Welcome back to the Fourth Wave podcast. Today, we are continuing our series on nonviolent action by looking at nonviolent actions actions in World War two. I'm particularly excited about this episode for a few reasons. First of all, World War two is often the war used to justify the necessity of violence in the world. You know, if if you ever try to bring up the idea of pacifism or non violence, people are always gonna be like, Well, what about World War II?

You just let all the Jews die like you're okay with Holocaust? So in everybody's minds, World War II absolutely justifies the use of violence. But in reality, there's so much misconception about World War two. To begin with, this concept of World War two as this wonderful altruistic endeavor really imports the Holocaust as a reason for going into war. It's anachronistic.

It's taking this cause that we now know, right? Saving the Jews, and it imports that as a rationale for people back in the day, when by and large, it just it wasn't a reason that people were going to war and fighting. And part of that is because a lot of people just didn't know what was going on, or the extent to which it was occurring, and I'm sure part of it is because people didn't really care all that much. They might have cared if they knew to the extent that it was, but I mean, we're coming out of a time in The United States when we were pretty big on eugenics. I mean, what was it like 1929, you have the Buck versus Bell case when we're forcefully sterilizing people, and there's all kinds of eugenic stuff going on in The US prior to the Nazis, and the Nazis used a bunch of our stuff that we were doing here as kind of a playbook for what they did.

Now, they might have amps that up a bit and and gone to much worse extremes, but to an extent, I don't know how big of a problem we had with with certain forms of of eugenics. And if you want to push back on that and say, well, no, we knew what was going on and that's why we got in. That's why we got into World War II. Then you're gonna have to explain why we turned away plenty of Jewish refugees. I mean, that that either indicates that we were ignorant to what was going on, and makes my point, or it shows our complicity with the Holocaust and makes an even stronger point for me that I don't think you want to make.

I think you'd rather agree with me that we were largely ignorant to what was going on in World War II. But even even beyond this, even beyond being anachronistic and importing the Holocaust as a rationale for for the war, which I don't think it was, beyond that, using World War II as a standard for a moral war also shows the ignorance of what that war actually entailed. It ignores the targeting of civilian centers, the fire bombing, which was worse than the nuclear bombs, but then of course, we do have the nuclear bombs. We have starvation blockades, and I mean, the the list just goes on. World War two was an atrocity on all sides.

So one reason I'm going to enjoy this episode is because it really I think it's going to help to show an alternative narrative to this concept that that death, destruction, and physical powers power are the ways to peace and victory. I just I think that this is gonna kind of dismantle that a bit. The second reason I am looking forward to this episode is because there's just so much here in terms of non violence, and it's so powerful. I mean, I'm only gonna scratch the surface of non violent events in World War Two. And of the events that I scratch from the whole pile of events, I'm only going to scratch the surface of those particular events in this episode.

But what I I think you're gonna see in this is the power of nonviolence. Because, you know, a lot of times what people are gonna say is that, oh, if nonviolence worked, it was a fluke. So say someone like Gandhi's nonviolent movement, that worked because the sun was setting on the British Empire, and, you know, they were overextended at this point, and the world's favor on empires and colonialism was kind of fading. So of course, Gandhi's non violent movement worked. He had momentum in his favor.

The British were on their heels. They were already on the way out of imperialism, and, Gandhi just kind of gave them that last little nudge over the edge. And the same might be said of the civil rights movement. And while the South was going strong on Jim Crow and lynchings, the rest of the world and the rest of the nation had become so different in terms of the visible atrocities that it that it was willing to accept. King and other civil rights leaders simply exploited the newer medium of television to get the images of what was going on to the the larger public who was was very against what the the smaller segment of the nation, in the South in particular, was was doing.

So it wasn't really non violent strategy that brought about results, it was just kind of happenstance. It just worked out that way because they exploited the timing. But you can't really say that about World War II. You know, when when you are using non violence against the strongest military power in the world at the peak of their strength, What are you gonna say about that? The Nazis were on their heels in 1942 when they had all of Europe under their boot?

Yeah, the argument just doesn't work out so well. So I think non violence in World War II is some of the strongest evidence that you're gonna be able to get, some of the strongest stories that you're gonna have, because you you can't imagine a more dire situation when it seems like fighting with weapons is all you have, and what you're gonna see is something very different, I think. So those are just a few of the reasons that I really love talking about World War II. Now I do want to be clear, I'm not gonna claim that non violence brought down the Nazi regime. Bombs and guns ultimately did that, largely.

But what you are going to see is that where non violence was implemented against the Nazis on a larger scale, the most powerful army in the world had very little power. In the episode that follows then, we'll take a look at some individual and small group efforts, as well as some larger scale non violent efforts. Some of the efforts ended up being failures in the sense that they led to prison or death for the adherents, though I suppose if becoming a POW or getting killed in action negated one's cause, then many soldiers are losers too. And I don't think anybody's really gonna want to say that, right? You sacrifice for a greater good for an ultimate cause to push that cause forward.

And if you recognize that it's not a failure because one side has POWs and casualties from battle, then I don't think you can you can call non violent action a failure based on those things either. On the other hand, we'll also see a number of non violent actions here which did have huge success. So, buckle up, I guess, because without further ado, we'll jump right into the show here. We'll start with probably a not very well known event, though if you listen to season one, I forget which episode, maybe four, but we did mention this individual's name. So we're gonna start with an individual whose name is Sophie Scholl.

