Some vintage mid-century illustrations from an impressive online collection, here (warning: gender roles oh-so-clearly delineated).

Ashram at Wardha, India (July, 1939)

Just over a month before Germany invades Poland (on 1 September 1939, seventy years ago this month), therewith triggering World War II, the great Mahatma Gandhi writes the first of two letters to Adolf Hitler in an attempt to prevent the oncoming war. This particular letter never reaches Hitler, due to an intervention by the government… letter found here; more information here; a transcript of the typewritten letter above follows (Note: knowing a bit about Gandhi, I’d suggest that his sign-off “Your sincere friend” is rhetorical [and more than a wee bit passive aggressive]):

As at Wardha
C. P.
India
23.7.’39.

Dear friend,

Friends have been urging me to write to you for the sake of humanity. But I have resisted their request, because of the feeling that any letter from me would be an impertinence. Something tells me that I must not calculate and that I must make my appeal for whatever it may be worth.

It is quite clear that you are today the one person in the world who can prevent a war which may reduce humanity to a savage state. Must you pay that price for an object however worthy it may appear to you to be? Will you listen to the appeal of one who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success? Any way I anticipate your forgiveness, if I have erred in writing to you.

I remain,

Your sincere friend

M. K. Gandhi

HERR HITLER
BERLIN
GERMANY.

If you like ephemera and old letters (as I very much do), you’ll find the website Letters of Note to be a treasure trove.

Thanks for the link, Gregor!

I hope you love birds too.
It is economical…
It saves going to heaven…

—Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

+

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it!

The above is an admittedly ‘loose’ translation of the Leitmotif of Goethe’s Faust, which was first performed at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland back in 1938 [practically my home stomping grounds as a kid].

09/09/09

Today is all about nines… a fine whole number indeed, as elucidated here.

 Painting: Apollo and the Nine Muses (c. 1599?) by Flemish mannerist painter Hendrik van Balen.

Kaunas, Lithuania

Emma Goldman, a political activist who played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century, was born 140 years ago in Kovno (now Kaunas). An outspoken writer and lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women’s rights, and social issues, Goldman was imprisoned several times after emigrating to the U.S. for “inciting to riot,” illegally distributing information about birth control, and for conspiring to “induce persons not to register” for the newly instated draft (in 1917). Eventually she was deported to Russia (where she initially supported the Bolshevik revolution—later she opposed the Soviet use of violence and repression of individual voices), and then lived in England, Canada, and France.

During her life, Goldman was lionized as a free-thinking “rebel woman” by admirers, and derided by critics as an advocate of politically motivated violence and anarchistic revolution. Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, homosexuality, and gender politics. Following decades of obscurity, Goldman’s iconic status was revived in the 1970s, when feminist and anarchist scholars rekindled popular interest in her life.

Some quotables she left us with:

+  +  +

Before we can forgive one another, we have to understand one another.

No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.

All claims of education notwithstanding,
the pupil will accept only that which his mind craves.

Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian.

Idealists are foolish enough to throw caution to the winds.
They have advanced mankind and have enriched the world. 

The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity;
the least divergence from it is the greatest crime.

The individual whose vision encompasses the whole world often feels nowhere so hedged in and out of touch with his surroundings as in his native land.

Heaven must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit live there.

Puritanism, in whatever expression, is a poisonous germ. On the surface everything may look strong and vigorous; yet the poison works its way persistently, until the entire fabric is doomed.

When we can’t dream any longer, we die.

Someone has said that it requires less mental effort
to condemn than to think.

The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.

The most violent element in society is ignorance.

If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.

If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.

+  +  +

Images: from archival police mug-shots of Emma Goldman taken in Philadelphia (1893) and Chicago (1901).

Starting on the Polish border, then spreading almost everywhere…

The start of World War II took place on 1 September 1939 with the German invasion of Poland, followed by declarations of war on Germany by most of the countries in the British Empire and Commonwealth, and by France. The war was the most widespread in history, a global military conflict involving a majority of the world’s nations and the mobilization of over 100 million military personnel. Over seventy million people were killed (the majority of whom were civilians) making this the deadliest conflict in human history.

Fairfax, Virginia

These are a few samples from a treasure-trove of hundreds of ad illustrations dating from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s… found here.

Hanover, Germany

Hannah Arendt was an influential German-Jewish political theorist. Often described as a philosopher (a label she refuted), Arendt’s work dealt with the nature of power and the subjects of politics, authority, and totalitarianism— with much of her work focusing on affirming a conception of freedom which is synonymous with collective political action among equals. She theorized that freedom was “public and associative.”

A selection of “quotables” by Arendt that I find interesting:

+   +   +

In order to go on living one must try to escape
the death involved in perfectionism.

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up.

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative
the day after the revolution.

It is my contention that civil disobediences are nothing but the latest form of voluntary association, and that they are thus quite in tune with the oldest traditions of the country.

Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed
in words that equal what is given by the senses.

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.

There are no dangerous thoughts;
thinking itself is dangerous.

What really distinguishes this generation in all countries from earlier generations… is its determination to act, its joy in action, the assurance of being able to change things by one’s own efforts.

Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

+   +   +

(It seems I’m into philosophers of late…)