POSTSCRIPT (3)

POSTSCRIPT (3)

Global Warming – Global Warning!

          In my last blog I said that I was a member and supporter of the Green Party because I believed that Climate Change (global warming largely due to human activity) was currently the biggest threat facing humankind.  Since then I have had an email from a regular blog reader who points out that global warming is not just a future threat – it is already responsible for most of the political problems that are causing us concern today.  Here is part of that email:

I am beginning to see world events in terms of global warming.  Did you know that the real cause of the “Arab Spring” was the rising price of grain, resulting in people in the Arab countries being unable to afford to eat?  The uprisings coincided with a spike in the price of grain. Then the price subsided a bit, but the trend remained very definitely upwards due to lower crop yields and more of the world’s arable land becoming desert. This was reducing output while the population continued to grow.  The uprisings were a cry for help and a call for an end to dictatorial and corrupt governments.  As things got worse the protestors tried other governing systems.   In that part of the world a liberal parliamentary democracy is not the obvious choice of the reformers - but a more rigorous interpretation of Islam is.  Hence the advent of the Muslim Brotherhood (in Egypt now brutally suppressed) the Taliban, Al Qaida and, most extreme and the most successful of all, the so-called Islamic State.

  The no more than Two Degrees Centigrade rise in world temperature upper limit to which all world leaders have agreed is not an ideal figure. It is the point at which scientists predict the world will no longer be able to feed itself, and there will be widespread famine, riot and war. NASA has said publicly  that today Climate Change represents the greatest threat to world peace

So in the light of that, I think what we are witnessing in the Mediterranean and Calais, is the beginning not the end.   It is fundamentally the impoverished world meeting the rich world, and the rich believing their prosperity would be diminished if they shared it with migrants.  I think the incredible risks which the “economic” migrants are prepared to take is testament to the fact that they are escaping a life of destitution as well as immense danger, and particularly, they can see no future for their children in the country they came from. This is really what has driven all previous mass migrations, like the Irish escaping to the USA from the potato famine.

                In the past Britain has been far more generous. We welcomed Jewish migrants from Nazi Germany, we welcomed the Vietnamese Boat people escaping tyranny there and we welcomed Ugandan Asians escaping Idi Amin. And of course, in each case, the migrant population has not been a burden but has done very well in the UK.  The political tide has really turned since then.

I think that the situation in the Mediterranean, and in Eastern Europe where  almost as many migrants are  coming via land frontiers, is the most significant development.   The total number of migrants has reached 180,000.  By contrast there are “only 4000” in Calais. The rest have gone elsewhere in Europe – mainly Germany and Sweden.   So why the fuss in Calais?  Well this is entirely caused by the UK decision not to be part of Schengen, not to accept any quota of migrants at all, and to relocate the frontier to Calais, instead of it being in Dover. It is NOT the result of the UK Benefits system being too generous (it isn’t actually more generous than France), but it’s a good myth to promote.

If we had no borders – like France / Belgium – there would be none of this.  There are migrants arriving in Italy and wandering all over Europe to other EU  countries all the time, and no  one even knows. If the border was in Dover, as it should be, then people could legally hitch a ride with a lorry driver or car driver, and then apply for asylum as soon as they land. However, by putting the border in Calais, they can never get to English soil in order to apply for asylum, so they have to practically kill themselves in the attempt. Why can we not have an asylum office in Calais as well? Is it because they don’t want them applying and it is likely that too many would be approved? Why does the UK stay in the UN if we aren’t prepared respect international agreements?  

                I agree with my correspondent that those migrants aren’t attracted to the UK by our generous benefits.  Even if it were true that our benefits are more generous than those of other countries, I really don’t think that migrants would risk their lives daily in the hope of acquiring a few extra quid!   Many are attracted to the UK because they have learned a little English at school and think, probably correctly, that they’d speak it fairly fluently after a few months.  English has become a world-wide language – and that has its disadvantages as well as its benefits.

                When I hear David Cameron saying that migration from France to the UK is a European problem, not just a problem for France and Britain, I am amazed at his temerity.  It would be a European problem if we had signed up to the Schengen Agreement and had abolished our national frontiers – or if we had been prepared to accept a few of the thousands of migrants who have reached Italy, Spain or Greece either across the Mediterranean  or from Turkey.   As it is I think our fellow Europeans could surely quite reasonably say, ‘If those opt-out Brits want to keep their own frontiers and accept no refugees from Africa of Asia – it’s up to them to guard those frontiers and keep the migrants out.  We’ve got plenty of our own problems to solve before we can give thought to those   that the Brits have brought upon themselves!’

