Allegations of CIA measures against the WPC
The Congress for Cultural Freedom was founded in 1950 with the support of the CIA to counter the propaganda of the emerging WPC,[51] and Philip Agee claimed that the WPC was a Soviet front for propaganda which CIA covertly tried to neutralize and to prevent the WPC from organizing outside the Communist bloc.[52]
In the Feb. 7, 1941 issue of Life magazine, founder and publisher Henry Luce authored and signed an editorial, "The American Century," announcing that the American Synarchists intended to rule the world at the close of the war and impose their own jaded version of "American values" on the world, through "any means necessary." Luce's thesis was reproduced and mass-circulated throughout the United States.
The populations of the world, exhausted from the destruction of war and the bestiality of Hitler, Stalin, and Hiroshima, naturally hoped for something better. But the universal glimmer of optimism, of being able to rebuild, was further shattered when Allen Dulles, John J. McCloy, and their associates, including Luce, deployed to create the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CFF), whose explicit purpose was to launch a fascist assault on truth as science and on Classical culture.
Time magazine was created in 1923 as a mouthpiece for the American Synarchists, grouped around the banking interests of J.P. Morgan. It is hardly a coincidence that, simultaneous to the launching of Time, in Europe, Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, another leading Synarchist, was launching his Pan-European Union, which would be a leading propaganda vehicle for the winning of support among Europe's financial oligarchy for the "Hitler-Mussolini" universal fascism project.
Henry Luce was just out of Yale University, where he was a member of the secret society Skull and Bones (class of 1920). Morgan funnelled Luce start-up cash, and Luce tapped numbers of his friends from his secret brotherhood to create and run what would become a propaganda empire. In 1930, for example, Luce chose Russell Davenport, an intimate Bonesman, to become Fortune magazine's first editor-in-chief.
Initial members of the board of directors of Time included Henry P. Davison, Jr., a fellow classmate and Bonesman, whose father was a senior partner at J.P. Morgan. Davison brought in Dwight Morrow, another Morgan partner, to finance the start-up. Morgan interests were further strengthened, when in 1927, John Wesley Hanes was placed on the board. Start-up funding also came from William Hale Harkness, a board member, who was related to Rockefeller partner Edward S. Harkness.
Luce's personal lawyer, who would come to represent his entire media empire, was his brother-in-law Tex Moore, of Cravath, deGersdorff, Swaine and Wood, the same firm which deployed both Allen and John Foster Dulles to facilitate bringing Hitler to power in the early 1930s.
Luce was an intimate of Britain's Lord Beaverbrook and the Prince of Wales, who were notoriously pro-Hitler and members of the Cliveden set. He also formed an extremely close relationship with Winston Churchill, himself a promoter of Hitler in the early 1930s.
Americans were introduced to Benito Mussolini and Fascism in one of Time's first issues when the Synarchists decided to celebrate Il Duce's 40th birthday, and have Americans join them, by placing his portrait on the cover of the Aug. 6, 1923 issue of Time. This would be the first of five cover appearances.
Luce was America's fascist "Elmer Gantry." He toured the country selling fascism to America's business elite and upper class on the one hand, and using his mass propaganda outlets to "sell it to the mickeys" on the other.
Luce unabashedly promoted Synarchy. Appearing before business groups, he promulgated the idea that America's corporate and banking elites were more powerful and important than the U.S. government, stating, "It is not a seat in Congress but on the directorate of the greatest corporations which our countrymen regard as the greater post of honor and responsibility." Likening America's financial tycoons to Europe's aristocracy, he featured both in the pages of Fortune magazine.
In an article in 1928, Luce declared the U.S. Constitution obsolete and called for "a new form of government." What was this new form of government? In March of the same year, in a speech to businessmen in Rochester, N.Y., he stated "America needs at this moment a moral leader, a national moral leader. The outstanding national moral leader of the world today is Mussolini." On Nov. 28, 1930, he stated to a Chicago audience that Mussolini's Italy was a success story: "A state reborn by virtue of Fascist symbols, Fascist rank and hence Fascist enterprise." Luce further declared, on April 19, 1934 in a speech to the Scranton, Pa. Chamber of Commerce, "The moral force of Fascism, appearing in totally different forms in different nations, may be the inspiration for the next general march of mankind."
While Luce organized the upper crust through Fortune, he fed the general population a carefully crafted diet of stories about Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco through the writings of his foreign news editor, Laird Goldsborough, a publicly avowed fascist, anti-Semite, and pro-Nazi who in 1933 interviewed both Hitler and Mussolini.
Luce had a visceral hatred of FDR and the New Deal. He attacked them both on his speaking tours and in print. Intimates reported that he became apoplectic with violent rage at the mere mention of FDR's name.
Luce's role in the Morgan-organized "Smedley Butler" coup plot against Roosevelt was significant. Luce prepared the entire July 1934 issue of Fortune as a detailed study of the political, cultural, and economic experiments of Italian fascism. This was unheard of. The issue was timed to appear as the coup went into its final month, and it was undoubtedly intended to rally upper-class support for the coup and the transition to an American form of fascism.
