“Stop The War” is using an old Soviet playbook
It seems an odd name for a pro-war group, until you understand its Soviet-backed predecessor, the equally misnamed “World Peace Council”.
A shameful video is doing the rounds of British MP Dianne Abbott speaking at a “Stop The War“ coalition conference in which she describes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a US-led NATO campaign against Russia.
This “Stop The War coalition” supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014.
More accurately, it’s a Stop The West coalition, continuing an old playbook used by the similarly misnamed “World Peace Council” that was backed by the Soviets to spread their talking points.
Let’s rewind a century.
In the 1920s, the Soviet Union organised Communist International (AKA ‘Comintern’), a series of international conferences advocating for world communism.
They were quite explicit about their intentions to create front organisations for this purpose with abstract noble-sounding goals but, as stated at the 1935 conference, to “attack the enemy in the rear”.
This led to the creation of the Soviet-funded World Peace Council in the aftermath of WW2.
Presented as a supposedly spontaneous post-WW2 initiative of intellectuals across Europe, the Soviets maintained strict control over its activities and messaging.
They defined war and imperialism as inherent features of capitalism, while defining peace as communism.
With that logic, it would only ever condemn the West for waging war, while either staying quiet or defending wars and occupations of the Soviet Union. Only the West ever had agency to them.
Just as Stop The War blames the West for Russia invading Ukraine and laments the end of Assad’s civil war in Syria, the World Peace Council supported the North Korean invasion of South Korea and had nothing to say about the Soviet crushing of the uprising in Hungary nor the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
It demanded the US, UK, and France withdraw all troops abroad, but of course never demanded the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the occupied Baltic countries – or anywhere else.
Based on its noble-sounding name, the World Peace Council grew into the most prominent part of the post-WW2 international ‘peace’ movement, organising protests and lobbying campaigns around the world focused on opposing NATO and other Western activity.
The downfall
Its devoutly communist members slowly lost their faith in their funders, however.
One notable blow came from their own side when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a former Red Army captain sent to the gulag by Stalin was released and allowed by Khrushchev to write about Stalinist terror …before he once again became persona non grata after Khrushchev and got arrested.
While trying to ignore growing divisions and disillusionments among communists, the World Peace Council got epically trolled on this.
Someone (British intelligence, as we now know from their own declassified files) issued a fake statement on behalf of the World Peace Forum in support of Solzhenitsyn after he got arrested.
This statement sent to journalists around the world had all the pro-Soviet rambling hallmarks of a real World Peace Council statement but its singular purpose was to goad the real organisation into having to declare their actual position on Solzhenitsyn.
The World Peace Council took the bait. It wanted to maintain silence about human rights in the Soviet Union but, even more so, it could never allow itself to be seen to stray from the official Soviet position.
So they angrily denounced the fake letter, making it clear that they had never said anything at all ever about Solzhenitsyn. Their concern for human rights always stopped at the Soviet border.
Solzhenitsyn himself isn’t an admirable figure, by the way. He was merely off message at the time due to his personal experience of Soviet terror but remained a Russian imperialist after the end of the Soviet Union.
More important is what he directly revealed about Soviet terror and what his case indirectly revealed about Soviet supporters around the world.
The World Peace Council increasingly discredited itself, alongside the collapsing Soviet Union. The membership splintered. New groups came out of it.
New name, same tricks.
Key figures behind Stop The War were part of the World Peace Council and regularly appear on Russian state channels.
In this same speech from Dianne Abbott, she even decries the “coup” against Assad and includes it in her list of US wars. Yeah, not the actual Civil War, but the end of that war. And they can’t ascribe any agency to Syrians.
Stop The War and Dianne Abbot held panel discussions about the Syrian war with pro-Assad talking points from only Western panelists while furious actual Syrians were excluded.
James Bloodworth
The Soviet Union is no more. World communism can’t inspire many people anymore.
But, absent its strict dogmatism, it’s still the same logic about war and peace used by organisations like Stop The War and Dianne Abbot in this clip.