                 On the world stage our top politicians diligently pursue what they think of as our national interests. Meanwhile Climate Change waits in the wings with nasty surprises in store for all of them……….and us!

                 

            

30th January 2015

Tendring Topics……on line

‘Jaw, jaw is always better than War, war!’

            Sir Winston Churchill, the fiftieth anniversary of whose death was remembered last week, was best known as a great war leader.  Perhaps it was his own personal experience of two world wars, and the South African war before them, that inspired him to declare that ‘Jaw, jaw’ (negotiating with the perceived enemy), was always better than ‘War, war’ (confronting that perceived enemy with the weapons of death and destruction).

            It is advice that the world’s leaders really need to heed today.  The news that the Russian Ambassador had been summoned to explain why Russian bombing aircraft had flown round the United Kingdom some 25 miles from our shores, had been shadowed by our fighters and had disrupted air traffic over the English Channel wasn’t one of the first items in the BBC’s news bulletin today (29^th January).  It could well have been the most significant news story though, because it is just such provocative acts that could, unless those concerned are prepared to ‘jaw, jaw’,  trigger the outbreak of World War III.  

            One doesn’t have to be either a psychic or a James Bond to guess the answer of the Russian Ambassador. The flight of the Russian bombers was a direct response to NATOs provocative military manoeuvres in Poland and the Baltic States during the course of which I have little doubt that NATO military aircraft had on many occasions flown up to – and perhaps beyond – the Russian and/or the Belorussian frontiers.

            The NATO manoeuvres were a response to Russia’s recovery of the Crimean peninsula (which had been welcomed by the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants), and Russian support for the Russian-speaking rebels of Eastern Crimea demanding freedom from the rule of the Ukrainian Government in Kiev.  Tit for tat – just as in a primary school playground, but possibly with rather more dire results!

            The NATO response had not been to discuss the possibility of a joint demand for a cease-fire from both Russia and the NATO countries, and a discussion of possible remedies of the grievances of the people of Eastern Ukraine. Nor have they suggested a referendum, under United Nations auspices, of the people of Crimea to enable them have the same right of self-determination as – for instance – the people of the Falklands, Gibraltar and Kosovo.  Instead ‘the west’ immediately gave wholehearted backing to the Government in Kiev, decided that Russia was entirely responsible for the rebellion in the east, and imposed economic sanctions on Russia.   They gave no credit to the Russians when they managed to achieve a cease-fire and peace talks between the two sides, but now that the ceasefire seems to have been broken (by which side I wonder?) they are proposing further sanctions.

            As a lifetime supporter of the BBC I have been bitterly disappointed that they have reported nothing of the Kiev government’s relentless shelling and bombing of towns and villages under rebel control nor, as I discovered from quite another neutral source, of the thousands of civilian refugees from the shelling who have fled into Russia to seek asylum.

         
 I remember our foreign secretary (it was William Hague at the time) declaring darkly that Russia must realize that its actions would have consequences.  Indeed, and so they did.   But, of course, in the Kremlin other politicians were saying exactly the same thing – in Russian.  

            There’s no doubt that EU and American sanctions have damaged the Russian economy – but Russia has, as might have been foreseen, imposed counter-sanctions against us.   A few days ago we heard how British dairy farmers, struggling to keep their heads above water, had been hit a devastating blow by the Russian ban on the import of British dairy products.  A regular blog reader has suggested that the whole country, not just the dairy farmers, should bear the financial burden of this ban, perhaps by an increase in income tax, not likely to be a very attractive idea a few months before a General Election!

            Now the EU and NATO are meeting to discuss further sanctions on Russia.  How the terrorists of IS (Islamic State) Islamic State – in Syria and Iraq, Africa and  Afghanistan – must be laughing to see their enemies, in Russia and ‘the West’, impoverishing themselves, and treading the very dangerous path that could end in war.  How delighted they’d be if World War III did break out!  And all because the leaders of ‘the west’ were not prepared to ‘jaw, jaw’ with Russia the possibility that a substantial minority of Ukrainians should be granted the right to determine their own future; a right that ‘the west’ has supported in other parts of the world.

Eton and Oxbridge?   Try North Essex!