Now Scholl was a German university student who along with her brother and and some others were engaged in disseminating leaflets with an with anti Nazi sentiments on it. They're part of, I believe, they were called the White Rose Group, and there were different cells all over the country. While distributing one of their their anti Nazi leaflets, Sophie and her brother were caught. They were later tried and convicted, I guess of treason probably, and then they were executed by guillotine. Now as far as the known impact of their actions, there isn't really anything that that we have directly in terms of what occurred at the moment, like from their direct contact with other people.

We don't know if any or many students were persuaded, and we don't know what actions may have resulted from their lives, from their actions. However, even assuming that no great things came of their actions, Sophie recognized something profound, something which was discussed in the Gandhi episode when we talked about Sultanizen's Live Not by Lies, where where he discusses the importance of exposing lies, of bearing the truth, and how that undermines the system. Because you're like, why would why would Sophie, a a young teenage girl who probably is zero threat to the Nazi government, I mean, what, she's handing out pamphlets and you know that she's non violent so she's not gonna try to kill or sabotage, you know, the Nazis, like she's not gonna cut their brakes so a truck full of Nazis dies, like she's non violent, like what's she gonna do? But she was executed via guillotine because the Nazis, just like all dictators and and those in the political sphere, recognize that facades and lies are what prop up violence and evil and power. So here's here's what Sofie said, quote, Somebody, after all, had to make a start.

What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don't dare express themselves as we did, end quote. So like Sultanizen and Havel recognized in their works, again, we discussed in the Gandhi episode, the exposing of lies is vital to stripping dictators of their power. Why would a few teenagers be executed for distributing some pamphlets? Because when truth is revealed and lies are exposed, it threatens power.

A young teenage girl realized that in Nazi Germany, but most of us don't get that today. Sophie recognized the power of courageous action and the importance of a willingness to be the first and among the few to stand up to evil. She recognized the power that that had, And she went to her execution bravely, and she's quoted as saying the following on her way right before her execution. Quote, Such a fine, sunny day and I have to go. What does my death matter if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?

End quote. She died without regrets. You know, she knew that her life up to this point may have been meaningless, handing out a bunch of pamphlets, but she recognized that her execution wasn't exposing of evil, it was a revealing of the truth, of where evil lay and where true power lay because she could make the decision to do right, a decision many Germans weren't doing at that time to stand up for their neighbors. She was choosing rightly and that was true and that was beautiful. Now certainly, we could dismiss Sophie's actions as meaningless, and her death as a waste.

If we measure any soldier's or dissident's life by direct impact, most are in vain, aren't they? I mean, even like we were talking about soldiers and POWs and casualties, most of the death and destruction is vanity in terms of direct impact. However, even Sophie's seemingly meaningless act didn't go unnoticed through history. Now, here's a quote from from the Wikipedia page on on her and her legacy in Germany, quote, In 02/2003, Germans were invited by television broadcaster ZDF to participate in a show, Our Best, a nationwide competition to choose the top 10 most important Germans of all time. Voters under the age of 40 helped Scholl and her brother Hans to finish in fourth place above Bach, Goethe, Gutenberg, Bismarck, Willy Brandt, and Albert Einstein.

If the votes of young viewers alone had been counted, Sophie and Hans Scholl would have been ranked first. Several years earlier, readers of Bridget, a German magazine for women, voted Scholl the greatest woman of the twentieth century, end quote. Now obviously, I don't think that her being recognized, her legacy being recognized, validates what she did, that's not what gives her apt meaning, but it is, I think, naive to think that what she did was a waste. Even if some people are only able to recognize that in retrospect because her story was preserved, we recognize that speaking truth to violence is a characteristic that we all want, and something that we hope is true in our society, that if there's a tyrant, if there are nationalists, fascists, whatever it may be, if our neighbors start to get taken, we want the courage to speak truth to power, even if that costs us our lives. So let's move on to another story.

We'll we'll do another individual here. This is, of course, probably were expecting this Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I'm not going to spend a ton of time on Bonhoeffer here because I have two episodes dedicated to him in season two, our season on consequentialism, and I'll link those episodes in the show notes. But Bonhoeffer is one of the the few strong voices among German Christians who pushed back against the Nazi Party. He taught non violence to his students, and while a lot of people today assume that he threw off non violence for something they consider more realistic, I think that's a big assumption.

And part of that, there are lots of reasons that people think that he ended up embracing violence, and one is because of Metaxas' work, which is from the Germans with whom I've spoken, his work is garbage on Bonhoeffer, and a lot of works kind of take liberties in in the facts here. So I I really do encourage you to go back and listen to the the episodes on Bonhoeffer from season two, and and take a take a listen to an alternative perspective which which might also be, you know, on the the opposite side, and and maybe the truth lies somewhere more in the middle. But the story is a lot more complex than everybody thinking that, well, Bonhoeffer was a pacifist, then one day he woke up and realized that he needed to kill some people because sometimes you just have to do that. That's, in my opinion, not how it went down. So in season two, we do discuss the evidence for Bonhoeffer's maintained non violent position, and maybe the implications of if he did change over, does that mean that, you know, he was willing to compromise with evil and so his decision still wasn't right?