Although Luce later promoted the turn away from fascism, when it was necessary to defeat Hitler, he heralded the postwar policy of the Anglo-American Synarchists with his famous 1941 Life magazine editorial, "The American Century," which announced the Synarchist goal of Anglo-American world domination at the close of the war. Luce wrote: "We must accept whole-heartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit." The editorial was mass-produced and circulated widely; it appeared in full in the Washington Post and Reader's Digest. Although he did not include the point in this editorial, Luce would soon argue, also in the pages of Life, for preventive nuclear war against the Soviet Union.
The outlook of today's Beast-Men, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, is a continuation of the policies represented by Luce and the fascists of the 1930s and 1940s. Cheney's inner core of neocons are all signers of the founding principles of William Kristol's Project for a New American Century, explicitly modelled on Luce's theme. The Children of Satan, as Lyndon LaRouche has determined they rightly be called, had Henry Luce as one of their godfathers. Luce's brothers at Skull and Bones gave him the secret name of "Baal."
The Congress for Cultural Freedom was created to implement Luce's "American Century." Luce helped finance its operations, and his trusted vice president at Time-Life, C.D. Jackson, oversaw much of its policy as special advisor to the President for psychological warfare.
-- Henry Luce's Empire of Fascism, by Steven P. Meyer and Jeffrey Steinberg
CIA's Direction of Cultural Warfare
CIA employee Tom Braden, who had been the MoMA's managing director from 1947 to 1949 before he began working for the CIA, was initially in charge of the CIA section that oversaw the culture cold war. The section was called the International Organisations Division (IOD). The IOD indirectly, via their fronts and agreeable Foundations, funded prestigious journals, organized conferences, music competitions and art exhibitions.
The rationale behind this covert philanthropy was that American avant-garde culture that was both leftist and anti-communist could be an effective foil against Stalinist Communism's rise in Western Europe, post World War II. It was not just the CIA that directed the flow of money, it was also some very influential and wealthy Americans with names that included Rockefeller, Ford, and Dodge. Although they were not CIA fronts, many other foundations have been implicated as having received CIA monies.
The primary beneficiary of the Farfield Foundation's philanthropy was another CIA front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and its US Chapter, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, which in turn funded groups and individuals through themselves. Even early neoconservative thinkers received funding from covert CIA sources for journals and freelance authorship.
The need for secrecy was as much for domestic reasons as foreign. The McCarthy-era federal politicians distrusted modern culture and viewed it as destructive of American Ideals; it is highly unlikely that Norman Rockwell paintings and evangelical-styled Christian missionaries would have been successful in holding Communism's cultural allure at bay in Post-WWII Western Europe.
What's wrong with the CIA covertly funding the export of American Expressionism? It is a true art form. It is a product of America that many have felt an affinity to. Artists have usually required patrons supporting both their physical sustenance, and their psychological well being in a positive recognition of their creative worth. Historically, artists' sponsorship has often been government or religious officials. Communism's spread was viewed as a positive force, or in muted fatalism, an inevitability, amongst many of Western Europe's Post WWII cultural elite. The unbridled individualism of expressionism offered an effective contrast, as well as viable alternative to the stark bleakness of Soviet Realism's portrayal of grayscaled existence within the Stalinist sphere of influence. The Soviet Government had their own arsenal of covert actions too. It would be a great stretch of logic to view the funding of musicians who were virtuosi of Jazz's improvisational spontaneity in the 50's on working trips to Europe as the acts of an evil empire. There is an aura of comical irony swirling about an effective usage of the frequently apolitical lords of American Abstract Art and the drop out Icons of the Beat Generation as the USA's secret Cold War arsenal in cultural warfare. Both American politicians and their Soviet analogs viewed them as part of an American degeneracy that was infecting their country, and causing a decline in domestic morality. Soviet politicians perceived it as an effect of capitalism's excesses, while American politicians viewed it as a creeping red menace.
What is condemnable isn't the act of funding artists in an ideological cultural war, it is the unseen hands of manipulative elitists, who believe they are acting for the greater common good, secretly affecting the World's societies. The overuse of and dependence upon a methodology of opaque actions, and an unyielding faith in the propriety of the use of stealth within an open democratic society is where the malevolence lies. The same mechanisms used for covertly funding and secretly manipulating culture to fight communism were also used to covertly aid undemocratic-but-anti-communist regimes around the world. Instead of just listening to Coltrane, Byrd, Gillespie or Brubeck, while contemplating the artworks of Motherwell, Pollock, Rothko or Kline; reflect also upon "Papa Doc" and "Baby Doc" Duvalier of Haiti, Anastasios Somoza of Nicuragua, Augusto Pinochet of Chile, General Suharto of Indonesia, Hugo Banzer of Bolivia, Jonas Savimbi of South Africa, Lon Nol of Cambodia, Manuel Noriega of Panama, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, Raoul Cedras of the Raboteau massacre, Reza Shah Pahlavi of Iran, Roberto D'Aubuisson of El Salvador, and do not forget Saddam Hussein. Secrecy surrounding government's foreign policy is all too often used to obfuscate foreign policy that is a destructive force on the receiving end. The target country's citizenry ends up taking the brunt of the force, and the seeds of their democratic will are sown into the wind. Covert action is also used to hide governmental practices that would be viewed negatively by the majority of American citizens if it were not kept secret. It ends up being an antidemocratic government action, ostensibly engaged upon for protecting and expanding liberty and democracy world-wide. This hypocrisy causes the onset of anti-Americanism, leads to blowback, as well as being a primary cause for the disbelieving naiveté Americans often express when confronted with the storm of antagonism resultant from the hidden actions, having awakened just in time to reap its whirlwind.
