The "peace movement" has always been a lucrative war-mongering terrorism campaign to frighten people away from rational free debate, a war on democracy, a war on the only proof tested means to maintain peace through deterrence; in summary, peace propaganda is the use of lies and subjective scare-mongering to declare war on the very principles of liberty itself. If you want peace, be ready for war. If you want to encourage aggressors, disarm.
Dr Spencer Weart, "Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another" (Yale University Press, 1998, ch. 1):
“This idea had been developed by 1785 ... A world where every state was a democracy, [Immanuel Kant] wrote, would be a world of perpetual peace. Free peoples ... will make war only when driven to it by tyrants. ... there have been no wars between well-established democracies. ... the absence of wars between well-established democracies [has a probability of being coincidence] less than one chance in a thousand. ... robust statistics ... When toleration of dissent has persisted for three years ... a new republic [is] ‘well established.’ ... [Diplomatic pacifism made war by the ‘appeasement trap’ of trying to ‘accommodate a tyrant.’] ... the tyrant concluded that he could safely make an aggressive response ... [thus] negotiating styles are not based strictly on sound reasoning.”
As Spencer Weart's 1998 book "Never at War" proved, democracies that have tolerated dissent for at least the last three years are never at war and the probability that this is coincidence is under 0.1%; wars involving democracies result from the "appeasement trap" where a democracy makes peace treaties or talks with a dictatorship (treating it as a fellow democracy), and then the dictatorship sees this as a sign of exploitable weakness and unwillingness to fight, thus using threats and coercion, and treating the democracy as foolish. Thus, appeasement, rather than replacing threats and violence with dialogue and civilized debate as its "pacifist" backers claimed, caused wars (not just with Hitler but with other dictators like Saddam).
On 14 March 1933, Lt Col Moore Brabazon complained of Britain’s disarmament policy to the House of Commons: “The enemy of the Air Force is not across the Channel, it is in Whitehall.” Brabazon was praised by military aviation expert W. E. Johns, who added that contrary to popular illusions, the 1914-18 war had not ended war:
“War, a barbaric custom handed down through centuries of fear, will only be condemned to the limbo of such things as witchcraft, torture and feudal systems, when nations come to know each other better, for with mutual understanding will come confidence, goodwill and a toleration of each others’ national characteristics; our hopes, our curses and blessings, our likes and dislikes, and our pleasures and antipathies.”
– W. E. Johns, “Disarmament, Dementia and Economy,” editorial, Popular Flying, May 1933.
Conventional propaganda-led historical treatments by fashionable CND founding/backing/applauding “historians” such of A. J. P. Taylor and his entourage of the “appeasement problem” entirely miss the Chamberlain coercion point. Chamberlain's government attempted to edit the media by pushing publishers of periodicals to fire or clamp down on free speech, most notoriously trying to stop cartoons by David Low ridiculing Hitler from appearing in the Evening Standard, but also successfully getting military aviation journalists like Captain W. E. Johns fired as Editor of Flying (weekly) and Popular Flying (monthly, founded March 1932). These journals were widely read by other journals and so had indirect as well as direct influence on the public and politics. Instead, the historians tend to be taken in by the illusion of a “free press”, thus ignoring coercion and taking the published articles and their editing at face value. People like A. J. P. Taylor prefer to focus exclusively on the inept “star players” with direct “key government influence” like Winston Churchill, who actually appeased Hitler in his article “The Truth About Hitler” (Strand Magazine, Nov. 1935; Hitler still complained about the article not being nice enough).
Johns’ was proved correct when Japan simply withdrew from the “League of Nations” after being “condemned” for invading China. He ridiculed the pseudo-“freedom of the press” (officialdom-cultivated newspaper journalists whose “defence correspondents” relied on propaganda handouts and friends in Westminster). Johns’ views received support from Brigadier-General P. R. C. Groves’ new book, Behind the Smoke Screen. The Government’s sock puppets accused Johns of “warmongering” and “clamouring” for arms:
“Feeling in this country runs the way the party in power at Westminster wants it to run, its wishes being conveyed to the public by means of carefully prepared propaganda in the newspapers. … [Hitler] has not kept strictly to the letter of the disarmament clause … The cost of a thousand aeroplanes today would be nothing to what failure to safeguard ourselves might cost.”