          I wasn’t particularly surprised when I read in the local Daily Gazette that exam results had revealed Colchester Royal Grammar School and Colchester’s High School for Girls to be the best schools in England.  They have both had an unrivalled reputation for years.

            I was totally astonished though to learn from the same Gazette that Yanis Varoufakis, a Ph.D graduate at Essex University (just on the Colchester side of the Colchester/Tendring District boundary) is the Finance Minister of the new Greek Government; that Rena Dourou, another Essex University Graduate who had been the elected governor of Attica (the part of Greece surrounding Athens) is also a member of that government, while a third Essex Uni. Graduate, Fotini Vaki, has been elected to represent the island of Corfu in the new Greek parliament!

            Nor, records the Gazette, is it only in Greece that graduates of Essex University have achieved distinction.  John Bercow, Speaker of our House of Commons, graduated there in 1985. Daniel  Libeskind, world-renowned architect and master-plan architect for the reconstruction of the World Trade Centre site in New York after the destruction of 9/11, graduated in 1972,  Lord Triesman who graduated in 1969 is Labour’s shadow minister for foreign affairs.  David Yates,  BAFTA winning tv and film director, who directed the final four episodes of the Harry Potter film series, graduated in 1987,  Oscar Arias Sanchez who graduated in 1975, was twice President of Costa Rica and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987; Baroness Virginia Bottomley, who graduated in 1970 was a Conservative MP for twenty-four years and held two Secretary of State roles in the ‘90s, and Sir Christopher Oissarides who graduated in 1971, was awarded the Nobel prize for his contribution to the theory of search frictions and macroeconomics!  (No – I’ve no idea what that means!)

            It is clear that Eton and Oxbridge isn’t the only route to the top.  Essex University may have arrived rather late on the scene but it has certainly made its mark. I have no doubt that, less than twenty miles from my front door, there are more future cabinet ministers and Nobel prize winners in the pipeline!

Week 7 2012 16.2.2012

Tendring Topics....on Line

The Thirteenth of February

           Tuesday of this week (13^th February) was the 67^th anniversary of an event has played a major role in moulding the political and ethical attitudes that motivate me in the weekly production of Tendring Topics….on line.

  Regular readers of this blog will know that I spent the final eighteen months of World War II at a working ‘camp’ of thirty ‘other rank’ British POWs in the small East German town of Zittau, at the point where the frontiers of Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland now coincide.  By February 1945 no-one in Zittau, not ourselves, not our guards, not the conscripted foreign civilian workers, nor the German civilians with whom we were in daily contact, had any doubt that Germany had been defeated and that the war would be over within weeks.  The failure of the Christmas offensive (‘the Battle of the Bulge’) in the Ardennes had ended any hope of a German victory or of a face-saving negotiated peace.  The RAF and American Air Forces ruled in the skies, the news from the Western Front was uniformly bad and in Zittau the sound of gunfire from the east had grown from a distant murmur to an ever-deepening roar as the Soviet Army advanced inexorably through Poland into Germany itself.

Throughout that bitter winter the flow of refugees westward through Zittau  grew from a trickle to a steady stream.   There were old men (the young and middle-aged ones had long since been called up), women and little children.   There were British and allied prisoners of war, still under guard, and conscripted foreign workers mainly from Russia and the Ukraine.  There were defeated units of Germany’s allies – Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians, renegade Cossacks.  Some were in ancient lorries fuelled by Holzgas  (a flammable gas produced from smouldering wood chips). Some had wagons drawn by oxen.  All the fit horses had been commandeered by the Wehrmacht.  Many trudged through the snow with all their worldly goods piled onto small handcarts. As the thunder of battle drew closer, folk from Zittau joined them.

A fellow-prisoner and I, with our German guard, returned to Kurt Kramer’s wholesale grocer’s premises in Zittau’s Neustadt Square, from delivering  groceries to local retailers, to find that a young woman refugee from Silesia had climbed to Kramer’s top storey and, in despair, thrown herself to her death on the  cobbles of their yard.

The refugees were heading for Dresden, sixty or seventy miles west of Zittau, where they would be sorted out and distributed to the rapidly diminishing areas of Germany that were still relatively safe.  As the second week of February drew to its end, Dresden was packed with them.

Dresden's Lutheran 'Cathedral'. Almost totally destroyed in the bombing raids of February 1945 but now lovingly restored to its former glory.

