Dimitri Roussopoulos

Dimitrios I. Roussopoulos (born 1936) is a political activist, ecologist, writer, editor, publisher, community organizer, and public speaker. Educated in philosophy, politics and economics at several Montreal universities and London. Roussopoulos has sought to keep himself free from any academic confinement, and apart from having taught for two years in the late sixties at a college that followed the progressive education philosophy of John Dewey, he has remained institutionally independent.

He founded, in 1959, the Combined Universities Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament [CUCND] in Canada, having organised a student demonstration in the capital, Ottawa, on December 25 of that year. The CUCND grew quickly and established 22 campus chapters across the country. He remained the Federal Chairman until 1964, and was organizer of a 64-hour vigil in front of the House of Commons in Ottawa, when a 150,000-signature petition was handed to the Prime Minister, Lester B. Pearson, which urged Canada not to acquire nuclear weapons. The Pearson Liberal government did acquire nuclear warheads for the Bomarc B missiles, but the Liberal government, with Pierre Trudeau as prime minister, removed all nuclear weapons from Canada.

Roussopoulos founded and edited Canada’s first peace research quarterly journal in 1961, Our Generation. Its first issue gained a circulation of 3000 and was prefaced by Bertrand Russell. The journal evolved into an international new left journal, titled Our Generation. By the mid-sixties the journal evolved further into a journal on the theory and practice of anarchism, ceasing publication in 1992. In its closing years, the journal had a subscription list of 2800 in over a dozen countries.

In 1962 he co-founded the International Confederation for Disarmament and Peace (ICDP) at the University of Oxford, which brought together for the first time all the non-aligned new nuclear disarmament movements and pacifist organisations in some 20 countries as a counterbalance to the pro-Soviet World Peace Council. The ICDP was among the first to protest and help organize opposition to the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. Roussopoulos organised in August 1968 the first international meeting of the new left in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia with delegates from several countries, including Frank Wolff from the German SDS and Bernadine Dorne from the U.S. SDS. He was an active council member throughout the history of the ICDP which mobilized world-wide opposition against the Vietnam War.

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