-- Farfield Foundation, by SourceWatch
Steinem has always pretended that she had been a student radical. "When I was in college, it was the McCarthy era," she told Susan Mitchell in 1997, "and that made me a Marxist." (Icons, Saints and Divas: Intimate Conversations with Women who Changed the World 1997. p 130) Her bio-blurb in June 1973 MS. Magazine states: "Gloria Steinem has been a freelance writer all her professional life. Ms magazine is her first full-time salaried job."
Not true. Raised in an impoverished, dysfunctional family in Toledo Ohio, Steinem somehow managed to attend elite Smith College, Betty Friedan's alma mater. After graduating in 1955, Steinem received a "Chester Bowles Student Fellowship" to study in India. Curiously, an Internet search reveals that this fellowship has no existence apart from Gloria Steinem. No one else has received it.
In 1958, Steinem was recruited by CIA's Cord Meyers to direct an "informal group of activists" called the "Independent Research Service." This was part of Meyer's "Congress for Cultural Freedom," which created magazines like "Encounter" and "Partisan Review" to promote a left-liberal chic to oppose Marxism. Steinem, attended Communist-sponsored youth festivals in Europe, published a newspaper, reported on other participants, and helped to provoke riots.
One of Steinem's CIA colleagues was Clay Felker. In the early 1960's, he became an editor at Esquire and published articles by Steinem which established her as a leading voice for women's lib. In 1968, as publisher of New York Magazine, he hired her as a contributing editor, and then editor of Ms. Magazine in 1971. Warner Communications put up almost all the money although it only took 25% of the stock. Ms. Magazine's first publisher was Elizabeth Forsling Harris, a CIA-connected PR executive who planned John Kennedy's Dallas motorcade route. Despite its anti establishment image, MS magazine attracted advertising from the crème of corporate America. It published ads for ITT at the same time as women political prisoners in Chile were being tortured by Pinochet, after a coup inspired by the US conglomerate and the CIA.
Steinem's personal relationships also belie her anti establishment pretensions. She had a nine-year relationship with Stanley Pottinger, a Nixon-Ford assistant attorney general, credited with stalling FBI investigations into the assassinations of Martin Luther King, and the ex-Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Latelier. In the 1980's, she dated Henry Kissinger. For more details, see San Francisco researcher Dave Emory.
Our main misconception about the CIA is that it serves US interests. In fact, it has always been the instrument of a dynastic international banking and oil elite (Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan) coordinated by the Royal Institute for Internal Affairs in London and their US branch, the Council for Foreign Relations. It was established and peopled by blue bloods from the New York banking establishment and graduates of Yale University's secret pagan "Skull and Bones" society. Our current President, his father and grandfather fit this profile.
The agenda of this international cabal is to degrade the institutions and values of the United States in order to integrate it into a global state that it will direct through the United Nations. In its 1947 Founding Charter, the CIA is prohibited from engaging in domestic activities. However this has never stopped it from waging a psychological war on the American people. The domestic counterpart of the "Congress for Cultural Freedom" was the "American Committee for Cultural Freedom." Using foundations as conduits, the CIA controlled intellectual discourse in the 1950´s and 1960's, and I believe continues to do so today. In The The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, Francis Stonor Saunders estimates that a thousand books were produced under the imprint of a variety of commercial and university presses, with covert subsidies.
-- Gloria Steinem - How The CIA Used Feminism To Destabilize Society, by Henry Makow, Ph.D.
AEI is the most prominent think tank associated with American neoconservatism, in both the domestic and international policy arenas. Irving Kristol, widely considered a father of neoconservatism, was a senior fellow at AEI (arriving from the Congress for Cultural Freedom following the widespread revelation of the group's CIA funding) and many prominent neoconservatives—including Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ben Wattenberg, and Joshua Muravchik—spent the bulk of their careers at AEI.
-- American Enterprise Institute, by Wikipedia
Not everyone was enchanted by the renegade psychedelic scene at Harvard. A confidential memorandum issued by the CIA's Office of Security, which had utilized LSD for interrogation purposes since the early 1950s, suggested that certain CIA-connected personnel might be involved with Leary's group. This prospect was disconcerting to Security officials, who considered hallucinogenic drugs "extremely dangerous." "Uncontrolled experimentation has in the past resulted in tragic circumstances and for this reason every effort is made to control any involvement with these drugs," a CIA agent reported. The document concluded with a specific directive: "Information concerning the use of this type of drug for experimental or personal reasons should be reported immediately.... In addition, any information of Agency personnel involved with ... Drs. ALPERT or LEARY, or with any other group engaged in this type of activity should also be reported."
