Henry Cadbury’s 1934 speech and us

June 28, 2018

In 1934, Philadel­phia Friend and co-founder of the Amer­i­can Friends Ser­vice Com­mit­tee Hen­ry Cad­bury gave a speech to a con­fer­ence of Amer­i­can rab­bis in which he urged them to call off a boy­cott of Nazi Ger­many. A New York Times report about the speech was tweet­ed out last week and has gone viral over the inter­net. The 1930s does­n’t look so far away in an era when author­i­tar­i­ans are on the rise and lib­er­als wor­ry about the lines of civil­i­ty and fairness.

Make no mis­take: Cad­bury’s speech is cringe­wor­thy. Some of the quotes as report­ed by the Times:

You can prove to your oppres­sors that their objec­tives and meth­ods are not only wrong, but unavail­ing in the face of the world’s protests and uni­ver­sal dis­ap­proval of the injus­tices the Hitler pro­gram entails.

By hat­ing Hitler and try­ing to fight back, Jews are only increas­ing the sever­i­ty of his poli­cies against them.

If Jews through­out the world try to instill into the minds of Hitler and his sup­port­ers recog­ni­tion of the ideals for which the race stands, and if Jews appeal to the Ger­man sense of jus­tice and the Ger­man nation­al con­science, I am sure the prob­lem will be solved more effec­tive­ly and ear­li­er than otherwise.

The idea that we might be able to appease Hitler was obvi­ous­ly wrong-headed. To tell Jews that they should do this is patron­iz­ing to the extreme.

But in many ways, all this is also vin­tage Quak­er. It is in line with how many Friends saw them­selves in the world. To under­stand Cad­bury’s reac­tion, you have to know that Quak­ers of the era were very sus­pi­cious of col­lec­tive action. He described any boy­cott of Nazi Ger­many as a kind of war­fare. They felt this way too about union­iza­tion – work­ers get­ting togeth­er on strike were war­ring against the fac­to­ry owners.

When John Wool­man spoke out about slav­ery in the 1700s, he went one-on-one as a min­is­ter to fel­low Quak­ers. Dur­ing the Civ­il War, Friends wrote let­ters one-on-one with Abra­ham Lin­coln urg­ing him to seek peace (they got some return let­ters too!). Cad­bury naive­ly thought that these sorts of per­son­al tac­tics could yield results against author­i­tar­i­an twentieth-century states.

Miss­ing in Cad­bury’s analy­sis is an appre­ci­a­tion of how much the con­cen­tra­tion of pow­er in indus­tri­al­iz­ing soci­eties and the growth of a man­age­r­i­al class between own­ers and work­ers has changed things. Work­ers nego­ti­at­ing one-on-one with an owner/operator in a fac­to­ry with twen­ty work­ers is very dif­fer­ent than nego­ti­at­ing in a fac­to­ry of thou­sands run by a CEO on behalf of hun­dreds of stock­hold­ers. Ger­many as a uni­fied state was only a dozen years old when Cad­bury was born. The era of total war was still rel­a­tive­ly new and many peo­ple naive­ly thought a rule of law could pre­vail after the First World War. The idea of indus­tri­al­iz­ing pogroms and killing Jews by the mil­lions must have seen fantastical.

Some of this world­view also came from the­ol­o­gy: if we have direct access to the divine, then we can appeal to that of God in our adver­sary and win his or her heart and soul with­out resort to coer­cion. It’s a nice sen­ti­ment and it even some­times works.

I won’t claim that all Friends have aban­doned this world­view, but I would say it’s a polit­i­cal minor­i­ty, espe­cial­ly with more activist Friends. We under­stand the world bet­ter and rou­tine­ly use boy­cotts as a strate­gic lever. Cad­bury’s Amer­i­can Friends Ser­vice Com­mit­tee itself piv­ot­ed away from the kind of direct aid work that had exem­pli­fied its ear­ly years. For half a cen­tu­ry it has been work­ing in strate­gic advocacy.

Friends still have prob­lems. We’re still way more stuck on racial issues among our­selves than one would think we would be giv­en our par­tic­i­pa­tion in Civ­il Rights activism. Like many in the U.S., we’re strug­gling with the lim­i­ta­tion of civil­i­ty in a polit­i­cal sys­tem where rules have bro­ken down. No AFSC head would give a lec­ture like Cad­bury’s today. But I think it’s good to know where we come from. Some of Cad­bury’s cau­tions might still hold lessons for us; under­stand­ing his blind spots could help expose ours.

