“During the Cold War, there was an organization called the World Peace Council, some called it a KGB front organization, it was financed by the Soviet Union… It was anti-Western, pro-Soviet Union… the strategy of the KGB was to make it look like it was very diverse… but the point was to weaken the West.”—Dietmar Pichler

I often repost one of my podcast interviews with Vienna-based disinformation analyst Dietmar Pichler, who frequently attends our weekly Tuesday Happy Hour meetings to update us on the latest breaking news on Russian attacks on democratic nations.

He explained the origins and infiltration of the peace movement, and how for Russia ‘peace’ is an anti-Western operation.

It’s important that we have armor against the upside down world of information warfare. Those promoting peace in the same breath as appeasement in Ukraine are actually promoting Putin’s war objectives, and there is a Soviet history of infiltration and the co-opting of peace narratives.

When Russian stooges promote ‘peace,’ they’re really doing Kremlin theater. Loyal servants to organized crime, as Alex Alvarova explained, have no interest in peace.

When autocrats talk of peace, what they really mean is they want their opponents to surrender their weapons so they can go on murdering, raping, torturing, stealing children, resources, and borders indefinitely.

“What we know is that starting in the Cold War… we saw huge peace rallies all around Europe and in Germany, and these peace rallies, this peace movement, was infiltrated by the KGB,” Pichler told Bette Dangerous in our 2024 interview. “There was an organization called the World Peace Council, some called it a KGB front organization, it was financed by the Soviet Union… It was anti-Western, pro-Soviet Union… the strategy of the KGB was to make it look like it was very diverse… but the point was to weaken the West, to infiltrate and demoralize societies, to make us think that only us, the Western side, needs to lay down weapons. There’s a script behind all this.

“Being Austrian and knowing our history, if there’s one thing we learned about the crimes our own ancestors committed is there are times when things are black and white… if you take a look at the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and take a look at movements like Code Pink — they were here in Vienna for a Peace Conference… we know that this ‘peace’ movement during the era of the ‘80s — the actors that were active back then — a lot of them are active now, propagating that we should not support Ukraine, the same people! So what we always forget is that it’s not only that Putin is using the same techniques, they can rely on the same people they brainwashed back in the Soviet era.”

The Orwellian named ‘Board of Peace’

Today, I asked Dietmar to help us explain to those in our networks how ‘peace’ is once again being weaponized, Soviet-style, as Trump trolls the world with his so-called Board of Peace, which includes every tinpot dictator he could find and a notable shortage of leaders of any credible Western nations. Even the logo is a troll, mimicking the UN logo but with oligarch flourishes.

“In the information space, a ‘Board of Peace’ that includes countries at war, such as Russia and its partners, reminds me a little bit of the problem of ‘whitewashing’ and reality distortion, similar to what we have seen in the UN Human Rights Council, which has included several authoritarian regimes that violate human rights excessively,” he told Bette Dangerous. “This is ironic, especially given that the ‘Board of Peace’ is presented by its supporters as a possible alternative to the UN. It also has to be mentioned that there are reasons to be skeptical when an organization that should have an international impact relies so much on one person, in this case the U.S. president.“