(left) Urakami Cathedral cross, Nagasaki, on display at Wilmington College's Hiroshima-Nagasaki Memorial Collection until 2019 (my photo); (right) graphic from Wilmington College's Peace Resource Center (source).
Last week's post considered some of the political and spiritual difficulties World War II posed for Quaker colleges in the USA. Among the specifics of that story was the welcome that those colleges extended to a group of Japanese American students whose families had been forced into relocation camps by the notorious Executive Order 9066.
Thanks to an article posted today on the Web site of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, "The political implications of Hiroshima’s scarred 'maidens'," by Alex Wellerstein, I've been thinking about other Quaker involvements with Japanese and Japanese Americans—and the nuclear bombings—originating in that war.
First in chronological order were American Quakers who had special ties to Japan before the war, and who became advocates for the incarcerated Japanese and Japanese American families in wartime. The case I knew best was Herbert Nicholson, whose nephew Ed Nicholson used to tell us stories about his uncle.
(Ed died in 2018, and his wife of 63 years, Chris Nicholson, just died this past July 29. Aside from many other ties between the Nicholsons and Judy and me, they were great encouragers of our service in Russia.)
Another Quaker advocate for incarcerated Japanese people and their families was Floyd Schmoe of University Friends Meeting in Seattle. After the war ended, he expressed his concern for war-torn Japan and the consequences of the atomic weapons by beginning a project called Houses for Hiroshima. Of all the people mentioned in these stories, Floyd was the only one I met personally, thanks to my work with Friends World Committee in the 1980's.
The "Hiroshima 'maidens'" story mentioned above, published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, also had a Quaker connection. During the young women's stay in the USA for plastic surgery, they were accommodated by Quaker families, and spent time at Pendle Hill in Wallingford, Pennsylvania. More details in this Wikipedia article.
Those years—the 1950's—were a peak time for hydrogen bomb testing in the Pacific Ocean, which led to a series of protests against those tests, the weapons being tested, and the radioactive pollution resulting from the tests. Barbara Reynolds and her husband Earle were among those who sailed into the test zones in protest. She later established the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Memorial Collection at Wilmington College in Ohio, USA, part of the college's Peace Resource Center. Judy and I got to know and appreciate the work of this center during the years we lived in Wilmington.
One of the remarkable exhibits in the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Memorial Collection was a charred cross from the ruins of the Urakami Cathedral in Nagasaki. In 2019, as described in this Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists post, the director of the Peace Resource Center, Tanya Maus, accompanied the cross on its journey home to Nagasaki.
There is a gap in this very brief summary: the experiences of Japanese Quakers themselves during the war. The only Japanese Quaker meeting I've personally attended, the one in Osaka, was founded after the war. I have family ties to Japan—my mother was born and raised in Kobe—but, sadly, those ties don't connect with Quakers. My mother, having survived the war and eventually moving to Germany and then the USA, never spoke to me about her war years. Her primary political concern in my childhood years was the threat of Communism.
I'd love to have more examples of connections among these themes—Quakers, Japan and Japanese people, and World War II. Please share additions and corrections.
God bless the memory of those who risked everything for peace and justice in those brutal years.
I mentioned our own short visit to Hiroshima here.
This article by Friends House Moscow staff member Sergei Grushko originally appeared on the Web site quakers.ru. Translated and reposted here by permission.
"I feel bound to recommend that policy which will enable us to do positive good rather than merely to refrain from evil."
— John Nason, wartime president of Swarthmore College.
Soldiers and students sit on the steps of Swarthmore's Parrish Hall. Source.
World War II presented a severe challenge for American colleges. But perhaps no group faced a more difficult dilemma than the institutions of higher education founded by Quakers. How could they reconcile a centuries-old witness to peace with the need to survive? Different colleges came up with different answers. And this experience gives rise to reflections on how the Quaker commitment to peace was maintained in the face of total militarization and war hysteria.
With the United States' entry into the war in December 1941, male students began leaving campuses en masse—some students enrolled in military service voluntarily, while others were conscripted. Private colleges, already struggling with funding—Quaker colleges among them—found themselves facing threats of closure.
The numbers speak for themselves. By the spring of 1943, only 296 students remained at Earlham College (the Quaker college in Indiana)—97 boys and 199 girls. The college had lost nearly 48% of its male students. By October of that year, the total enrollment had dropped to 267, of whom only 64 were men. At Swarthmore College (Pennsylvania), during the same period, only 527 students were enrolled (down from 700 in 1940), 143 of whom were boys. The decline in male enrollment was catastrophic.
The school administrations were faced with the question of how to preserve their educational institutions. The U.S. government offered higher education a solution: participation in the V-12 program for training junior officers for the Navy, which would provide the colleges with a steady supply of military students as well as government funding. For Quaker colleges, this response was dangerously tempting.
The Quaker witness to peace was one of the cornerstones of the identity of these educational institutions. Swarthmore's founders believed that "the disposition to introduce military drill into the course of instruction in our public schools … is especially objectionable to Friends." The college's co-founder, Benjamin Hallowell, had himself been a conscientious objector.
However, by the 1940s, the Quaker identity of some colleges had weakened significantly. Swarthmore had officially given up its affiliation with the Society of Friends as early as 1909*, and by the start of the war, Quakers constituted a small minority among the student body. The number of actual conscientious objectors in the 1940s was minimal.
