Dyer: Philippines drama first step in long journey
Gwynne Dyer — Mar 23, 2025
Everybody has heard the saying: “The mills of justice grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine”. The saying is a promise that all crimes will eventually be punished
– but it is a lie.
Most crimes everywhere always have gone unpunished. So, while the arrest of former Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte by the International Criminal Court (ICC) last week was long overdue, it also came as a great surprise.
Duterte was elected president in 2016 on the promise he would wage a war on drugs, but he meant “war” literally. Once in office, he sent the police out with orders to kill drug dealers and drug users without trial or even arrest. Their bodies generally were left in the streets.
Many people around the world are calling for an end to the Israel-Hamas war and its huge toll of civilian casualties. But Gwynne Dyer argues that this chorus does not include the handful of key actors in the bloody drama.
The Palestinian death toll in the Gaza Strip since October’s Hamas attacks on Israeli settlements will reach 40,000 people in the next week or so. (It’s back up near 50-100 civilians dead a day.)
QUIT is — or rather was — the Quaker Initiative to end Torture. It began in the spring of 2005, with a call by Friend John Calvi, just as the international scope, the vast evil plus the flagrant criminality of the U. S. “War on Terror” torture program — all this was becoming shockingly clear.
As detailed below, QUIT formally ended this week, on July 15, 2024.
Nineteen years.
We worked hard, we did stuff. We joined with others. But in my view, we failed. At our most active and diligent, we didn’t really lay a glove on our three main targets.
The Western Friend is continuing evidence (tho it’s still news to some) that there is lively Quaker periodical publishing outside Philadelphia. When the editor learned about Tell It Slant, she didn’t hesitate: Friend Mitchell Santine Gould’s review, the first, was included in its current online newsletter edition.
Mitch is a distinguished independent historian with a theological bent. His special interest in the quasi-Quaker poet Walt Whitman has produced many impressive essays, including Walt Whitman: 10 Misconceptions, Least to Greatest, which is here, and very much worth a look (but read this review first . . .)
Reviewed by Mitchell Santine Gould, Multnomah Monthly Meeting (6/19/2024):
Emma and Chuck at a 2017 history roundtable at Earlham School of Religion.
Emma Lapsansky-Werner offers us a sprawling biography of Quaker journalist, activist, and gadfly Chuck Fager, in Tell It Slant. I read the first half with growing appreciation for two essential aspects of Chuck’s life. The first is his truly impressive involvement with so many historic moments in politics, society, and religion. The second, which nicely humanizes this history, is a very frank, very modest account of his own life – warts as well as triumphs. It must be rare that a biography succeeds so admirably on both aspects.
Chuck’s long experience as a professional journalist and author gives perfect clarity to his parts of the overall narrative. However, he had so much to say, that in order to marshal some flow and organization to so many anecdotes, memories, and histories, he was lucky that Emma Lapsansky-Werner extended her invaluable editorial contributions into the role of co-author.
As she put it, “In crafting this narrative, I have echoed Chuck’s scaffolding, weaving my spin together with many of Chuck’s own words; biography is interwoven with autobiography.” Although Dr. Lapsansky-Werner is an academic — a professor of Quaker history — she delivered the kind of powerfully clear and simple journalistic prose that seamlessly matched Chuck’s own. I think given all the constraints, Lapsansky-Werner acquitted herself well.
We’re no longer in an age of book-reading — info-snacking is more like it — and one might set the book aside rather read the whole thing at once. But should you resume in the middle of the book, its humor, charm, interest, and insight will even more deeply impress you. Tell It Slant is inspiring and above all, highly relevant. In addition to his decades of involvement with Quaker faith, practice, and internal politics, Chuck really kept his finger on the pulse of American society and politics — precisely because of his investment in his faith, of course.
When the stories are this compelling, you want the book to be perfect. Viewing Friend Chuck as the modern-day equivalent of history’s Publick Friend, I wanted him to be the exponent for liberal Quaker faith as I understand it. I hoped to see a conscious allegiance to the key innovation of Quakerism: its Inner Light theology. Informal polling that I did years ago revealed that Friends today have reduced the doctrine of Inner Light to little more than a sentimental “that of God in everyone.”
But historically, the Inner Light was recognized as a secret, silent hotline to the Divine, quite specifically as a source of guidance in times of an ethical crisis. Crucially, it was seen as capable of over-riding the two ubiquitous avenues for all moral supervision: the Bible and the clergy. Chuck mentions the Inner Light only twice, exclusively in anecdotes about an old Quaker lady he once admired. In reality, the Light is the power behind the often-praised Quaker virtue known as “discernment.”
Mitchell Santine Gould
Having said all this, let me turn to the controversial proposition that Quakerism can be succinctly described as SPICE: simplicity, peaceableness, integrity, community, and equality. I could write a whole sequel review showing how Chuck hits quite robustly on all these cylinders. And that ultimately trivializes all my criticisms of his book. I believe every Quaker should read it, and non-Quakers will also be deeply inspired, as I have been, by it.
Last month I attended two presentations by the new AFSC Director of Quaker Engagement, Brian Blackmore, at Durham and Chapel Hill Meetings here in North Carolina.
Many people around the world are calling for an end to the Israel-Hamas war and its huge toll of civilian casualties. But Gwynne Dyer argues that this chorus does not include the handful of key actors in the bloody drama.
I wish it wasn’t time to write this post.
We’re no longer in an age of book-reading — info-snacking is more like it — and one might set the book aside rather read the whole thing at once. But should you resume in the middle of the book, its humor, charm, interest, and insight will even more deeply impress you. Tell It Slant is inspiring and above all, highly relevant. In addition to his decades of involvement with Quaker faith, practice, and internal politics, Chuck really kept his finger on the pulse of American society and politics — precisely because of his investment in his faith, of course.
