Quakernomics by Mike King

Author:Mike King
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857281128
Publisher: Anthem Press

Slavery, Pacifism, the League of Nations and the United Nations

We have already seen that many prominent Quakers were active in the anti-slavery movement. Although early Quakers owned slaves in America it was typical that they should be ahead of their time in abandoning this practice and then seeking its universal end. Hence why the accusations of the Evening Standard were so hurtful to the Cadburys. Quakers were involved in the movement to end the opium trade, and of course in the temperance movement, rather to the discomfort of some Quaker brewers.

We have seen that pacifism is a central Quaker belief, though this was not dogmatically held, and in the American Civil War some Quakers did take up arms, and not all were disowned for it. Pacifism is often misunderstood as an entirely passive stance, but for the Quakers, work towards peace and preventing war is as important as refusing to serve. Quakers met with Tolstoy, and, whether it was through such direct contact or through reading their literature, or both, Tolstoy was greatly influenced by them in his pacifism.19 In turn Ghandi, a self-professed disciple of Tolstoy, must have indirectly also owed some of his pacifist thinking to the Quakers. Tolstoy suffered much vilification for his pacifism, and the Quakers too have been subject to prejudice on that count. When John Bright made an impassioned speech against the Crimean War it lost him his seat in Parliament.

Here I want to briefly focus on a more recent Quaker, Philip Noel-Baker (1889–1982) who was heavily involved in the formation of the League of Nations. As a young man he was an athlete and ran for Britain at the Stockholm Olympic Games in 1912. During World War I he organised and led the Friends’ Ambulance Unit attached to British troops in France, and afterwards became the first Sir Ernest Cassel Professor of International Relations at the University of London. We saw already that he was later elected as a Labour MP to Parliament, but he was also a renowned campaigner for disarmament who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1959. In 1944 Noel-Baker was placed in charge of British preparatory work for the United Nations and the following year helped to draft the charter of the UN at San Francisco.

The connection between the UN and the Quakers does not stop there however: the Quaker United Nations Office (QUNO), set up in 1948, has operations both in New York and Geneva. Its parent body, the Friends World Committee for Consultation, has consultative status at the UN, alongside other religious organisations such as the Brahma Kumaris. Along with contemporary institutions like the various Rowntree Trusts, the QUNO is part of the Quaker legacy for peace and social justice in the twenty-first century. In 1947, the Quakers, represented by their two great relief organisations, the Friends Service Council and the American Friends Service Committee (which published Speak Truth to Power), were given the Nobel Peace Prize for their work. Another Quaker, Emily Greene Balch, the leader

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.