* For retired faculty to receive payments from the pension fund organized by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, colleges had to comply with its rules. The fund in its early years did not provide pensions to faculty from institutions "controlled or owned by religious organizations." This was primarily why Swarthmore had to end its formal Quaker affiliation.
Swarthmore President John Nason, himself a Quaker, chose a path that could be called ministry through presence. He reasoned that if the college didn't embrace the military, it might not survive as an institution. And if it disappeared, who would train the future peacekeepers, scientists, and doctors who would restore peace after the war? "I feel bound to recommend that policy which will enable us to do positive good rather than merely to refrain from evil," Nason declared.
Nason didn't see this as a contradiction to Quaker values. He sought to find new expression for these values in the changed circumstances. He ensured that the military presence on campus didn't turn the college into a barracks. And he succeeded. By the end of 1943, Swarthmore had 297 naval officers, 234 female students, and 155 civilian men enrolled. In addition, 49 Chinese naval officers arrived to study English. Each of them, in addition to military disciplines, took a full academic course. It was during these years that Swarthmore took two important steps toward social justice. It admitted its first African-American students, Dorothea Kopczynski and Gloria Clement. And it accepted Japanese-American students, who had been interned in camps by the government. Nason personally chaired the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council. The college used the military presence to protect its existence while remaining a place that valued human dignity.
Earlham College took a different path. In 1942, its president, William Dennis, declared to Indiana Yearly Meeting, "A Quaker college as such should not participate directly in the war effort…." And he remained true to his word. Military personnel were not allowed on campus. But the search for ways to collaborate with the government continued. Dennis proposed establishing a military police training unit on campus. He envisioned the military police not as an offensive force, but as a structure for maintaining order. However, the board of trustees rejected this proposal, deeming it incompatible with Quaker principles. This episode illustrates how even within a single Quaker community, there can be different understandings of the line between unacceptable compromise and acceptable service.
The failure to establish a military police unit strengthened the resolve of Earlham’s president to pursue an alternative direction. The college joined the Civilian Public Service (CPS) program, an alternative for conscientious objectors. It was a conscious choice: to help the country not with weapons, but with knowledge that would be useful after the war. But even here, difficulties arose. The program was underfunded, Congress reduced support, and by 1943, it effectively ceased to exist. Dennis turned to alumni, to Quakers, to those who believed in the college's mission. He asked for help. The response was overwhelming. A Free Will Fund campaign raised over $10,000—three times more than any similar campaign before it. Alumni wrote: "I was so grateful that Earlham College had remained true to Quaker principles in not taking a military unit onto the campus, that it was my intention as soon as possible to respond with a contribution to the Free Will Fund." "I am so proud of Earlham for the stand she has taken." The college also admitted 12 students of Japanese descent.
Representatives of seven Quaker educational institutions—including Haverford, Guilford, Friends University, William Penn, and Wilmington—met in September 1942 and decided to organize an alternative Civilian Public Service Reserve Force program to train conscientious objectors rather than soldiers. This initiative, proposed by historic peace churches (Quakers, Mennonites, and the Church of the Brethren ), would allow pacifist students to continue their education instead of being sent to Civilian Social Service camps. However, the government limited the program's total quota to 260 places for all participating colleges, of which Quaker colleges received only 100–120.
In the postwar years, the schools that had made their varying decisions continued to reflect on their choices. At Swarthmore, the debate continued. In 1950, prominent alumnus Thomas McCabe declared, "I was never more proud of Swarthmore than in the early days of the war when this Quaker institution, in spite of its traditional stand against war, offered all of its facilities voluntarily to our Government in time of need." William Richards (Class of 1948), who was imprisoned from 1942 to 1946 for resisting the draft, strongly disagreed: "A Quaker college has no place in aiding a war. Swarthmore should have taken a stand for peace and not sold its birthright for a mess of pottage." This debate reflects the deep tension between different understandings of the Quaker peace witness: from strict abstention from any participation in military action to active service to peace, even if it requires compromise.
Today, Swarthmore, Earlham, Haverford, and other Quaker colleges are proud of their Quaker heritage and are considered Quaker in spirit, although Quakers constitute a small minority of their student bodies. Their experience during World War II demonstrates that Quaker identity is not monolithic—it can be expressed differently in different institutional and historical contexts. The ability to remain faithful to the witness of peace, regardless of how it is practiced, is a characteristic feature of the Quaker tradition, allowing it to remain vibrant in diverse contexts. Fidelity to principle does not require uniformity.
Sergei Grushko lists these resources he consulted in writing his article:
LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGES IN THE TUMULTUOUS 1940S: INSTITUTIONAL IDENTITY AND THE CHALLENGES OF WAR AND PEACE. A Dissertation in Higher Education by Jordan R. Humphrey etda.libraries.psu.edu/files/final_submissions/2963 (the most significant resource);
For some additional interesting information concerning the internment of Japanese Americans and Quaker advocacy and hospitality for Japanese Americans during the displacement camp era, see
A more recent case of U.S. Quaker colleges vs conscription: the Solomon Amendment (1982) prohibiting federal financial aid to nonregistering students.
Looking for summer reading? Kristin Du Mez has some suggestions.
Jemar Tisby on The Pastor No One Can Correct. "Douglas Wilson can hold paedocommunion, dominionism, household voting, and his long apologetic for the Confederacy, because he answers to almost no one."