Like was he just willing to do a bad thing because he felt like he had to, but that he didn't think it was justified? Or did he really change his whole philosophy, his whole theology? Now regardless of if Bonhoeffer did maintain his ideological position, we do know that he did use non violent tactics to help rescue some Jews. He infiltrated the Abwehr, which is I guess the CIA or NSA, I don't know, of Nazi Germany, and he used his position to sneak some Jews out of the country, and he did teach non violence to his students. Bonhoeffer was later captured and executed.

Now some say that he was executed for a conspiracy to kill Hitler, though his arrest record and the timing of his imprisonment don't really line up with that. Today Bonhoeffer's work is very influential worldwide. He's best known for his book Life Together, and any of the completed works that we have are in Bonhoeffer's written from Bonhoeffer's non violent stage, if you think that he ever changed stages. So that's Bonhoeffer and Scholl, two individuals, both ended up being executed in the end for their actions. Bonhoeffer had to argue for his subversive actions in regard to sneaking out Jews, and Scholl in regard to her distribution of anti Nazi propaganda.

And interestingly, both of those individuals were German citizens who worked to resist non violently from within Germany. So we're gonna kind of switch from individual Germans to now group Germans, and then after after this next one, we'll switch to just groups outside of Germany. So for number three, and I know that I'm gonna say lots of words wrong in this podcast, so if you're German, I'm sorry, but the Rosenstrasse Protests. In 1943, hundreds to thousands of Jewish men were rounded up to be deported to death camps, and I believe this was inside Berlin specifically. Now thousands of women, wives and fiances who were non Jewish protested even in bitter weather and even through an air raid.

They protested for seven days. And eventually, the Nazi leadership released the prisoners back to their loved ones. They ended up saving their Jewish husbands and fiances. Now the amazing thing about this story to me is that we're talking about 1943 when Germany was in its prime, or had at least just peaked. You know, this isn't retreat mode here.

This isn't nineteen forty four Battle of the Bulge, right? This is, I mean, at least a good six months before D Day even. So we're talking about Germany's prime, or Germany had at least just peaked. So Germany, at the height of its power and momentum, put one of the major part of its plans to kill Jews on hold for maybe like 2,000 women who were coming out in the streets and just refusing to move. That's pretty amazing to me.

And of course, at least in The States, never heard about it at all. You know, I'd heard about Bonhoeffer before, never heard of Scholl, never heard of the Rosenstrasse Protests. And I think, if I'm gonna be a little bit cynical, the reason that we hear about Bonhoeffer is because he didn't stay a pacifist in the eyes of a lot of people. Like, Oh, we can use him and we can refer to him because look, he's a realist. Maybe that's too cynical, but I kind of have a feeling that things would be different if he remained naive as we would see it.

So but anyway, let's consider the protest at hand. Now there there are a few things to consider here. First, since this was in Berlin, a major city in Germany, there were tons of eyewitnesses, including the international press who was there. So the Germans knew that they couldn't keep a massacre under wraps if they were gonna just kill all the women, because that was an option that was on the table that they they threw around I don't know how seriously or for how long, but you know, the fact that there were witnesses around was a consideration. So visibility played a key role in preventing the women from just being killed outright.

Second, the leader there argued that the women shouldn't be killed because their reasoning was apolitical. And so what he what he was saying is, Hey look, they're not really against Jews being deported. This is a family issue, right? They're not undermining Nazi politics protocol. This is self interest, right?

They they just want their husbands and fiances back, it's personal. And so we can deal with people who are protesting for personal reasons, so long as it's not something that's undermining the Nazi regime. Now I don't know if this was kind of an excuse to kind of save face, you know, to say, Look, we really can't kill them, but they deserve it. So I need to come up with some excuse for why we're not killing them that allows me to maintain my power and control, or I don't know if this is legitimately what they thought. And they're like, We don't need to kill a bunch of women.

I would guess that probably it's, you know, to maintain power because, again, lies and power and violence all go together. So the leaders didn't want to show who they truly were, that they're willing to kill a bunch of unarmed women who are citizens of the state, non Jewish citizens, like valuable citizens in their eyes, right? You have to maintain this lie that we are without reproach, that we are above, that we have these high standards and high values. And so I think that that was probably something that they made up, that, Oh, well, these women, they have personal reasons. It's not political, it's apolitical.

It's not against the Nazi regime, it's just for their personal interest. Now clearly, there was personal interest involved because the women didn't come out when some of their neighbors had gotten taken away probably, whole Jewish families, but when it impacted them, they decided to come out, sure. Right? So what the leadership said was true, but nevertheless, their acts still undermined the Nazi regime's power. And you know, it's this reason though that might help to explain why were these women not killed, yet these teenagers who were distributing anti Nazi pamphlets were beheaded.

That was worthy of death. One reason is probably because killing a group of 2,000 women is different than killing a couple kids to make an example of, but also because if you're anti Nazi, if you're distributing anti Nazi propaganda, that's not apolitical. Like, that's clearly against the Nazi regime, and you can't really save those people. So numbers and intents definitely had a role to play in saving these women. But then there's a final piece to all of this that I think solidifies why these women were successful, and that is because the leadership didn't want the protest to spread.

