by Ammon Hennacy

Cartoon by Art Young, The Masses, 1917 and in Hennacy’s autobiography; courtesy wikipedia.org

Editor’s Preface: In the mid-1950s New York City was in the grips of a civil defense hysteria over fears of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Mandatory civil defense drills were instituted, wherein at the sounding of the alarm New Yorkers had immediately to rush to one of the designated shelters, such as a nearby subway station. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker were among the first to refuse to comply and among the first to be arrested. Ammon Hennacy (1893-1970) was a Christian anarchist and pacifist and a great friend of Dorothy Day. He later founded the Joe Hill House of Hospitality in Salt Lake City, Utah. Those who knew Hennacy often commented on his wry sense of humor, readily seen in what follows. This unpublished article was found in the War Resisters’ International archive, which we are researching. Please consult the notes at the end for further information about Ammon, links, and acknowledgments. JG

In the spring of 1955 I saw in the paper that according to a new law there would be an air raid drill on June 15th and all were supposed to take part or suffer a penalty of up to a year in jail and a $500 fine. I phoned Dorothy Day, editor of the Catholic Worker and said we must get ready to disobey this bad law, for “a bad law is no better than any other bad thing.” She suggested that I contact other pacifists, so I phoned Ralph De Gia of the War Resisters League. We got in touch with leaders of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the American Friends Service Committee, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, so when the time came we had 28 at the City Hall Park, and I spoke on television about our coming civil disobedience.

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by Gertjan Cobelens

“Free Prisoners” poster art courtesy www.wri-irg.org

In the first article of the first postwar issue of The War Resister, the journal of the War Resisters’ International, Herbert Runham Brown offers us a look into what might be described as the WRI’s covert operations [see previous posting below].  In his “Buchenwald and Dachau” (1), Runham Brown not only provides a deeper insight into what the WRI considered to be its role in the world, he also highlights some instances of personal courage in the best Gandhian tradition and sheds new light on the fact that, right from the start, the WRI harbored no illusions about the nature of the Nazi regime. And finally, in passing, his article also challenges the discredited reputation of a Dutch Quaker.

From its inception, WRI has never limited itself merely to an intellectual opposition to war. Equally important was their role as what might be termed a “trade union” for war resisters in general and conscientious objectors in particular. Much of the day-to-day activities were focused on providing legal and moral support to conscientious objectors and on putting moral and legal pressure on governments to release convicted war resisters or reduce their sentences. What is much less known, and what is mostly lacking from Devi Prasad’s otherwise comprehensive study, War is a Crime Against Humanity: The Story of the War Resisters’ International (2) is the story of WRI’s “covert operations” and the lengths to which it went to secure the safety of its members. Runham Brown’s article bears witness to this side of WRI’s concerns, as do the 150 or so files in the WRI archiveon the refugees whom the WRI helped to escape Nazi Germany, (3) and as well the War Resisters’ International “Pool Scheme”, a system set up in conjunction with the British Home Office to maximize the number of refugees the WRI helped flee Germany.

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by H. Runham Brown

Dachau Memorial Sculpture by Nandor Glid; courtesy commons.wikimedia.org

Editor’s Preface: It was only in the aftermath of World War II that War Resisters’ International could begin to tell the story of its wartime clandestine operations to free conscientious objectors imprisoned in Germany or German occupied territories. They wasted no time. The official German surrender came on 7 May 1945, and this article appeared in the summer of 1945 in the WRI official publication. Please see the pdf file for the full article, and the notes at the end for further information. JG

When after the last war the French Government deported their War Resisters to French Guiana (Devil’s Island) it took the War Resisters’ International seven years to trace and bring some of them home. But it was more than seven years before we could tell that tragic story of Devil’s  Island. Now it is twelve years since our German and Austrian comrades began to find their way into Buchenwald and Dachau Concentration Camps. At last the story can be told.

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by Terry Messman

“The destruction of creation and its creatures is done in the name of profit, convenience, and wealth. The truth is that capitalism is poison, and we are its victims.”   Shelley Douglass

The path of nonviolence is a lifelong journey that leads in unexpected directions to far-distant destinations. One of the most meaningful milestones on Shelley Douglass’s path of nonviolence came on Ash Wednesday, Feb. 16, 1983, when she walked down the railroad tracks into the Bangor naval base with Karol Schulkin and Mary Grondin from the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action.