– W. E. Johns, Popular Flying editorial, January 1934.
Editor W. E. Johns was mobilized the day war broke out, 4 August 1914, with the Norfolk Yeomanry in the trenches of the Middle East until 1917, before training as a fighter pilot and serving in France from 1917-18. Shot down in 1918, he was taken prisoner, escaped and was recaptured three times, ending up in a Bavarian punishment camp. Describing patrols during trench warfare, he wrote: “you remember (and you never forget it) that there is a chance that at any moment you may trip over a land-mine, walk into a line of bullets …” (W. E. Johns, Men Only, March 1940.)
W. E. Johns, “Popular Flying” Editorial, July 1934:
“I hold the view that the more aeroplanes we have the more likely we are to avoid war. ... The more we bristle with aeroplanes, the longer people will think before they start anything.”
Johns relied for his Nazi threat data on his personal friends inside Germany, first the commandant of Johns’ last prisoner of war camp (Fort Orff near Heppberg), and second the German Luftwaffe fan Willy Heckel (who gave Johns details in a Barcelona meeting, during November 1934). (Source: P. B. Ellis and J. Schofield, By Jove Biggles, Norman Wright, 2003, p. 129.) But the disarmament fanatic Lord Londonderry, Secretary of State for Air, on 22 October 1934 attacked Johns and Churchill’s calls for “a vast armament of aeroplanes” in a speech to the Mechanics Institute in Darling. Winston Churchill responded in the Daily Express on 1 November 1934, but the disarmers simply dismissed him as scare mongering for political ends (warmongering):
“Germany is arming secretly, illegally and rapidly. A reign of terror exists in Germany to keep secret the feverish and terrible preparations they are making.”
W. E. Johns pointed out in his “Popular Flying” Editorial, December 1935:
“However appalling war may be, and however remote the chance of success, a nation that can lay any claim to the title will always fight rather than suffer an intolerable peace. ... There seems to be only one thing that we can do, and that is pick up the weapons we so foolishly laid aside when we went to Geneva, spit on our hands, and keep an eye on our property.”
After the Disarmament Conference collapsed as he predicted, the Government quangos inevitably attempted to place the blame not on Hitler but on those who wanted to deter Hitler, people like editor W. E. Johns:
“... the Royal Commission on the Private Manufacture of, and Trading in, Arms ... in its report ... has quoted certain statements that have been made on this page and endowed them with a meaning far from the one intended. ... I have supported armaments – or, rather, the policy of rearmament - ... because it is my firm conviction that only by a fair balance of power can peace be maintained. ... The Disarmament Conference failed ... The reason was that England had lost her talking point. With 3,000 more aeroplanes in the nation’s hangars our ‘friends’ would have been more genuine in their anxiety to talk of peace. Surely it must be quite clear to anyone who has watched the march of events since 1918 that England, inadequately armed, was wasting her time by even attending conferences of any sort, where the men who have the guns have ever called the tune.
“Following the line of argument of the disarmament theorists, we might as well disband the police force in the hope of ending crime.”
- W. E. Johns, “On the folly of war,” Popular Flying editorial, May 1936.
Today’s UN “international police force” is powerless to stop crime/war because all the major players have a veto, guaranteeing that someone will veto intervention; hence you need armies, or national police, not “international police” controlled by an ineffectual diplomatic system.
“When Mr Chamberlain first stepped into an aeroplane bound for Germany we were on the very brink of war. ... In plain, unvarnished fact, what really happened was this. Civilization was suddenly confronted by a new menace – an international gangster in a big way. That’s all Hitler really is. Just an arch-gangster; a thug who points a machine gun at a crowd of men, women and children ...”
- W. E. Johns, Flying, 29 October 1938.
“The danger was there for all to see. Most people saw it. Unfortunately, those whose business it was to take the necessary precautions did not see it. Or if they did they buried their heads, ostrich-like, in the sands of their commendable but out-of-date belief in British immunity from catastrophe. ... Parity is not enough. If Germany has 5,000 bombers, then we must have 10,000. For every blow that Hitler can strike, we must be able to strike two in return. This is the only argument dictators understand.”