Now the protest was very visible, it's in Berlin, it's so a packed city, it's also right in front of the the international press. So the Nazi leadership wanted this stuff resolved fast. And it might seem like capitulating to these women would have encouraged more action elsewhere, but capitulating and doing so quickly was considered a better choice than massacring the women or allowing the action to continue. Now if you allow the action to continue for two months, more people are gonna know about it, and it's gonna become a bigger deal, like, holy cow, these women are out in the snow and freezing rain and air raids for two months? Like, this is serious, and that allows for time you know, you could say, well, the movement might die out, and that's true, but the movement also could gain traction, and you don't want that to happen.

And then, of course, with the massacre, not only does that get out, but that that just heightens the seriousness of that protest because now you have innocent, defenseless women citizens who dead. So capitulating within a week of the women protesting was deemed the best response to prevent this, you know, these sorts of actions from spreading. You make it less likely to get known the quicker you get it resolved, and the less serious you take it. Not shooting people, you know, just get it over with. So there are definitely many factors that went into this protest being successful: numbers, motivation, visibility.

However, it does bring into question what may have happened if there were more of these types of protests where significant groups came out. Like Scholl said, and as the Nazi leadership acknowledged in this instance, and as Sultanizen and Havel wrote from their experiences in The USSR, Truth exposes lies and such things can spread like wildfire. Those who embrace non violence, they know the power of truth, while those who seek the power and allure of violence and force, they continue to wage futile battles that kill and destroy cyclically all throughout history. Okay, that wraps it up for our exploration of Germany. We've talked about some individual and some group protests, acts.

Now we're gonna move on to some larger group actions across Europe. Let's talk about Bulgaria. The story of Bulgaria's resist resistance is probably one of my favorites because it hits on so many aspects of what we've been talking about throughout throughout this series, but also just throughout this podcast in general. First, it highlights the effectiveness of non resistance. Depending on how you look at the statistics, Bulgaria's Jewish population was one of the only Nazi Allied or Nazi occupied countries that had its Jewish population grow from the beginning to end of World War II.

At at the least, its Jewish population did not decrease due to the Nazi culling. They began with 50,000 Jews and they ended with approximately the same number. I've seen some some people post like 52,000 they ended with. But no matter what how you look at it, they didn't they didn't lose their Jewish population, any of them. Second, the Bulgarian resistance shows how the truth is vital, and we we've tried to hammer this home over and over and over again, that truth is vital, and power and violence rely on facade.

There's an interview with Comfrey, a guy who has Bulgarian heritage, who did a documentary on Bulgaria's saving of the Jews, and the film is called The Optimists. Here's a quote from an interview he did that I thought was was really pertinent here. Quote, Why was Bulgaria, a nation whose population was a tenth the size of Germany's, able to resist the racist ideology that captivated much of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Comfrey said that after millennia of peaceful coexistence with Jews and five hundred years of oppression by Turks, Bulgarians just weren't buying the hate Hitler was selling. It's really hard for somebody to come in from the outside with Nazi theory and try to impose it on them, said Comforty.

End quote. And how did Bulgarians speak this truth? Well, when the Nazis planned to take away their Jewish neighbors, the Bulgarian bakers hid Jews in their ovens, priests forged baptismal certificates, and religious leaders stood in front of transport trains preventing their movement out of Bulgaria at the risk of their own lives. Those with religious and social power stood up to evil and they exposed it. So truth, speaking truth and being true to your values was huge, exposing the evil and protecting the truth and the good.

That was huge in Bulgaria. Another thing that we see is, we see how counting of one's life as lost is vital to having true power, devoid of a fear which controls us. There's a quote from one of the religious leaders that just so powerful here. So, here it is, quote, Whether it is one or 1,000 Jews, the Nazis can only shoot me once. End quote.

Now, I don't have quotes from all of the Bulgarians who participated in in this efforts to save the Jews, but I would imagine that the Bulgarians who did participate, and probably most non violent participants, would share the same sentiment. Look, they can shoot me once, I have but one life to live. Shoot me, right? I'm gonna do the right thing. Now you can say the same thing from a violent perspective, right?

I have only one life to live, sure. But a huge part of non violence is that, yeah, you count your life as lost, and you see that with Bulgaria, because they were putting their lives on the line. Another thing that we see see later, because this isn't actually about the Nazi regime, it's what comes afterwards but what we see if we when we understand what Bulgaria did and then what it became, is we see how true power and change is actually despised by whatever the current evil's antithesis is, or the past evil's antithesis is. So Sultanizen and Havel, whom we've referenced a lot in this series, they identified that truth fights power. But what we so often see is that violent power is confronted by violent power, and evils are often just simply exchanged.

And we saw this with The United States confrontation of the USSR, and the propaganda and war machine that The United States became to combat the threat of the Soviet Union. And while The US exerted its violent power throughout the world, it was the internal non violent struggles which exposed evil for what it was from the inside. You've got The United States being terrorists by our current definition in Afghanistan against Russia, and you have us fighting, killing, dying in Korea and Vietnam, and know, having proxy wars and funding and supporting coups all over the world that lead to so much death and destruction and manipulation in the name of fighting communism. But what ends up destroying communism is the exposing of evil from the inside through non violence. Now sure, okay, there are lots of reasons.