It was then that the Western Allies struck. On the night of the 13^th February wave after wave of RAF bombers rained fire and destruction on the capital of Saxony, a beautiful historic city crammed with refugees.  Thousands of incendiary bombs created devastating firestorms from which there was no escape. Zittau’s inhabitants saw the westward sky blood-red from the inferno.  With dawn the RAF withdrew and bombers of the US Air Force took their place. Estimates of the dead range from a conservative 30,000 to as many as 100,000.  Among them must have been many of Britain's and America's allies.

I have heard all the explanations and all the excuses.  I remain convinced though that those raids, slaughtering thousands of innocent civilians at a time when the war was all but over, was a war crime and a crime against humanity.  It was not, of course, on the same scale as the Holocaust or other crimes committed by Nazi Germany – but would we really wish to make such a comparison our excuse?

My memory of the cruel slaughter of the innocents in Dresden changed my whole outlook on life and was a major factor in the decision of my wife and I in 1948 to turn our backs on violence, whatever the provocation, and to join the peaceful Quakers.  

‘Full of sound and fury!’*

            ‘Fury’ is a word much overused in the press.  There is ‘fury in the city’ over the suggestion that heads of huge business corporations might be overpaid, ‘fury’ in the House of Commons at the obstinate refusal of the Bishops in the House of Lords to rubber-stamp their plans to penalise the poor, ‘fury’ almost every day in the Daily Mail about ‘benefit scroungers’ being subsidised by hard working Daily Mail readers.

  I try not to get furious too often.  I am sure that at my age it is bad for me. Just occasionally though I read in the press, or hear on radio or tv something that brings me very close to it!  Such a moment occurred this morning (10^th Feb.), making me choke over my boiled egg and toast as I watched a review of the daily press on the BBC’s tv Breakfast programme. A newspaper sympathetic to the government carried a headline telling us that one of David Cameron’s closest advisors (that usually indicates that the government is giving some thought to the matter) suggests that old people should carry on working longer and should downsize their homes. 

Why on earth, the advisor no doubt thinks, should an ancient widower like Ernest Hall, who is no longer a viable ‘human resource unit’ and whose children have long since left home, continue to live in comfort in a three bedroomed bungalow?  ‘A one-bedroomed flat would be ample and much more appropriate for his needs. At ninety he’s probably too old for most paid work but possibly he could take up some profit-making hobby, knitting or basket-making perhaps, that could help to prevent his being quite such a burden on the state’.

              What is the point of urging old people, well past their prime, to carry on working when there are tens of thousands of young, fit and active people looking in vain for jobs?  The government (well, I suppose that one can’t expect too much from a group that probably holds the biggest concentration of millionaires in the UK!) seems to persist in the delusion that unemployment is mostly, if not entirely, the fault of the unemployed.  Government efforts to reduce unemployment concentrate on making young people ‘employable’ – how to prepare a CV, how to write a winning job application, how to prepare and conduct themselves during an interview!  All that would be fine if there were jobs for which people could apply and be interviewed but, thanks largely to the government’s own policies, there aren’t. Perhaps we’ll finish up with having the best-qualified army of unemployed in Europe!

We learn that only one in five of ‘graduates’ from the government’s much-vaunted training schemes obtains a job within a year. That is about right, bearing in mind that nationwide there are at least half a dozen applicants for every job vacancy! 

           

As for the accommodation down-sizing - when the palaces, stately homes, desirable residences and second (and third) homes of the wealthy have been occupied to capacity by the homeless, I’ll think about the future of the modest bungalow that my wife and I bought with our blood, sweat, toil and tears in the 1950s,  '60s and '70s; the home in which, five and a half years ago, my wife’s life came to an end, and in which I hope  mine will come to an end too too!  I don’t think I’ll need to be consulting an estate agent just yet!

            Yes – it does make me furious to think that instead of the better, fairer and more peaceful future for which my generation thought we were fighting in World War II we find ourselves in a grubby and materialistic world of sleaze and corruption, of bankers bonuses and of a press controlled by non-tax-paying cosmopolitan billionaires owing loyalty to no-one but themselves; a world of wealth and privilege for a small minority and homelessness, hopelessness, poverty and enforced idleness for the many.

            I can only hope and pray that this triumph of Mammon is temporary and that goodness, justice and peace will ultimately triumph – though I no longer have any hope of seeing even the beginning of the beginning of that victory.