- W. E. Johns, “On Peace in Our Time,” Popular Flying, December 1938.
P. B. Ellis and J. Schofield state in their biography of Johns, “By Jove Biggles” (published by Norman Wright, 2003, p. 146):
“[W. E. Johns] returned to London in early January [1939] to find his editorial attacks on the Government had upset several prominent politicians who were now bringing pressure to bear on [publisher] George Newnes Ltd to have him removed from his editorships. Johns … had been removed from the editorship of the weekly Flying and given notice that the May issue of Popular Flying would be his last as editor. … According to information that Johns gave his [book] publishers, Hodder and Stoughton: ‘In 1939, as a result of criticism of the Government’s lagging air policy, he was removed from the editorial chairs of both Popular Flying and Flying …’.”
The less popular, non-controversial new editor Oliver Stewart led to the closure of both Popular Flying and Flying during WWII. Johns suffered similar coercion from the Labour socialists after the war with regard to his attacks on the Communist Dictatorial threat in his books. But political interference with the “free press” again intervened when in 1945, the Labour Party went to visit Johns in Scotland to try to make his children’s book hero a socialist. In 1947, Johns wrote to fellow children’s author Geoffrey Trease, who was researching the influences on juvenile fiction writers:
- W. E. Johns, quoted in Geoffrey Trease, editor, Tales out of school, Heinemann, London, 1949.
Expanding on this later, Johns wrote:
“After the war, a member of the Labour Government came to see me at my house in Scotland. They were impressed by the hold Biggles had on young minds, minds which in another 5 years would be voting. Couldn’t I possibly give Biggles a few Socialist tendencies? It would be worth my while.”
- W. E. Johns, quoted by Hunter Davies, Sunday Times, 4 July 1965.
The hard left responded to both the anti-appeasement and anti-political stance by slandering Johns for alleged racism and violence. English lecturer Bob Dixon of Stockwell College, in his two-volume diatribe, “Catching them young” (Pluto Press, London, 1977), a piece of sophistry claiming: “Johns’ fixation on race is quite abnormal.” This in 1979 led to the Education Institute of Scotland banning all Johns’ books as racist, based on a liars dogmatic mythology of socialist academic ideology. P. B. Ellis and J. Schofield, “By Jove Biggles,” Norman Wright, 2003, p. 199:
“The critics who have judged the series adversely seem to have done so on very little reading and highly selective quotations. … ‘Objectionable’ passages themselves should be considered in their contexts.”
Dixon and others on the left simply ignored Johns work for feminism in his Worrals book series and contrived the racism charge in ignorance, using a provably false interpretation of highly misleading out-of-context misquotations from 2 out of 96 Biggles books, the other 94 books having white European villains. Johns most misquoted book on the racism charge was first published two years after his death, in which a villain called “Lazor the Razor, from the habit of carrying an old-fashioned cut-throat razor, his favourite weapon … Actually, he’s a British subject. He must be … although he might be one of those queer crossbreed types that can be thrown up almost anywhere between Liverpool and the Middle East.” In fact, the criticisms of this rely on a provably false interpretation of the intended meaning of the term queer, which simply meant unusual, not inferior as critics claimed (in Johns final book, Biggles does some homework, written around the same time and also published after his death, Johns has such a mixed race hero take over the job of his lead character Biggles when he retires!). The one other book singled out by the Dixon-agenda lobby had a coloured poacher in Africa as the villain. As P. B. Ellis and J. Schofield argue: “Unless no African can ever be a poacher or a gangster, there is nothing racialist about the words used to describe him.” (By Jove Biggles, Norman Wright publisher, 2003, p. 203.)
