War Resisters' International (WRI), headquartered in London, is an international anti-war organisation with members and affiliates in over 30 countries.[ citation needed ]
War Resisters' International (WRI), headquartered in London, is an international anti-war organisation with members and affiliates in over 30 countries.[ citation needed ]
War Resisters' International was founded in Bilthoven, Netherlands in 1921 under the name "Paco", which means "peace" in Esperanto. WRI adopted a founding declaration that has remained unchanged:
War is a crime against humanity. I am therefore determined not to support any kind of war and to strive for the removal of all causes of war.
It adopted the broken rifle as its symbol in 1931.
Many of its founders had been involved in the resistance to the First World War: its first Secretary, Herbert Runham Brown, had spent two and a half years in a British prison as a conscientious objector. Two years later, in 1923, Tracy Dickinson Mygatt, Frances M. Witherspoon, Jessie Wallace Hughan, and John Haynes Holmes founded the War Resisters League in the United States.
Notable members include Dutch anarchist Bart de Ligt, Quaker Richard Gregg and Tolstoyan Valentin Bulgakov. WRI attracted some of the world's best pacifist thinkers and activists, amongst them George Lansbury, Mahatma Gandhi, Bertrand Russell, Bayard Rustin, Martin Niemoeller and Danilo Dolci. The group had a close working relationships with sections of the Gandhian movement. In January 1948, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi attended a preparatory meeting for the World Pacifist Meeting he called, at the behest of WRI, and which eventually took place in December 1949. It took the form of 50 international pacifists meeting with 25 of Gandhi's close associates in an "unhurried conference" in Santiniketan, West Bengal. [1]
In the 1930s and 1940s, WRI helped to rescue people from persecution under Francisco Franco and under the Nazis and found them safe homes with WRI members in other countries. [2] One of the leaders of the Norwegian branch of WRI (FmK), Olaf Kullmann, was arrested by the German Occupiers for his pacifist agitation; he was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he died in 1942. [3]
During the Cold War, WRI consistently sought out war resisters in the Soviet bloc: first individuals, and later groups. After the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, WRI organised protest demonstrations in four Warsaw Pact capitals. [4]
Daniel Ellsberg's attendance at a talk by Randy Kehler (as Kehler was preparing to submit to his sentence for draft resistance) at the WRI's 13th Triennial Meeting, held at Haverford College in August 1969, was a pivotal event in Ellsberg's decision to copy and release the Pentagon Papers. (It was Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers which led President Nixon to create a group of in-house spies, who undertook the ill-fated Watergate break-in, which led to Nixon's resignation). [5]
In 1971, when Pakistani troops were blockading what was then East Pakistan, WRI launched Operation Omega to Bangladesh. More recently, the International Deserters Network associated with WRI has offered support for people resisting the Gulf War of 1991 and, on a much larger scale, the wars in the Balkans, where it was also engaged with several other peace organisations in an experiment in international nonviolent intervention, the Balkan Peace Team.
In 1988, a WRI advert was cited[ by whom? ] as one of the reasons for the seizure of an edition of the Weekly Mail in South Africa, after the banning of the local End Conscription Campaign.[ citation needed ]
The WRI office in London has supported three programmes: work on conscientious objection, supporting nonviolent movements against war and countering youth militarisation.
War Resisters' International is a network of member groups. An international conference takes place at least once every four years.
The Chair has been elected at international conferences (Assembleys) or by postal vote in advance of the international conference. Since the office of chair was created in 1926, chairs have been:
The office of Chair has been abolished at the 2019 Assembly meeting in Bogotá, Colombia, and the former responsibilities of the Chair are now shared between the members of the executive committee.
Pacifism is the opposition or resistance to war, militarism or violence. The word pacifism was coined by the French peace campaigner Émile Arnaud and adopted by other peace activists at the tenth Universal Peace Congress in Glasgow in 1901. A related term is ahimsa, which is a core philosophy in Indian religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. While modern connotations are recent, having been explicated since the 19th century, ancient references abound.
Anarcho-pacifism, also referred to as anarchist pacifism and pacifist anarchism, is an anarchist school of thought that advocates for the use of peaceful, non-violent forms of resistance in the struggle for social change. Anarcho-pacifism rejects the principle of violence which is seen as a form of power and therefore as contradictory to key anarchist ideals such as the rejection of hierarchy and dominance. Many anarcho-pacifists are also Christian anarchists, who reject war and the use of violence.
The War Resisters League (WRL) is the oldest secular pacifist organization in the United States. The organization is celebrating its centennial from the founding date of October 19 into 2024.
The Fellowship of Reconciliation is the name used by a number of religious nonviolent organizations, particularly in English-speaking countries. They are linked by affiliation to the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR).
