Did you know that in 1947, Festival delegates helped rebuild towns destroyed by the Nazis? That in 1962, delegates brought back testimony from the Vietnamese delegation about early US intervention in that country? That Bob Dylan performed in a fundraiser for the Festival?
Dynamic interviewed past World Youth Festival participants to learn about the history of the movement that will take another giant step forward in Caracas this August. Without exception, the Festival was a turning point in their lives.
Bernice Diskin
“A moment of hope for peace�
I was at the first World Youth Festival in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1947, with 72,000 young people. This was two years after the end of World War II. After five years of fighting Nazism, the youth of the world shared a very special unity and determination. The defeat of fascism pulled together many different groupings, which may have disagreed on many things but were all united against fascism. Many countries that sent delegations were still fighting colonialism, including Indonesia, India, and many African countries. It was a very hopeful time. It felt like a new beginning. Eastern Europe was building socialism, instead of suffering under capitalism like today.
Our US delegation was about 325 people. The government—I mean the CIA, FBI, and all the rest—was determined to keep us from going. We had airline reservations, and they nixed that. So we went in a British tub. This ship was for cargo really, not for passengers. The trip took weeks. But we had a great time! We made friends with a group of Indian seamen working on the boat. We were a pick-up delegation, not very organized. We came from many different peace organizations and youth groups. I was active in the Young Communist League. The Festival was full of singing, dancing, competitions and
prizes. I would ask everyone I met to sing me a song from their country. I learned many songs that way! We saw with our own eyes the devastation that fascism had created. Whole areas, towns and villages were in very bad shape, even two years after the end of the war.
After two weeks of the Festival, all of the delegates spent two weeks helping towns in Czechoslovakia rebuild. Of course, we weren’t skilled workers! We just came and said, tell us what to do and we’ll do it! I worked laying roadbed. Each day we walked to the worksite from where we were staying, about 2 miles, and we sang work songs and peace songs the whole way.
One of the places I worked in was called Litice. Litice was a small town, and a leading Nazi figure had been assassinated there by the resistance. This made Hitler so furious that he wanted to wipe out the whole town and make it so it had never existed. So the Nazis killed the men and sent the women and children to the camps in Germany. Then they burned the city down. But that wasn't enough: they changed the course of the river, so no one could ever find where Litice had been. And that's where the Festival delegates went to build roads. The Festival was such a moving experience. It knocked the hell out of me! We had a chance to speak to so many people. We all thought world peace was possible - that moment of hope had not yet disappeared. The Festival was a major light in my life.
Bobbie Rabinowitz
Building, Learning and Bringing it All Back Home
The Festival is the most exciting, life-changing experience for a young person or those young at heart. You won’t get much sleep, but then again, so what! You have an opportunity to meet, speak, dance, sing, and exchange ideas with young people from all over the world. You have the chance to meet activists from your own country involved in many movements, who will become lifelong friends. I can think of at least two ‘international Festival romances,’ and I know there are many more! I was forever changed by meeting the Cuban delegation to the Helsinki festival, fresh from the victory of revolution, young in spirit and heart, hard at work bringing literacy to the island. What inspiration they brought us! We also met with the Vietnamese delegation and learned about the growing US involvement in that region. (This information was kept from us at home). We met first hand with those who were tortured at the hands of the US government "advisors" and were able to document and bring the story home to a fledgling anti-Vietnam War movement.
The Festival gave us the ability to meet people living under a socialist system, including the USSR delegation, and to learn about that system. It definitely promoted my desire to be politically active and fight for positive social change and a socialist system. Organizing the US delegation to the 1962 Festival was itself a learning experience. At
the time I was a college student and activist at the City University of New York. The editor of our college newspaper wrote an editorial urging students to attend the Festival. The college President opposed the editorial: the Festival was 'communist dominated,' he charged. He suspended the writer of the editorial.This became an issue of academic freedom and got nationwide attention. Needless to say, this attempt to deter us from attending did not work, but rather encouraged us!
Our Festival committee organized a fundraiser at the Village Gate. The program included Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Judy Collins, Odetta and Bob Dylan, all before they were nationally known, and all singing to support the Festival! We raised enough funds to send a cultural contingent on scholarship. Over 400 youth from all over the US attended the Helsinki Festival. They are lurking everywhere still! I can think of some now prominent folks who were on that Festival contingent, including NAACP chair Julian Bond and Bernice Reagon, who founded Sweet Honey in the Rock. It is part of history that there was an attempt to have a "counter" US delegation at Helsinki, whose role was to disrupt. This delegation, composed mainly of Yale students,was funded by the CIA. Which goes to show you that "dirty tricks" were alive and well in 1962.
Joe Sims
“The Festival made me an internationalist�
I had the opportunity to participate in World Youth Festivals in Berlin, Moscow and Pyongyang. At the first festival I was 15 years old. It changed my life and way of thinking. I had such a great time! I would go and sit on corner in Berlin with a beer and hot dog and immediately there would be a crowd of people around me, wanting to talk and exchange views. What a party. I made many friends there, some of which I still have today. At my first Festival I was a young kid from Youngstown, Ohio. That was all I knew. Going to the Festival opened up a whole new world to me. Its impact was lasting. It made me an internationalist. The highlight of my trip to Berlin was crossing the border into the eastern part of the city and seeing the decorations and banners of the festival, the red flags waving, and statues of founders of socialism. All of us cheered. The US delegation has changed over the years I went. Each moment represented the times, cultures and styles of the period. When I first attended I had a big unruly Afro. At the
last Festival, my hairline had already started to recede. That's life!