THE IRA TERRORISTS AND PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
People like ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair often claim that the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland is a blueprint for solving all the world's problems, particularly the Palestine Moslems versus the Israeli Jews. If Catholics and Protestants can agree to share devolved power in Northern Ireland, why can't the Islam and Israel? The two reasons are that: (1) extremist Shia Moslems have a greater difference with Jews than Protestant Christians have with Catholic Christians (both after all different sects of the same basic religion), and (2) the two sides in Northern Ireland have been long settled in situ, so there was no fear of being opening the door to a vast change in the culture caused by immigration (which is key to the Israeli worries about opening the door to an influx of Arabs). These two differences make the situations incomparable.
But the terrorism issue is of interest. The USSR under Brezhnev's KGB chief Andropov (later Premier himself after Brezhnev's death) supported terrorism across the world, including gun running to the IRA and subversive infiltration of the enemy's media and political civil service, not merely to spy, but also to spread propaganda to leaders from under cover of official-looking camouflage. These tactics are being used in the Ukraine today by the pro-Russian separatists. Undoubtedly there are pro-Russians everywhere in small numbers, but in the Ukraine they are being organized, agitated and armed by Russia. Putin is on the record calling the break up of the USSR a tragedy, and recently claiming that another superpower is needed to balance American influence and power in the world. In other words, he denies the USSR "evil empire" history, and wants to put the clock back to the "good old days" of the Cold War and the arms race.
So let's examine an example of how terrorism succeeds in bringing about dialogue. During World War II, German "Jerry" pushed propaganda-terrorism into the Blitz on London and over British towns and cities, but it wasn't only German "Jerry" using terrorist tactics against Britain in WWII: in 1942 the IRA's Gerry Adams was shot and wounded while attacking a police patrol in Northern Ireland. That Gerry Adams was the namesake father of Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams, now arrested and currently being questioned over the abduction and murder of mother of ten, Jean McConville.
Brendan "the dark" Hughes, who in 1972 participated in the IRA's "Bloody Friday" attacks using 20 car bombs that caused 139 casualties including 9 dead, claimed that Gerry Adams ordered Jean McConville's murder for being an informer. Her remains were finally discovered on a beach. Despite this, the Queen shook Gerry's hand in 2012.
Above: Martin McGuinness, deputy leader of the IRA in Londonderry/Derry in 1972 during the "Bloody Friday" IRA terrorist bloodshed, has stepped in to offer his view that the arrest of his friend Gerry Adams is a political action by rogue elements of the police. What a surprise! I bet Gerry is pleased to have someone so reputable behind him. After all, good old Martin last month had dinner with the Queen, and in 1973, Her Majesty the Queen technically had the "pleasure" of giving Martin McGuinness six months free board and lodgings, after he was caught with explosives and ammunition.
Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein and Martin McGuinness are the living proof that cheap underground terrorism and "peace propaganda" does pay in forcing an opponent to open dialogue. The Vietcong's literally underground (tunnel shelter) resistance to expensive bombing by the West demonstrates the failure financially and diplomatically of aerial power. If you want to force an enemy into concessions and dialogue, you must be capable of using successful, not unsuccessful tactics over a long period of time to wear down enemy resistance. This is what the Putin-backed Russian separatists are attempting to do in the Ukraine.
The USA doesn't have effective mass civil defense because Scientific American's Lawyer/book reviewer James Newman in 1961 falsely dismissed Herman Kahn's book on the effectiveness of civil defense as a support for war deterrence, On Thermonuclear War, a "moral tract on mass murder". But when the chips go down, the most vital job of civil defense in the first place is to boost war deterrence to PREVENT war. If you exaggerate the effects of war so much that it is totally incredible, you might as well disarm and wave a white flag.
So we in England based all our cold war civil defence on our first nuclear test Operation Hurricane at Monte Bello in 1952, which proved the validity of the WWII Anderson shelters and concrete buildings (unlike the wooden houses that burned down in Hiroshima) and we've uploaded key declassified reports at the UK National Archives to Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/BritishNuclearTestOperationHurricaneDeclassifiedReportsToWinston This is all still censored out of lying cold war "historians" who were trained by CND's A. J. P. Taylor (aka Moscow's "World Peace Council").