It is known that during this period Leary gave LSD to Mary Pinchot, a painter and a prominent Washington socialite who was married to Cord Meyer, a high-level CIA official. (Meyer oversaw the CIA's infiltration of the US National Student Association and the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Europe, which provided financial support to numerous Cold War liberal intellectuals and writers.) Leary and Pinchot struck up a cordial friendship during her occasional visits to Cambridge in the early 1960s. She asked him to teach her how to guide an LSD session so she could introduce the drug to her circles in Washington. 'I have this friend who's a very important man," she confided to Leary. "He's very impressed with what I've told him about my own LSD experience and what other people have told him. He wants to try it himself." Leary was intrigued, but Pinchot wouldn't tell him who she intended to turn on. Nor did she inform her LSD mentor of her marriage to a CIA bigwig.
-- Acid Dreams, The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond, by Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain
The Fugitives: The Fabian Society Joins the Klan (1920s)
In 1917, Walter L. Fleming was appointed dean of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. During the preceding years, the college, once Southern Methodist Church-sponsored, had been taken over by a consortium of Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan Wall Street financier interests. Vanderbilt, under Fleming, would provide the launching pad for the Fugitives, a literary mafia that would promote a revival of Confederate ideology and wage cultural war against the American System paradigm of scientific and technological progress and republican statecraft. Beginning in the 1920s, the Fugitives published a literary magazine of the same name.
Fleming's most famous work had been his 1905 history of the original post-Civil War Ku Klux Klan, which he prepared in consultation with many of the surviving "Tennessee Templars" who had led that organization. Fleming, along with other political, cultural, and spiritual leaders, had been instrumental in the 1915 re-launching of the Klan, which was promoted through the mass circulation of Hollywood's first full-length feature film, D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, beginning with highly publicized screenings at President Woodrow Wilson's White House, and at the Supreme Court.
The Fugitive's high priest was a Rosicrucian mystic, Sidney Mttron Hirsch. Its temporal leader, John Crowe Ransom, had just returned from his Rhodes Scholarship studies at Oxford University. Ransom was well known, at least by his family connections, to Dean Fleming, because his great uncle, Tennessee Templar and Ku Klux Klan founder James R. Crowe, had been Fleming's chief source on Klan history. In fact, the entire Crowe family were KKK, and Ransom cherished his childhood memories of mama Ella Crowe, and the other Crowe women, sitting around the family hearth, sewing sheets together for the rallies.
This was not an aberration. The core of the Fugitive circle, and their later literary and political collaborators, were descended from Tennessee Templars, officers of Nathan Bedford Forrest's Confederate Army "Critter Company." The small Fugitive circle, in addition to Ransom, included five others: William Yandell Elliott, Bill Frierson, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and Cleanth Brooks. All but Tate were also to be Rhodes Scholars. And Warren, Brooks, and Tate, along with Ransom's younger students, John "Jack" Thompson, Robbie Macauley, and Robert Lowell, were all to play leading roles in the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
At the time Ransom's Fugitive circle was formed, the main Fabian Society publication was a journal called The New Age, which was financed by the Fabian playwright, and promoter of Friedrich Nietzsche, George Bernard Shaw and published by a Theosophist, Alfred Richard Orage, who later became a disciple of the Russian mystic, Georg Gurdjieff. In The New Age, the works of Fabians Shaw, H.G. Wells, G.K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc, appeared alongside those of the leading Satanist of the 20th Century, the self-proclaimed "Great Beast", Aleister Crowley, and assorted other pornographers and mystics like William Butler Yeats, future Fascist spy Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and D.H. Lawrence.
Chesterton and Belloc, though associated with the Fabian Society early in the 20th Century, were to become the leaders, along with Maurice Baring, of a Synarchist, pro-Spanish Inquisition, pro-Roman Empire, pro-Fascist Catholic grouping known as the Distributists. Fellow New Ager (and later Nobel Prize winner and major figure in CCF operations) T.S. Eliot, was to ally with them in this effort, as were Ransom and the Fugitives.
During the First World War, Chesterton, Wells, and others of the New Age crowd worked for Wellington House, Britain's propaganda unit under Charles Masterman, which was taken over by Lord Beaverbrook [aka Max Aitken] in 1917.
The alliance between the New Age crowd and the Fugitives was initially forged by William Yandell Elliott. During his Rhodes Scholarship term, 1922-24, at Oxford's Balliol College, he came under the influence of leading Round Table and Fabian Society figure, A.D. Lindsay. Elliott's subsequent professional career at Harvard's Government Department, and in various Congressional and Executive positions in Washington, centered on the idea that the United States Constitution should be scrapped, and the nation reorganized as a section of a "New British Empire," an idea derived from Lindsay's Round Table program.
At Oxford, Elliott had consorted with the occultist literary figures of The New Age. He was part of a late-night drinking circle including Aleister Crowley's one-time lodge brother, the Nobel Prize-winning poet William Butler Yeats, and long-time Fugitive intimate Robert Graves. Future CCF operative Graves is known today for his adoring history of the Roman Empire, I Claudius and his promotion of the cult of the White Goddess.
-- The CCF and the God of Thunder Cult, by Stanley Ezrol & Jeffrey Steinberg
Current organisation
The WPC currently states its goals as: Actions against imperialist wars and occupation of sovereign countries and nations; prohibition of all weapons of mass destruction; abolition of foreign military bases; universal disarmament under effective international control; elimination of all forms of colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination; respect for the right of peoples to sovereignty and independence, essential for the establishment of peace; non-interference in the internal affairs of nations; peaceful co-existence between states with different political systems; negotiations instead of use of force in the settlement of differences between nations.
