Henry Cadbury was a New Testament scholar and a professor at Harvard Divinity School.
He was also a staunch anti-war activist, and a Quaker.
In fact, when the Religious Society of Friends – the Quakers – was awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize in 1947, it was Professor Cadbury who accepted it.
He was a good guy, in other words.
He devoted his life to peace and social justice.
He was a role model in many ways.
But this video isn’t about that.
This video is about a time when Henry Cadbury got it wrong.
So wrong.
In 1934, Adolf Hitler had been Chancellor of Germany for a year, and his Nazi party
had been steadily gaining power in Germany for over a decade.
While the worst was still to come, the Nazis had already been established as the country’s
only legal political party.
Trade unions had been banned, with many of their leaders sent to concentration camps
such as the one that had just opened the year before at Dachau.
A program to sterilize the mentally ill and disabled had been put into action.
Jews had been banned from practicing law, working as journalists, or joining the civil
service.
That June the Central Conference of American Reform Rabbis held its annual convention at
the South Mountain Manor Resort, about 90 minutes west of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Professor Cadbury was invited to address the opening session of the convention.
And to this gathering of 150 American and Canadian rabbis, he said:
“By hating Hitler and trying to fight back, Jews are only increasing the severity of his
policies against them.”
Cadbury also criticized efforts to boycott products produced in Nazi Germany.
He called boycotts “war without bloodshed.”
“War in any form is not the way to right the wrongs being inflicted on the Jewish people,”
he told the rabbis.
Like I said, Henry Cadbury was a good person.
And like any good Quaker, he was absolutely sincere in his commitment to non-violence.
And it’s easy to see the appeal of that point of view.
When faced with an opponent that has shown itself capable of perpetrating the most egregious
forms of violence imaginable, the notion that you can defeat all that hatred and horror
with kindness and humanity is an attractive one.
That’s what Cadbury told the conference of rabbis.
“If Jews appeal to the German sense of justice and the German national conscience, I am sure
the problem will be solved more effectively and earlier than otherwise,” he said.
It’s simple.
It calls out to the best parts of us – our compassion, our reason.
It’s also a bit of self-flattery, isn’t it?
“If I could just have a civil conversation with them, I’m sure I could show them the
error of their ways.”
Who wouldn’t like to think themselves capable of that?
There are many of us today who think we should be responding to rising modern fascist movements
just as Cadbury urged the rabbis to respond to the Nazis.
Earlier this week I got a comment on one of my videos that read “A fascist-enabling
piece of garbage needs to be talked to about the issues and shown the error of their ways.
Attacking, no matter how despicable, the person changes no hearts EVER.
. . . Doing what the other side has done, because the other started it first, is childish
and is detrimental to your higher cause.”
And then you can also see my smartass response, calling him Professor Cadbury.
I was writing this video at the time.
I couldn’t help it.
I don’t fault the intention behind comments like that.
And I certainly sympathize with the desire to not add violence to an already violent
situation.
But here’s my problem with strategies like the ones proposed by Professor Cadbury and
my commenter: they don’t work.
When we assume we can have an honest conversation about our differences of opinion with a Nazi
– neo or original recipe – we’re making a couple of very dangerous mistakes.
First, we’re elevating the beliefs and goals of Nazis to the level of civil discourse.
That’s a bad idea.
That’s worse than a bad idea – that’s morally abhorrent.
If you’re on one side of the table arguing that all people deserve justice and equality
regardless of their race, religion, gender, sexuality, ability, what-have-you, and the
person across from you believes that certain people are inherently inferior and deserving
of persecution and death based on which of those categories they happen to fall into,
what’s in the middle?
Where do you compromise with someone who rejects the very concept of universal human rights?
Ah, you might say, but I’m not seeking to compromise with that person!
I won’t have to give up any ground, because I’m going to persuade them that I’m right!
That’s where the second mistake comes in: assuming that Nazi sitting across the table
from you is any less committed to his ideals than you are to yours.
I think, whether we realize it or not, a lot of us have this idea that people only disagree
with us because they haven’t seen what we’ve seen, and they don’t know what we know.
A Nazi only thinks white people are superior because he hasn’t gotten to know enough
people of color.
He only wants to establish an ethnostate because he doesn’t know any better.
Right?
Sometimes.
It happens.
There are ex-Nazis, ex-Klansmen.
People do see the light, and change.
But a World War wasn’t necessary to end the horrors of the Third Reich because more
people didn’t try to reason with Hitler.
It wouldn’t have mattered how many Jews answered Hitler’s hatred with shows of goodwill.
It wouldn’t have mattered how many others took the high road and tried to reason the
Nazis out of committing atrocities.
It’s not as if the people who are now ex-Nazis are the only ones to ever encounter the arguments
that convinced them to walk away from their old ideology.
Lots of Nazis have heard those arguments.
Most of them aren’t persuaded.
Most of them don’t change.
You don’t defeat Nazis by making friends with them.
You have to fight them.
That doesn’t necessarily mean violence.
Sometimes it does – which is difficult for certain people to accept – but not always.
But it does mean actively opposing them, working to thwart their attempts to accumulate power
and influence.
This isn’t a recent insight.
Some of those who heard Henry Cadbury’s speech in 1934 thought the same thing, and
said so.
The conference of rabbis released an official statement responding to Cadbury, which read
in part:
“While the conference . . . does not advocate any particular type of resistance, it believes
that moral persuasion should be supplemented by every manor of non-violent resistance calculated
to bring an end to the regime of inequity and enslavement which today obtains in Nazi
Germany.”
One of the rabbis, Stephen Wise, was also quoted in the New York Times specifically
repudiating Cadbury’s proposal that Jews adopt a “live and let live” approach to
the Nazis, saying that Cadbury “makes it appear as if some vulgar quarrel or street
brawl had occurred between Hitler and the Jews and that the Jews were at fault.”
Another rabbi put it more directly: “If we do not resist evil, we go along with it.”
Last year Angus Johnston, historian and professor at the City University of New York, wrote
about Cadbury’s speech for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
He also tweeted the excerpts of New York Times articles on Cadbury’s speech and the rabbis’
official response that served as the immediate inspiration for this video.
Johnston closes his JTA article with this:
“We now know that Cadbury was wrong because Nazism was worse than he was able to imagine
it being, and because it would soon become far worse than he could imagine it becoming.”
We don’t have that excuse.
We don’t have to imagine how bad Nazism and similar ideologies can get if they are
allowed to gain the power they seek.
We know.
It happened.
We know Cadbury was wrong, and the rabbis who challenged him, and everyone else who
tried to warn the world about Hitler and the Nazis, were right.
You can’t put your faith in the reason and humanity of Nazis.
If their reason and humanity were propertly functioning, they wouldn’t be Nazis in the
first place!
Being nice to them, engaging them in intellectual discourse, appeasing them, doesn’t work.
You have to fight them.
Again, that doesn’t necessarily mean violence.
The rabbis who released that statement in response to Cadbury stopped short of endorsing
violence.
But what they did endorse was resistance.
Those who promote bigotry and intolerance, who vilify and scapegoat minority groups,
who seek to destroy institutions set up to guard against dictatorship and despotism,
must be resisted.
If you pass them a microphone, you’re not resisting them.
If you fight for their ability to fundraise or recruit, you’re not resisting them.
If you argue they deserve a place onstage, you’re not resisting them.
If you invite them on your podcast or your livestream, you’re not resisting them.
If you share articles from their websites, you’re not resisting them.
If you ignore them, you’re not resisting them.
And if you do not resist evil, you go along with it.