An Eagle Flies

An Eagle Flies a Distant Sky
Crystal eyes, aetheric nerves

From distant skies look down.

Robot claws release their grip.

Fires of hell begin their fall.

Beneath, an edenic plain.

Two children, sisters play

With a doll blue eyed and blonde


Passing between small dark hands.

 

Bright smiles, laughter break under


Dark eyes. Joy and leaping

Steps as a new game begins.

The doll's pulled two ways at once,

Breaks and its wound bring silence,

Small recriminations.

But huddl’d beneath the sun

They splint and bandage its arm.

 

Becoming nurse and doctor

Another game is born.

The shade of the courtyard wall

is now a hospital ward.  

Faster yet hell’s fire bores down

From wings they never see.

Bursting through the courtyard wall

A pyre engulfs brick and stone.

 

Smoke and dust carry the flame

That melts the broken doll
,

lighting the sisters afire,

Burning flesh to char the bones.

Dead splattered meat draws the flies.

Games, dreams, and hopes are gone

Still above the eagle soars,

Crystal eyes never weeping.

 

Aether hides the assassins.

It’s us they claim to serve.

But where lies the loyalty

To life, to joy and laughter?
Where lays the true loyalty?
Is it to human life?
Have we forgotten what once
we lov'd and held so dearly?

Life, liberty and freedom
are not divisible.
True liberty and freedom
can not be bought with murder.

 

For all the victims of assassination, the killed, the wounded and their families, friends and neighbours:

 

This nation once opposed assassination on principle. It is our to our enduring shame that fear and indifference permits those we elect to continue in this morally reprehensible calculus of murder. 

Executive Order 11905 signed in 1976, by Gerald R. Ford formally banned political assassination while "improving" oversight on American Intelligence agencies, stating No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.
This order was strengthened by Jimmy Carter's Executive Order 12036 in 1978 which states No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.
Executive order 12333 signed by Ronald Reagan reverted to a language closer to Ford's order; No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.

Today, assassinations have become a routine instrument of national policy. So long as the proposed target is named as a terrorist, the American president can, on his signature alone, authorise a drone strike anywhere in the world except American territory. The level of acceptable "collateral  damage," other people killed or injured in the strike is likewise set according to standards set by the president alone.

Recently border security forces have been authorised to use drones. Though it is claimed they are unarmed, they are reputedly of the same type used to carry weapons overseas.

Total civilians killed are estimated at between between 380 to 801.  The moral damage done to our nation and to democracy has been incalculably high. 57 drone strikes are known to have occurred under the authority of George W. Bush in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen alone.

During Obama’s two terms, 563 known drone strikes are know to have occurred in the same countries.
In Afghanistan during the Obama administration, more than a thousand strikes took place in 2016 alone. Those documented above do not include the far larger number of declared military drone strikes in that benighted nation, nor in Iraq, or Syria, the Sudan or Libya.
Constitutionally, the only way to effectively end this world wide campaign of terror is for the American Congress to ban political assassination in its entirety, and to provide for effective oversight armed drones, banning their use either entirely or at the minimum in declared wars. Armed drones, if they must exist, should be operated only by the military, not by so-called intelligence agencies, which have time and again proven unreliable when granted unsupervised power.
Here's the source for drone use data.

 

Jefferson and America's Lost Liberties

Portrait of Jefferson by  

Charles Wilson Peale, 1791

I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.

- Thomas Jefferson in a letter to James Madison,  30 January 1787

For all his failings, not least his slave holding and his views of the First Nations peoples whose lands he coveted for the American Republic, Thomas Jefferson was nonetheless the architect of America's now lost conception of liberty. Deeply formed by both the philosophers of an earlier generation called Humanists, and even more by his European philosophical contemporaries, the early advocates of the Enlightenment, Jefferson taught without hesitation that the rights of humankind to liberty, to strive for happiness, to speak freely without fear of reprisal, to believe or not believe in divinity, and to equal justice before the law are all apparent as the natural product of reason. He taught that the moral obligation of a fearless conscience is the defence of these rights. The famous quote that appears above is part of a larger argument, that it is the nature of government to seek power, to gather power and to exert power at the expense of natural human liberty. 

Rebellions, said Jefferson, are the people’s way of putting governments in their place as servants to the people, not their masters. In the generations since the Second World War we have seen rebellions in America: both the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-War Movement were precisely the kinds of correctives Jefferson envisioned. But at the same time and since, aided by changes in technology and communications, as well as a spirit of fear fostered by our government -- first the 1950’s Red Scares, secondly the fear of annihilation that pervaded the Cold War with the USSR, and today, the government’s drumbeat of fear and economic loss that blend the image of terror with the faces of ethnic and religious difference.

