Red Herring?

The "Cominform" origin of the World Peace movement is a sadly flogged horse before the end of the first instalment of our friends' article. It will doubtless be bleeding on through the second instalment, too.

Connection between the 1947 Cominform meeting and the 1948 Wroclam Conference of Intellectuals for Peace (where Julian Huxley, Kingsley Martin, Lord Boyd Orr, Olaf Stapledon and Louis Golding took a hand among others) is tenuous if shadily existent, and quite unproven.

And even if the Communists did take such a big hand, is that merely to the eternal shame of the declared disciples of the Prince of Peace? It certainly is that, just as much as are the Pope's Mass for Mussolini's butchers off to Abyssinia, Cardinal Souhard's infamous relations with the Vichyites, and Cardinal Innitzer's obsequies to Hitler.

While our friends snort about only 17 out of the 138 members of the first World Peace Committee not being "Communists or fellow-travellers," they would do well to remember that Professor Joliot-Curie and the Abbe Boulier were risking their lives organising the French Resistance while our self-proclaiming "Christian" friends were selling their countries to the Nazis. In his report to the N.Z. Peace Council on the Warsaw Congress, Mr. Keith Matthews states that there are "very many fewer Communists than others" on the World Peace Council.)

And who would pit himself in stature against the "fellow-traveller" Chinese poet and scholar Kuo Mo-Jo? Or against "fellow-traveller" Mexican Socialist and elder statesman Lazaro Cadenas? Or against "fellow-traveller" Metropolitan Nikolai of the Russian Church?

The new western darling, Tito, gets more solicitude from our friends. (Is Archbishop Stepinac to be left to his fate?) The truth is that the World Peace Committee's severance of connection with the Yugoslav Peace Committee in 1949 followed that body's servile echoing of bellicose utterances by Tito himself. Members of the former Yugoslav Peace Committee still serve on the World Peace Council in exile. Similarly, the only Spaniards on the top level of the World Peace movement are living in exile—including a recently-escaped Roman Catholic priest whom Mr. Keith Matthews (of Wellington) met in Warsaw in November.

(Yugoslavia and Spain were the only countries on earth where the Stockholm Appeal was officially banned. In other places—West Germany, the south USA, and some of fascist Latin Americas for instance—practical police measures were taken against signatories and collectors.)