Jeremy Morris on a certain leader's "magical thinking." (By the way, I wrote a post about Russia, Ukraine, and avos' three and a half years ago.)
Ursula K. Le Guin's house here in Portland, Oregon, is added to the National Register of Historic Places. (Should also be on some intergalactic registry....)
Three Danish bluesmen cover "Dust My Broom": H.P. Lange, Troels Jensen, Hugo Rasmussen.
Last week I described how we Quakers peeked out of an obscure corner of the Atheist's Companion in the form of a sort of earnest verbal caricature. Here's another place where you might not expect a Quaker to show up: the world of European surrealism between the wars.
Today's example comes from a film I watched on the plane trip coming home from the Nordic Yearly Meeting. The film was Lee, a biopic depicting important episodes from the life of American model, photographer, and war correspondent Lee Miller, starring Kate Winslet in the title role. Winslet was also one of the producers and financiers of the film.
Many critics were not kind to the film, some charging that it was a standard-issue biopic with a confusing timeline, lifted only by the gifted performance of Winslet. I disagree; a flashier treatment would not have done the material justice. I was very impressed by the emotional range of the film, starting with scenes of Miller's merry bohemian social life in the years before World War II, and going on to portray her convincing transformation into a determined wartime photojournalist, eventually talking her way into post-Normandy France, and then into a fierce documentarian of Nazi atrocities, driven by "icy fury" to record for posterity what she saw in the death camps.
In the film, these vivid experiences and the resulting photos from those episodes are being prompted now and then by questions from an unidentified interviewer. Only at the end of the film do we learn who that interviewer was and the exact nature of the interview. The framing worked perfectly for me.
(If you insist, here's Wikipedia's summary of the film, but I recommend not reading it until you see the film first.)
One of her lovers, and eventually her husband, was British surrealist artist Roland Penrose, played in the film by Alexander Skarsgård. Roland is the Quaker character. His pacifism does not allow him to join up for a combat role in wartime; instead he becomes an air raid warden, and eventually makes his skills in camouflage available to the British military.
I immediately thought of a somewhat parallel Quaker character: Arthur Stanley Eddington, who conceived of his wartime (World War I) scientific research as a contribution to the scientific search for truth, a search which had no national boundaries. Therefore it was ethical in his mind to communicate across enemy lines with Albert Einstein to try to figure out why Mercury's orbit did not quite conform to Newtonian expectations.
Roland Penrose was an incredibly active artist, creative organizer, and socialite. How much energy he put into his life as a Quaker, after his early service with the Friends' Ambulance Unit, isn't as clear to me. Eddington, on the other hand, was an active Friend. His Swarthmore Lecture of 1929 argued for the compatibility of faith and scientific inquiry. Rather than becoming a full-time Quaker activist, that faith drove him to devote himself to a productive life of scientific discoveries and related worthwhile controversies.
Both Penrose and Eddington came from well-known Quaker families. Roland's most famous ancestor (at least among Quakers) might be his father James Doyle Penrose, whose painting "The Presence in the Midst" is in many Quaker homes.
Among Roland's contemporary relatives is his nephew Roger Penrose, a well-known mathematical physicist, and also a very effective explainer of particle physics, consciousness and physics, and related topics, to the general public. In terms of faith, he describes himself as an agnostic, but see this Wikipedia summary for his own interesting twist.
I've been reflecting on the contrast between these lives, and these families, and my own background. I did not come from a Quaker background. Quite the opposite. My parents came from opposite sides of World War II and were not above fighting the war all over again in their worst arguments. My father's background was the military resistance to Nazi occupation of his country; my mother was born and raised as a German in Japan, and insisted to me that our family comes from "officer class."
My Quaker faith was a direct outcome of a personal conversion, a joyful experience of meeting Jesus and then looking for the best home to honor and continue that elemental experience—despite the weight of my parents' disapproval. You Friends gave me that home, and ever since I've wanted others to have that same generous welcome. I've worked directly among Friends in service of that goal, with mixed results, but with no regret. That may be a different trajectory from that of the Penroses and Eddingtons and their lives of creativity and research, but if they and others like them hadn't been there—with all their variety, faithfulness, eccentricities, tangents, piety (James Doyle Penrose) and merriment (Roland Penrose)—where would I be now?
Certainly, today’s ongoing political crisis should remind concerned Christians that they can’t sit out the battle for the Bible and should remind the rest of us that we can’t concede religion to extremists. Christian nationalists weaponize the Good Book because they believe they have a monopoly on morality and can distort the word of God with impunity.
I imagined, in my least cynical moments, that Russia would become more like America over the years, or at the least more habituated to pluralism and the rule of law. Of course, the very opposite happened. America is becoming Russia with every day. The tractors I would watch on Soviet television leading to ever more heroic harvests are now tariffs that will bring manufacturing back to our land. The dissidents who were the Soviet enemy within are now the vastly fictionalised Tren de Aragua gang members who supposedly terrorise our land, and indeed all migrants deemed insufficiently Afrikaner.
I think it's beautiful that the resurrection account isn't an account of simply words that Mary Magdalene is going to preach, that she's going to go off and tell information to the other disciples. But, instead there is, in this garden, a sort of a remaking of Mary Magdalene and her whole relationship with Jesus. I think that's part of the do not embrace me yet moment. There is this reunion that is happening between them – but not as what we typically think of a male and female joining – in word and in spirit that will result in a new creation being birthed.