The WPC is a registered NGO at the United Nations and co-operates primarily with the Non-Aligned Movement. It cooperates with United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), International Labour Organization (ILO), and other UN specialized agencies, special committees and departments. It is said to have successfully influenced their agendas, the terms of discussion and the orientations of their resolutions.[53] It also cooperates with the African Union, the League of Arab States, and other inter-governmental bodies.[54]
Leadership
• President: Socorro Gomes, Brazilian Center for Solidarity with the People and the Struggle for Peace (CEBRAPAZ)
• General Secretary: Thanasis Pafilis, Greek Committee for International Détente and Peace (EEDYE)
• Executive Secretary: Iraklis Tsavdaridis, Greek Committee for International Détente and Peace (EEDYE)[27]
Secretariat
The members of the Secretariat of the WPC are:
• All India Peace and Solidarity Organisation (AIPSO)
• Brazilian Center for Solidarity with the People and the Struggle for Peace(CEBRAPAZ)
• Congo Peace Committee
• Cuban Movement for Peace and Sovereignty of the Peoples (MOVPAZ)
• German Peace Council (DFR)
• Greek Committee for International Détente and Peace (EEDYE)
• Japan Peace Committee
• Palestinian Committee for Peace and Solidarity (PCPS)
• Portuguese Council for Peace and Cooperation (CPPC)
• South African Peace Initiative
• Syrian National Peace Council
• US Peace Council (USPC)
• Vietnam Peace Committee (VPC)[27]
Peace prizes
The WPC awards several peace prizes, some of which, it has been said, were awarded to politicians who funded the organization.[46]
Congresses and assemblies
The highest WPC body, the Assembly, meets every three years.[55]
Year / Event / Location / No. of delegates / Countries represented / Comments
1948 / World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace / Wrocław / 600 / 46[56] / --
1949 / World Congress of Advocates of Peace / Paris and Prague / 2,200 / 72 / Established the World Committee of Partisans for Peace, chaired by Frédéric Joliot-Curie.
1950 / World Congress of the Supporters of Peace / Sheffield and Warsaw / -- / -- / Moved from Sheffield to Warsaw as a result of the British government refusing visas to delegates.
1951 / -- / Stockholm[23] / -- / -- / --
1952 / Congress of the People for Peace / Vienna[21] / -- / -- / Presiding committee included Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Robeson, Pablo Neruda, Diego Rivera, and Louis Aragon.[19] Also attended by Madame Sun Yat Sen, Ilya Ehrenburg and Hewlett Johnson.[57]
1952 / -- / Berlin / -- / -- / --
1953 / -- / Helsinki -- / -- / --
1954 / -- / Berlin / -- / -- / 23–28 May
1955 / -- / Budapest / -- / -- / --
1958 / World Congress on Disarmament and International Cooperation[21] / Stockholm / -- / -- / Bertrand Russell withdrew his sponsorship of the congress and denounced the WPC for its refusal to condemn the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the kidnapping and murder of Hungarian prime minister, Imre Nagy.[58]
1962 / World Conference for General Disarmament and Peace[21] / Moscow / -- / -- / Addressed by Nikita Khrushchev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.[59]Attended by delegates from non-aligned groups. Sponsors include Bertrand Russell and Canon John Collins of CND.[40] As a result of confrontation between western and Soviet delegates, 40 non-aligned organizations form the International Confederation for Disarmament and Peace, without Soviet membership.[42]
1965 / World Congress for Peace, National Independence and General disarmament / Helsinki / 1,470[60] / 98[60] / Called for withdrawal of all U.S. armed forces from Vietnam.[60][61]
1971 / Assembly / Budapest[62] / -- / -- / --
1973 / World Congress of Peace Forces[63] / Moscow / 3,200[64] / -- / Chaired by Romesh Chandra, general secretary of the WPC.[64] The main speaker was Leonid Brezhnev
1977 / -- / Warsaw[16] / -- / -- / --
1980 / World Parliament of Peoples for Peace / Sofia / 2,230[29] / 134[29] / Launched campaigns against stationing of new US nuclear weapons in Western Europe, against Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, and campaigns of solidarity with Vietnam, Syria, Cuba, the PLO and the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan.[65]
1983 / World Assembly for Peace and Life Against Nuclear War[5] / Prague / 2,635[29] / 132[66] / Noted that "An especially acute danger is represented by plans to deploy first-strike nuclear missiles in Western Europe."[66]Members of Charter 77 not permitted to attend.[67]Members of the unofficial Hungarian student peace movement Dialógus (Dialogue) who attempted to attend "were met with tear gas, arrests, and later deportation back to Hungary."[43]
1986 / World Congress for the International Year of Peace[5][68] / Copenhagen / 2,648[29] / -- / The International Year of Peace was declared by the United Nations.[69]This was said to be the first WPC-sponsored congress to be held in a NATO country.[68] The Coalition for Peace through Security demonstrated against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, giving rise to worldwide media coverage.[70]
1990 / -- / Athens / -- / -- / --
1996 / -- / Mexico / -- / -- / --
2000 / -- / Athens / -- / 186[71] / --
2004 / -- / Athens / 150[72] / 50+[72] / --
2005 / -- / Seoul[71] / -- / -- / --
2008 / World Congress of the World Peace Council[73] / Caracas, Venezuela / 120 / 76 / --
2009 / -- / New York / 400[71] / 194[71] / --
