Magilla Gorilla - Nobel Peace Prize

In article
,
" wrote:

On Oct 12, 10:30*am, Ryan Cousineau wrote:
" wrote:

Your suggestion elsewhere that in a slow year, the prize
committee should pluck some worthy but maybe obscure
luminary (Mother Teresa, Norman Borlaug, Gates Foundation)
is exactly how you get winners like the Pugwash conferences.

Ben

My specific objection to the Pugwash conferences was that they were used
by the Soviet Union as a front organization. That makes their choice
substantially more tainted than the run of the mill.

It's kind of like when you find out that people have seriously
campaigned in the last few years for Dany Heatly to win the Lady Byng
trophy: maybe he's a better man, but let's see if we can maybe give
hockey's sportsmanship-and-character award to someone who didn't kill
one of his teammates in a drunk-driving crash.

Dumbass,

Nobody cares what happened during the Cold War anymore ...
but for the one or two of us that do, you just made what used to
be a very serious accusation.

Lots of people and things were called Soviet fronts back in the
day, a few of whom actually were, but many of whom were
guilty of expressing an opinion some cold warrior didn't like
(e.g. American Friends Service Cmte, M. L. King). To my mind,
in order to be a Soviet front a group would actually have to accept
covert support from the USSR _and_ advocate a party line
favorable to the Soviets as a quid pro quo. Simply consorting
with Commies, or taking a peacenik position independent of
Soviet influence, does not count.

Well, you've created a particular definition of a Soviet front, but
perhaps you'd settle for "The Pugwash Conference were useful idiots
infiltrated by the KGB." I don't know if that meets your definition,
but...

I looked at the Wikipedia entry for Pugwash and it says Pugwash
"became a front conference" and implies that the problem was
its connection with something called the World Peace Council.
The WPC may have been an actual front, but about Pugwash
it says "the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs
and the Dartmouth Conferences, both of which were used by
Soviet delegates to promote Soviet propaganda."
Well, ****, if something is used by known Soviet delegates to
promote Soviet propaganda, that doesn't make it a "front."
You could call anything with a Belgium delegate a Belgian
front by those standards.

The citations for the idea that Pugwash was a front come from
a book published by the Hoover Institution, which you can read
on Google Books (page 86-87):
http://books.google.com/books?id=Hvv...epage&q= &f=f
alse

I read it. There's absolutely no evidence. It just says that
Pugwash are a bunch of peacenik scientists and they had a
meeting in the USSR. Actually, even this book doesn't lump
Pugwash in with the "front conferences" like the World Peace
Council thing.

So basically, Pugwash may be a trivial winner of the Peace Prize,
but apparently they ****ed someone off enough to smear them.

You somehow piqued my curiosity enough to go and dig into some journal
archives. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the NY Times 1982
archive where Flora Lewis' "A blow to peace: the meekness of Pugwash"
is, but I do have access to the Globe and Mail's September 9, 1982
syndication of that story. If you have access to a good newspaper
database, you should be able to call it up yourself. There's also a
letter to the NYT shortly after this story came out from Pugwash, but I
can't access that.

I will now stretch the limits of fair use. Don't tell JT.

"It wasn't exactly the fault of Pugwash that it convened in Warsaw under
martial law. The site was agreed upon years ago. But the U.S. Pugwash
group was embarrassed enough to refuse to participate, and those
Americans who attended went as individuals. Many who did turn up from
Europe and the United States were appalled to find that the regime was
making active use of their presence to legitimize the military junta.

"They pleaded for a modest public statement dissociating the movement
from what's going on in Poland. The Western organizers, supported of
course by the Soviet delegation, which included at least two known KGB
officials, blandly refused on grounds that Pugwash shouldn't get into
"politics" and must maintain communications at the worst of times."