*From Macbeth again and perhaps particularly appropriate to politics today ‘A tale told by an idiot, full of sound  and fury, signifying nothing’

Toward a Godless Britain?

          It seems likely that the prohibition resulting from a court case, of official prayers at the beginning of local Council Meetings will be short-lived.  Providentially, the Government’s shortly to be enacted Localism Bill will restore the right of local authorities to begin, as Parliament does, with a short period of prayer if their members wish it.

            What disturbs me about this matter is the implication of the National Secular Society, which I haven’t heard effectively refuted, that religion is a private matter having nothing to do with local or national politics, that should be practised only by consenting adults in a church or other special building intended for that purpose.  As a committed Quaker and a communicant member of the Church of England, I believe the exact opposite to be true.  Our religion should inform and guide our every thought and action.

            George Bernard Shaw, no great lover of the Church, said that our faith does not consist of the things that we think we believe, but of the assumptions on which we habitually act.   Jesus said that those who heard his words and acted upon them were like the man who built his house upon a firm foundation. We may indeed hear the word of God in Church, Meeting House, Mosque, Temple or Synagogue but we act in our daily lives. St. Theresa pointed out that, ‘In this world God has no hands but ours to do his work, no feet but ours to run his errands’.

Certainly, before beginning their Council business, Christian councillors should pray that they may be guided to speak and vote in accordance with God’s will.  As an Anglican I am happy for that prayer to be formal and vocal. As a Quaker I’d be equally happy for there to be a few minutes silence at the beginning of each council meeting to be used for silent prayer by those who wish to do so.  Even committed atheists might find a few minutes of quiet reflection helpful before the business of the meeting begins.

            The National Secular Society has the impertinence to consider that it speaks for the majority of Britons.  I am quite sure that it does nothing of the sort.  It will surprise me if the recent census doesn’t reveal that in the UK a comfortable majority of the adult population do have a religious faith and that the Christian faith is the one with the greatest number of adherents.  I am personally acquainted with dozens of committed Christians – Anglicans, Quakers, Roman Catholics, Methodists and United Reformed Churchmen.   I don’t know a single member of the National Secular Society.  Do you?

             I know, none better, that Christians have done some appalling things to each other and to other people in times past.  But I also know that it has been Christians ‘dabbling in politics’ who have pioneered every worthwhile reform that has taken place in this country during the past fifteen hundred years*.  Christians, from King Alfred the Great onwards, have pioneered education for the masses, have cared for the poor and provided shelter for the homeless.  It was a Christian priest, John Ball of Colchester, who preached that When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’ He went on to become a leader of the medieval peasants’ revolt, and paid for his egalitarianism with his life.   Christians led the campaigns against the slave trade and against the exploitation of men, women and children in the ‘dark, satanic mills’ of England’s industrial revolution.  Christians pioneered prison reform and the provision of social housing and medical care for all.  Christian Bishops in the House of Lords today, lead the opposition to the penalisation of the poor and disadvantaged to help solve national financial problems created by wealthy, but greedy and incompetent, bankers.  Christian charities such as Christian Aid, Cafod and Quaker Peace and Service help people of every race, creed and colour world-wide.  

            Yet the National Secular Society would like to see Christian – and no doubt every other form of worship – confined to special buildings serving dwindling congregations and having no connection with their ‘real’ world!   We must not let them succeed.

*  It could be argued that Christian concern about material matters has a much earlier beginning. The triumphal prayer of Mary, when she knew she was to be the mother of Jesus, contains a note of distinctly radical and very practical politics: ‘He hath showed strength with his arm.  He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.  He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things and the rich he hath sent empty away’.  Isn't that just what is needed today?

            

Week 7 09

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Candlemas…and after!

Last year at this time (yes, I have been writing Tendring Topics….on Line for over a
Year!) I quoted an old rhyme about Candlemas which I have found usually provides a pretty reliable long-range weather forecast:

If Candlemas be clear and bright, winter will have another flight.
If Candlemas be dull with rain, winter has gone and will not come again!

Neither forecast fits this year’s Candlemas (Monday 2nd February) which, you’ll recall, was overcast all day and gave us the heaviest and most severe snowstorms that we had experienced for decades. As usually happens, our Essex coast escaped much more lightly than most. I doubt if Clacton had more than about half an inch of snow. Elsewhere though, the country was brought to a standstill, with closed schools, no bus services whatsoever in London and not much better elsewhere, and rail and air services either cancelled altogether or severely disrupted.