2012 / World Peace Assembly and Conference[27] / Kathmandu/Nepal / -- / -- / --
2016 / Anti-Nato Conference[27] / Warsaw / 85 / 22 / --
Past presidents
• Frédéric Joliot-Curie (1950–58)
• John Desmond Bernal (1959–65)
• Isabelle Blume (1965–69)
• Romesh Chandra (General Secretary in 1966–1977; President in 1977–90)
• Evangelos Maheras (1990–93)
• Albertina Sisulu (1993–2002)
• Prof Niranjan Singh Maan (General secretary)
• Orlando Fundora López (2002–08)
Current members
Under its current rules, WPC members are national and international organizations that agree with its main principles and any of its objectives and pay membership fees. Other organizations may join at the discretion of the Executive Committee or become associate members. Distinguished individuals may become honorary members at the discretion of the Executive Committee.[55]
As of March 2014, the WPC lists the following organizations among its "members and friends".[74]
Current Communist States
• Chinese Association for Peace and Disarmament
• Cuban Movement for Peace and Sovereignty of the Peoples
• Lao Peace and Solidarity Committee
• Korean National Peace Committee (North Korea)
• Vietnam Peace Committee
Former Soviet Union
• Armenian Peace Committee
• Belarus Peace Committee
• Georgian Peace Committee
• Ukraine Anti-Fascist Committee
• Latvian Peace Committee
• International Federation for Peace and Conciliation (the former Soviet Peace Committee a federation of a number of organizations in the CIS). Its member organizations, at the time of its founding in 1992, included:[75]
• Armenian Committee for Peace and Conciliation
• National Peace Committee of Republic of Azerbaijan
• Public Association Belarusian Peace Committee
• Peace Committee of the Republic of Georgia
• Public Association Council for Peace and Conciliation of the Republic of Kazakhstan
• Public Association Council for Peace and Conciliation of the Kyrgyz Republic
• Latvian movement for peace
• Lithuanian Peace Forum,
• Public Association "Аlliance for Peace of the Republic of Moldova"
• Russian Peace Committee
• Republican Public Association Peace Committee of the Republic of Tajikistan
• Peace Fund of Turkmenistan
• Ukrainian Peace Council
Former Eastern bloc
• Bulgarian National Peace Council
• Czech Peace Movement
• Hungarian Peace Committee
• Mongolia Union for Peace and Friendship
Europe
• Austrian Peace Council
• Vrede (Belgium)
• Croatia Anti-Fascist Committee
• Cyprus Peace Council
• Danish Peace Council
• Finnish Peace Committee
• Mouvement de la Paix (France)
• German Peace Council
• Greek Committee for International Detente and Peace
• Ireland Peace and Neutrality Alliance
• Forum against War (Italy)
• Peace Committee of Luxembourg
• Malta Peace Council
• Netherlands Hague Platform
• Portuguese Council for Peace and Cooperation
• Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals (Serbia)
• Swedish Peace Committee
• Swiss Peace Movement
Asia
• Bangladesh Peace Council
• Bhutan Peace Council
• Burmese Peace Committee
• Cambodian Peace Committee
• All India Peace and Solidarity Organisation
• Association for the Defense of Peace, Solidarity and Democracy (Iran)
• Peace Committee of Israel
• Lebanese Peace Committee
• Japan Peace Committee
• Nepal Peace and Solidarity Council
• Pakistan Peace and Solidarity Council
• Palestinian Committee for Peace and Solidarity
• Philippines Peace and Solidarity Council
• Peace and Solidarity Organisation of Sri Lanka
• Sri Lanka Peace and Solidarity Council
• Syrian National Peace Council
• Timor-Leste Conselho da Paz
• Peace Association of Turkey
• Yemen Peace Committee
Africa
• Angolan League for the Friendship of the Peoples
• Congo Peace Committee (Democratic Republic of the Congo)
• Egyptian Peace Committee
• Ethiopian Peace Committee
• Peace Council of Mozambique
• Peace Committee of Madagascar
• Peace Committee of Namibia
• Nigerian Peace Committee
• South African Peace Initiative
• Sudan Peace and Solidarity Council
• Tunisian Peace Committee
• Zimbabwe Peace Committee
Americas
• Movimento por la Paz, Soberania y Solidaridad (Argentina)
• Caribbean Movement for Peace and Integration (Barbadoes)
• Comite Boliviano por la Paz, Tupaj Amaru
• Brazilian Center for Solidarity with the Peoples and Struggle for Peace
• Canadian Peace Congress
• Peace Committee of Chile
• Colombian Peace Committee
• Costa Rican National Peace Council
• Dominican Union Journalists for Peace
• Ecuador Peace and Independence Movement
• Movimento Mexicano por la Paz y el Desarollo
• Comite de Paz de Nicaragua
• Comite Nacional de Defensa de Solidaridad y Paz (Panama)
• Comite de Paz de Paraguay
• Comite Peruano por la Paz
• Movimento Salvadoreno por la Paz
• U.S. Peace Council
• Uruguay Grupo Historia y Memoria
• Comite de Solidaridad Internacional (Venezuela)
Oceania
• Australian Peace Committee
• New Zealand Peace Council
Other
• International Action for Liberation
• European Peace Forum
See also
• List of anti-war organizations
• List of peace activists
• Active measures
• Soviet influence on the peace movement
• International Confederation for Disarmament and Peace
• Communist propaganda
• Front organization
• National Council of Arts, Sciences and Professions
• Peace movement
• World peace
• World union for peace and fundamental human rights and the rights of peoples
Footnotes
1. Milorad Popov, "The World Council of Peace," in Witold S. Sworakowski (ed.), World Communism: A Handbook, 1918–1965. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1973; pg. 488.
