I should have ordered another thousand copies of last month’s issue of REM. We ran out before the end of the month (10,000 copies). To me, the edition’s rapid disappearance from our boxes indicates that our story about Dana Schmidt, the young journalist who was sent to Berlin in 1938 just as Hitler was about to annex Czechoslovakia and launch his destructive rampage across Europe, might have struck a nerve with readers. In this critical moment in our country and our world, the message I interpret from Schmidt’s more than one thousand letters home and articles he wrote about his experiences in Germany eighty years ago is loud and clear: Don’t do this again. The global rightward swing to dictatorships and fascism signifies, may I say, that the devastating lessons of WWII are not being heeded.
I keep thinking about the time I went to see old friends who’d moved to France from our Fort Bragg neighborhood. After a stay at their place in Brittany, we all piled in a car and took a road trip to Paris, stopping at The Caen Memorial in Normandy, a museum dedicated to peace. Its exhibits cover the history of World War II with images and artifacts from the largest and deadliest conflict in human history, during which sixty to eighty million people were killed.
The impact of browsing the museum’s displays almost brought me to my knees. In the plaza in front of the massive doorway that splits the flat face of the building in half stands a showstopper, a fitting preamble to what is inside: a statue called Non-Violence, also known as The Knotted Gun. It is one of about a hundred copies of a bronze sculpture, created by Swedish artist Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd, of an oversized handgun with its barrel tied in a knot. The image is so stark and shocking and the message from the past, again, quite plain: Do NOT let this happen again. Inscribed on the entrance of the building is a quote from poet Paul Dorey: “The pain broke me; the fraternity relieved me; of my wound sprang a river of freedom.”—referring of course to the sacrifice of those who fought and gave their lives to vanquish the evil of Nazism and fascism in Germany, Italy, Hungary and beyond. But the cost…
Non-Violence…Tie the barrel in a knot. The powerful image urges anything but war…Diplomacy, reason—in short, not giving democracy over to power-hungry authoritarians who would deceive the world into overthrowing the ideals those soldiers fought so hard for.
But here we are. Divided and at war in a matrix of worldwide discordance that surely will not lead to peace. How is it that so many are opting for authoritarian rule; how is it that so many cannot perceive the warnings and clear examples of history going in this direction? I hope, if you missed last month’s feature story, “1000 Letters Home Eighty Years Later,” that you will go to our website, read, and recommend it. How can we not heed the wisdom of those who know what they are talking about? Non-Violence. Really.