Last week we observed the 80th anniversary of V-E Day.
Ten years ago, Russia's version of Victory in Europe Day, May 9, occurred on the day Moscow Friends met for our weekly worship. We met that day in a theater not far from Moscow's Dostoevsky Museum, and afterwards we visited the Victory Day celebrations in progress at nearby Catherine Park. That's where we saw those peace doves, pictured above.
Victory Day in Elektrostal, Russia, 2010.
A lot can be said about Russia's Victory Day observances—both the enduring importance of remembering the human cost of that victory for practically every family in the former USSR ... and also the exploitation of Victory Day by Russia's current leadership, particularly as they now portray the war in Ukraine as a continuation of that sacred struggle against Nazi forces.
World War II has a deep fascination for me, too. My mother lived in Japan from her birth in 1929 to her family's expulsion to West Germany in 1948, the result of a U.S. policy that expelled all resident Germans from Japan. As I found out during our visit to Japan in 2018, her father joined the Nazi party in 1934.
In what became West Germany, my mother began her university studies in Heidelberg, but then went as an exchange student to Northwestern University in the Chicago area, where she met my father, who was an exchange student as well. He came from the University of Oslo. His father had been an officer in Norway's resistance army, fighting the German occupiers, so his parents' surprise at their son's choice of bride was understandable. (Their other child, my father's sister, married an American soldier in Oslo.)
It's just about impossible to take in the total human cost of that war—the cost in lives and limbs, the grief among survivors, the destruction of housing and workplaces in many places, and the displacement of whole populations. My own peculiar origin story is part of that sweeping narrative: my parents might never have met if my mother and her family had not been evicted from their adopted homeland.
One of the questions I can never answer satisfactorily is what lessons our species has learned from that war. The postwar international institutions that the WWII victors set up have seemingly prevented wars of a similar scale since 1945, although a tacit part of the deal was that the USA took over much of the imperial role that the UK was forced to relinquish. As a country, we've had a hard time accepting criticism for our less-than-perfect stewardship of global power. Even so, there was an undeniable portion of idealism in those postwar arrangements, much to the apparent distaste of the USA's current leadership.
I've also meditated on the micro scale: what must it have been like for my mother to grow up as a child and teenager in the Nazi sphere of influence and then in total warfare? On this last Mother's Day, I gave a sermon at Silverton Friends Church, in which I mentioned the importance of these meditations for my slowly growing capacity to "honor my father and mother" despite the violence and "master race" mentality that we children witnessed in our family's life. When I was comforted by those who told me that "your parents did the best they could," I used to get irritated. Why did alcohol seem so much more important than us kids? Now I am learning to allow for factors in my parent's lives that I've never had to experience personally: total dictatorship and total war, starting in childhood. I owe it to them—and myself—to consider their own share of World War II's global tragedy, and grow accordingly in compassion. If they had not made certain decisions in favor of life, I would not exist.
Some of my other posts on World War II and related themes:
Scot Loyd: "Jesus didn't die for our country—he died because of it."
Jeremy Morris (commenting on recent research on Russians' sense of stability and satisfaction): on being happy in a Mercedes and on "the ludicrous optimism of minimal expectations."
The socially galvanizing effect of war short of rally-round-the-flag is what I call ‘defensive consolidation’. Fears and foreboding are real and remain massively underacknowledged in research, but the sense of ‘the world is against us, so we have to find sources of satisfaction in the now’ in consumption, in leisure, in socially meaningful work, in geopolitical resentment even, is also palpable.
My tiny rebellion as a high school student: in TV production class, making a video on a risky subject, using a track from an album I wasn't allowed to play at home:
I went down on 31st Street just to buy me a drink of alcohol.
I went down on 31st Street, buy me a drink of alcohol.
Told the man to put in some water but he wouldn't put in a drop at all.
Then I was drinking my straight alcohol, went wobbling on down the street.
Drinking my, drinking my straight alcohol, went wobbling on down the street.
Yeah, but my head got so heavy, my eyes couldn't take a peek.
Yeah, but my baby said, "J.B., J.B., you ain't no good at all."
My baby said, "Hey, J.B., J.B., you ain't no good at all.
She said, "You ran around on the West Side, and then drank too much alcohol."
Cover design shows Grini Concentration Camp main building. Print made by Ole Olden and smuggled out as his greeting for Christmas 1941. Nothing can keep a star from shining.
A couple of weeks ago, I posted "Under occupation" as one of the ways I'm trying to make sense of the current USA presidency and its actions.
A commenter on that post mentioned Myrtle Wright's book Norwegian Diary 1940-1945. I just finished re-reading it, to my great benefit.
On April 9, 1940, Wright was a Quaker peace worker who happened to be on her fourth day of a brief visit to Norway when the Germans invaded that morning. She ended up remaining there for nearly four years. Thirty years later, her account of those years was published by the Friends Peace and International Relations Committee in London. It's now out of print but there are used copies on the market. Online, a Russian translation is available in various formats.