Hitler jokes and Quaker schools

March 26, 2018

The case of a beloved Quak­er Jew­ish teacher being fired from a NYC Friends School for mak­ing a Nazi salute as a joke is bring­ing us some inter­est­ing com­men­tary. Mark Oppen­heimer writes in Tablet:

One might call this whole episode the tri­umph of Waspy good inten­tions over Jew­ish com­mon sense… But of course Quak­er schools — and Quak­er camps, like the one I once attend­ed, and Quak­er meet­ing­hous­es — are, these days, pret­ty Jew­ish places. The Times arti­cle has a bur­lesque feel, with a bunch of Jew­ish stu­dents and alum­ni per­form­ing in Quaker-face.

He also makes inter­est­ing points about the cul­tures of Jew­ish humor (“We Jews sur­vive because of Hitler jokes”) and that of Friends:

The Quak­er prac­tice of silent wor­ship can dis­pos­es its prac­ti­tion­ers against the loud, bawdy, con­tentious dis­course that infus­es Jew­ish cul­ture. I’m not mak­ing claims about indi­vid­ual Quak­ers — I can intro­duce you to per­fect­ly hilar­i­ous Quak­ers, some of whom inter­rupt even more than I do — but at their insti­tu­tions, the val­ues that come to the fore are Gene Sharp not Gene Wilder. In their earnest­ness, Quak­er schools are David Brooks not Mel Brooks. You get the idea.

I’m always a bit unsure how seri­ous­ly to take cul­tur­al Quak­er stereo­types as moti­vat­ing forces in pieces like these. I won­der how many Friends actu­al­ly work or study at a Man­hat­tan Quak­er school. A more gener­ic head­mas­ter fear-of-conflict seems as like­ly a cause as any­thing to do with silent wor­ship. Then too, we don’t know what oth­er issues might be at play below the sur­face of pri­va­cy and con­fi­den­tial­i­ty. But the Friends Sem­i­nary inci­dent seems as good a mark­er as any­thing else of the com­pli­cat­ed dynam­ics with­in Friends schools today.

http://​www​.tablet​mag​.com/​s​c​r​o​l​l​/​2​5​8​3​9​4​/​j​e​w​i​s​h​-​t​e​a​c​h​e​r​-​f​i​r​e​d​-​f​r​o​m​-​q​u​a​k​e​r​-​s​c​h​o​o​l​-​f​o​r​-​m​a​k​i​n​g​-​n​a​z​i​-​j​oke

March 9, 2018

That one final­ly becomes the thing he vio­lent­ly fights is a fact that Hitler under­stood, in 1933, when he said, “The great strength of the total­i­tar­i­an state is that it forces those who fear it to imi­tate it.” It would be a trag­ic thing indeed if we Amer­i­cans were stripped of our free­dom by a for­eign and aggres­sive pow­er; it is all the more trag­ic that we grad­u­al­ly and some­what unknow­ing­ly give up our free­doms, one after anoth­er, in the pur­suit of that force which we claim will guard our liberty.

— Bayard Rustin [Source]

Why don’t we say that charity and love are Christian issue?

November 3, 2004

In this elec­tion, reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives were able to craft a mes­sage mak­ing same-sex mar­riages look like an afront to apple pie and base­ball and of course peo­ple vot­ed against it. What if we could have some­how framed this elec­tion with the details of human suf­fer­ing that these laws suggest?
Now avail­able for the fash­ion­able Bush-era bumper. Pro­ceeds go to sup­port the Non​vi​o​lence​.org websites:
  