American government has become a tyranny all but unrestrained by the freedoms Jefferson saw as unalienable rights, our rights to free speech, to unfettered communication and thought, to travel where and how we please, to champion the causes that appeal to our hearts, and to command equal protection under the law, all have been scoured away by technologies of surveillance, by legal acts that deprive of an unfettered right to habeas corpus, that permit secret courts, secret warrants and secret trials, even secret detention and torture, all in the name of “Homeland Security.” 

Never has tyranny had a better friend than the tiny minorities of religious fanatics, both Muslim and Christian that have engaged in acts of terror, save one, those who have taken advantage of terror to establish their own power by trampling ours. Today we suffer under an administration that trades on fear, that asks us to hate that we might fear all the more. What should our response to such tyrants be? I know the answer Jefferson offered. I’m not sure that Americans have the stomach for liberty today. I know what Jefferson the revolutionary taught, but it’s so much easier to live behind walls of hate, to trade the depth of conscience liberty demands for these superficial protections from our fears. 

DHH

Here is the complete text of Jefferson’s letter, written 232 years ago:

Dear Sir,

My last to you was of the 16th of December; since which, I have received yours of November 25 and December 4, which afforded me, as your letters always do, a treat on matters public, individual, and economical. I am impatient to learn your sentiments on the late troubles in the Eastern states. So far as I have yet seen, they do not appear to threaten serious consequences. Those states have suffered by the stoppage of the channels of their commerce, which have not yet found other issues. This must render money scarce and make the people uneasy. This uneasiness has produced acts absolutely unjustifiable; but I hope they will provoke no severities from their governments. A consciousness of those in power that their administration of the public affairs has been honest may, perhaps, produce too great a degree of indignation; and those characters, wherein fear predominates over hope, may apprehend too much from these instances of irregularity. They may conclude too hastily that nature has formed man insusceptible of any other government than that of force, a conclusion not founded in truth or experience. Societies exist under three forms, sufficiently distinguishable: (1) without government, as among our Indians; (2) under governments, wherein the will of everyone has a just influence, as is the case in England, in a slight degree, and in our states, in a great one; (3) under governments of force, as is the case in all other monarchies, and in most of the other republics.

To have an idea of the curse of existence under these last, they must be seen. It is a government of wolves over sheep. It is a problem, not clear in my mind, that the first condition is not the best. But I believe it to be inconsistent with any great degree of population. The second state has a great deal of good in it. The mass of mankind under that enjoys a precious degree of liberty and happiness. It has its evils, too, the principal of which is the turbulence to which it is subject. But weigh this against the oppressions of monarchy, and it becomes nothing.  [loosely Better the evils of liberty than the quiescence of servitude -- Jefferson is quoting from Rousseau's Social Contract of 1762 - ed.]. Even this evil is productive of good. It prevents the degeneracy of government and nourishes a general attention to the public affairs. I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government. If these transactions give me no uneasiness, I feel very differently at another piece of intelligence, to wit, the possibility that the navigation of the Mississippi may be abandoned to Spain. I never had any interest westward of the Allegheny; and I will never have any. But I have had great opportunities of knowing the character of the people who inhabit that country; and I will venture to say that the act which abandons the navigation of the Mississippi is an act of separation between the Eastern and Western country. It is a relinquishment of five parts out of eight of the territory of the United States; an abandonment of the fairest subject for the payment of our public debts, and the chaining those debts on our own necks, in perpetuum. I have the utmost confidence in the honest intentions of those who concur in this measure; but I lament their want of acquaintance with the character and physical advantages of the people, who, right or wrong, will suppose their interests sacrificed on this occasion to the contrary interests of that part of the confederacy in possession of present power. If they declare themselves a separate people, we are incapable of a single effort to retain them. Our citizens can never be induced, either as militia or as soldiers, to go there to cut the throats of their own brothers and sons, or rather, to be themselves the subjects instead of the perpetrators of the parricide. Nor would that country quit the cost of being retained against the will of its inhabitants, could it be done. But it cannot be done. They are able already to rescue the navigation of the Mississippi out of the hands of Spain, and to add New Orleans to their own territory. They will be joined by the inhabitants of Louisiana. This will bring on a war between them and Spain; and that will produce the question with us, whether it will not be worth our while to become parties with them in the war in order to reunite them with us and thus correct our error. And were I to permit my forebodings to go one step further, I should predict that the inhabitants of the United States would force their rulers to take the affirmative of that question. I wish I may be mistaken in all these opinions.