After the initial conquest, the German occupation of Norway seemed relatively mild at first; the occupiers hoped to convince Norwegians that the invasion was simply to protect Norway from the UK's hostile plans. German soldiers conducted themselves correctly, by and large; the German overlords mostly operated behind the facade of the Quisling government and other local collaborators. In summer 1942, the mass arrests of Jewish people began, including a group of Jewish children who became a special concern of Wright and her friends. Executions were more frequent, private radios were outlawed on pain of death, labor conscription began (often destined for Germany). The occupation became much harsher. As life in Norway became more and more complicated under these conditions, Wright began keeping a diary starting in June 1942 in order to record and remember significant events, travels, and contacts as they happened. The first four chapters of her book were written after the war, and cover her arrival in Oslo, the German invasion, the famous teachers' and pastors' acts of resistance. After those first four chapters, the contemporary diary itself begins, and takes up most of the rest of her book.
The book was published in 1974, the very year I became a Friend. In 1975, after my visits to Moscow and Leningrad, I spent a couple of weeks with my grandparents in Oslo. On Sundays I attended the Oslo Friends Meeting, and there I met some of the people whose names come up in Wright's book, and visited some of the locations she described.
Norwegian Diary reminded me of Patricia Cockrell's more recent Sketches from a Quaker's Moscow Journal. In both cases, much of their service consisted of making and keeping appointments, arranging meetings, carrying food, money, clothing, and letters, dealing with bureaucracy, responding to emergencies, and observing discretion in risky situations. The level and character of repression differ between the two cases, but, sadly, that gap is narrowing.
I wondered—what might Myrtle Wright have recorded in her book that we might find interesting in our present situation? Here are some of her observations on living in an occupied country.
The importance of community. Even after being unexpectedly trapped in a country under occupation, Myrtle Wright was not alone. Her overlapping networks—including Quakers, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and Old Woodbrookers (alumni/ae of Woodbrooke College in Birmingham, England), and their families and friends—were sources of mutual support. Although at the start of her story, Oslo had just one Quaker member, there were frequent opportunities for worship with likeminded people. Occasionally Wright was able to travel to Stavanger, the historic center of Norwegian Quaker life.
The importance of information. After the German authorities confiscated private radios upon pain of death, Norwegians listened to BBC news and similar sources on hidden radios at great personal risk, and then passed along war news by word of mouth and through underground newspapers—also a very risky business. Information about arrests, prisoner transport, and incarcerations, about the underground railroad to Sweden (its departures, arrivals in Sweden, failures and betrayals) needed to circulate under the noses of the occupiers. The book gives several examples of the code words used by the resistance. Despite all the impediments, Norwegians found ways to keep themselves informed. One example: the amazing story of the White Rose circle in Germany became known in Norway.
Pacifists' dilemmas in war and occupation. Myrtle Wright and many of her friends were committed pacifists, yet (as she writes eloquently) they understood that Allied successes on the battlefield would hasten the end of the war. Within Norway, most people agreed that nonviolence was the only basis for resistance, but many people quietly cheered the Allies' advances in the USSR, (Stalingrad is often mentioned), North Africa, Italy, and France. With these wartime realities, Wright and her friends preferred to discuss postwar visions of freedom, justice, and the growth of empathy without distinctions.
War and occupation create understandable bitterness. The pacifist outlook, as expressed by Wright and many of her friends, not only made violent resistance unacceptable, it also helped them preserve empathy (for example) for the German cities being bombed by the Allied air forces. Such spiritually grounded empathy was nothing if not universally applicable, and would be badly needed when the time for repair and restoration would come, as these circles believed it would.
The value of humor. Humor has the power to build community, point out awkward truths, reward divergent thinking, and restore perspective.
At Christmas the prisoners had decorated the barracks and Per Krohg had painted a frieze. Fehmer, from the Gestapo ... came to inspect. He was evidently impressed and stopped in front of Per Krohg's frieze with the remark, "It is remarkable what a primitive nation can produce under German control." This became a byword in Grini and, when prisoners were digging ditches in slow tempo or on some other work, they would say to each other, "It is wonderful what a primitive nation can produce when under German control."
The importance of rest. The constant demands on Wright and her friends eventually brought them to the very limits of their energy. As the war went on and restrictions on travel increased, it became harder and harder to do the usual Norwegian thing—hiking on mountain paths, along rivers, on glaciers, in meadows ... and away from the stresses of daily life. Some of the most beautiful passages in Wright's book describe these wonderful escapes, even as they find their movements being more and more restricted by the occupation.
There are few direct parallels between the occupation that Myrtle Wright experienced and the looming threats to democracy in the USA, but I think that some of the values and capacities that aided her and her friends remain valid for today's resistance.
July 10 Saturday (from Norwegian Diary, 1943).
Landing on Sicily—the news has gone round like lightning and spirits rise at once. Everyone adds a few more details until there is no more to tell, and rumour does the rest. At least this is another step, and a long-awaited one. A pacifist, what should she think? Many lives will be lost, but every day of delay means more lives, to say nothing of illness and misery. The fury of this disease of violence is not likely to abate without much more loss of life, and, therefore, can one feel a little relief if only the end draws nearer? The physical death of the soldier cannot be worse than the torturing decay of the concentration camp, or the ghetto, or the terror of the civil population in the bombed towns. But physical death is not the ultimate test—what of the spirit which is bred in the warring nations and the occupied countries? We at least can do nothing to stop the fury of the armed warfare; our job lies in another direction and is quite clear, if only we can get it done. We have to prepare the minds of men for the moment when they again have choice and can by their actions, determine the way the peace shall be built; or will the end of the outward war show that Nazism, beaten in the battlefield, has won a victory in men's hearts?
