"...This is not a legal system, it is a system designed to create fear, to destroy social bonds, and to put absolute power into the hands of a few, immoral elitists.
Martin Niemöller, a German Protestant pastor learned this lesson the hard way.
Niemöller was a commander of a German U-boat in World War I. A seminal incident in his moral outlook, as he related in many public speeches later in his life, occurred when he commanded his submarine crew not to rescue the sailors of a boat he torpedoed, but let them drown instead.
In 1931 Niemöller became a pastor in a wealthy Berlin suburb. As a German nationalist he initially supported Hitler, but as the Nazis began to interfere in church affairs, he moved into opposition.
In 1937 he was arrested because of his outspoken sermons, and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In 1941 he was moved to Dachau, where he stayed until the end of the war.
Shortly after the end of the war Niemöller became convinced that the German people had a collective responsibility for the Nazi atrocities. In October 1945 Niemöller was the prime mover behind the German Protestant Church's "Confession of Guilt".
It was clearly in this Oct/Nov 1945 context that Niemöller's most quoted saying began to evolve. This early statement implies that he may have thought first of the Communists, then the disabled, then Jews, and finally countries conquered by Germany.
In a 6 January 1946 speech, Niemöller said:
We preferred to keep silent. We are certainly not without guilt/fault, and I ask myself again and again, what would have happened, if in the year 1933 or 1934 - there must have been a possibility - 14,000 Protestant pastors and all Protestant communities in Germany had defended the truth until their deaths? If we had said back then, it is not right when Hermann Göring simply puts 100,000 Communists in the concentration camps, in order to let them die, I can imagine that perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 Protestant Christians would have had their heads cut off, but I can also imagine that we would have rescued 30-40,000 million people, because that is what it is costing us now.
In 1947 his reputation was challenged because he devoted substantial energy to protecting Nazi war criminals from the death penalty, and because of some pro-German things he had said in his own defense while on trial by the Nazis in 1937. However, during the 1950s and 1960s he refused to join in the dominant anti-communist sentiment in the West, which earned him the respect of the left again. His uncompromising stance allowed him to remain a figurehead of the German peace movement into the 1980s.
Niemöller's famous quote generally runs as follows:
First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist, so I said nothing.
Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat, so I did nothing.
Then came the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist.
And then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did little.
Then when they came for me, there was no one left to stand up for me.'
Many people use this quotation in various ways. Some of them even alter it to suit their purpose. When Time magazine used the quotation, they moved the Jews to the first place and dropped both the communists and the social democrats. American Vice-President Al Gore likes to quote the lines, but drops the trade unionists for good measure. Gore and Time also added Roman Catholics, who weren't on Niemöller's list at all. In the heavily Catholic city of Boston, Catholics were added to the quotation inscribed on its Holocaust memorial. The US Holocaust Museum drops the Communists but not the Social Democrats; other versions have added homosexuals.
'The Nazis did not come first for the Jews," Peter Novick tells us in his book, The Holocaust in American Life, "First they came for the Communists" - a circumstance acknowledged by Niemöller. The Holocaust Museum in Washington DC is just another place where "Communists" is omitted from Niemöller's homily. [Some interesting background on Niemöller can be found HERE: http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/niem.htm ]
Do you get it?
The gestapo and the Inquisition had no power without normal humans turning against each other because they believed the lies of psychopaths.
And so it is in America today: Categories of heretics have been established, and soon, it will become possible to hold the hammer of the New Inquisition over the heads of everyone..."
