The true Genesis of amnesty international.(History)

THE HIGH TIDE of the Cold War concealed vastly more than fanciful antics by KGB agents, and it is unlikely that we will ever know how many quiet initiatives originally designed to divide, influence, distract or, ultimately, to overcome resistance to the communist onslaught escaped detection at the time and will remain hidden forever. Some probably failed ingloriously, and most of those that succeeded at first were later crushed under the rubble of the Berlin Wall, but a few survived the Soviet debacle and went on to prosper in its aftermath, and of these, Amnesty International must be counted among those that most convincingly went on to flourish after managing the difficult transition with suitable adroitness. Only three years have passed since 2004 when the fiftieth birthday of its governing idea should have been celebrated and it is meet and just, albeit belatedly, to throw light on its true origins and rescue from obscurity the name of its real begetter.

Three centuries ago Giambattista Vico pointed out that the controlling methodological postulate of his Scienza nuova was that:

 
   The nature of institutions is nothing but their 
   coming into being [nascimento] at certain times 
   and in certain guises. Whenever the time and guise 
   are thus and so, such and not otherwise are the 
   institutions that come into being ... The inseparable 
   properties of institutions must be due to the 
   modifications or guise with which they are born ... 
   By these properties we may therefore verify that the 
   nature or birth [natura or nascimento] was thus and 
   not otherwise. 

Three centuries later, Isaiah Berlin remarked on the importance of Vico's understanding that "The nature of men, as of everything, can be discovered by asking the question, 'What comes into being, at what time, in what fashion?'" (1) This may or may not be applicable as a constituent sine qua non of all created things, but it does appear to obtain in self-governing entities such as Amnesty International, distant from external scrutiny and possibly disinclined to stray far from an original intent consistent with the urgencies of the Cold War.

It is gently amusing to note that when marking what purported to be its fortieth anniversary in 2001, there was no reluctance to describe the official version of the inception of Amnesty, included even in Peter Benenson's obituary, as a "creation myth". (2) "According to Amnesty International's 'creation myth'", it reads:

 
   one day in late 1960, a British lawyer named Peter 
   Benenson was reading the Daily Telegraph in the 
   London tube, when he saw a brief article about two 
   Portuguese students who had been arrested for 
   making a toast to freedom in a Lisbon bar. He 
   decided to start an organization to rescue political 
   prisoners and other victims of government 
   repression around the world. (3) 

To call this a myth was as apposite and truthful in 2001 as it is now timely and appropriate to place it reverently on the same shelf with Athena, Romulus and Remus, and proceed to describe the individuals and circumstances really responsible for creating this very visible and influential organisation.