Myrtle Wright (Norw.) married Quaker educator Philip Radley in 1951 and was then known as Myrtle Radley. She died in 1991. More about Myrtle and Philip.
Meanwhile, in Russia: Meduza's Lilia Yapporova and colleagues survey the realities and dysfunctions of the Russian opposition inside and outside Russia.
Less convenient: keeping up with the news. (Did you see this item on California water?) Maybe it's less important to scan for every single scandal that comes along, but cultivate the reflex to fact-check dubious and polarizing claims from those in power, as well as self-styled heroes of the resistance.
Politicians in the Democratic party are far from united in how to cope with all this breakage. Here are some thoughts from a trusted commentator:
... [T]here's a whole debate raging in the Democratic Party of what to do about Trump, with an early consensus forming that we can't just be the party of "the resistance" forever, (nbcnews.com) and I can see that point—pussy hats don't necessarily appeal to your average swing voter—but I think it's misguided, because the Republican Party is no longer a normal political party, it's a cult of fealty to their God-Emperor and if the Democrats don't push back with every tool in the toolbox, the Democratic Party will be banned (designated a terrorist organization or something), and there will be little room for discussing the finer points of Trump's economic agenda. Likewise, tuning out the "culture war" makes sense in some ways (although it misreads the moment—Harris never ran on culture-war issues, and she still lost), but the now-typical Democratic line that trans issues are a "distraction" from kitchen-table issues isn't quite right, because to the Republicans, trans issues are just the early fault line they're using to cleave apart America's multiracial democracy. Democrats need to push back on every issue, gum up the works in every way they can, because picking and choosing your battles right now may make some sense on a messaging level (no reason to chase after every single perceived Trump slight) but it makes no sense on the level of the political machinations of our fragile republic.
Coping emotionally may be just as big a challenge as keeping informed. (By the way, I was fascinated by Ashley Parker's article on the apparent competition in Washington, DC, to be at the top of the persecuted list.) Yes, "shock and awe" may be the tactic, but I'm looking for a more systemic metaphor to help me absorb and respond to what's going on.
That's where "under occupation" comes in.
Hebron, Palestine. Graffiti. 2019.
"Occupation" implies an alien power imposing control on us. "Alien" is a loaded term—I remember when I was an alien here—and I can't really claim that Donald Trump and his team are from outside the U.S. (with a few exceptions), despite their apparent affinities with certain authoritarian leaders on the global stage. And racism and nativism are certainly not new to America.
Here's the "alienation": MAGA priorities seem to diverge so dramatically from the generally bipartisan postwar consensus in favor of equal rights, free trade, workplace safety, educational reforms, greater access to health care, international collaboration and collective security, independent civil service and judiciary, and at least some improvements in energy and environmental policies, that the word "alien" may not be too far off the point. Any ideal that isn't linked to myth-based nationalism is dismissed or ridiculed.
All of these areas of postwar progress are now under simultaneous and coordinated (if at times sloppy and chaotic) attack, with potentially disastrous short-term and long term consequences. It's that "simultaneous and coordinated" quality, imposed from a central executive, that I'm comparing to an occupation.
The word "occupation" also implies that this control is coercive, even violent. If we don't think this danger applies to ordinary U.S. citizens minding our own business, we are probably not immigrants, we are likely of northern European background, and we fit into the new administration's preferred gender categories. (Full disclosure: I'm a former alien, an immigrant.) Also, our denial may be based on layers of financial security that most people don't have.
If we are Christians in denial, maybe we've managed to smother our testimonies on wealth, hospitality, and mercy in favor of a dominion agenda.
I don't want to push this "occupied" metaphor too far. It's certainly not perfect. For most of us life is pretty easy in comparison with, for example, Palestine, or Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine. But it does help me think more systematically about how not to inventory obsessively each new piece of evidence of all this breakage, but rather to contribute toward resilient communities of mutual care, communities who welcome the vulnerable people among us.
My father and his extended family lived under actual occupation in Norway (1940-1945), and they told me a lot about what that was like. Some interesting features:
Circulating accurate information was a vital service, far riskier in the Nazi years than it is so far in the USA. (Radios were banned, so considerable ingenuity went into concealing them. Alternative newspapers were another source of news—also at great risk.)
Teachers, pastors, judges, and other organized groups in Norway learned to practice nonviolent resistance as communities, defining the red lines that most of them would refuse to cross. My cousin Axel Heyerdahl told me how much he had admired his own teachers who joined that campaign.
Those who had particular resources (such as isolated cottages to hide fugitives), jobs (my grandfather spent most of his war years in the coastal lifesaving service), and physical stamina could undertake high-risk missions to undermine the occupiers. Smuggling Jewish people and British pilots into Sweden was one example from my own family.
In opposition to the resistance movement, there were people who actively supported the occupation. Aside from the actual collaborators at the top, such as Vidkun Quisling, the most famous example might be the great novelist Knut Hamsun. And in between these two groups of committed antagonists, there were thousands of people who simply tried to get along without being noticed by the authorities. Some of those became collaborators for convenience' sake. Some fell in love with enemy soldiers and bureaucrats. Some changed position during the war.