2. Deery, Phillip (2002). "The Dove Flies East: Whitehall, Warsaw and the 1950 World Peace Congress". Australian Journal of Politics and History. 48.
3. Suslov, M., The Defence of Peace and the Struggle Against the Warmongers, Cominform, 1950.
4. Wittner, Lawrence S., One World or None: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement Through 1953 (Vol. 1 of The Struggle Against the Bomb) Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Paperback edition, 1995.ISBN 0804721416
5. Santi, Rainer, 100 years of Peace Making: A History of the International Peace Bureau and other international peace movement organisations and networks, Pax förlag, International Peace Bureau, January 1991.
6. "Communists", Time Magazine, 2 May 1949.
7. Committee on Un-American Activities, Report on the Communist "peace" offensive. A campaign to disarm and defeat the United States, 1951
8. Gerald Horne, Mary Young (eds), W.E.B. Du Bois: An Encyclopedia, p. 47.
9. Andersson, Stellan, "'Madness is Becoming More Widespread.' Peace and disarmament".
10. Barbara J. Beeching, "Paul Robeson and the Black Press:The 1950 Passport Controversy", The Journal of African American History, Vol. 87 (Summer, 2002), pp. 339-354
11. Picasso's poster for the Congrès Mondiale des Partisans pour la Paix
12. Defty, A., Britain, America, and anti-communist propaganda, 1945–53, Routledge, 2004. p. 217
13. Laird, R. F., and Erik P. Hoffmann. Soviet Foreign Policy in a Changing World, New York: Aldine, 1986. p. 189.
14. Burns, J. F., "Soviet peace charade is less than convincing", New York Times, 16 May 1982.
15. The Way to Defend World Peace Archived 4 June 2012 at the Wayback Machine., Speech by Liao Cheng-Chin at the Stockholm session of the World Peace Council, 16 December 1961.
16. United States Department of State,The World Peace Council's "Peace Assemblies", Foreign Affairs Note, 1983
17. Prince, R., "The Ghost Ship of Lönnrotinkatu", Peace Magazine, May–June 1992.
18. Moro, R., "Catholic Church, Italian Catholics and Peace Movements: the Cold War Years, 1947–1962".
19. "Congress For Peace - Vienna 1952" (book), A History of the World in 100 Objects.
20. Moubayed, Sami M. (2006), Steel & Silk: Men & Women Who Shaped Syria 1900–2000, Cune Press, p. 368
21. "World Peace Council Collected Records (CDG-B Finland), Swarthmore College Peace Collection". Retrieved 25 December 2016.
22. Seedbed of the Left, Workers Liberty, WL Publications, 1993.
23. Wernicke, Günther, "The World Peace Council and the Antiwar Movement in East Germany", in Daum, A. W., L. C. Gardner and W. Mausbach (eds), America, The Vietnam War and the World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
24. Mikhailova, Y., Ideas of Peace and Concordance in Soviet Political Propaganda (1950 – 1985).
25. Stalin, J. V. The People Do Not Want War.
26. DOI: Andrew G. Bone, "Russell and the Communist-Aligned Peace Movement in the Mid-1950s", Russell:The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies, Vol. 21, 2001
27. "World Peace Council". Retrieved 25 December 2016.
28. U.S. Congress. House. Select Committee on Intelligence, Soviet Covert Action: The Forgery Offensive, 6 and 19 Feb. 1980, 96th Cong., 2d sess., 1963. Washington, DC: GPO, 1980.
29. Richard Felix Staar, Foreign Policies of the Soviet Union, Hoover Press, 1991, ISBN 0-8179-9102-6, pp. 79–88.
30. Effect of Invasion of Czechoslovakia on Soviet Fronts, CIA.
31. Wernicke, Günter, "The Communist-Led World Peace Council and the Western Peace Movements: The Fetters of Bipolarity and Some Attempts to Break Them in the Fifties and Early Sixties", Peace & Change, Vol. 23, No. 3, July 1998, pp. 265–311(47).
32. E. P. Thompson, "Resurgence in Europe and the rôle of END", in J. Minnion and P. Bolsover (eds), The CND Story, London: Allison and Busby, 1983.
33. "Were the 1980s' Anti-Nuclear Weapons Movements New Social Movements?". Peace & Change. 22: 303–329. doi:10.1111/0149-0508.00054. Retrieved 26 September 2014.