Nonresistance is "the practice or principle of not resisting authority, even when it is unjustly exercised". At its core is discouragement of, even opposition to, physical resistance to an enemy. It is considered as a form of principled nonviolence or pacifism which rejects all physical violence, whether exercised on individual, group, state or international levels. Practitioners of nonresistance may refuse to retaliate against an opponent or offer any form of self-defense. Nonresistance is often associated with particular religious groups, such as Anabaptist Christianity.
The International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR) is a non-governmental organization founded in 1914 in response to the horrors of war in Europe. Today IFOR counts 71 branches, groups and affiliates in 48 countries on all continents. IFOR members promote nonviolence, human rights and reconciliation through public education efforts, training programs and campaigns. The IFOR International Secretariat in Utrecht, Netherlands facilitates communication among IFOR members, links branches to capacity building resources, provides training in gender-sensitive nonviolence through the Women Peacemakers Program, and helps coordinate international campaigns, delegations and urgent actions. IFOR has ECOSOC status at the United Nations.
Peacemakers was an American pacifist organization founded following a conference on "More Disciplined and Revolutionary Pacifist Activity" in Chicago in July 1948. Ernest and Marion Bromley and Juanita and Wally Nelson largely organized the group. The name “Peacemakers” was taken from a section of the Bible, the Beatitudes or Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God." The group’s organizational structure adopted a multidivisional organizational structure with a loose hierarchy, prioritizing local committees including but not limited to the Tax Refusal and Military Draft Refusal Committee. The Peacemakers were social anarchists whose organizational beliefs are largely attributed to Marxist philosophy. Peacemakers aimed to advocate nonviolent resistance in the service of peace.
José Brocca was a pacifist and humanitarian of the Spanish Civil War, who allied himself with the Republicans but sought nonviolent ways of resisting the Nationalist rebels.
In the 1930s Spain became a focus for pacifist organisations including the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the War Resisters' International whose president was the British MP and Labour Party leader George Lansbury. Prominent Spanish pacifists such as Amparo Poch y Gascón and José Brocca supported the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Brocca argued that Spanish pacifists had no alternative but to make a stand against what he viewed as fascism. He put this stand into practice by various means including organising agricultural workers to maintain food supplies and through humanitarian work with war refugees.
Ralph DiGia was a World War II conscientious objector, lifelong pacifist and social justice activist, and staffer for 52 years at the War Resisters League.
A peace movement is a social movement which seeks to achieve ideals such as the ending of a particular war or minimizing inter-human violence in a particular place or situation. They are often linked to the goal of achieving world peace. Some of the methods used to achieve these goals include advocacy of pacifism, nonviolent resistance, diplomacy, boycotts, peace camps, ethical consumerism, supporting anti-war political candidates, supporting legislation to remove profits from government contracts to the military–industrial complex, banning guns, creating tools for open government and transparency, direct democracy, supporting whistleblowers who expose war crimes or conspiracies to create wars, demonstrations, and political lobbying. The political cooperative is an example of an organization which seeks to merge all peace-movement and green organizations; they may have diverse goals, but have the common ideal of peace and humane sustainability. A concern of some peace activists is the challenge of attaining peace when those against peace often use violence as their means of communication and empowerment.
Myrtle Solomon was a British pacifist. She was general secretary of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU), a British pacifist organisation, between 1965 and 1972, and chair of the War Resisters International (WRI) between 1975 and 1986.
Operation Gandhi was a pacifist group in Britain that carried out the country’s first nonviolent direct action protests in 1952.
Randy Kehler is an American pacifist activist and advocate for social justice. Kehler objected to America's involvement in the Vietnam war and refused to cooperate with the draft. He was involved in several anti-war organizations in the 1960s and 1970s.
Devi Prasad was an Indian artist and peace activist. He was a pioneering studio potter, painter, designer, photographer, art educator and peace activist.
Aldo Capitini was an Italian philosopher, poet, political activist, anti-fascist, and educator. He was one of the first Italians to take up and develop Mahatma Gandhi's theories of nonviolence and was known as "the Italian Gandhi".
Howard Clark was an active pacifist who was Chair of War Resisters' International (WRI) from 2006 until his sudden death from a heart attack. As well as having played an important role in the WRI from the 1980s, he had been an active contributor to the British pacifist magazine, Peace News.
The Bilthoven Meetings were a series of networking and capacity building meetings of pacifist activists after World War I in the town of Bilthoven in the Netherlands. The activists gathered under the name of Movement Towards a Christian International, which was later renamed to International Fellowship of Reconciliation. The meetings took place at the house of Kees Boeke, a Quaker missionary and pacifist.
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