What remained consistent however was the broad and representative nature of each delegation. There were always young trade unionists, students, young Democrats, socialists and communist youth. Some delegations had representatives of prominent civil rights families, like the King family, and others had elected officials. All the delegates represented a strong desire for peace and understanding and solidarity with others. At the Moscow Festival our slogan was "The friendship of young generations, can bring peace among nations.
A U.S. State Department official was once quoted as saying that the Festivals were “the greatest plot ever hatched from the mind of Stalin.� Nothing could be further from the truth. The Festivals came out of the experience of the World War and the desire to make sure nothing like that ever happens again. The Festival movement’s greatest contribution
has been to bring forward young peace and solidarity supporters who remain active over the years. Once you attend a Festival, the experience never leaves you.
Treston Faulkner
“Young people need to see Venezuela for ourselves�
I was a delegate at the 14th World Festival of Youth and Students in Havana Cuba. I had a wonderful time. I got to see and hang out with friends who I don't see often enough, and do so in a dynamic and beautiful space. Going to the festival gave me the chance to meet people from around the world and interact with them to find out what is happening in their countries. I also got to see a different country with a different economic system. Seeing how Cuba worked was thrilling.
Based on my past experience with the festival I am excited about attending the festival this year because I support the development of long-term and multi-issue labor-community-faith-student coalitions in the Southern Region of the US through Jobs with Justice, and attending the 16th Festival will be very inspiring and energizing. I will be able to place our work directly in a global context in terms of better understanding the substance of the work our sisters and brothers from other countries are engaged in as well as how they talk about it. Furthermore, I may also be able to make direct contacts with young workers and other activists who could prove to be quality additions to our work around outsourcing, the Central American Free Trade Act, etc.
The 16th WFYS provides a unique opportunity to visit a country that has and is experiencing a mostly peaceful revolution where the government and its main industry has been transformed to serve the needs of its people and not the profit of Venezuelan and international corporate and capitalist institutions. US youth need to see how a real democracy works, where the people elect their local, provincial and national leaders directly, without the capitalists' safeguard in the U.S. electoral system known as the as the Electoral College. We need to see the Chavez government and its policies with our own eyes and ears and not what the corporate media feeds us. Let's go and see for ourselves if Chavez is a champion of working-class people, or a military dictator as the corporate media loves to suggest.
Peter Tatchell
Marching for Gay Rights at the Festival and Beyond
Story by Joey Mooney
At the 1973 World Festival of Youth and Students held in East Berlin, a contingent of progressive youth staged the very first gay and lesbian rights demonstration ever held in an Eastern-Bloc nation. The leaflets of a British man named Peter Tatchell who was attending the Festival as a representative of the Gay Liberation Front from London initiated the march. At this time, only a handful of East European nations had decriminalized homosexuality. Like in many European countries, GLBT society was very much stifled by the cultural mores and sexual norms.
However, it is noteworthy to point out that East Germany legalized homosexuality in 1968, a year before West Germany. During a forum, Mr. Tatchell spread the leaflets among the crowd. The reactions were quite mixed. Some responded threateningly while many other young people reacted with curiosity and even enthusiasm. Some delegates
began to complain of "bourgeois gay liberationists" upsetting the anti-imperialist goals of the Festival. When it came time for Peter Tatchell to give his speech, he found that the mics were conveniently malfunctioning. He insisted, against the will of the officials, that the mics get fixed and he finish his speech. Pandemonium broke out.
Many people were enraged by his attack on socio-sexual chauvinism. Others were excited by his message of equality and openness. The sides soon polarized and before long the gay liberationists took to the streets! The young Festival delegates marched for the democratic rights of homosexuals and for an end to discrimination and cultural condemnation of homosexuality. Unfortunately, the East German officials were not of the same accord. The demonstration was broken up by the police. People were accusing the banners that read "Homosexual Liberation! Homosexual Revolutionaries Support Socialism!" of reading "East Germany Persecutes Homosexuals" and other such flagrant nonsense. Soon, the situation had become unbearable. That night, some sympathizers from the Free German Youth (the communist youth group of East Germany) helped Tatchel leave the city.
The demonstration energized the movement for GLBT rights and inspired some of the first GLBT rights groups and lobbyists in Eastern Europe, especially in East Germany. Many communist parties and workers' organizations were appalled with the way the East German officials had dealt with the issue of GLBT liberation. Before, only a few workers' organizations had devoted themselves also to equal rights for homosexuals. The Australian CP was the only communist party that previously had anti-homophobia in its campaigns. After the Festival, dialogue grew between socialists and anti-homophobia
activists, and soon the British CP and other national and international groups added GLBT rights to their list of objectives. This one event goes to show how when young people get together with equality and freedom as their goals, progressive ideas can take root and blossom among otherwise uneducated/uninformed circles.
Nowadays, the World Festival of Youth and Students has GLBT rights among its campaign for absolute freedom from the scourges of imperialism, war, fascism, etc. Peter Tatchell deserves a hats-off for stirring things up at the Festival as well.
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