November 11

Alfred Hermann Fried, Daisy Bates, and Lucretia Mott

Author

David Barnhart
November 11, 2025

Pinhole photo of Trinity UMC in Birmingham, 2008. The camera was made from a round cookie tin, so the walls appear to curve away. Own photo.

Today is the birthday, in 1864, of Alfred Hermann Fried, an Austrian Jewish pacifist who helped spearhead the movement to form the League of Nations. 

Today is also the birthday, in 1914, of Daisy Bates, civil rights activist, journalist, and publisher of the Arkansas State Press. As both an organizer and reporter, she played a major role in the events surrounding the Little Rock Nine.

Today marks the death, in 1880, of Lucretia Mott, Quaker abolitionist and women’s rights advocate. Her home was a stop on the Underground Railroad. When she attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840, the men of the convention voted to segregate the women and not let them participate, because they did not want abolitionism to be confused with women’s liberation—yet another way movements for liberation have historically participated in oppression. She and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848.  

Today also marks the execution by hanging, in 1887, of Albert Parsons, who was likely framed for his involvement in the Haymarket Affair. He was a labor activist and anarchist who repented of his earlier service to the Confederate Army and dedicated himself to liberation from capitalism. He was married to Lucy Parsons, also an anarchist and an anti-lynching advocate.

Reflection: 

Alfred Hermann Fried wrote: 

“War is not in itself a condition so much as the symptom of a condition, that of international anarchy. If we wish to substitute for war the settlement of disputes by justice, we must first substitute for the condition of international anarchy a condition of international order.” 

Immanuel Kant published his essay “Perpetual Peace” in 1795, in which he argued, like Alfred Hermann Fried, that international laws could create a basis to actually end war. Ever since, attempts to create a world-wide framework for peace have been opposed by White Christian Nationalists and conspiracy theorists. 

Recently, billionaire and fascist-enabler Peter Thiel held a series of lectures on “The Anti-Christ,” in which he trotted out the old boogey-man of a One-World Government that would somehow mislead the world with the promise of peace. This has been standard fare since well before the Left Behind series was published in the 1990’s or The Late Great Planet Earth in the 1970’s. 

The billionaire oligarchs who are trying to take over this planet, who are much closer to being “the Anti-Christ” than anyone else, do not want any kind of structure that would impede their rape ot the planet and their oppression of workers. If the world is to address the global problems of climate change and oligarchy, the people of the world will have to exert their democratic will and support a rule of international law. I think it will look less like a “world government” and more like sanity. 

Albert Parsons wrote: 

“Every great robbery that was ever perpetrated upon a people has been by virtue of and in the name of law. By this tool of thieves the great mass of the people who inhabit our planet have been robbed of their equal right to the use of the soil and of all other natural opportunities.”

Daisy Bates wrote: 

“No man or woman who tries to pursue an ideal in his or her own way is without enemies.”

and

“Surely the world we live in is but the world that lives in us.”

Lucretia Mott wrote: 

“The question is often asked, "What does woman want, more than she enjoys? What is she seeking to obtain? Of what rights is she deprived? What privileges are withheld from her?" I answer, she asks nothing as favor, but as right; she wants to be acknowledged a moral, responsible being. She is seeking not to be governed by laws in the making of which she has no voice. She is deprived of almost every right in civil society, and is a cipher in the nation, except in the right of presenting a petition. In religious society her disabilities have greatly retarded her progress. Her exclusion from the pulpit or ministry, her duties marked out for her by her equal brother man, subject to creeds, rules, and disciplines made for her by him, is unworthy her true dignity.”

Prayer: God, we have been making steps toward liberation for many centuries. Liberate humanity itself from our self-destructive greed. Amen.