Letters - 17 October 2014
From commemoration to contacting Quaker trusts
Commemoration of the first world war
I was glad to read Michael Bartlet’s piece on affirming the significance of each individual death (3 October).
I have recently held a commemoration at the retirement complex where I live. I made a display of photos, letters and so on of five family members involved in the first world war. Both my parents were doctors and worked to save life. My mother’s two brothers were both killed in the war, one aged twenty and the other twenty-two. My father-in-law survived his time in the trenches with terrible memories.
I felt that I wanted to commemorate those two young uncles that I never knew and used some letters of one of them in the commemoration.
My father wrote poems that speak of the waste of life and all its potential, which I used, too.
I was also invited to take the display into a school. I hope that the children came away with a sense of the great loss of men and the quote from my father that ‘it is difficult to justify war – indeed impossible – for anyone who has met it face to face’.
I think we can and should commemorate those young men who gave their lives, while avoiding glorifying war.
Ann Fox
Concerns
Michael Yates (10 October) asks Friends to consider the possibility ‘that pure pacifism in the current Islamic State situation makes us complicit in the death, torture and rape carried on by this non-Islamic force’. He asks, ‘Can we really “pass by on the other side”?’
This is a false dilemma, and I hope we shan’t spend much time discussing it. Fighting is not the only alternative to inaction.
The answer is indicated in Michael’s Bible reference. The good Samaritan did not raise the level of violence in the situation; instead he tried what love can do (as William Penn urges us all) in acts of compassion and healing.
John Lampen
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