from Alastair McIntosh 25 July 2022

Hi Tim (and Jonathon)

I see it a little differently than Jonathon. I completely get the logic of what he is saying. The logic of war is impeccable all the way up to nuclear war. But not least as a Quaker, I don’t think that war has to be the only way. For me, nonviolence is a spiritual and not an instrumental approach. It may entail the way of the cross, though it may also be the key to “kingdom” or as I prefer to translate it, “community come”.

 

Nonviolence is not a tap that can be turned on and off at will. It is an integrated approach to life. With Ukraine, and other wars such as those the west has recently engaged in, the question is not just what do you do now, it is what have you been doing all along to, as Quakers put it, “take away the occasion of all war”. I address this in two very short articles that I wrote for Quaker publications at the time of the Ukraine invasion, here.  I address it more fully in my military addresses, a summary of which in a British military ethics handbook is here. And I attach the uncorrected proofs of my chapter in the forthcoming The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Religion and Peace.

 

What might have been the alternative for Ukraine? I would point to the nonviolent response of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the “parallel polis” (see the Vaclav Benda and Vaclav Havel et al. paper attached) that then took root and helped to seed the freedom that emerged from Glastnost a generation later in 1989. Yes, it took a generation, but it helped to inspire wider freedom across the former USSR, and the pity is that the West squandered the peace dividend as Gorbachev has ruefully observed – see, for example, here and here (where in 2016 he blasted western “triumphalism”).  

 

I would love to have more time to study the Czechoslovakian response (and criticisms of it) more closely. Meanwhile, I would observe that they emerged with their country and a generation of their young men mostly intact. With Ukraine, whenever I hear the calls to pump in more weaponry, I ask “How’s the war going”. And I lament, especially where both Russia and Ukraine have a Christian foundation from which, if they cared to heed the gospels and especially their culmination in John 18:36, they might have proceeded.

 

Alastair

Many thanks for this, Alastair.

I do love John 18:36 that is marked in my Bible with a lovely Christmas card from my three Halesowen South ward councillors and MP, James Morris from a few years ago - but has never been repeated!  And, I adore the alternative Rule of Jesus in the Gospels to the Rule of Johnson and Patel, Sunak and Truss that is so barren, unenlightened and contrary to the community of Christ based on justice, equality and the Other First and Foremost.

Thanks to both of you.