The USSR is overspending on and yeah, granted, I'm not saying that non violence all by itself is the only explanation for what made the USSR crumble, but you see from a lot of US violent action is that those things weren't equivalent, I guess maybe the best word here that I can think of at the moment. We took lots of lives, lots and lots and lots and lots of lives, we lost a bunch of lives, spent a bunch of money, caused the other side to spend a bunch of money, and we didn't really gain anything from that in terms of long term peace. And in the meantime, look at the type of nation that that The US shaped itself to be. The US's military and propaganda endeavors have exacerbated the divided culture. It's created a mythology around its benevolence and religion, and it's destroyed the lives of so many in the world through war and exploitation.

In the story of Bulgaria, we get a glimpse of how violent power which usurps violent power and calls itself a good, you know, hey, we need to overthrow the Nazis, so we're our power is good. Right? What we see in the Bulgaria story is how a violent power which calls itself good in terms of trying to fight this other thing that is clearly evil, is itself often averse to truth, just like The United States is averse to truth when it fights the USSR and creates its own evil and propaganda. So upon learning the story of the Bulgarian Jews, one of the the first things I asked myself was, Why why is such an incredible story hidden? Like, why did I never hear this before that Bulgaria basically saved all of its Jews?

Why didn't I hear that before? How did I not know about this? How do other people not know about this? Now listen to this quote from an article linked that I'm gonna link in the show notes. Just listen, and think about what we've been talking about.

Quote, in his book, Beyond Hitler's Grasp, Michael Barzohar states that, for years, Bulgaria's communist regime had tried to suppress the real story about this rescue for a very simple reason. The Bulgarian rescue had been carried out mostly by Communism's three worst enemies: the Church, the Royal Court, and the pro Fascist politicians. The Communist regime couldn't admit that because it contradicted its basic beliefs. End quote. So communism's usurpation of the Nazis meant that its power had to ride a wave of generalizations and caricatures about groups that it needed to dehumanize and villainize.

They couldn't let it be known that the enemy could do such courageous and meaningful acts. It couldn't let it be known that the church was a huge participant in defeating evil, because not only then would the Church get credit for something that this new power wanted and needed, but it would undermine the caricature and dehumanization that the new regime had for these other powers with which it was in competition. As I've mentioned many times in this series, history is framed, and it's often framed by the victors who use violent power to achieve that victory. The truth about non violent action, especially actions done by those deemed enemies of the current regime, can't make it to a prominent position in the history of of our textbooks. Such a thing would not only humanize our enemies, but it would also demystify the mythologies we create around the heroism of our violent actions in battle.

And I would lessen the sacrifices of those who died in battle because it would expose those sacrifices for what they really were, fighting evil with an alternative evil that seeks to destroy and wrest power from the enemy, not for good, but for self. Not for truth, but for facade that garners power. Americans, especially my group, the conservative Christian Americans, are extremely fearful of having America demythologized. Demythologizing America is actually the act that has the greatest potential to do me harm in my life, as we've experienced a number of threats from supporters and churches in regard to our expression of such ideas. It's not our theological ideas which garner hatred, it's it's usually political or or national concepts that we talk about.

We don't want to bow to the king of peace in Salem, we want to reign in our own Olympus. If you're not an American, you might think that I'm exaggerating here, but I assure you, I am not exaggerating. We here in The States have bought into this national mythology, and Christians, perhaps more than any other group, worship it. The Black community has seen through that for a long time because, you know, they were oppressed, and they saw who we really were as a nation. But you also get people like Niebuhr.

Niebuhr saw it, and he wrote some skating pieces a long time ago, like in the 70s about the prayer breakfasts, just the conniving and courting that went on with the religious community at the White House. So this is something that's not new, this Niebuhr's article I think that sticks out here is something to the extent of like, court prophets and wilderness prophets, right? And talking about how the court prophets, the ones who are in power and prominence and kiss the butts of current political leaders, they are generally the false prophets. I mean, just take a look at President Trump's spiritual advisors and the crazy things that they're doing and the hoops that they're jumping through to try to stick to the Bible, and cover their idolatry, their political idolatry and such, I mean it's just gross, it's crazy. And of course that happens on all sides.

People use religion, and religious people don't want to see it if it gains them power. Bonhoeffer knows a little bit about that because he fought a church that was licking Hitler's boots for the whole time, and he pushed back against that hard. But here in The States, yeah, there are a lot of people doing the exact same thing that the Church was doing in Germany and worshiping political power, and twisting the Bible to make that happen. And I think I can provide a more tangible example of how our nation is mythologized here. So at this point, it's been abstract, but let me kind of make it a little bit more tangible, factual, whatever.

So in the Capitol Building, there's a painting in the dome. And I didn't believe this. When I when I saw it, I was like, no. No. This is this is a little weird.

This is too crazy. I swear to you, go and and look this up online, go go to the Capitol Building yourself, and go see this thing. I have yet to do that, so I guess everybody could be lying about this, but I swear to you, as far as like other than having actually been there myself, this exists. You go to the Capitol Building, and there's this painting in the dome, and the painting is entitled The Apotheosis of Washington. Translated, that means Washington becomes a god.

