6 January
Jacques Ellul
January 6, 1912—May 19, 1994
Peaceful Anarchist
Born in Bordeaux, Ellul converted to Christianity at age twenty-two. He was a leader in the French Resistance in World War II, and, despite being greatly influenced by Marx’s Das Kapital at age sixteen (and later by theologian Karl Barth, the “second great element” of his intellectual life), Ellul maintained that Christianity and anarchism are neither ideologically nor socially incompatible. “Biblical thinking,” he argued, beginning with the Hebrew Scriptures, is intensely anarchist. Ellul believed that Jesus’ teaching on the relationship between the Divine and the state has been skewed by the institutional church in order to wield power within the state, thereby stymieing real peace and true cooperation between people.
In 1937, Ellul married Yvette while serving as Director of Studies at the University of Strasbourg. In 1940, after his father was arrested and killed by the Nazis for being a “foreigner,” Ellul fled with his Holland-born wife before she could suffer the same fate. For the next four years, the two lived a meager existence in the countryside while helping the French Resistance.
In 1944, Ellul became deputy mayor of Bordeaux and also served on the National Synod of the Reformed Church of France. Both these endeavors led him to become disillusioned and critical of both political and religious institutions.
Ellul was especially wary of technological advances, warning that technology in modern society is suspect if it becomes a vehicle for the mass media propaganda that serves to legitimate the sacrality of the state and thus acts as a means of manipulation and control. Ellul wrote, “When I say that I ‘despise technology’ . . . it is not technology per se, but the authoritarian power that the ‘technocrats’ seek to exercise, as well as the fact that technology determines our lives without our being able to intervene or, as yet, control it.”
Ellul dedicated himself to writing philosophical and theological works on Christianity and anarchy. His anarchy, which he argued was modeled on Jesus’ social teachings, specifically championed non-domination as opposed to disorder.
A sympathetic commentator once remarked that Ellul’s sharp criticisms of the politics of modern society made him like the child who “blurted out that the emperor has no clothes.” The “prophet of Bordeaux,” as his admirers called him, died in Pessac, France. Thanks to his work, we’re more attuned to invisibly oppressive structures that stifle freedom and foster violence.
7 January
Sadako Sasaki
January 7, 1943—October 25, 1955
A Child’s Hope for Peace
The death of a single child due to the insanity of war may be the world’s most heinous crime. In the city of Hiroshima, Japan, one monument dedicated in 1958 depicts a young victim of the atomic bomb. The plaque reads, “This is our cry. This is our prayer. Peace in the world.”
Sadako Sasaki was only two years old and one mile away from ground zero when the atom bomb named “Little Boy” struck on 6 August 1945. Most of her family miraculously escaped destruction, but the radioactive black rain that subsequently fell upon the city stained Sadako’s clothes. In 1954, at the opening of the Hiroshima peace park, Sadako told her best friend, Chizuko Hamamoto, “I can remember it. There was a flash, like a million suns, then a heat that felt like pricking needles.”
Sadako was a strong, athletic eleven-year-old track runner when she was diagnosed with leukemia, which was most probably caused by her exposure to the bomb’s radiation. Shortly after she was admitted to Hiroshima’s Red Cross hospital, members of her track team visited her, bringing her gifts. One of them, Sadako’s best friend Chizuko, told her the story of the “thousand cranes” after she noticed Sadako admiring the bright paper birds hanging over the hospital beds of other patients.
The tale Chizuko told was the legend of the crane, a creature sacred in Japan for its longevity; cranes were believed to live for one thousand years. Functioning like the prayer flags of India and Tibet, folded paper cranes in Japan connected the human and divine realms. It was believed that the sacred crane favored whoever made the effort to fold a thousand pieces of paper into its shape, and would grant the wish of the maker.
The story renewed Sadako’s hope for recovery from her illness. She longed to rejoin her track team and run relay races once again. So she spent most of her time folding cranes, scrounging scraps of paper—sometimes using even the wrappers on medicine bottles—wherever she could find them. Inside each one, Sadako carefully wrote her wish: Make me well.
Sadako died at the age of twelve after folding thirteen hundred cranes. Her teammates began a campaign to raise funds for a memorial to her—a statue of Sadako holding a golden crane. It stands in her honor and to the memory of all the children who died as a result of the atomic bomb blast in Hiroshima. It is one of the world’s most vivid monuments to peace.
8 January
Emily Greene Balch
8 January 1867—9 January 1961
Global Peace Is Ultimately Personal
The second woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize (awarded to her in 1946), Emily Greene Balch was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of a prosperous and educated family dedicated to abolitionism in the years leading up to the Civil War. Taking advantage of the opportunities in higher education available to women of her generation, Balch was a member of Bryn Mawr’s first graduating class in 1889.
Balch’s commitment to social justice and peace began in her youth under the influence of the Reverend Charles Dole, whom she described as a preacher of “good will, not in the sense of mere kindliness, but of unceasing ‘all out’ willing the good.” Along with Vida Scudder and Helena Dudley, Balch founded Denison House in Boston, named in honor of the British socialist theologian Frederick Denison Maurice and inspired by the burgeoning Christian Socialist movement in America.
Balch’s religious views—founded on the liberal Unitarianism of her youth, which valued rational discourse over polemics—led her to view coercive force as “self-defeating” and to assert that “new methods, free from violence, must be worked out for ending abuses and for undoing wrongs, as well as for achieving positive ends.” She became a Quaker in 1921.
After graduate studies in economics and social justice in Paris and Berlin, Balch joined the faculty of Wellesley College in 1896. When the United States entered World War I, she participated in anti-war movements because she believed that the violence of this and all other wars reflected “our whole economic and social system [and] our scale of value.” Her socialist and pacifist views led to her termination from Wellesley after a twenty-two-year teaching career.
In 1919, Balch became the Secretary-Treasurer of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. In that position, she worked diligently for global peace, believing that nationalism was antithetical to real or enduring peace. Social change, Balch argued, came only through understanding that “the most precious thing we know of is personality.” Personal relationships are the key to peace.
In 1939, Balch was again at the forefront of the anti-war movement. Soon, however, she reluctantly modified her pacifist stance toward Nazism, believing that military opposition to Hitler was a necessary although unspeakably tragic evil.
Balch’s enduring work with the Women’s International League for Peace and Justice helped shape policy decisions of the League of Nations and eventually influenced the principles promoted by