Con­tin­ue read­ing

North Korean nukes and cowboy politics

July 16, 2003

Yes­ter­day North Korea claimed that it has processed enough plu­to­ni­um to make six nuclear weapons. I’ve often argued that wars don’t begin when the shoot­ing actu­al­ly begins, that we need to look at the mil­i­taris­tic deci­sions made years before to see how they plant­ed the seeds for war. After the First World War, the vic­to­ri­ous allies con­struct­ed a peace treaty designed to humil­i­ate Ger­many and keep its econ­o­my stag­nant. With the onslaught of the Great Depres­sion, the coun­try was ripe for a mad dem­a­gogue like Hitler to take over with talk of a Greater Germany.
In his Jan­u­ary 2002 State of the Union address, Pres­i­dent Bush’s team added North Korea to the “axis of evil” that need­ed to be chal­lenged. By all accounts it was a last minute addi­tion. The speech­writ­ing team nev­er both­ered to con­sult with the State Depart­men­t’s east Asia experts. In all like­li­hood North Korea was added so that the evil three coun­tries would­n’t all be Mus­lim (the oth­er two were Iraq and Iran) and the “War on Ter­ror” would­n’t be seen as a war against Islam.
North Korea saw a bull­dog pres­i­dent in the White House and judged that its best chance to stay safe was to make a U.S. attack too dan­ger­ous to con­tem­plate. It’s a sound strat­e­gy, real­ly only a vari­a­tion on the Cold War’s “Mutu­al­ly Assured Destruc­tion” doc­trine. When faced with a hos­tile and militaristically-strong coun­try that wants to over­throw your gov­ern­ment, you make your­self too dan­ger­ous to take on. Let’s call it the Rat­tlesnake Defense.
Mil­i­tarism rein­forces itself when coun­tries beef up their mil­i­taries to stave off the mil­i­taries of oth­er coun­tries. With North Korea going nuclear, pres­sure will now build on South Korea, Chi­na and Japan to defend them­selves against pos­si­ble threat. We might be in for a new east Asian arms race, per­haps an east Asian Cold War. Being a paci­fist means stop­ping not only the cur­rent war but the next one and the one after that. In the 1980s activists were speak­ing out against the bru­tal regime of Sad­dam Hus­sein, an Amer­i­can friend who was gassing his own peo­ple. Now we need to speak out against the cow­boy pol­i­tics that is feed­ing insta­bil­i­ty on the Kore­an Penin­su­la, to pre­vent the hor­ror and mass death that a Sec­ond Kore­an War would unleash.

The Real Phantom Menace is Us

May 27, 1999

Being the home to a cou­ple of dozen peace groups, the Non­vi­o­lence Web has pub­lished a lot of press releas­es call­ing for an end to bomb­ing in Koso­vo and Yugoslavia. They’re all very fine but also all very predictable.

But as we write, the U.S. gov­ern­ment con­tin­ues pur­su­ing a war that has no clear real­is­tic goals, has led to even more killing in the region, and has seri­ous­ly dis­rupt­ed post Cold-War rela­tion­ships with Rus­sia and Chi­na (See George Lakey’s “Cold War Return­ing? — A Chill­ing Russ­ian Visit”).

At home, Amer­i­cans just watch the pic­tures on TV as they go about liv­ing a glo­ri­ous Spring. We laugh, cry, work and play; we make trips to the shore for Memo­r­i­al Day week­end; and we obe­di­ent­ly flock to a movie called Phan­tom Men­ace that tells the sto­ry of the start of cin­e­ma’s most famous Evil Empire.

A new empire is being shaped here. The Unit­ed States has been able to claim the title of “empire” for at least a hun­dred years. But some­thing new is at work here ( see my own War Time Again). We’re wit­ness­ing the birth of a new Amer­i­can order which is start­ing a new wars every three months. New kinds of wars, which bare­ly touch Amer­i­can lives, even those of the bombers wag­ing them from 20,000 feet. The Pen­ta­gon and State Depart­men­t’s plan­ners are build­ing on lessons learned at the start of the decade in the Gulf War. They’re refined their mis­siles for accu­ra­cy but they’ve learned how to spin the media

Now every new vil­lain is pre­sent­ed to the media as the new Hitler. Sad­dam Hus­sein. Osama bin Laden. Milosvic. Every­one call­ing for peace is paint­ed as a neo-isolationist, a con­tem­po­rary Cham­ber­lain appeas­ing a tyrant. After­wards it’s easy to see how overly-dramatic the pro­pa­gan­da was and how inef­fec­tu­al all the Amer­i­can bombs were. But still, here we are in Koso­vo, in anoth­er Nineties war and next year we’ll be in yet anoth­er. Unless we stop the zest for these Clin­ton wars now.

What do we have to do to end this war? And what do we need to do to stop the U.S.‘s new­found zest for cruise mis­siles? How can peace and anti­war activists start act­ing beyond the press releas­es and iso­lat­ed vig­ils to think cre­ative­ly about link­ing folks togeth­er to bring new peo­ple and ideas into the peace movement?

