Tag Archives ⇒ germany

Kristallnacht, Kindertransport, and help for refugees

November 15, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Quak­er refugee work cir­ca 1933:

The reports gath­ered from the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty in Ger­many by Quak­ers were of influ­ence when Quak­ers accom­pa­nied the Jew­ish del­e­ga­tion who went to see Home Sec­re­tary Sir Samuel Hoare to plead the case for allow­ing immi­gra­tion of chil­dren into Britain with­out the usu­al visa restric­tions. They swayed the gov­ern­ment and this planned immi­gra­tion of Ger­man and Aus­tri­an Jew­ish chil­dren became known as the Kinder­trans­port. Around 10,000 chil­dren were evac­u­at­ed from Ger­many and Aus­tria to Britain between 1938 and 1939. 

What I find most fas­ci­nat­ing is the detail that the Friends library in Lon­don does­nt have a lot of records of this work. It was so much in line with oth­er refugee assis­tance Friends were doing in Europe that they evi­dent­ly con­sid­ered it just anoth­er day on the job, so to speak. I shared a piece on the relat­ed Quak­er­speisun­gen a few days ago.

Kristall­nacht, Kinder­trans­port, and help for refugees

Quakerspeisungen and an Oscar Schindler connection

November 13, 2018
· Martin Kelley

This week marks the hundred-year anniver­sary of the end of the “Great War,” World War I, brand­ed as the war to end all wars. Our annu­al com­mem­o­ra­tion of the armistice in the U.S. large­ly went by the way­side in 1954 when Con­gress changed the name from Armistice Day to Vet­er­ans Day. Instead of mark­ing the end of a hor­rif­ic war that lit­er­al­ly con­sumed much of Euro­pean resources and peo­ple for years in trench­es that nev­er moved, we now spend the day fill­ing lec­tures with clich­es of mil­i­tary service.

But the hun­dred year anniver­sary also means we can start remem­ber­ing the after­math of the war. The First World War set up the sec­ond. We large­ly think of the mis­takes and half-efforts of the vic­to­ri­ous pow­ers but Quak­ers were part of more right­eous storyline:

Even more food was sent by Amer­i­can Quak­ers under the lead­er­ship of Her­bert Hoover, pro­vid­ing dai­ly meals for 60,0000 starv­ing Berlin­ers for five years. The Ger­mans labelled this mas­sive effort, Quak­er­speisun­gen: “Quak­er Feed­ings.” It saved thou­sands of lives, includ­ing those of the fam­i­ly of Oscar Schindler who famous­ly went on to help 700 Jews to escape the gas cham­bers at Auschwitz in the Sec­ond World War. Schindler’s sis­ters spent six months recu­per­at­ing with the Hall fam­i­ly and one even attend­ed Thirsk Gram­mar School for a term. 

Friends Jour­nal Bonus­es: Quak­er work in Ger­many in the 1920s and 30s was the sub­ject ofQuak­ers in Ger­many dur­ing and after the World Wars from 2010. Relief efforts in Spain were part of a more recent sto­ry that tied it to present-day refugee assis­tance in Gota de Leche.

https://​www​.dar​ling​to​nand​stock​ton​times​.co​.uk/​n​e​w​s​/​1​7​2​0​7​6​8​9​.​h​e​r​o​i​c​-​q​u​a​k​e​r​s​-​a​n​d​-​a​-​f​a​s​c​i​n​a​t​i​n​g​-​l​i​n​k​-​b​e​t​w​e​e​n​-​o​s​c​a​r​-​s​c​h​i​n​d​l​e​r​-​a​n​d​-​t​h​i​r​s​k​/​?​r​e​f​=​t​w​t​rec

North Korean nukes and cowboy politics

July 16, 2003
· Martin Kelley

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.

Tough Time to Love War(Making)

January 23, 2003
· Martin Kelley

This just isn’t a good time to be George W. Bush. Unit­ed Nations inspec­tors comb­ing Iraq for weapons of mass destruc­tion have come up emp­ty hand­ed. Sad­dam Hus­sein has allow­ing them rel­a­tive­ly unfet­tered access but all they’ve uncov­ered is a few unused shells.

Bush is noth­ing if not per­sis­tent when it comes to per­ceived world bad guys. Just yes­ter­day he told an audi­ence in St. Louis that Hus­sein is “a dan­ger­ous, dan­ger­ous man with dan­ger­ous, dan­ger­ous weapons.” Despite the repeat­ed use dan­ger­ous, the rest of the world is uncon­vinced. Ger­man Chan­cel­lor Ger­hard Schroder still talks about “peace­ful solu­tions” and Ger­many and France is putting the brakes on war in the U.N. Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil, wait­ing for evi­dence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruc­tion to turn up.

It must frus­trate our pres­i­dent to see that all these years of mil­i­tary sanc­tions against Iraq have been work­ing. All the evi­dence uncov­ered by the U.N. inspec­tors prove that we can “win with­out war,” as one cur­rent slo­gan goes, and that we have in fact been win­ning. We’ve kept Sad­dam Hus­sein from rebuild­ing his mil­i­tary after the Gulf War. U.S. iso­la­tion of Iraq has been suc­cess­ful despite its numer­ous flaws. Sad­dam is not a threat.

Which brings us to real threats and to North Korea. Pres­i­dent Bush and his team of war mon­ger­ers have been so busy look­ing at Iraq that they’ve giv­en North Korea just spo­radic atten­tion. Recently-declassified reports show that the U.S. Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency has known much more about North Korea’s nuclear bomb mak­ing over the last dozen years than anyone’s been admitting.

The C.I.A. has known that North Korea and Pak­istan have been trad­ing nuclear secrets. Pak­istan has been show­ing its ally of con­ve­nience how to build the cen­trifuges that process weapons-grade ura­ni­um. North Korea in return has pro­vid­ed the mis­sile tech­nol­o­gy that gives Pak­istan the nuclear reach to destroy arch-rival India. Now that we know Pres­i­dent Bush knew all about this his­to­ry of what we might call “dan­ger­ous, dan­ger­ous” tech­nol­o­gy trade, why did he cozy up to Pak­istan fol­low­ing Sep­tem­ber 11th? He so want­ed wars with Afghanistan and Iraq that he nor­mal­ized rela­tions with a coun­try far more dan­ger­ous. If a Pak­istani or North Kore­an nuclear weapon goes off in New York City it will kill a whole lot more peo­ple than Osama bin Laden’s four hijacked air­planes. What hap­pened on Sep­tem­ber 11th was ter­ri­ble but it’s noth­ing com­pared to what a ene­my with resources could do.

There are real threats to world peace, far more “dan­ger­ous, dan­ger­ous” than Iraq. The Unit­ed States needs to drop its president’s obses­sions and look square­ly at the world and who we’re allied with. And when we reset our poli­cies we wqcan use Iraq as our mod­el. For as the U.N. inspec­tors have proven, we can cre­ate peace through diplo­ma­cy and we can iso­late trou­ble­mak­ers through smart sanctions.

What a tough les­son for U.S. lead­ers bent on war.