Barly this year PEACE NEWS asked its readers to take part in a survey "Towards a definition of ourselves." This is both typical and significant. Normally, one judges the policy of a paper by its leaders and by the kind of contributions it accepts for publication. It is difficult to do this so far as PEACE NEWS is concerned. There is no single editor to take decisions, "leadership passes freely" from one to another of a group of editors and, according to the editors themselves, "Too often so far the result in the office has been chaos." Not only in the office. In the April 19th issue one of the editors ended an article on "Berlin, Dutschke and the new dimensions" by referring to the militant students in the following words: "Who can blame them? And who can blame their counterparts in Britain, America and elsewhere? If we are to have any future at all, the main hope lies with the young." If these are not rhetorical questions, then the answer is PEACE NEWS!
It was predominantly the young who demonstrated - with their German comrades - in Grosvenor Square on March 17th. But on March 8th PEACE NEWS published from its own address a letter signed "Chairman YCND", urging its readers to "Forget March 17th. It is irrelevent and dangerous." Only on the very eve of the demonstration, March 15th, in response to a letter from Adrian Mitchell threatening to withdraw from the YCND platform, did PEACE NEWS publish a disclaimer from the YCND-executive saying that the letter was written "in a personal capacity", that YCND had "not had any official position as regards the March 17th demonstration," that some members of the executive would "definitely be taking part"!
The March 8th issue also contained a leader "Sham Solidarity" - in which PEACE NEWS attacked the motives of the organisers, and those who contemplated taking part in the demonstration, in language which, in its misrepresentation and pejorative and emotive use of words, could not have been bettered by the yellow press. It was suggested that the organisers "...ask the mass of supporters simply to shout raucous slogans from the safety of the horde, to interfere with passing motor traffic, no doubt, and to break through a few police cordons," 'Two days before the demonstration PEACE NEWS leaders were still attacking it "....there is bound to be violence, either sporadic or more probably widespread" —- and
These are truths which PEACE NEWS would do well to ponder. When, before March 17th was PEACE NEWS questioning the motives of the organisers, In the event four policemen were treated in hospital for slight injuries and all had been discharged the following day!
UNDERSTANDING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MARCH 17TH
Nowhere in PEACE NEWS leaders was there any understanding of the fact that thousands of men and women wanted, by their actual presence at the symbolic centre of aggression, Grosvenor Square, to express their solidarity with the Vietnamese in their suffering. Nor, afterwards, was there any recognition that masses of people had risen above indifference, risk of arrest, injury and loss of employment to "vote with their feet" against the enormity of the American presence in Vietnam.
If a paper has no consistent policy in times of social, political and economic stress, it inevitably becomes reactionary. This is the position in which PEACE NEWS now finds itself. In Britain at least, where so many libertarian intellectuals have their cosy little niches, demonstrations must at all costs be peaceful. It still seems to believe when it comes to action, that there is something ethical about the law itself, whereas in fact it is a bludgeon in the hands of the establishment, and that we should continue to play the democratic game according to the rules although everyone knows the cards are stacked. It is significant that in Paris, Rome, Berlin, London and New York it is the students' heads which have been bloody but are still unbowed!
RAYMOND WILLIAMS ON "WHY I DEMONSTRATE"
The crunch is coming but PEACE NEWS just doesn't know what it is all about. Recently Raymond Williams spoke over the BBC on "why do I demonstrate?", and the playwright David Mercer wrote an unpublished letter to THE TIMES. Williams said: "I think we have to remember that violence can be present in an established order where all is superficially calm, just because the reserves of sheer power are effective. I don't think men who disturb such an order can be honestly charged with beginning the violence. It is necessary to say soberly and quietly that the decay and corruption of the political system and the intolerable violence now actually directed against the poor of the world, will go on being fought by all effective means; and that unless the demonstrations grow into a new and open political movement, that fight will be ugly. Under a strain like this, it's time, not simply for those of us who are demonstrators, who want a new democratic politics, but for the society itself, a society more and more openly based on money and power, to change and be changed."
Mercer says: "With quite extraordinary obtuseness you recommend demonstrators once more to those constitutional procedures which they know perfectly well will have no results... The violence on Sunday was not some kind of discreditable lapse from decent standards of public expression in a democratic society - it was the dramatic outcome of profound and irreconcilable differences cutting across young and old, right and left... So long as it takes place in Vietnam or elsewhere, most people are not unduly disturbed, except to click their tongues over the horror of it all. When it happens in Grosvenor Square, there is a sense of public outrage - and columns of self-righteous drivel in the newspapers. The unreality of the response is amazing."