"Even worse, to my mind, than the cringing acquiescence of the
conference leadership to Communist requests for silence was the
effective suppression of an open letter from Andrei Sakharov. The
persecuted atomic physicist had smuggled from his exile at Gorky an
appeal for Pugwash to speak up on behalf of other imprisoned scientists
in the Soviet Union. He criticized those in Western peace movements who
take "a position that is one-sided and therefore futile and even
dangerous." Pugwash people, he said, sound like Soviet officials and
"behave like well-disciplined functionaries of one gigantic bureaucratic
machine." Maintaining his own commitment against nuclear war and for
disarmament negotiations, Mr. Sakharov said, "The same standards should
be applied to both sides." He asked for open discussion of his letter.
No one has better credentials to address an East-West scientific
meeting. But after some confusion and a charge of censorship, the letter
was distributed privately with no chance for debate. It will not be
published with the conference documents."

"The Pugwash Council, which expressed gratitude to Gen. Wojciech
Jaruzelski for receiving its members for two hours, made "fools and
tools of themselves," said a Canadian delegate. That is just the point.
Such people act as though the Russians were doing them a big favor by
attending their meetings and must on no account be offended by truths.
Unlike Mr. Sakharov, they don't risk prison or a psychiatric ward but at
worst a snub."

I also found an October 1995 Montreal Gazette article on the Pugwash's
Nobel Prize, and it has this quote:

"Rotblat is president of the Pugwash organization, which was sometimes
seen as one of Moscow's pawns during the Cold War.

""Fellow traveller is a loaded term," said Frank Gaffney Jr., a former
Reagan administration official who now directs the Centre for Security
Policy, a non-profit Washington group. "But these are people who in the
darkest days of the Cold War were used shamelessly as vehicles for
Soviet propaganda.""

I'm also enough of a witch-hunting fool to think that it matters that
Dorothy Hodgkin, who had a Nobel-in-Chem-winning career for her work in
X-ray crystallography, and who was also a long-time president of
Pugwash, won the Lenin Peace Prize:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy...ial_activities
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin_Peace_Prize

Technically, that wikipedia article doesn't say Hodgkin was a communist.
Yes, her lover-and-scientific-mentor was a communist, and her husband
was a one-time communist and later advisor to non-aligned Marxist Kwame
Nkrumah, but that is mere guilt by association.

I'll concede that the Wikipedia article's cite is thin, though it seems
to me the book it quotes just sort of takes it for granted that you
understand what kind of organization Pugwash is.

--
Ryan Cousineau http://www.wiredcola.com/
"In other newsgroups, they killfile trolls."
"In rec.bicycles.racing, we coach them."

In article ,
Howard Kveck wrote:

In article ],
Ryan Cousineau wrote:

I'd rather do that with the Oscars (and parenthetically, I agree with you that
the previous "worst Oscars" list I published was a bit eccentric, but not
indefensibly so. I'd also say that in some years and with some prizes you can
practically hear the machinations by which the AMPAS members ground out
whatever choice they did.

Actually, it was mostly Ben who was discussing the Oscar list with you (though I
do agree with what he said about it).

In contemplating my eccentricities, it is fair to note that I think
Churchill missing out on the Peace prize was arguably a bigger upset (in
terms of contributions to world peace) than Gandhi missing out. Though
on that note, in 1948, the year of Gandhi's death, the Nobel prize was
vacated as a posthumous honor to him.

Churchill has one in literature. Why do you believe he deserved it more than
Ghandi (is dandy but liquor is quicker, hahaha!)? Think about the methods Ghandi
espoused in his quest to get India free from colonial rule and the change that made
for millions of people.

Ghandi was mostly a product of his own self promotion.
He awarded himself the title "Mahatma." He was a bog
standard politician with some unsavory habits.
For all of what he said and wrote he did not adopt
a policy of non-violence.

How many people were killed by their countrymen
during the independence massacres? ~ 4000000.

