Letters - 11 August 2023
From Privations and promise to Evolution and revolution
Privations and promise
I am delighted that Sergei Nikitin’s latest project has been successful (28 July). The dreadful famines that followed world war one in central and eastern Europe could so easily be forgotten, particularly in Russia where they remain a brutal and inconvenient reminder of some of Russia’s failures in the last century. It was only through researching my wife’s family history in Austria that I learnt something of those privations.
Sergei’s previous work: Friends and Comrades: How Quakers helped Russians to survive famine and epidemic (happily translated into English) is a meticulous account of the relief work carried out by Friends in the Soviet Union after world war one.
It was this work that earned Friends such a reputation, one that enabled a group of Friends, led by Rufus Jones, to meet with the Gestapo in the wake of Reichspogromnacht in November 1938 (euphemistically called Kristallnacht by the Nazis). They pleaded to bring relief and were heard: ‘the promise made to us was kept, and the door was opened for the extensive relief which followed our visit, including the emigration of many Jews’.
It was initiatives such as these (and the Kindertransport of course) that earned the Friends Service Council the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947, in the still-smoking rubble of a world shattered again by war, as twenty million displaced people sought some sort of safety and refuge.
Ol Rappaport
Climate denial
In response to another reference to climate denial (21 July), is it fair to refer to people like Steve Baker as climate change deniers?
As far as I can make out, he is simply questioning whether: a) the current warming period amounts to a crisis; b) whether an anthropogenic rise in CO2 contributes to that rise in temperature; and c) warning against the importance of handling the research scientifically, wary of using computer modelling to generate results that suit a particular end. Surely true science is that which can be questioned and tested against other than the prevailing view?
Once willing to consider a perspective that goes against mainstream thinking, we would surely be slower to put someone who disagrees with the popular view into the ‘denier’ camp.
Sue Holden
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