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WRI’s Never-Ending Story

By Judith Mahoney Pasternak

War Is a Crime Against Humanity:
The Story of War Resisters’ International
By Devi Prasad
Publisher’s Note by WRI Chair Joanne Sheehan; Foreword by George Willoughby
War Resisters’ International, 5 Caledonian Rd., London N1 9DX, Britain
www.wri-irg.org., 2005; 556 pages; $50, paperback

IN 1921, with the memory still fresh of an apocalyptic war, a handful of European and U.S. pacifists met in the Netherlands to look for a way to prevent another such catastrophe. They decided to work for peace through a new kind of organization: an international secular peace group that would not only oppose war, but would work nonviolently for the social changes without which war would never end. “War is a crime against humanity,” they declared. “We therefore are determined not to support any kind of war and to strive for the removal of all causes of war.” They called themselves Paco, the Esperanto word for peace.

Within a few years they had modified their declaration and changed the name of the organization to War Resisters’ International. As the blood-drenched 20th century wore on, WRI’s work often seemed quixotic. Yet in the course of the century, the organization grew into an international network that today comprises thousands of antiwar activists in 43 affiliated groups spread out across every continent. The story of its growth and development over its first 53 years can now be found in War Is a Crime Against Humanity: The Story of War Resisters’ International, the long-awaited, monumental history of the organization from its founding in 1921 through the Vietnam War years, written by former WRI Executive Secretary and Chair Devi Prasad.

Encyclopedic in its length and details, the book provides far more information than can be summarized here. Highlights include a cast of thousands, campaigns successful and doomed, and most of all, the tireless everyday work of articulating the goals of such a group and administering the efforts to attain those goals.

The more famous WRI activists and supporters included Danilo Dolci, the Italian writer-activist often called the “Sicilian Gandhi,” and the German anti-Nazi priest Martin Niemöller; both were vice-chairs of WRI. The great Mohandas Gandhi himself, the world’s most prominent advocate of nonviolent resistance, maintained warm relations with WRI from 1928 until his death 20 years later. Leading U.S. pacifists like labor and antiwar organizer A.J. Muste, civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, and WRL’s own David McReynolds served on WRI’s executive council and regularly appeared at its meetings and conferences. (McReynolds later served as chair.)

But Prasad also relates heroic efforts by less famous people—the hundreds of women and men who resisted war at any price, like Herbert Runham Brown (to whom the book is dedicated), the jailed British WWI conscientious objector who became WRI’s first Executive Secretary. Prasad describes too the work of Myrtle Solomon, the group’s first woman chair.

Some struggles were successful; others were fated from their start. Particularly poignant is the account of the attempt by WRI activists and other European pacifists in the ominous years before World War II to rally support for nonviolent resistance to fascism from labor unions and other anti-fascist organizations. More encouraging are the accounts of the opposition to the Vietnam War and the first stirrings of feminist consciousness in WRI.

Most of all, however, War Is a Crime Against Humanity is the story of tireless political organizing, of meetings and conferences and campaigns created by a different kind of hero—not the people whose names go down in history, but those who work for a lifetime to accumulate small victories. Prasad names the organizers of WRI events and the crafters of WRI statements that slowly but steadily brought more and more people into the pacifist orbit.

No one is better qualified to tell this story than Devi Prasad, who has spent some 50 years closely associated with WRI and before that was an associate of Gandhi’s for the last seven years of the Indian leader’s life. But Prasad only joined the WRI staff in 1962; the book is the fruit of years of meticulous research as well as personal recollection. Dozens and dozens of interviews bolster the archives Prasad mined to create this extraordinarily comprehensive book.

War Is a Crime Against Humanity closes as the Vietnam War was finally ending and WRI was looking forward to new levels of organizing and cooperation in what we now call the global South. Someone—Prasad or a successor—should take it from that point to today.

Meanwhile, we have this invaluable history and reference work. Unfortunately, WRI’s decision to publish the book itself has resulted in a price that may be too high for many activists’ home libraries. But peace workers can turn that to an advantage: Persuade your local public library to stock the book and you may facilitate meetings between WRI and a much larger number of readers.

In the 10 years she edited this magazine, journalist Judith Mahoney Pasternak attended and reported on WRI triennial conferences in Ireland and Croatia and visited with WRI staff in London and New York City.