Ripper, an insane Cold Warrior. (Kubrick’s insinuation is that all Cold Warriors are insane.) He sends nuclear bomb–laden B52s to Russia, deceptively telling the pilots that the Soviet Union and the United States are at war, and refuses to surrender the radio codes needed to order the pilots to abort the mission. His justification for launching the strike comes straight from Kahn: although the nuclear war that’s bound to ensue will kill thousands of millions of Russians and Americans, it’s winnable if the U.S. hits first.
The film shifts back and forth between Ripper’s headquarters at the fictional Burpelson Air Base and an operations room, presumably at the Pentagon, where the U.S. president, an ex-Nazi named Dr. Strangelove (both played by Peter Sellers), and a cabal of generals and advisors gather to figure out how to deal with the rogue General Ripper’s nuclear launch. Along the way, the Soviet ambassador to the United States reveals that his country’s scientists have invented a Doomsday machine, fifty fail-safe nuclear bombs buried around the world that will automatically detonate if the Soviet Union is attacked. But there’s no calling the American pilots back. They drop their payloads on Russia, and the film ends with nuclear mushrooms from the Doomsday machine blossoming all over the world. Kubrick’s message was clear: there may be survivors in a nuclear standoff, but they won’t be human. The idea of a winnable nuclear war is as absurd as it is terrifying.
8 March
Maria Skobtsova
8 December 1891—31 March 1945
The Giving of One’s Soul
Like so many other Russian refugees fleeing from the Bolshevik Revolution, Maria Skobtsova made her way to Paris. The disruption of her old life and the additional blow of the death of one of her three children provoked a profound spiritual crisis in the woman known in Russia as a poet and political activist. She began a search for a more “purified” way of life that eventually led her, in 1932, to monastic vows in the Orthodox Church.
But as a nun, she refused to live a cloistered life. Instead, she ministered to the poverty-stricken and spiritually despairing refugees in Paris. She rented a large house and opened it up to the hungry and the homeless, reserving for herself only a cot in the basement. Her goal, she said, was to discern and revere the living God in every person she encountered, no matter how broken they were or how great the cost of serving them was. “I think service to the world is simply the giving of one’s own soul in order to save others.”
Hitler launched his signature blitzkrieg attack against France in May 1940. Five weeks later, the Nazis were in Paris and the persecution of Jews began. With no hesitation, Skobtsova began defying the Nazis by offering shelter and assistance to Jews on the run. She worked closely with an Orthodox priest, Father Dimitri Klepinin, who gladly issued baptismal papers to Jews who requested them. Together, the two of them moved fleeing Jews along escape routes to Switzerland. On more than one occasion, they smuggled Jewish children to safety by hiding them in trash bins and bribing garbage collectors to take them out of the city.
In 1942, French Jews were ordered to wear the infamous yellow star. Skobtsova immediately protested and called Christians to display solidarity with their Jewish brothers and sisters. “If we were true Christians,” she said, “we would all wear the Star.” Although she hated war, seeing it as “the brutalization of nations, the lowering of the cultural level, the loss of creative ability, the decadence of souls” that “throws the whole of mankind back,” she also believed that it offered a profound opportunity to serve and sacrifice for war’s victims.
For Skobtsova, the sacrifice came in February 1943 when she, Father Dimitri, and her son Yura, a collaborator in their aid to the Jews, were arrested by the Gestapo. They were interrogated and tortured. Skobtsova was eventually sent to Ravensbrück and Dimitri and Yura to Buchenwald. All three of them perished in the camps, Skobtsova surviving until 31 March 1945. She was sent to the gas chamber just days before the camp was liberated. During her two years at Ravensbrück, she ministered to her fellow prisoners, and there is testimony that she died taking the place of another prisoner who had been “selected” for the gas chamber. If so, Skobtsova’s manner of dying, like her manner of living, exemplified her dedication to serving others.
9 March
Tom Fox
7 July 1951—9 March 2006
Standing with the Dehumanized
Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) is an organization founded by members of historic peace churches that sends volunteers to hot spots across the globe where the well-being of local people is threatened by violence. The hope is that the presence of nonviolent witnesses with ties to international media will tamp down the level of violence. As Peacemakers says, its goal is “to get in the way.”
Tom Fox joined the CPT following a twenty-year career as a musician in the Marine Corps Band and after becoming a Quaker. In 2004 he joined three other CPT members on a mission to Iraq. Their work in Baghdad consisted of helping the families of imprisoned Iraqis secure financial assistance, making sure that medical supplies wound up in hospitals and clinics instead of on the black market, and working to build a strong CPT presence in Iraq.
In late November 2005, Fox and his fellow CPT volunteers were kidnapped by Al-Qaeda guerrillas who threatened to execute the four men unless the United States released all Iraqi prisoners. Three of the hostages were eventually rescued after being held for five months. Fox wasn’t one of them. His body was found on 9 March 2006. He had been shot several times and dumped on a garbage heap in Baghdad. Cuts and bruises on his body suggested that he might have been tortured.
It’s still unclear why Fox was singled out for execution. Perhaps it was because of his service in the Marine Corps. Before his abduction, knowing the danger he and his fellow CPT volunteers faced, Fox made his friends promise that they wouldn’t seek vengeance if he was abducted.
During his time in Iraq, Fox wrote a blog recording his activities and impressions. In an entry titled “Why are we here?”—posted the day before he was snatched by Al-Qaeda—Fox wrote this: “If I understand the message of God, his response to that question is that we are to take part in the creation of the Peaceable Realm of God. As I survey the landscape here in Iraq, dehumanization seems to be the operative means of relating to each other. We are here to root out all aspects of dehumanization that exists within us. We are here to stand with those being dehumanized by oppressors and stand firm against that dehumanization. We are here to stop people, including ourselves, from dehumanizing any of God’s children, no matter how much they dehumanize their own souls.”
In the way he conducted himself during the last few years of his life, as well as in the way he died, Fox truly did stand with the victims of dehumanization.
10 March
Asghar Ali Engineer
10 March 1940—
De-politicizing Religion
When he was a boy, Asghar Ali Engineer’s father, a Muslim Bohra priest (Bohra is an India-based Shi’a sect), told him two things. The first was that violence is never justifiable. “He often drew my attention,” recalls Engineer, “to the verse of the Qur’an that to kill a person without justification amounts to killing whole humanity and to save a human life amounts to saving whole humanity.” The second bit of advice from his father was “to do what my conscience dictated and not to care for the consequences.” Engineer took both to heart.
After working as a municipal engineer in Bombay for twenty years, Engineer retired to serve as a leader in the Bohra community. But over the years
