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Hiroshima
An old eucalyptus tree grows in the ruins of Hiroshima Castle. Although only 750 metres from ground zero when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima at 8.15 am on 6 August 1945, the eucalyptus tree survived and still lives. All around it for miles about was destroyed. Warfare has not been central to the discussion that has unfolded on this site, but it cannot be ignored. It is only foreigners or rebels that we kill in war. To label someone a foreigner is potentiality or in reality a licence to deprive them of life in “the national interest”. Moreover the logic of war provides a licence to deprive our…
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The Duty of Kindness and Sympathy Towards Strangers and Foreigners
It is hardest to write of those things about which we feel most deeply. Today I wish to write about someone whose words and life have profoundly influenced and inspired me. That person is Abdu’l Baha: the son of the founder of the Baha’i Faith and its leader from 1892 to 1921. I wish to address particularly what Abdu’l Baha had to say about the issue of ‘foreignness’. One hundred years ago, on 16 and 17 October 1911, he gave his first recorded talk to the people of Paris. The theme of his talk was “the duty of kindness and sympathy towards strangers and foreigners”. What did Abdu’l Baha see…
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Love Your Mother
Pictures of planet Earth “our home planet” capture our imagination. This one commemorates Earth Day and its message is simple: we need to love the planet we live on. It’s easy to take our ability to see the whole Earth for granted and to forget that until the ‘Space Age’ at the end of the 1960’s we had simply never seen it that way: we’d never got the whole thing in perspective. “The Blue Marble”, the photograph that appears in our logo, was taken in 1972 by Harrison Schmitt, one of the astronauts of the Apollo 17 mission. Robert Poole is his book Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth describes it as ‘A photographic manifesto for…
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Abolish Foreignness
Eight million children under the age of five die each year from largely preventable causes. One billion people live in abject poverty. Thousands die crossing international borders while fleeing poverty, war or persecution. Rich countries reinforce barriers, laws and measures to prevent people crossing their borders. Hundreds of thousands are held in migration prisons as if they were criminals. 67 million people live as refugees or are internally displaced as a result of persecution, war, poverty or other causes. Believing that human beings are “foreigners” makes such profound human rights violations possible.
