Taken from The New Statesman 29 March 1958
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament's first big march took place over Easter weekend in 1958. Thousands walked from central London to the Aldermaston nuclear facility in Berkshire in protest at the existence of nuclear bombs. The creation of the largest mass movement in British history since the Chartists had been inspired by an article in the New Statesman the previous November. In this follow-up piece, J B Priestley reported on CND's astonishing growth.
Selected by Robert Taylor
Copies of this journal find their way to almost all parts of the world, and it is chiefly for the benefit of distant readers that I want to explain what has been happening to our Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament. For the last few weeks I have been, so to speak, ‘up in the front line’ and so have plenty of hard news.
First, let me say that we are doing very well, thank you. More and more meetings are being organised, more and more requests for speakers are arriving, and there is brisk movement all along the front. And this could soon be a very wide front. Letters come from many different countries, with a high proportion from Canada and the US. And I have had many urgent demands for the script of my anti-nuclear TV play, Doomsday For Dyson. Both sides of the Curtain seem to be interested in this piece, though it was in fact written specifically for a British audience.
But what chiefly interests me at the moment is not the unqualified success of our meetings but the attitude towards us of the people who disagree with our policy. This attitude is very significant. It explains a great deal that badly needed some explanation. It tells us nearly as much about our campaign as our own accounts of it. Light has been thrown in some rather dark places.
The first move, not very clever, was to ignore us, to pretend we weren’t there. When we had a press conference—in itself perhaps a mistake— most of the national newspapers didn’t bother to send anybody, or, if they did, then they took care not to print anything about us. Then when we held those astonishing meetings in Westminster on 17 February—when we filled four halls and could probably have filled four more if they had been available — the same technique of either boycotting us or playing us down was largely employed. This didn’t work. The campaign was news and obviously couldn’t be ignored. And since then we can’t complain of any lack of attention. Acres of newsprint have been devoted to us. The Establishment roared with one voice.
Here I must be allowed to be personal for a brief space, if only because a man can only tell directly his own story. When I wrote a longish piece for this journal, in the early part of last November, on Britain and Nuclear Weapons, I didn’t spend a week or two groaning and sobbing. I asked first to be supplied with every possible argument in favour of nuclear weapons, and then examined those arguments and tried to take every one of them into account while writing my piece. I may be — and no doubt am — a faulty logician, my heart may work harder than my head, but God knows I tried to use such powers of reasoning as He has given me.
Nor did my colleagues in the campaign strike me as wildly emotional unstable fellows. Bertrand Russell would hardly seem to the unbiased observer to be inferior in reasoning power to members of parliament and leader writers. And, sharing the same platform at various meetings, I have listened to Alan Taylor and Stephen King-Hall coolly and methodically taking the case for nuclear weapons to pieces. They did it impersonally too, without resorting to personal abuse, smearing and calling names.
But from the first our opponents have taken a line that suggests they are deeply uneasy. Instead of replying, courteously but firmly, to our arguments, they began at once hurling wild accusations, making a personal issue of it from the word Go. We were, it seemed, all ‘emotional’ and ‘hysterical’. They told us so, screaming at the top of their voices. Never have tempers been lost so quickly. We had to be denounced, often by name, not reasoned with. The references to Bertrand Russell, whose age and eminence entitle him to respect, have been particularly unpleasant. Such instant departures from the decencies of public debate are unusual and, I believe, are very significant.
A later and even more unpleasant move has been to smear us by making use of false analogies and of vague references to what happened in the Thirties. We are the same men, it seems, who nearly let Hitler in, the same old bunch of cowardly defeatists. And if there is much more of this, I for one propose to exhibit and then compare a few anti-Hitler records, just to see who was doing what in the later Thirties. As much out of laziness as good nature I for one am always willing to let bygones be bygones and to avoid recriminations, but if some of these Tory types want to play this game on a who-was-against-Hitler basis, I’ll be happy to oblige them with a few sets played under floodlighting.
The significance of all this seems to me quite plain. It is a beautiful example of what the psychologists call ‘projection’. These men of both parties who are in such a hurry to abuse us really project on to us the feelings they will not recognise in themselves. It is they who are emotional and hysterical. They know very well, in their heart of hearts, that they should not be depending on these weapons, that the arguments they use in favour of them are muddled and silly, that they have failed the people who trusted them, that Britain as a military nuclear power impresses nobody and cuts a contemptible figure, that they have got themselves and us into a horrible mess and lack the moral courage to. stand up and say so. So instead of trying to prove that a nuclear arms race can be turned into a stalemate and that in this stalemate honest disarmament talk can begin and a peaceful settlement finally reached, which is the only case they have that is worth arguing (though I think it wrong), they ignore their deep uneasiness by screaming ‘Emotional!’ and ‘Hysterical!’, by calling us names, by smearing us with any muck that is handy.
Meanwhile, something else is happening, something that only increases this uneasiness. Some of the English, quite a large number of them in fact, as our meetings are proving, are waking up. These people have the impertinence, condemned so far by both parties in happy unison, to insist upon having a voice in affairs. They would like to be heard before they die. They are rather tired of being disposed of as if they were inferior breeds of cattle. They do not see why they and their families should be merely so many dumb pawns in a game of power politics. Some of them believe that Democracy could be something better than a tired word. Moreover, as our mailbags amply testify, there are people elsewhere, across several different seas, who are beginning to be restive too and to ask awkward questions.
If politics were my trade — and let nobody imagine I should like them to be, for I detest speech-making, committees, conferences—then instead of throwing names about and being silly and abusive, I would give some serious attention and thought to this campaign. Here is something that suddenly reverses all the judgments of party managers and agents, that contradicts all that melancholy stuff about people-only-wanting-to-watch-their-TV-screens-nowadays, that even proves something too can be done with TV screens. Whether it is heading for victory or defeat, the campaign is important. If it succeeds, a lot of important people are going to have to eat their words. If it fails, then a host of the more sensitive and articulate persons in this country are going to feel deeply frustrated while the rest turn and go to sleep again — perhaps for ever.
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