Now Washington is depicted in this mural painting, whatever it is, fresco, I don't know, I'm terrible with art. But Washington is depicted as sitting with various gods, as he himself has become or is becoming one. Now we can all laugh at this and call it, oh, it's just symbolism, like people didn't really believe that Washington's becoming a god. Right. I would I would agree with that.

I don't think anybody really thinks that Washington is literally has literally become a god. But I've lived in my community long enough to know the difference between what we worship and idolize, and what we revere. Nationalism and pseudo history are huge, huge in my community. We have to believe the propaganda about it if we wanna live at peace in our community. Just as the communists in Bulgaria couldn't allow the truth out about their enemies, it's the same way in The United States.

True history is suppressed and the mythologies surrounding our country are elevated. And that's how all empires and all power with violence works. Now, we could talk about a lot of other things besides the apotheosis of of Washington, and and we could discuss, you know, how close to reality real beliefs that symbolism is because even if it's symbolism, it doesn't mean we have to literally believe Washington became a god to treat him as a god and to worship him. But anyway, this this episode is about nonviolent action in World War II. But I think it's this was an important rabbit trail when we look at Bulgaria and see how how all powers, even powers who defeat the powers that came before them, which maybe the powers that came before them were really evil.

Maybe the powers that we're fighting as a United States, some of them are truly evil. But we need to be aware that our power is also evil, right? Satan offered Jesus the kingdoms of the world for a reason because Satan has has them under his control, right? Jesus is taking the nations back, He's making the nations His footstool, but that's because somebody else has them in their control as we speak. And our job is to be multinational, and to be different, and to take those nations back and make them multi ethnic.

If you only get one thing out of this, even though it's not really about the nonviolent action, I think this truth that we just talked about is will open up your understanding of of how the world works and functions and how we go about fighting it. So but we have an episode to finish, so let's continue. Number five, Denmark. From my understanding of the nonviolent acts in Denmark and Bulgaria, these acts weren't really immediately coordinated. Now it seemed like there were significant groups of the population who had similar values and implemented things individually, or were as small groups, kind of on the fly.

Denmark, like Bulgaria, was able to save a large portion of its Jewish population around 90% it's estimated. The main element of success came from the fact that a German delegate actually tipped off the citizens of Denmark to the German plan of deportation, and that allowed the citizens to quickly spring into action. So it it's impressive that they were able to do such a thing on a relatively on relatively short notice and without central planning. Basically, some some non resistance individuals got the word, they started going through the phone book, calling everyone with Jewish sounding names, and telling them to get out. Some citizens hid Jews while others helped them to escape.

Not everyone was altruistic of course, and there were some fishermen who took advantage of the situation by charging exorbitant fees to carry Jews across to Sweden to escape. But they're still putting their lives at great risk. Now obviously, I don't think that ideologically these people were nonviolent because they loved their enemies, right? But nevertheless, their nonviolent action put a lot of lives at risk, and they saved a lot of people at risk to their own lives. So I'll throw it in here.

It's not not ideologically what we're talking about per se, but it is non violent action. So I'm putting it in there that it worked against the Nazis to save 9090% of Jews. Norway. Next one, Norway. While there's definitely some violent resistance in Norway, there were also beautiful depictions of nonviolent resistance.

Norway had an underground press which kept the people informed. They also had demonstrations and protests in which most of the country participated. And of course, there's the famous teacher strike, where a quarter million parents wrote protest letters for new curriculum with their full names written. That's that's a very courageous thing to do. And more than 10,000 teachers refused to teach the curriculum that the Nazis implemented.

Over a thousand teachers ended up being sent to concentration camps for this, but the Nazis eventually relented and reversed the curriculum, because the curriculum wasn't going get implemented anyway if kept it. So yeah, they of they relented, they realized they didn't have a choice. What I like about the story in Norway is that the church was different in Norway. It was kind of like the church in Bulgaria that actually put its money where its mouth is. While Bonhoeffer represented a small contingent of Christians who ended up being faithful to Christ in Germany, in Norway, Six Fifty out of the 700 clergy in Norway resigned when the Nazis started putting their own people in the pulpits and started forcing the clergy to comply with them.

They're like, no, we're not gonna we're not gonna spew your your garbage, like we quit. So the Nazis were forced to like appoint other people. But when the Nazis appointed other people into the churches, the churches band together rather than allow denominational differences to keep them apart, and they kept having church services, underground services, with parishioners pretty much being faithful to their original pastors who were, you know, living out the Gospel and doing the right thing, rather than go to the new pseudo churches and pseudo pastors who are just fake hypocrites. The Norwegians also implemented extensive shunning practices. So if you were a Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer and like you get on the bus and you sit down next to somebody, they might just get up and move somewhere else.

Contact was avoided with with these people at all costs, including the changing of the seats on a bus, boycotting shops and stuff like that. This displayed the truth of Norwegian sentiments publicly, while also showing solidarity with those in the community. So let the Nazis know the sentiment of the Norwegians, they're like, we're not gonna hide, our allegiance. But at the same time, it also showed one's neighbor, hey look, I'm standing up, you stand up too, right? Positive peer pressure.