Once when his wife was very sick, hemorrhaging badly,
and seemed to be dying, he wrote to her from jail:
"My struggle is not merely political. It is religious
and therefore quite pure. It does not matter much
whether one dies in it or lives. I hope and expect that
you will also think likewise and not be unhappy."
And rather than allow physicians to give her penicillin
he left her untreated and dead. It was okay for him
to take quinine for his malaria.

--
Michael Press

On Oct 13, 7:51*pm, Ryan Cousineau wrote:

" wrote:
On Oct 12, 10:30*am, Ryan Cousineau wrote:
" wrote:

Your suggestion elsewhere that in a slow year, the prize
committee should pluck some worthy but maybe obscure
luminary (Mother Teresa, Norman Borlaug, Gates Foundation)
is exactly how you get winners like the Pugwash conferences.

Ben

My specific objection to the Pugwash conferences was that they were used
by the Soviet Union as a front organization. That makes their choice
substantially more tainted than the run of the mill.

It's kind of like when you find out that people have seriously
campaigned in the last few years for Dany Heatly to win the Lady Byng
trophy: maybe he's a better man, but let's see if we can maybe give
hockey's sportsmanship-and-character award to someone who didn't kill
one of his teammates in a drunk-driving crash.

Dumbass,

Nobody cares what happened during the Cold War anymore ...
but for the one or two of us that do, you just made what used to
be a very serious accusation.

Lots of people and things were called Soviet fronts back in the
day, a few of whom actually were, but many of whom were
guilty of expressing an opinion some cold warrior didn't like
(e.g. American Friends Service Cmte, M. L. King). *To my mind,
in order to be a Soviet front a group would actually have to accept
covert support from the USSR _and_ advocate a party line
favorable to the Soviets as a quid pro quo. *Simply consorting
with Commies, or taking a peacenik position independent of
Soviet influence, does not count.

Well, you've created a particular definition of a Soviet front, but
perhaps you'd settle for "The Pugwash Conference were useful idiots
infiltrated by the KGB." I don't know if that meets your definition,
but...

Quick response: There is, or was, a difference between a
"Soviet apologist" and a "Soviet front." Neither is a nice thing
to be, but the latter is significantly worse (IMO) since it suggests
deception. With an apologist you can evaluate the position
on its merits or lack thereof.

The story you bring up about their behavior during Polish
martial law is indeed repellent.

Frank Gaffney is an unreliable witness, however, and when
somebody says "Fellow traveler is a loaded term, but ..." it means
"I want to call these people fellow travelers without having
to pay the price of actually making the accusation." The
reasons I think Frank Gaffney is unreliable can be seen
in his views, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Gaffney
He may be right that Pugwash was useful to the Soviets,
but his testimony doesn't add much weight to an argument.
This is just a manifestation of the fact that while there was
a better and worse side in the Cold War, some of the people
on the "right" side were not necessarily

As for Dorothy Hodgkin, maybe she was a commie.
So? It was legal to be a commie. Wikipedia suggests her
associates started to be Commies in the 30s and left
after the invasion of Hungary, which was a fairly common
trajectory. We should judge people by the positions they took
rather than their labels. If she was never a commie but
shook Jaruszelski's hand in 1982, that's much worse than
having been a commie in 1950. To my mind, anyway.

Ben


I looked at the Wikipedia entry for Pugwash and it says Pugwash
"became a front conference" and implies that the problem was
its connection with something called the World Peace Council.
The WPC may have been an actual front, but about Pugwash
it says "the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs
and the Dartmouth Conferences, both of which were used by
Soviet delegates to promote Soviet propaganda."
Well, ****, if something is used by known Soviet delegates to
promote Soviet propaganda, that doesn't make it a "front."
You could call anything with a Belgium delegate a Belgian
front by those standards.

The citations for the idea that Pugwash was a front come from
a book published by the Hoover Institution, which you can read
on Google Books (page 86-87):
http://books.google.com/books?id=Hvv...g=PA86#v=onepa...
alse

I read it. *There's absolutely no evidence. *It just says that
Pugwash are a bunch of peacenik scientists and they had a
meeting in the USSR. *Actually, even this book doesn't lump
Pugwash in with the "front conferences" like the World Peace
Council thing.