Perhaps there needs to be a third line of folklore verse. How about?

If Candlemas be snowy day, winter is here……and here to stay!

The photograph on the left shows my back garden early on 2nd February this year with snow lying, but not very deeply. The one on the right is of the road in which my younger son lives in Enfield, taken on the same day and at about the same time……and there were many places that had much more snow than Enfield.

Darwin’s Other Legacy

I am very sorry that Sir David Attenborough should have received hate mail in connection with his exposition of Darwin’s theory of evolution and the agnosticism that he believes follows naturally from that theory. I am particularly sorry that this hate mail should appear to have come from those who ‘profess and call themselves Christian’.

Surely we who hold the Christian faith should attempt, however imperfectly, to live in the imitation of Christ. Since none of us is perfect we shall certainly fail in this attempt. I hope though that very few would fail so sadly as to imagine that Jesus would or could ever send a message of hate to any of his fellow men or women; certainly not to someone who, whether or not he realizes it, has devoted much of his adult life to revealing the wonder of God’s creation. Whatever are his personal beliefs, few can have done more than Sir David to invoke among the rest of us ‘the fear (or awe) of the Lord that is the beginning of wisdom’.

I’m certainly not one of those ‘creationists’ who believe that a ‘ready for instant use’ world was created by God during the course of six days in the late summer of 4004 BC. Does anyone really still believe that? On the other hand, neither do I believe that the universe came into being by blind chance as a result of the accidental juxtaposition of just the right atoms billions of years ago, that life arose as a result of a similarly accidental combination of atoms and natural forces, and that evolutionary theory explains everything that has happened since. That would demand from me an act of faith far greater than that required for acceptance of, for instance, the Nicene Creed.

I am sure that many people believe, as I do, that God is fulfilling his purpose through evolution, as part of a creative process that began in the infinitely distant past, is taking place today, and will continue into the infinitely distant future. As a Quaker Christian I believe that something of God’s essential nature, his ‘inward light’, is the heritage of every single human, whatever his or her race, colour or creed, and that that ‘inward light’ was personified in Jesus Christ some 2,000 years ago. It is this instinct within ourselves that urges us towards truth, love, compassion, forgiveness and reconciliation; all the things that we know instinctively are good. We may stifle it, ignore it or deny its existence but we cannot utterly destroy it. ‘The Light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overwhelm it’.

Godless interpretations of Darwinism assume that human life has no spiritual dimension whatsoever. The material world that we can see and touch is, it proclaims, all that there is. What we call ‘love’ is just a bio-chemical reaction in the brain that has evolved to ensure the reproduction of the species and encourage its survival. This is the sole purpose of life, including our own. The hope of eternal life is a delusion that has evolved to prevent our being diverted from our evolutionary purpose by the fear of personal extinction.

Acts that we would describe as being of heroism and self-sacrifice are simply those of individuals whose instinct for the survival of the species has evolved more strongly than the instinct for self-preservation. The work of Shakespeare and Milton, of Michaelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, of Archimedes, Galileo, Isaac Newton and Einstein are just the result of evolution having induced fortuitous electro-chemical reactions in their brains.

This kind of Darwinism, reduced to its lowest common denominator of ‘Survival of the Fittest’, justifies the subjugation and genocide of ‘inferior’ humans by those who consider themselves to be ‘superior’. It provided a justification for the Nazi death camps. The Nazis believed that they were fulfilling their evolutionary destiny as a master-race by enslaving and eliminating what they considered to be inferior human stock. Fundamentalist Darwinism has no time for those of us who clearly have no evolutionary purpose …… octogenarians (like myself!) for instance, the mentally or physically disabled, the weak, the drop-outs and the miss-fits. As for the preservation of endangered species and threatened human ethnic groups, extinction is their evolutionary destiny. It would be wrong to interfere.

Would you wish to live in the ‘brave new world’ to which unfettered natural selection points us? I wouldn’t. Fortunately we don’t have to. We have been given (or have evolved) free will. We accept, welcome in fact, the idea of evolution but we do not have to become its helpless puppets. We are free to follow what our Quaker Advices and Queries refer to as ‘the promptings of love and truth in our hearts, and to trust them as the leadings of God’. They will ultimately I believe, bring us toward the fulfilment of part of the universal Christian prayer, ‘Thy will be done on Earth, as it is in Heaven.