It's easier to do the right thing like Sophie Scholl was trying to get going. It's easier to do the right thing when somebody takes that first step, when you see other people doing it. And that's part of what makes non violence work. You have to have people who have the courage to do the right thing, who have that integrity, and then other people can muster up the courage, and you're hoping for this chain reaction to build up a significant amount of people because numbers are key in nonviolent action. Now of course, the Norwegians, I have to admit, were treated less harshly than those in Eastern Europe, right?

So the Germans acted differently towards the Norwegians than they did towards the Polish, I mean, very different. So obviously, I'm not trying to say, Well look, people in Poland should have just done what the Norwegians did, and it would have all been fine. Now obviously, the Germans viewed different groups of people differently, and there are all kinds of circumstances which make things more possible to do in certain locations than in others. The in this is not to say that, you know, you can apply this across the board in the exact same way, but part of nonviolence is seeing how different people it's amazing how diverse the circumstances are. Like we've talked about colonial United States, we've talked about the racially segregated United States, we've talked about India under colonial rule.

Now we're talking about Nazi occupied Europe, and varying countries like Bulgaria, and Germany, and Denmark so far. And we're going to talk about Iran, and The Philippines in the future. Like, what you begin to see is that, okay, maybe the Norwegians had it easier, but there are a lot of places where people have it different, and in a lot of cases a lot harder than the Norwegians, where they do things differently, they respond differently to their circumstances. And part of non violence is about having this palette, this color palette that allows you to tap into creativity to figure out what situation you're in and what options you might have. And, you know, whereas in war, you know, you just get the biggest bomb that you need to do the job and you drop it.

Obviously, it's a lot more complex than that, but non violent action relies on a lot of creativity in terms of dialogue, in terms of how to attack and such. Nevertheless, we do see that there were some Norwegians who were sent to concentration camps, specifically the teachers. So there was a real cost to what the Norwegians did, and they knew that, yet many of them spoke truth to power. Number seven, the Netherlands strike. So The Netherlands is perhaps the most is most famous for people like Anne Frank and Corrie Ten Boom.

One reason that famous situations come out of The Netherlands is because they had quite a number of families who hid Jews. It was almost like a national value, it seems. I'm gonna read a pretty extended quote from an article that I'll put in the show notes, I think is pretty important as we move forward in this discussion. One of the most widespread activities was hiding and sheltering refugees and enemies of the Nazi regime, which included concealing Jewish families like that of Anne Frank, underground operatives, draft age Dutchmen, and later in the war, Allied aircrew. Collectively, these people were known as Onderdukers or people in hiding or literally, under divers.

Corrie Ten Boom and her family were among those who successfully hid several Jews and resistance workers from the Nazis. The first people who went into hiding were German Jews who arrived in The Netherlands before 1940. They were not duped by the German attitude just after the Dutch capitulation. In the first weeks after the surrender, some British soldiers who could not get to Dunkirk and French Flanders hid with farmers and Dutch Flanders. In the winter of nineteen forty and forty one, many French escaped prisoners of war passed through The Netherlands.

One single family helped 200 men. In total, about 4,000, mainly French, some Belgian, Polish, Russian and Czechs POWs were aided on their way south in the province of Limburg. The number of people cared for by the, by the LO in July of nineteen forty four is estimated to be between 550,000. That is one out of 40 inhabitants of The Netherlands. One Thousand Six Hundred Seventy One members of the LLLKP organizations lost their lives.

End quote. So the resistance was very big in The Netherlands, and they helped many people many, many, many people while losing more than 1,500 people to the cause themselves. The Netherlands also had a number of large strikes, including one strike that had over 300,000 participants demonstrate, shutting down factories, railroads, etc. So The Netherlands seemed to have a pretty cohesive view of the Nazis and what they were to do about it. And they took big risks, some many who even died for that.

All right, number eight, I think it's the last one, La Chambon. Now, I saved what I think is probably the best story for last, though it's it's definitely a hard pick out of all of these stories. Now, please excuse me through this. I know you've you've excused my German and my Dutch, excuse now my French, because I I know that French are a little bit touchy about how you say things, so I'm really sorry. But, and that's particularly bad here because I heard that La Chambon is if you say it wrong, which is easy to do for for non French speakers, that you're basically saying Ham, and the town's name is not Ham.

Anyway, the show must go on. So I'm only going to touch very briefly on this story here, but I I really want to recommend to you that you check out in the show notes after this episode, that that you check out this link and dedicate the next ten or so hours of your podcast listening to the podcast City of Refuge, which has a series all about this wonderful French town, and even gets like audio clips of some of the people from there, and some video interviews with like their relatives, living relatives. The series helps you to see how the main protagonist came to nonviolent action, the struggles he went through in implementing it, the trials, the cost, the impact it's great. It's a fantastic case study of non violence against the most powerful force in the world at the time. And this tiny town success amidst hardship against such immense power makes you wonder what the world would have been like if even a fraction more people in towns had the courage to stand up for justice.

Anyway, our protagonist in this story is Andre Trocme, who was a pastor in the small town of La Chambon. Tocque began to recognize the need to house Jews, and through Quaker contacts, organized a rescue ring in his town. They'd hide Jews passing through and assist them on their way to safety. Now it's estimated that this little town is responsible for saving anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 lives, probably closer to the 1,000. But like I said, listen to the podcast for interviews with with some of the real survivors from from that time, and the story is just like absolutely amazing, their encounters with with the Nazis and how they circumvented discovery and and all that stuff.

