finally admitted he met a number of leading members of the Czechoslovakian human rights organization, Charter 77. Charter 77 spokesperson Vaclav Havel, noted in the Winter 1986 issue the Eastern European Reporter that what emerged from these meetings was a discovery that “in its stress on morality in politics and the power of truth (frequently more effective than the force of arms) in its non–ideological stance, in its interest in people as specific individuals, its new openness regarding the meaning of life, the general non–violence of its political approach, based on respect for law and the framework of the given political system, its internal plurality of opinions and other features, the Green Party has a lot in common with Charter 77 whose principles possibly inspired it in some areas.”

The Greens’ support for Charter 77 is part of a general solidarity with persecuted eastern human rights and peace activists in the western European peace movement. Charter 77 has been in dialogue with the western peace movement since the launching on April 28, 1980, of the Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament, which formed the initial basis of unity of the firmly non–aligned END peace network. In response to the END appeal to have a European nuclear weapons free zone, Charter 77 added a concern for the removal of all foreign troops. Charter 77 dialogue with western peace activists was joined in by the Hungarian Dialogue Organization and by the independent Polish group, Freedom and Peace, Freedom and Peace have endorsed Polish Solidarity leader Jarek Kuron’s appeal for the neutralization and demilitarization of central Europe and also, like Dialogue and Hungarian Catholic peace activists have campaigned for the right of conscientious objection.

The solidarity of the Green party and western peace activists has been vital in sustaining the heavily persecuted Moscow Trust Group. The West German Greens persuaded the Moscow Trust Group to oppose nuclear power the week before the Chernobyl disaster. In response to the accident, the Trust Group held a public demonstration calling for the closure of Soviet nuclear reactors. American and British peace activists later smuggled literature into the USSR that was distributed with Trust Group members, featuring how Soviet citizens could protect themselves from radiation dangers.

Apart from a minority of organizations such as Project Ploughshares, ACT for Disarmament, Christian Initiative and Christian Movement for Peace, Radio Peace, and Peace Magazine, the World Federalists and the member groups of the Coalition Quebecois pour le Disarmament et la paix (CQDP), the Canadian peace movement has been silent on both the defense of the independent peace movement in Eastern Europe, and nuclear power. In large part, these have been deleted from the peace movement’s agenda because of the threat of peace activist influenced by the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) to withdraw from peace coalitions.

Relations with the Eastern Bloc

Unlike its counterparts in most western European countries, Australia, and Japan, the CPC remains firm in brooking no criticism of the foreign policies of the USSR. In a December, 1985 address to the CPC’s Central Committee, reprinted in the March, 1985 issue of Communist Viewpoint, Communist Party leader, William Kashtan, stressed the need for Communists “to enter into dialogue with peace activists” to teach them “the significant role of the USSR.” In effect, Kashtan was urging Communists to enter the peace movement with the aim of preventing it from taking positions critical of the eastern bloc. He praised the founding convention of the Canadian Peace Alliance as being an outstanding success in this regard as it agreed to “push aside questions which might divide, such as anti–Sovietism and red–baiting’ and instead focused on issues which “unite” in an “all–out fight for peace.”

Those who value the foreign policies of the USSR have every right to them; what must be grasped, however, is that this does not mean that peace activists with other values should feel compelled to abandon them in the name of “unity.” The price for such a unity is too high; it means a neglect of a recognition of the importance of human rights and respect for the environment in a transition to world peace. It is also bought at the cost of marginalizing the peace movement.

When Canadian peace activists wonder at the greater strength shown by the British, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, and West German peace movements they should note these movements’ contrasting solidarity with their persecuted counterparts in Eastern Europe.