34. Vladimir Bukovsky, "The Peace Movements and the Soviet Union", Commentary, May 1982, pp. 25–41.
35. John Kohan, "The KGB: Eyes of the Kremlin", Time, 14 February 1983.
36. Rotblat, Joseph, "Russell and the Pugwash Movement", The 1998 Bertrand Russell Peace Lectures.
37. Russell, Bertrand, and A. G. Bone (ed.), The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell (Volume 28): Man's Peril, 1954–55, Routledge, 2003.
38. Schwerin, Alan (2002). Bertrand Russell on Nuclear War, Peace, and Language: critical and historical essays. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 35. ISBN 978-0-313-31871-9. Retrieved 19 July 2010.
39. Driver, Christopher, The Disarmers, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964.
40. "Moscow Peace Congress: Criticism Allowed", Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, October 1982, p. 42.
41. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June 1963, p. 39
42. Donald Keys and Homer A. Jack, "Oxford Conference of Non-aligned Peace Organizations", 30 January 1963.
43. Bacher, John, "The Independent Peace Movements in Eastern Europe", Peace Magazine, December 1985.
44. Egy eljárás genezise: a Dialógus Pécsett (in Hungarian)
45. Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999. p. 163
46. Prince, Rob, The Last of the WPC Mohicans, The View from the Left Bank, 1 August 2011.
47. Prince, R., "Following the Money Trail at the World Peace Council", Peace Magazine, November–December 1992.
48. Clews, John, Communist Propaganda Techniques, New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1964
49. Barlow, J. G., Moscow and the Peace Offensive, 1982.
50. WPC, Peace Courier, 1989, No. 4.
51. Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949–50, Central Intelligence Agency.
52. Agee, Philip (1975). Inside the Company: CIA Diary. Farrar Straus & Giroux. pp. 60–61. ISBN 0883730286.
53. Roger E. Kanet (ed.), The Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and the Third World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
54. "Information letter about the World Peace Council". World Peace Council. 7 January 2008. Archived from the original on 3 December 2009. Retrieved 24 September 2009.
55. WPC Rules
56. "Ziemie Odzyskane i miłośnicy pokoju". Wroclaw.gazeta.pl. 2008-09-18. Retrieved 24 August 2012.
57. "Dirty hands", Time Magazine, Monday, 22 December 1952.
58. John Ballantyne, "Australia's Dr Jim Cairns and the Soviet KGB", National Observer (Council for the National Interest, Melbourne), No. 64, Autumn 2005, pp. 52–63.
59. "World Peace Conference: Moscow - British Pathé". britishpathe.com. Retrieved 26 September 2014.
60. "World Congress Sees US War in Viet Nam as Threat", The Afro American, 14 August 1965.
61. "World Congress in Helsinki", The Current Digest of the Russian Press (formerly The Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press), No. 28, Vol. 17, 4 August 1965, pp. 23–23.
62. Assembly of the World Peace Council, Budapest, May 13–16, 1971: Documents, World Peace Council.
63. Freden angår oss alla – Material och dokument från Fredskrafternas världskongress i Moskva den 25–31 oktober 1973. Stockholm: Svenska Fredskommittén, 1974. p. 36–37
64. Freden angår oss alla – Material och dokument från Fredskraf.
65. Von Geusau, F. A. M., "Pacifism in the Netherlands", in Laqueur, W., and R. E. Hunter, European Peace movements and the Future of the Western Alliance, Transaction Books, 1988. p. 206
66. Appeal adopted by the World Assembly for Peace and Life Against Nuclear War, Prague, 1983.
67. Hauner, M., Charter 77 and Western Peace Movements, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2011.
68. "World Peace Council: Copenhagen Congress", Hansard, 14 October 1986.
69. "A/RES/37/16. International Year of Peace". Retrieved 25 December 2016.
70. Lewis, Julian, "George Miller-Kurakin: Anti-communist campaigner who inspired Conservative activists during the Cold War", The Independent, Thursday, 26 November 2009.
71. "ГОЛОВНА - Українська Рада Миру". Retrieved 25 December 2016.
72. "Yahoo! Groups". uk.groups.yahoo.com. Retrieved 26 September 2014.
73. "Caracas Capital Mundial de la Paz". Retrieved 25 December 2016.
74. Members and Friends
75. Peace at Home and All Over the World, Moscow: International Federation for Peace and Conciliation, p. 345.
Further reading
• World Peace Council Collected Records, 1949 – 1996 in the Swarthmore College Peace Collection.
• Prince, Rob (May–June 1992). "The ghost ship of Lonnrotinkatu". Peace Magazine. 8 (3). p. 16.
• Prince, Rob (November–December 1992). "Following the money trail at the World Peace Council". Peace Magazine. 8 (6). p. 20.
• Honecker, Erich (1979). Welcoming Address (Speech). World Peace Council meeting. East Berlin. At the Internet Archive.
• Ballantyne, John (Autumn 2005). "Australia's Dr Jim Cairns and the Soviet KGB". National Observer (64). Melbourne: Council for the National Interest. pp. 52–63.
• Committee on Un-American Activities, US House of Representatives (19 April 1949). Review of the Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace Arranged by the National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions and Held in New York City on March 25, 26 and 27, 1949 (PDF). Washington, DC. at The Danish Peace Academy.
External links
• Official website
• Film of the World Congress of Partisans for Peace, Paris, 1949
• Pathe News film of 1962 Moscow Congress