Yours affectionately, Th. Jefferson

From An Anarchist Bible. 1.

This may be freely copied and distributed.

For those of us raised within the Christian tradition, the words of Saul of Tarsus, AKA St. Paul, are familiar and often remembered - his passage from the 13th Chapter of his 1st letter to the church at Corinth is considered a masterpiece, both in literary terms, and also for its appeal to our better nature, that we above all must love. :

“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ”

For those of us who have come to embrace the Anarchist movement as a politics of the future, as a means of resistance to the tyranny of this generation's self-serving political leadership, their use of technology as a means to enthral the human spirit, and perhaps more importantly against that invisible hand, that almost irresistible structuring of our lives in service to an economy that no longer serves us, but calls us to be replaceable servants to that inhuman master named profit, religion is often thought a mere corruption of the innate human desire to understand and master the choices we face under the burning sun and the emptiness of  the night time sky and its faint stars. There can  be little doubt that with its easy assurances and history of violence, religions, all religions have functioned in this way, but whether we take love or justice at the centre of our endeavours, we can not be far from what is needed in these days.                                     

Extinctions, The Economy and American Politics - Part 1

PART 1

Extinctions are happening at an accelerated rate because of human activity. We are altering the biosphere so quickly that many species have neither the ability to flourish nor adapt. Examples range from deforestation by burning so that we can plant palm oil plantations across formerly virgin rainforest in Indonesia, to the burning of dirty coal in the U.S., Russia and China which leads to acid rain which in turn has killed off freshwater fish. In America, even where we have brought back the fish, as in the 25,667 km²  Lake Erie, the waters and bottom sediments remain so contaminated that governments suggest it's fish not be eaten, or if ingested, only in severely limited amounts. The single factor that distinguishes humans from the rest of life on earth is our ability to collectively alter the environment on a vast scale. Fish can’t change the acidity of lakes, and orangutans can’t burn forests to replant the land as a mono-culture, No other species alters the environment on such a scale or so capriciously.

It's up to all of us to both recognise the gravity of the issues we face and press our governments to cooperate and move forward to address these concerns, for they ultimately affect us all. The potential for catastrophe is growing year by year, such that an increasing number of reputable climatologists believe that we may be too late to avert mass extinctions. They call the present time the anthropocene, an era when the Earth's biosphere came to be dominated by a wildly reproducing species that so fouled its environment, that survival became impossible for most life. This crazy self-destructive species is us. The boldest of these scientists suggest that the anthropocene is ending, and that our end as the dominant species will be its closing act.

Since the advent of the modern era, humans again and again have developed technologies that enhanced our ability to survive. We are living longer and have much lower infant and child mortality than ever in history. As a result, our populations has exploded. Beneath the advances in food production, sanitation, medicine and housing that have led to this population bomb, is a vast infrastructure of finance, commerce, and governments. Of these governments, which once ruled, have become agents of finance and commerce with the militaries and policing functioning to direct, control and defend these structures and their raw materials.

All three of these areas are currently contributing to rapid climate change, and to date are resistant to solutions to the problems that population growth and associated infrastructures are creating. Finance benefits from agile and rapid distribution of money, and identifies as a "good" a continuous increase in consumption (a growing market), commerce identify increases in productivity  and adaptation to the needs and desires of a growing population as a primary “good.” Governments, by and large, identify the security of each of these elements, and a peaceable, growing population, steady growth in both finance and commerce, as well as the survival of its own institutions as primary “goods.”

To date, all three of these stakeholder of modern life have been resistant to change in response to ecological and climatological concerns. In the U.S., for example, the last wide ranging ecology protection legislation were passed in the 1970’s. Over time, the three most important acts, concerning clean air, clean water and toxic substances have come under continuous attack by finance and commerce, and have all suffered at the hands of de-regulators, especially after the propagandistic association of these laws and regulations with a set of false economic claims put forward during the Reagan administration (1981-1989).