As the three women walked down the tracks used to transport nuclear warheads and missile motors into the naval base, they posted photographs of the atomic bomb victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — a prophetic warning of the catastrophic consequences of Trident nuclear submarines. The photos revealed the human face of war, the face of defenseless civilians struck down in a nuclear holocaust. The women continued on this pilgrimage deep into the heart of the Trident base, until security officers arrested them an hour after they began.

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by Terry Messman

Shelley Douglass (left with microphone) speaking out against the deaths of children caused by U.S. sanctions in Iraq; courtesy thestreetspirit.org

“The whole point of the arms race is to protect what we have that really isn’t justifiably ours. As long as we remain complicit with that, then to that extent we’re complicit with weapons like the Trident. So we were trying to withdraw our cooperation as much as we could.” Shelley Douglass

Street Spirit: You’ve devoted many years of your life to nonviolent resistance to nuclear weapons. When did you first become involved in the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action?

Shelley Douglass: The Pacific Life Community was the original group that started the Trident campaign. The crucial thing about it was that the whistle was blown on the Trident by the man that was designing it, Robert Aldridge. Jim and I had met Bob Aldridge when we were in the middle of the Hickham trial in Honolulu. [Editor: Jim Douglass, Jim Albertini and Chuck Julie were on trial for an act of civil disobedience at Hickam Air Force Base in protest of the Vietnam War. TM]

We didn’t know very much about Bob Aldridge until he came to visit us at our home in Hedley, British Columbia, several years later. He told us a very moving story about how he had spent his life designing nuclear weapons, and he and his whole family had made the decision that he should resign from his job for reasons of conscience. They had taken a tremendous cut in income. They had 10 kids, and his wife had gone back to work, and the whole family was behind this decision.

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by Terry Messman

“You age and die on death row if they don’t electrocute you or murder you in some other way. One of the men had a stroke and had to be taken care of. Leroy was one of the major caregivers for him. Leroy was never an angel, but he became a very compassionate person.” Shelley Douglass

Poster art courtesy thestreetspirit.org

Street Spirit: You described in Part 1 how you first became inspired by the Catholic Worker while in college. How did you begin Mary’s House in Birmingham?

Shelley Douglass: When we moved here to Birmingham, we were sort of delegated by Ground Zero to watch trains, but after we had been here for two years we realized there were no more trains to watch. So we had to make the choice: Do we go back to Ground Zero, or do we stay here, and if we stay here, what are we here for? That just kind of fit in with my always having wanted to do a Catholic Worker. So we decided that we would do a Catholic Worker, even though we had no money. I mean, you never have any money when you start a Catholic Worker.

Spirit: Dorothy Day described one of the primary missions of the Catholic Worker as providing houses of hospitality. Does Mary’s House offer hospitality?

Douglass: Well, physically, Mary’s House is a big old house, kind of like many Catholic Worker houses. It was built in 1920 in the Ensley area of Birmingham, which used to be a big steel and brick making area. It’s got four bedrooms, one of which I sleep in, and three of them we use as hospitality, primarily for families or single women. People come and stay while they get on their feet. It’s kind of like a big family house.

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by Harold F. Bing

Editor’s Preface: Harold Bing was chairman of WRI from 1949-1966. During World War I he was an “absolutist” conscientious objector, and received an unusually harsh sentence of three years imprisonment, while the norm was six months. He wrote pamphlets on pacifism, Palestine, and other topics. The Peace Pledge Union has an interesting article about him, at this link. This article is taken from War Resistance: Journal of the War Resisters, issue 39, fourth quarter, 1971. Please also see the archive reference information and acknowledgments at the end. JG

Drawing by a WWI British conscientious objector, courtesy ppu.org.uk

Although in origin the word Pacifism means merely ‘working for peace’ or ‘the creation of peace’, in recent years it has come to mean a code of conduct or a philosophy of life which rejects war of all kinds and relies upon nonviolence as a means of achieving both private and public ends. While, however, this interpretation of the word pacifism is relatively modern, the ideology which lies behind it is very ancient.