One of my grandfather's concerns as a member of the resistance army was to persuade hotheads not to engage in violence against Germans, which would only result in increased repression. By extension, in our own time, resistance doesn't require demonizing Trump supporters or committing our own sins of rhetorical mayhem. As disciples of the Prince of Peace, we are never allowed to forget that even our "enemies" are made in the image and likeness of God. We pray that their eyes would be opened to their captivity, even as we too seek to be free.
During our walking tour of Oslo's World War II and resistance-related sites last summer, our guide pointed out that five years of deprivation—little or no meat, fat, dairy products, etc.—actually led to better health for some people. (Do we see analogues in our own time? Increased capacity to discern priorities? I'm not sure, but I thought I'd ask.)
Finally, Germany's thousand-year Reich lasted twelve years in Germany, five years in Norway. Those were very costly years, but they ended.
I've found that the metaphor of occupation helps me to withstand the barrage of bad news, put it all in context, and focus on faith and resilience in community. What metaphors, filters, or tasks are helping you to cope? Where do you find resilience and mutually sustaining friendships?
Kristin Du Mez asks her "fellow enemies" at Christian colleges and universities to consider some implications of the MAGA regime.
In his new substack blog, Quakers and the End of Scapegoating, Tom Gates promises us "Part exploration of Rene Girard's groundbreaking 'mimetic theory,' part Bible commentary, and part dialogue with early and contemporary Quakers."
Coventry Cathedral (Cathedral Church of St Michael)—the ruins remaining from World War II and the new cathedral building, consecrated in 1962.
Provost Richard Howard had "Father Forgive" inscribed behind the altar of what remained of the cathedral after the Luftwaffe bombing of November 14-15, 1940. Later he participated in building a relationship between Coventry and Kiel, Germany, which had suffered similar bombing.
Last week, Judy and I visited Coventry Cathedral. The ruins left by the worst night of the Coventry Blitz of 1940 still remained for visitors like us to walk through, trying to imagine the horror of that night.
In the days and years since then, this extraordinary cathedral was reborn as an international center of reconciliation. Is it too soon to ask whether a witness to reconciliation will arise from the ashes of the Gaza Strip?
That may seem unlikely now, but imagine how unlikely it must have been in the heat of World War II's mutual destruction to envision the Coventry Cathedral of today. Just listen to these crushing words from that war:
Adolf Hitler, Germany: The other night the English had bombed Berlin. So be it. But this is a game at which two can play. When the British Air Force drops 2000 or 3000 or 4000 kg of bombs, then we will drop 150 000, 180 000, 230 000, 300 000, 400 000 kg on a single night. When they declare they will attack our cities in great measure, we will eradicate their cities. The hour will come when one of us will break – and it will not be National Socialist Germany!
Arthur Harris, Britain: The aim of the Combined Bomber Offensive ... should be unambiguously stated [as] the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilised life throughout Germany ... the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories.
But despite the terrible cruelties they inflicted, their voices did not prevail. The very day after the destruction of Coventry Cathedral, its provost made a commitment to forgiveness and reconciliation—a commitment that, by human persistence and God's mercy, survived the hatred and revenge of total war.
After Coventry, we had a wonderful visit with Diana and John Lampen, who promised to show us a cathedral of a very different sort. We were not disappointed. In the National Trust's Kinver Edge, just a few minutes' drive from their home in Stourbridge, we followed a trail that soon emerged into a space that took our breath away. Huge beech trees formed what really did seem like a natural cathedral—not only in appearance but in a sort of quiet grandeur that invited reverence.
Earlier that morning, the Lampens had given us a tour of the Stourbridge Friends meetinghouse, the main part of which dated back to 1689. The outward contrast between that beautiful little meetinghouse and Coventry Cathedral was impossible to deny, but the deeper kinship was also very evident. As soon as the four of us sat down in the quiet meetinghouse and entered into a meeting for worship, I knew that we were in a place where many generations of prayer had built an unquenchable flame.
(If you've kept up with this blog, you've seen the Lampens' names before, most recently in my review of their book Inner Healing, Inner Peace: A Quaker Perspective. We first got to know the Lampens when I was a new member of Reedwood Friends Church's pastoral team, back in the year 2000, and they came to Portland for several weeks as guests of Reedwood's Center for Christian Studies. For more about their interests, activities, and concerns, visit hopeproject.co.uk.)
The title of this post, "Is there fire under the ashes?", seemed to me to be very applicable to the spiritual fire that survived the ashes of Coventry, but the question is actually a quotation from John Lampen's novel, Hester and Sophie.
There are several reasons I'd very much like it if you would get a copy of this novel and read it yourself. (See the Hope Project's publications page.) In part this is because it would be hard to avoid revealing too much of what Hester will tell you in her own wonderful timing. But mainly I want you to experience the way Hester draws the reader into her life with her utterly believable thirteen-year-old voice—whether she is musing on the peculiarities of the Friends meeting her family attends, considering Ariane Grande's lyrics after the Manchester concert bombing, or trying to cope with the devastating loss of Hester's best friend Sophie.
At the beginning of her story, Hester wakes up from a vivid dream. Before she forgets the dream, she uses a blank book, a gift from Sophie, to write it down. She then locks up the book, but later that day, she goes back to read what she had written, and to her astonishment, the words "Is there fire under the ashes?" had been written below the dream...in Sophie's handwriting.
Thus begins a crucial week in Hester's life. It's a week that she describes in her own engaging way, sometimes deadpan and sometimes wry, as she discovers capacities in herself and unanticipated depths in others, and a growing realization that Sophie is still in her life.