I'll also put some other sources and books about the topic in there, but I know that if I talk any more about it, I'm just going to do it injustice. It's such a good story. All right, so let's wrap this up, conclusion here. Even though I I knew all of this information prior to making this episode, I have to say that that going through it again is really encouraging to me. I'm overwhelmed by the amount of good that was done in the world, and and how often times individuals or small groups accomplished far more than I would have thought possible against an overwhelming force.

World War two has always been portrayed to me as this time when all of Europe was subjugated and oppressed with no hope of freedom until the Americans came storming in with their bombs and military power. But what these stories show me is that while Germany had significant control, the freedom to choose the good was always present, and there were quite a number of people who chose the good, and it was happening with more power and more frequency than I was ever told. And this highlights to me the the third way or the fourth way. When I used to see occupied Europe, I saw a group that had no options available to them because they couldn't fight and therefore, they could only flee or recede into subjugation. Because if they'd fight, they'd be destroyed, right?

And that's what many did. They just kind of fled or froze. They just kind of went about their daily lives while and listened to their oppressors while their neighbors were taken away and killed. But for some, they recognized that while they couldn't win with arms, cowardice and complicity with evil was not an option. They boldly took another way which was the confrontation of evil with truth and love.

It wasn't passive, it was active love in the world. It was soul force as Gandhi called it in our last episode. Unlike the bombs and bullets that destroyed tens of millions of lives, including millions upon millions of innocent ones, and only led to freedom after years and years of fighting, many Europeans were doing act of good without harm day in and day out while the violent powers raged around them. Now one might argue that ultimate liberation came because of those bullets and bombs. That is true, but at what cost?

At the cost of 70,000,000 dead. One wonders how many lives would have been lost if only non violent resistance were implemented. Perhaps patiently waiting on that to work would have cost many lives, but so it was for the Jews in Germany waiting six years or more for the rest of the world to rescue them, and only then they did so because of economic interests or because Germany invaded other territory, not because it was to stop genocide or as a turning away of Jewish immigrants, as we see The United States did. What would the landscape have looked like if more people spoke truth to power? If the church had the integrity of the Norwegian church or of Bonhoeffer's group in Germany to stand up to power rather than trying to wield it for itself?

Is our American church preparing itself for hardship and for making the right decisions despite the high cost to self? Or are we catering to comfort, self interest, denominationalism, and the idolatrous power of violent assertion through legislation? And I'm sure you can guess where I think we are as a church here in The States. We're cowards. By and large, there won't be a third or fourth way for us.

We're not Bonhoeffer in Germany, we're Bonhoeffer's opponents. When we can no longer grasp at the powers we think are necessary, there'll be no third or fourth way for us. The majority will slink back in resignation and allow the oppressed to bear their crosses while the majority shuns their own cross as foolish weakness and not power. We saw it in the days of slavery, we saw it in the days of Jim Crow, we're seeing it as we face immigrant crises, and as we extend empire and and death across the world. We're seeing it in Yemen right now, as 100,000 kids are on their way to starvation as we wage a proxy war there.

We like crosses on the backs of our Savior and the backs of those we need to oppress so that our lives are comfortable. It might be true that the fourth way does have consequences. It probably will cost us something. But if we already count our lives as lost, what does it gain us if we get the world but lose our soul? Counting our lives as lost means that we we preserve our soul and count the world as lost.

Not in some dispensationalist way like the world's going to hell in a handbasket, but that the soul is needed for the body. I think maybe the best way to put this is to just have a quote from the letter to Diognetus, and at the end of it, there's this beautiful section where where the author talks about the soul and the flesh. Listen to it. Quote, to put it simply, what the soul is in the body, that Christians are in the world. The flesh hates the soul and treats it as an enemy, even though it has suffered no wrong, because it is prevented from enjoying its pleasures.

So too the world hates Christians even though it suffers no wrong at their hands because they range themselves against its pleasures. The soul loves the flesh that hates it and its members. In the same way, Christians love those who hate them. The soul, when faring badly as to food and drink, grows better. So too, Christians, when punished, day by day, increase more and more.

It is to no less oppose than this, that God has ordered them and they must not try to evade it. End quote. I think that's a beautiful summation here. The body with all of its desires and impulses rages against the soul. It rages against the spiritual.

And the soul needs to be disciplined because in its discipline and in the soul achieving, what is good, you get the ultimate achievement of good for the body as well. The soul doesn't hate the body back for its its impulses and desires. It loves the body so much that it's willing to suffer for it. And that, as the author of the letter shows us, is the Christian's role in the world. It is our role to speak truth to power, even if our body, the world, the flesh, whatever it is in the particular circumstance you're thinking of, it's our duty to suffer and to bear up the integrity of the soul because we are the soul of the world.

And it's in our bearing up under suffering, not the evading of it, but our bearing up under it that we do our body, we do the world good. We know truth, we know true value, and we know where ultimate power is. And I think you've seen a number of glimpses of that today. That's all for now, so peace, and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.