I don’t pre­tend to know what exact­ly we need. All I know is that I’m per­son­al­ly bored of the stan­dard issue peace actions we’ve been engag­ing in and want to see some­thing new. Some of it might look like clichés from the 60s and some might look like rip-offs of McDon­ald’s lat­est ad cam­paign. But we need to build an anti­war cul­ture that will intrude upon a sun­ny spring and remind peo­ple that a war is on. The real phan­tom men­ace this sum­mer is an Amer­i­can Empire that is retool­ing it’s mil­i­tary and re-conditioning its cit­i­zens to think of war as a nor­mal course of affairs.

Stop the Zipper War Before It Starts

January 30, 1998

Why is Pres­i­dent Clin­ton talk­ing about a reprise of the 1991 Per­sian Gulf War?

We’re told it’s because U.N. inspec­tors believe that Iraq has hid­den “weapons of mass destruc­tion.” But of course so does the Unit­ed States. And Britain, France, Rus­sia, the Ukraine, Chi­na, India and Pak­istan. Iraq does­n’t even hold a region­al monop­oly, as Israel cer­tain­ly has atom­ic weapons atop U.S.-designed rock­ets aimed this very moment at Hus­sein’s Bagh­dad palaces.

Insanely-destructive weapons are a fact of life in the fin-de-Millennium. There’s already plen­ty of coun­tries with atom­ic weapons and the mis­sile sys­tems to lob them into neigh­bor­ing coun­tries. Hus­sein prob­a­bly does­n’t have them, and the weapons U.N. inspec­tors are wor­ried about are chem­i­cal. This is the “poor man’s atom­ic bomb,” a way to play at the lev­el of nuclear diplo­ma­cy with­out the expens­es of a nuclear program.

Clin­ton seems obliv­i­ous to the irony of oppos­ing Iraq’s weapons of mass destruc­tion with our own. The air­craft car­ri­ers and bat­tle fleets that have been sent into the Gulf in recent weeks are loaded with tac­ti­cal nuclear missiles.

If the pos­ses­sion of weapons of mass destruc­tion is wrong for Iraq, then it is wrong for every­one. It is time to abol­ish all weapons pro­grams and to build real world peace along lines of cooperation.

He’s our Bully

Most Amer­i­cans, on hear­ing a call to let Hus­sein be, will react with dis­be­lief. Con­di­tioned to think of him as our mod­ern Hitler, any­one oppos­ing a new Gulf War must be crazy, some­one unfa­mil­iar with the his­to­ry of the appease­ment of Hitler pri­or to World War II that allowed him to build his mil­i­tary to the fright­en­ing lev­els of 1939.

But Amer­i­cans have alas not been told too much of more recent his­to­ry. Sad­dam Hus­sein is our cre­ation, he’s our bul­ly. It start­ed with Iran. Obsessed with glob­al mil­i­tary con­trol, the U.S. gov­ern­ment start­ed arm­ing region­al super­pow­ers. We gave our cho­sen coun­tries weapons and mon­ey to bul­ly around their neigh­bors and we looked the oth­er way at human rights abus­es. We cre­at­ed and strength­ened dic­ta­tors around the world, includ­ing the Shah of Iran. A rev­o­lu­tion final­ly threw him out of pow­er and ush­ered in a gov­ern­ment under­stand­able hos­tile to the Unit­ed States.

Rather than take this devel­op­ment to mean that the region­al super­pow­er con­cept was a bad idea, the U.S. just chose anoth­er region­al super­pow­er: Iraq. We looked the oth­er way when the two got into a war, and start­ed build­ing up Iraq’s mil­i­tary arse­nal, giv­ing him the planes and mil­i­tary equip­ment we had giv­en Iran. This was a bloody, crazy war, where huge casu­al­ties would be racked up only to move the front a few miles, an advance that would be nul­li­fied when the oth­er army attacked with the same lev­el of casu­al­ties. The Unit­ed States sup­port­ed that war. Inter­na­tion­al human rights activists kept pub­li­ciz­ing the abus­es with­in Iraq, and denounc­ing him for use of chem­i­cal weapons. They got lit­tle media atten­tion because it was not in U.S. polit­i­cal inter­ests to fight Hussein.

Noth­ing’s real­ly changed now except U.S. polit­i­cal inter­ests. Hus­sein is still a tyrant. He’s still stock­pil­ing chem­i­cal weapons. Why are U.S. polit­i­cal inter­ests dif­fer­ent now? Why does Bill Clin­ton want U.S. media atten­tion focused on Iraq? Look no fur­ther than Big Bil­l’s zip­per. Stop the next war before it starts. Abol­ish every­one’s weapons of mass destruc­tion and let’s get a Pres­i­dent who does­n’t need a war to clear his name.