As I was reading Hester and Sophie, nothing made me stop and think, "Hey, this was written by an 80-year-old man!" But I wonder if you'll agree that, even so, John peeks out from the pages in the form of quiet little hints and maybe one very brief cameo appearance, gently linked to the concerns that he and Diana have devoted their lives to.
I began my own diary when I was just a year older than Hester. I didn't have mysterious writings appear in my diary's pages, but some of what I wrote in those first years of my diary had a similar combination of directness, receptivity, skepticism, and hope.
After I finished the last page of the novel, I found Hester's voice continuing to echo in my mind and spirit. It was a deeply refreshing experience.
George Lakey, at age 86, is still getting into "good trouble." Here's what that looks like to the Philadelphia Inquirer. (My thanks to Keith Barton for the link.)
A fascinating, sometimes intense, video: Frank Schaeffer interviews Christian ethicist David Gushee. Normally I don't have the patience to watch long video interviews (I much prefer reading the transcript, if there is one), but this interview really drew me in.
Young Adult Quakers are invited to gather at Jordans Friends Meetinghouse and Centre, August 21-25, at Beaconsfield, not far from London, UK. Information and registration form are here.
A few days ago, I saw the made-for-TV docudrama Nuremberg, an extremely compressed three-hour dramatization of the postwar International Military Tribunal that tried 21 German individuals and six organizations from November 20, 1945 to October 1, 1946. For better or for worse, our current understanding of war crimes and crimes against humanity were largely formed by that tribunal's judgments.
Links to some Nuremberg background documents:
The reasoning given by the Nuremberg judges for their judgments of organizations (along with their definitions—on page 413—of the charges of crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and conspiracy).
Comments by Charles Wyzanski, published in The Atlantic both during and after the trial, concerning his important misgivings about the process.
By the time I'd watched this film, I'd already heard Margarita Simonyan, head of Russia's government-affiliated media channel RT, say that if Russia lost in Ukraine, The Hague awaited even the lowliest of the Kremlin's employees.
Then, last weekend, I watched Mikhail Fishman on TV Rain interviewing Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union board president Yevgeny Zakharov. Fishman asked Zakharov about European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen's proposal to set up a specialized court to prosecute Russian war crimes committed in Ukraine. Zakharov did not see this happening very soon but thought that, with 42,000 war crimes already alleged or under investigation, such a tribunal was needed.
Zakharov mentioned two major problems: first of all, there is the sheer volume of murders and summary executions, torture chambers, forced deportations and filtration camps, and other forms of cruelty repeated often enough that the word "systematic" seems to apply. This massive caseload is beyond the resources of local jurisdictions to cope with. This seems to call for a tribunal at the international level, but then the question of legitimacy arises. The United Nations is the most obvious actor, but the nation charged with these offensives has the power to frustrate the U.N., as it has already done by violating the U.N. Charter with the very fact of the invasion.
One of the most infuriating and frustrating aspects of Russia's crimes is Russian president Vladimir Putin's open and frank admission that the bombing of civilian infrastructure is justified and will continue. There are no circumstances in international law that permit the targeting of facilities on which civilians depend for their existence, but this seems to be of no deterrent value. The opinions of the world carry no weight in comparison with Putin's epic (and genocidal) vision of reorganizing the "Russian World."
Putin's own declarations, both concerning his military goals and his larger context—Ukraine's illegitimacy as a country, its domination by Nazis and drug addicts, its service as a tool of NATO—almost look calm compared to the extremist chorus in Russian media, some of whom have gone on state-controlled TV to charge Ukraine with being dominated by Satanists, with Zelenskyy nominated for the role of Antichrist. This deadly combination of justifications by Putin and his colleagues is a precurser to genocide. Either the international community puts together a response to these assertions or the whole legacy of postwar idealism, the mechanisms it put into place (the United Nations, the International Military Tribunal and its offspring, the whole idea of peace through international law) is at risk, and a new era of cynicism may take its place.
"Let me ask you this. What was Hiroshima? Was it not your medical experiment?" Brian Cox as Hermann Göring, Nuremberg (2000).
What is unique about Russia's actions? Isn't it true that every "great power" has blood on its hands? Even the USA, whose citizens probably assume a degree of superior righteousness not always justified by facts, was unwilling to ratify the treaty setting up the International Criminal Court—an institution whose very purpose is to try cases of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
I think it is fundamentally wrong to give history the power to define what is now possible, and block any progress in the future. If the case of Russia's attempt to extinguish Ukraine has any hidden blessing, let it be that it woke us up. Yes, Yemen should already have done so. Palestine should already have done so. But they didn't—at least not yet. If we can now succeed in reviving the mechanisms of global conscience, it may help to bring accountability to the crimes being committed against Ukraine, and then serve as a new and more powerful restraint on the rest of us as well.
Margarita Simonyan's comments about The Hague came back to me as I began following one of the wilder stories out of Russia: a report by Russian political scientist Abbas Gallyamov based on a Kremlin source. According to this source, already last spring, a plan was being hatched among Kremlin insiders, informally named Noah's Ark, that would provide a refuge for Putin and his top colleagues in the event that Russia lost the war in Ukraine and their hold on power became untenable. According to this strange report, China, Argentina, and Venezuela are among the possible target locations for that group to find safety.
