The “Peace” Movement

By Al Benson Jr.

Back in the days before Communism went underground, supposedly to disappear but actually to assume a whole bevy of new titles and to re-emerge under them, we had what was called a “peace” movement. This consisted of all manner of groups who, supposedly, were concerned about world peace and disarmament. What they were actually concerned about was US disarmament and the “peace” they were so actively promoting was actually the “peace” of no resistance to Communism. That’s the only kind of peace that Communists understand. For them anything else is a state of war. They understand that fully while we mostly don’t.

During the Viet Nam era and on into the 1980s these groups proliferated all over the world and this country had its share of them. Now lots of the folks that joined these groups were not Communists–they were just people whose desire for peace was commandeered by the Communists and used to promote Western disarmament while the Soviet Union remained armed to the teeth.

In this country, one of the better known of these groups was the U.S. Peace Council. Even http://keywiki.org  has noted that: “The U. S. Peace Council was created by the Communist Party USA and was launched as the official U.S. national section of the Soviet front, World Peace Council at a November 1979 conference in Philadelphia. On the weekend of November 12-13, 1979 the U. S. Peace Council was established in a meeting at International House on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. US rep. John Conyers twice addressed the conference.”

Back in December, 1982 the old news magazine Review Of The News carried an article called “Reds and the peace movement” written by John Rees. He observed, in part, “Now we know that the World Peace Council was not content to remain only in Europe. By early spring this Moscow front was moving forcefully in the United States of America, through its affiliate U.S. Peace Council and the Communist Party, U.S.A. to promote and manipulate “peace” groups and the ‘nuclear freeze’ campaign. In the early 1980s the Western Goals Foundation published a book called The War Called Peace: The Soviet Peace Offensive. Others followed up and later John Barron had an article in the Reader’s Digest called “The KGB’s Magical War For Peace.”
For his Reader’s Digest article John Barron had interviewed Stanislav Aleksandrovich Levchenko who was a KGB agent who, in 1979, sought political asylum in this country. He explained how the Communists work through front groups. He said: “The trick is to make people support Soviet policy unwittingly by convincing them they are supporting something else. Almost everybody wants peace and fears war. Therefore by every conceivable means, the KGB plans and coordinates campaigns to persuade the public that whatever America does endangers peace and whatever the Soviet Union proposes furthers peace. That’s the art of Active Measures, a sort of made-in-Moscow black magic. It is tragic to see how well it works.”

In another article in Review Of The News (a different issue) the question was asked who is behind the peace and disarmament movements. That question was partially answered: “Would you believe Reds and Rockefellers? Domestically, an arms freeze has been promoted by a group called Ground Zero. As reported by the Wall Street Journal on April 16th, ‘…after a year of organizing effort and the expenditure of $300,000 (much of the money, according to co-founder Earl Molander, coming from younger members of the Rockefeller family) Ground Zero is about to hit the streets.’.”

This is not the first reference I ever read in regard to the Rockefellers helping out the peace and revolutionary movements in this country. Back in the late 1960s a college student named James Simon Kunen wrote an informative book called The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary. It must have been a popular book. It went through ten printings by January, 1971. He talked in the book about listening to a student give a report on an SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) convention. The student said: “Also at the convention, men from Business International Roundtables–the meetings sponsored by Business International for their client groups and heads of government–tried to buy up a few radicals. These men are the world’s leading industrialists and they convene to decide how our lives are going to go. These are the guys who wrote the Alliance for Progress. They’re the left wing of the ruling class…They want (Eugene) McCarthy in. They see fascism as the threat, see it coming from Wallace. The only way McCarthy could win is if the crazies and young radicals act up and make Gene look more reasonable. They offered to finance our demonstrations in Chicago. We were also offered Esso (Rockefeller) money. They want us to make a lot of radical commotion so they can look more in the center as they move to the left.”

So here we have the so-called “peace” movement being co-opted by big business, which is really on the left along with the peace movement while trying to appear centrist.

So both Moscow and American big business financed the peace movement, which was, after all, only an appendage used to promote one-world government. And all these idealistic kids who thought they were making a difference were only being used as part of someone else’s agenda, because there wasn’t really all that much difference between Moscow, the Rockefellers, and the Council on Foreign Relations which the Rockefellers helped, and still help, to promote.

Basically, the “peace: movement in this country, whether it realized it or not, was on the Communist side in the Viet Nam War.

I can remember, during the Kent State debacle, seeing college students rioting or demonstrating all over the place. I worked at a college on the East Coast at the time and saw plenty of students rioting, marching in the streets, being taught by their professors how to effectively demonstrate, and all the rest. Piles of “peace” literature came into the area around the college. I picked up a whole batch of it to check it out. To my surprise, although I shouldn’t have been surprised in retrospect, some of it was even printed in North Viet Nam and it was being passed out wholesale on American college campuses in the name of “peace.”

“Peace” is what it was all about–Communist peace–the absence of resistance to the Marxist agenda. That’s what the peace movement was all about–absence of resistance to Marxist goals. I only hope some of those idealistic kids who were gulled into taking part in that have gotten enough discernment in the decades since then that they realize that.