PLEASE SUPPORT PEACE BY NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE FOR WORLD DEMOCRACY THROUGH FREEDOM FROM OPPRESSION BY FASCIST OR DEMOCRACY-DILUTING TYRANT DICTATORSHIPS (TRUE NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE), ENFORCED BY DETERRENCE MADE CREDIBLE AND EFFECTIVE BY CIVIL DEFENCE. NOT SURRENDER TO LYING, ILLIBERAL, DISSENT-CENSORING, FEAR-MONGERING, ELITIST, TERRORIST, COERCIVE, SCARE-MONGERING!
The World Peace Book is now on the Internet Archive, debunking the usual socialist agenda driven propaganda such as "disarm for peace", "give in to dictators for peace", and "go naked into the conference chamber for peace" and emphasising in its place the worthy role of civil defence (which is also useful against tornadoes, hurricanes, and other natural events) which is still viciously attacked by the "peace movement" who falsely reject out of hand the one proven method of world peace by democratic deterrence:
https://archive.org/details/WorldPeaceBook
 |
| World Peace Book. |
More about the IRA and Russia (akin to all Russian anti-West interference throughout the world)
From Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive [Secret KGB archives, copied by Mitrokhin], Penguin, 1999, pages 492-502:
"[In 1969, the KGB Moscow "Centre" chief] Andropov ... increasingly turned to using terrorist proxies. Among the first opportunities for their use was a new wave of troubles in Northern Ireland. On 6 November 1969 the general secretary of the Irish Communist Party, Michael O'Riordan ... forwarded a request for Soviet arms from the Marxist IRA leaders Cathal Goulding and Seamus Costello. According to O'Riordan:
There has always existed more or less good relations between the IRA and the Irish Communists. We not only conduct a number of public and anti-imperialist activities together, but for more than a year a secret mechanism for consultations between the leadership of the IRA and the Joint Council of the Irish Workers' Party and the Communist Party of Northern Ireland has existed and is operating. ...
"The IRA had been widely criticised by its supporters for failing to defend the Catholic community during the Belfast troubles of August 1969, when seven people have been killed ... parishioners were contemptuously calling the IRA, 'I Ran Away'. ... In a report to the Central Committee [of the USSR], Andropov insisted that, before going ahead with an arms shipment, it was essential to verify O'Riordan's ability 'to guarantee the necessary conspiracy in shipping the weapons and preserve the secret of their source of supply.' ...
"... It was almost three years before the arms requested by the IRA in November 1969 ... were finally delivered by the KGB. Shortly after the request had been made, the IRA had split into two: the Officials under Cathal Goulding and the Provisionals led by Sean MacStiofain. The sympathies of the KGB were wholly with the Marxist Officials rather than the more nationalist Provisionals. ... the Officials were responsible for some of the bloodiest episodes in the Troubles in the early 1970s. The only answer to the 'forces of imperialism and exploitation', Goulding [of the Marxist Officials] declared in 1971, lay 'in the language of the bomb and the bullet.' The Official IRA's bloodthirsty attempts to upstage the Provisionals ended by alienating some of its own supporters. In February 1972 a bomb planted at the Aldershot headquarters of the Parachute Regiment killed seven people, including a Catholic priest and five women ... On 21 August [1972, KGB chief Andropov] presented to the Central Committee a 'Plan for the Operation of a Shipment of Weapons to the Irish Friends', codenamed SPLASH. ... 2 machine-guns, 70 automatic rifles, 10 Walther pistols, 41,600 cartridges, all of non-Soviet origin to disguise the involvement of the KGB - were transported by a Soviet intelligence-gathering vessel ... the Reduktor. The arms, in waterproof wrapping, were submerged to a depth of 40 metres on the Stanton sandbank, 90 kilometres from the coast of Northern Ireland, and attached to a marker buoy of the kind used to indicate the presence of fishing nets below the surface. ... A few hours after the arms had been deposited ... they were retrieved by a fishing vessel belonging to the 'Irish friends' ..."
While the USSR was supplying arms to the IRA for terrorism against Britain, it was also talking peace and negotiating Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) with the USA.