Friday the Thirteenth

This coming Friday has a deep, and sad, significance for me. Not because it is the allegedly unlucky ‘Friday the thirteenth’ but because it marks the 64th anniversary of an event that, for the first time in my life, made me feel ashamed to be British.

It was February 1945. I was twenty-three years old and had been taken prisoner at Tobruk in North Africa on 21st June 1942. Since September 1943 I had been a member of a small Arbeitskommando (work camp) of British prisoners of war in Zittau, a small town in eastern Germany. Our main work was loading and unloading railway wagons but we also undertook any other manual task for which we might be needed.

The winter of 1944/’45 was a bitterly cold one in eastern Europe. There was deep snow and for weeks we endured subzero temperatures, day and night. However, any discomfort that this may have caused us was tempered by the conviction that our time of captivity was coming to an end.

Allied armies, after a temporary set-back with ‘the Battle of the Bulge’ at Christmas, were making steady progress on the western and southern fronts.

Meanwhile in Zittau, what had begun as a barely audible murmur from the east had grown louder and louder, and by February, had become a continuous rumble of gunfire as the Soviet Armies advanced through Poland and into Germany. Throughout that bitter winter a steadily swelling stream of refugees from the rapidly approaching Eastern Front had made its way westward through the town. There were old men (all the young ones had been called up), women and children……a few in broken down motor vehicles powered by Holzgas, a fuel produced from smouldering wood chippings, some with all their worldly goods loaded onto ox wagons (the army had seized all the horses). Many trudging through the snow pulling small and heavily laden hand-carts. They were not all German. Among them were allied prisoners of war from Stalags in Poland, Russian and Ukrainian ‘slave workers, and defeated fragments of the armies of Nazi Germany’s allies, Bulgarians, Romanians, volunteers from neutral but Fascist Spain and renegade Cossacks. People from Zittau, people we had known and worked with, had begun to join that westward flow.

Before and during World War II this building was the Zittau headquarters of Kurt Kramer, wholesale grocer. For several weeks, early in 1945, another POW and I worked here, pulling a large hand-cart and, with an elderly German civilian, delivering goods to retail grocers in the town. One day we returned after a delivery to find that one of the refugees, a young woman, had decided that her life was no longer worth living. She had climbed to the top-most storey and thrown herself down onto the cobbles below.


Neither they, nor we, nor our guards, nor the Germans with whom we worked had any doubt that the war would end within months, if not weeks. Few thought any longer of ‘victory’ or ‘defeat’. We all just wanted an end to the misery and carnage.

The refugees were heading for Dresden, some sixty miles west of Zittau, where they would be sorted out and distributed to those parts of Germany that were still considered to be relatively safe. By 13th February Dresden was crowded with refugees, as well as with its own population of German civilians, allied POWs and slave workers from allied countries.

That was the night on which the RAF struck. The American Air Force continued the attack on the following day. We British prisoners in Zittau, only some 60 miles from the target, spent the night in the cellar of the building in which we were housed. In Dresden itself 13 square miles of the beautiful and historic city were destroyed. Estimates of the, mostly civilian, dead vary widely but the true figure is generally accepted as being somewhere between 25,000 and 40,000, the majority burnt alive in the fire-storms produced by the raids. Bad news travels fast and we in Zittau learnt of the destruction and loss of life on the following morning, as the second onslaught by the American Air Force was in progress. It was the only time that I personally experienced hostility from German civilians

These raids, carried out just twelve weeks before the German surrender, were not, of course, comparable with the mass slaughter of the Holocaust. They do however put outrages like ‘nine-eleven’ and for instance, the shelling of Sarajevo by the Serbs during the Yugoslav civil war (reckoned to be a war crime) into perspective.

They changed my attitude to modern warfare and, just two or three years later, were a major factor in my wife Heather and I deciding to join the peaceful, and peace-making Quakers.
Within a few days of the bombing of Dresden it was decided to move 'treasures' from Zittau Town Museum to a place of safety. A party of us POWs had the task of loading a lorry with heavy cases, going with it to Mount Oybin, the spectacular mountain above, a few miles from the town, and unloading them into a ruined monastery at its summit. It is only during the last few years that I have learned that among these treasures was the seven centuries old Zittauer Fastentuch, an enormous piece of linen having painted on it 90 pictures illustrating events recorded in the Old and New Testaments. This ensured me a little local celebrity on recent visits to Zittau.