We know little about the moral code of primitive man, but there is considerable evidence to suggest that war, in the sense of organised conflict between groups of men specifically trained for that purpose, developed relatively late in human history and, in fact, coincided with the rise of private property in land and other primary sources of wealth and the division of society into classes differing in their privileges and possessions. The desire to secure economic advantages and social prestige, or to defend them if already possessed, led to armed conflict. Tools rather than weapons are found in the surviving remains of the earliest human settlements and no doubt a sort of communism characterised primitive human groups.

But as far back as recorded history goes, which is no more than some six thousand years out of the hundreds of thousand that man has been on the earth, mankind seems to have been troubled by wars and rumours of wars. At the same time there have been teachers, prophets and philosophers who have pointed out the evils of violence and suggested a better way.

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by Terry Messman

Poster art courtesy Ground Zero Center; gzcenter.org

When Father Dave Becker came to dinner at the home of Jim and Shelley Douglass next to the Trident base, the first sentence he said after he sat down on the sofa was, “I want to understand from you what it means to be the chaplain of the Auschwitz of Puget Sound.”

Street Spirit: After Robert Aldridge alerted you that first-strike Trident nuclear submarines would be based near Seattle, what were the first steps in planning a campaign that could resist such an overwhelming weapons system?

James Douglass: Number one, every worker on the Trident nuclear submarine base is Robert Aldridge.

Spirit: A potential Robert Aldridge, meaning a person of conscience?

Douglass: Yes, potentially. Therefore we must respect, understand and grow in truth through dialogue with every worker, and every civilian military employee on the Trident nuclear submarine base. We lived alongside it and worked alongside it. So everything we did had to fulfill that purpose.

On the one hand, we had to block the system — that systemic violence we’re talking about. That’s the Trident system which could literally destroy the world through nuclear fire and radioactivity. We had to block that through nonviolent and loving resistance.

And secondly, we had to engage in dialogue and respectful relationships with the people who were involved in that system, just as all of us were, and are, involved.

We are all involved. That goes from paying taxes, which we all do, even those of us who are military tax resisters because they collect the taxes in other ways. And through our silence, which we all do to the extent that we all aren’t constantly out there speaking against the evils in our society. And the number one evil is our capacity to destroy all life on earth, since we are U.S. citizens with the most powerful arsenal ever devised.

So on the one hand, resistance. On the other hand, dialogue.

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by Terry Messman

Protest Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 2015; left to right: Br. Utsumi Shonin, Father Bill Bichsel, Sr. Denise Laffin, Shelley Douglass and Jim Douglass; courtesy thestreetspirit.org

One Trident submarine can destroy a country. A fleet of Trident submarines is capable of destroying the world. Jim Douglass explains how Ground Zero Center organized a visionary campaign of nonviolent resistance to confront “the Auschwitz of Puget Sound.”

Street Spirit: While you were a professor of religion at the University of Hawaii in the late 1960s, you became active in the movement to end the Vietnam War. What led you to become involved in antiwar resistance while teaching in Hawaii?

James Douglass: Before living in Hawaii, I lived in British Columbia in Canada for two years, writing my book The Nonviolent Cross. So I was out of it in terms of resistance in the United States since I wasn’t living there. Going to Hawaii meant beginning to teach in a context which was also the R&R center for the military in the Vietnam War.

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by H. Ahmed

Editor’s Preface: This article is from The War Resister, issue 70, First Quarter 1956, and continues our series of essays on nonviolence in Islam. Please consult our Islam category for further articles. Reference and acknowledgments are at the end. JG

“Islam is Peace”; courtesy en.wikipedia.org

In the limited space at my disposal, I will concern myself with the fundamental principles of pacifism in Islam, as taught by the great Prophet of Arabia. As in the case of almost all the other religions, Islam has also been betrayed by its followers, so much so that the other day I came across a rather blunt remark that there is no place for nonviolence in Islam and that Islam does not advocate the establishment of world peace. And it is very often that we come across such remarks.

There is a bar to all knowledge, and that is contempt prior to investigation. Any scholar who studies the original Islam without preconceived ideas will realise that Islam is also a religion of peace and that it also advocates pacifism. It aims at the welfare and prosperity of every human being without the difference of caste, creed, colour or nationality. The teachings of Islam lead one to the golden rule of “Live and let live for mutual forbearance and tolerance”. The Prophet of Arabia declared, “Faith is restraint against all violence”. Further exhorting his followers to non-violence, he said, “Let no Muslim commit violence!” Can there be a clearer injunction than this?

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