The key fact about "winning war" is that it's always been about subversive propaganda, censorship, and spying, which subversive dictators with police states are better at than liberal democracies with lawyers shouting the word "McCarthyism" whenever defence contractors are merely asked if they are now, or have ever been, members of the communist party (or other enemy front) organization. There is a difference between supporting liberal freedom and supporting dictatorial enemy fronts. McCarthy's target was people who wanted the "freedom" not to speak out honestly about their views, but to hide their views and refuse to confirm or deny what they believed, even when it was highly relevant to national security. It's the hidden agenda combined with secrecy of the fanatics which is the real problem. McCarthy's problem was that the most dangerous communists, the Klaus Fuchs and others, were not being open and honest, but were trying to hide behind a loophole-interpretation of the Fifth Amendment,
"No person shall be held to answer ... unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in ... the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger ... nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself ..."
The problem with this was that the Cold War was in some ways more dangerous than an open conventional war, and this Fifth Amendment was vague enough to provide an umbrella for communists and over terrorism support groups.
SEWAGE PERCOLATING UP FROM BLOCKED DRAINS, IGNORED BY STATUS QUO
Sue Mayer has written helpfully about the motivations of anti-capitalist, pacifist academic Bob Dixon (1931-2008) mentioned above, who was born in the mining village Spennymoor, brought up by his grandparents, contracted TB, studied arts at Nottingham University taking an arts degree, became a teacher, and in 1977 produced his “Catching Them Young” literature survey, with its scaremongering call for illiberal censorship to help enforce politically correct views of gender, race and religion. Summarizing his final book, “The Wrong Bob Dixon”, it explains the development of his bitterness towards successful capitalism: “he shows clearly how his childhood in a family broken by narrow attitudes towards his unmarried mother, his illness and the war had affected him, and how his life post war had been blighted by those same narrow attitudes and the political system that confines the ambition and natural talent and creativity of young people in the education system.”
I think it is vital to understand where the hard left is coming up from, because you need to understand a problem to even have a hope of solving it. The traditional problem is that the “establishment” ignores critics, thereby allowing underground anti-radiation or anti-capitalism ideologue attitudes to fester and to surface only in disguised, camouflage forms that hide their true agenda in order to avoid censorship. In other words, ignoring the causes of social injustices and refusing to understand the motivations for terrorism and bitter attacks on status quo, just encourages more of it, and in a more disguised form that is harder to understand and deal with. If we are civilized, we should seek out and deal with problems as soon as possible, or they will simply be exploited by extremists with a grudge, or enemy backed “World Peace Council” fronts.
Bob Dixon’s hard line lefty pacifist stance in his “Agitpoems” (1985) includes insults to war casualties, such as “WAR MEMORIALS 1914-18. Some fell, the inscriptions say, but did they trip or were they pushed? Some lost their lives. You do tend to lose things in a foreign country, but this does seem a bit careless. …”
So while Dixon felt happy complaining about what he considered to be the free speech of others to be provocative or agitate, he had no qualms about doing so himself, for his own provocative beliefs. Also, as we have shown above with the example of his attack on Johns, he got the facts completely wrong. This is the trouble with underground movements. By refusing to engage in constructive dialogue with bitter critics of society, the status quo fails to correct their mythology with the facts, and thereby encourages falsehoods and myths (especially about radiation, nuclear weapons, and dictatorial threats) to arise and remain unchallenged as they seep into society in camouflaged, disguised form.
The problem is analogous to using perfume to try to camouflage the stink of sewage percolating up from blocked drains, due to an inefficient maintenance system for society, which simply ignores problems until they are can't be denied, and then wallpapers over the cracks. The problem was Karl Marx wasn't "equality" but his pre-occupation and fixation on money. This made it attractive to the masses of the poor, but it never worked. You can't make money equal without discouraging motivation. What Marx should have striven for was an end to subjective elitism, i.e. an increase (not decrease) in democracy. The problems with "democracy" are not that it fails an underclass, but that we don't have enough of it: it's been too watered down by "socialist" systems put in place to curtail freedoms for real debates and to create a celebrity culture, which is a form of dictatorship by an elite. The example of "pacifists" who cause wars by soaking the media in disarmament propaganda, and then get praised for "trying" after millions die and wars continue, is still taboo.