So basically, Pugwash may be a trivial winner of the Peace Prize,
but apparently they ****ed someone off enough to smear them.

You somehow piqued my curiosity enough to go and dig into some journal
archives. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the NY Times 1982
archive where Flora Lewis' "A blow to peace: the meekness of Pugwash"
is, but I do have access to the Globe and Mail's September 9, 1982
syndication of that story. If you have access to a good newspaper
database, you should be able to call it up yourself. There's also a
letter to the NYT shortly after this story came out from Pugwash, but I
can't access that.

I will now stretch the limits of fair use. Don't tell JT.

"It wasn't exactly the fault of Pugwash that it convened in Warsaw under
martial law. The site was agreed upon years ago. But the U.S. Pugwash
group was embarrassed enough to refuse to participate, and those
Americans who attended went as individuals. Many who did turn up from
Europe and the United States were appalled to find that the regime was
making active use of their presence to legitimize the military junta.

"They pleaded for a modest public statement dissociating the movement
from what's going on in Poland. The Western organizers, supported of
course by the Soviet delegation, which included at least two known KGB
officials, blandly refused on grounds that Pugwash shouldn't get into
"politics" and must maintain communications at the worst of times."

"Even worse, to my mind, than the cringing acquiescence of the
conference leadership to Communist requests for silence was the
effective suppression of an open letter from Andrei Sakharov. The
persecuted atomic physicist had smuggled from his exile at Gorky an
appeal for Pugwash to speak up on behalf of other imprisoned scientists
in the Soviet Union. He criticized those in Western peace movements who
take "a position that is one-sided and therefore futile and even
dangerous." Pugwash people, he said, sound like Soviet officials and
"behave like well-disciplined functionaries of one gigantic bureaucratic
machine." Maintaining his own commitment against nuclear war and for
disarmament negotiations, Mr. Sakharov said, "The same standards should
be applied to both sides." He asked for open discussion of his letter.
No one has better credentials to address an East-West scientific
meeting. But after some confusion and a charge of censorship, the letter
was distributed privately with no chance for debate. It will not be
published with the conference documents."

"The Pugwash Council, which expressed gratitude to Gen. Wojciech
Jaruzelski for receiving its members for two hours, made "fools and
tools of themselves," said a Canadian delegate. That is just the point.
Such people act as though the Russians were doing them a big favor by
attending their meetings and must on no account be offended by truths.
Unlike Mr. Sakharov, they don't risk prison or a psychiatric ward but at
worst a snub."

I also found an October 1995 Montreal Gazette article on the Pugwash's
Nobel Prize, and it has this quote:

"Rotblat is president of the Pugwash organization, which was sometimes
seen as one of Moscow's pawns during the Cold War.

""Fellow traveller is a loaded term," said Frank Gaffney Jr., a former
Reagan administration official who now directs the Centre for Security
Policy, a non-profit Washington group. "But these are people who in the
darkest days of the Cold War were used shamelessly as vehicles for
Soviet propaganda.""

I'm also enough of a witch-hunting fool to think that it matters that
Dorothy Hodgkin, who had a Nobel-in-Chem-winning career for her work in
X-ray crystallography, and who was also a long-time president of
Pugwash, won the Lenin Peace Prize:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy...in_Peace_Prize

Technically, that wikipedia article doesn't say Hodgkin was a communist.
Yes, her lover-and-scientific-mentor was a communist, and her husband
was a one-time communist and later advisor to non-aligned Marxist Kwame
Nkrumah, but that is mere guilt by association.

I'll concede that the Wikipedia article's cite is thin, though it seems
to me the book it quotes just sort of takes it for granted that you
understand what kind of organization Pugwash is.

--
Ryan Cousineau /
"In other newsgroups, they killfile trolls."
"In rec.bicycles.racing, we coach them."