Some pressure or force needs to develop for this slowly growing troika of forces to change, but barring a large scale catastrophe that will force the issue, it's likely that change will occur too late  to avoid large scale collapses of the biosphere. The only alternative agent of change is us, the citizens of the nation to act in defense of the biosphere.  But for this to happen, a decades long process of pacification needs to be upended, and a swift, decisive new definition of individual prerogatives and responsibilities needs to be quickly developed. Part of the issue preventing effective change  is that so many of us have been effectively disenfranchised, becoming consumers, rather than a responsible citizenry. A decades long decline in voting, the repeal of equal time regulations for broadcast media, journalistic acceptance of patently false and misleading electioneering claims, the programmatic diminution of news gathering abilities and resources by corporate owners,  has been coupled to legal and propaganda attacks on the Fourth Estate as a whole, just as its vulnerability to digital media was coming to the fore.

Cont. in Pt II.

Extinctions, The Economy and American Politics - Part II

Part II


So how do we accelerate change, not in the global environment, but within the human community?
Here's how we might begin:

First: In democracies there should be an absolute litmus test in electoral politics. Politicians in the hands of commerce or finance be driven from office, regardless of the stance on other issues. Commerce and finance should lose the growing franchise they have been granted in most Western democracies. Corporations must lose the the legal fiction that defines them as persons, with rights to engage in politics and debate, and which, to the ultimate detriment of all, allows them to sway, influence or even buy our democracy.

Second: Individuals citizens need education in the basics of the sciences, as well as logic, in order to understand the gravity of the situation, and perhaps more importantly, to be secure in participating in a meaningful debate as to the best paths forward. It also means a thorough revaluation of the right of ownership.

Third: We need to thoroughly reevaluate the right of ownership. In Western democracies the right of ownership has never been been absolute. We are limited from ownership of many dangerous materials, ranging from weapons to chemicals. There are plants we're not allowed to grow in our gardens, some being deemed dangerous, others because they are understood to play a role in the spread of disease to important crops or forests. Likewise, one may not construct a bomb, even though one might have a right to own all the components needed, nor are ownership right allowed which trump many dangers to the larger community. This can range from restrictions on mining and minimum height requirements and scrubbers on industrial chimneys to safety requirements for public accommodations. Thus in most western nations limits have been placed the use and ownership of real property, such that common actions which are likely damaging to others are constrained. Limitations are often placed on the types of buildings permitted, or indeed if building is allowed at all. Requirements exist as to materials and design with safety as a principle justification, though zoning laws often factor potential impact on the value of nearby properties and even community standards of decorum or aesthetics into potential uses, tied to code requirements for setbacks, exterior materials and the design of access. In recent decades large segments of construction have codes requiring consideration of the disabled in design and construction.

The pseudo-populist movements concerned with land rights, whether in the form of anti-eminent domain groups, anti-zoning groups or Western grazing rights groups have been quietly applauded and underwritten by commerce and finance, which has manipulated politics to link such concerns with their own privileges to sell and manufacture "as they like, when and how they like." The propaganda buzzword beloved of finance and commerce is “deregulation.” Its proponents ignore the fundamental fact that regulation designed to protect the populace from harm is the only means to to avert harm on massive, perhaps life denying scales.

What's missing from many of these fronts for the interests of commerce and finance is an ancient notion of the "common good."  One way to express this attitude is to redevelop a language of common ownership.  Public land is not "government land," but land which is held by all for the good of all. Vast swathes of western America currently owned by the "government," are held legally held as as if no more than trusts for the commerce. So-called "national forests" are designed to guarantee access by commerce to cheap wood supplies. Preservation of these great forests, and their integrity as complex living ecologies stands a distant second place to the interests of finance and commerce.

For several generations the American people have been force fed a paradigm that services commerce, but not the people: the notion that private home ownership is the best and most economically beneficial approach to housing for most people, when the facts, freed from the interest of commerce and finance simply do not support this proposition. The single best form of housing most people in urban and suburban areas is collective ownership. This means cooperatives, not condominiums or public housing. Condos are rapidly and often justly developing a reputation as shoddily constructed "entry level" housing that often rapidly lose value after initial sale. Co-ops, while relatively rare in American markets, offer, when reasonably regulated against abuses, a form of common ownership that inculcates both personal and collective responsibility. While condo fees are often seen as little more than taxation, co-op membership can be structured to inform and develop community. In urban areas co-ops have been developed for visual artists, dance communities, musicians and their families, and many other natural affinity groups. It takes careful regulation to prevent some co-ops from becoming bastions of the antisocial, with existing members seeking to exclude "undesirables." but this can be easily prevented by substantial transparency requirements.

More Soon...

Extinctions, The Economy and American Politics - A Reading List

These are short works that can form a basis for discussion of real change. Remember, time is
running out.  Theory is Practice:


Anti-Systemic Movements
by Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K. Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein 1989/2011

This is a thoughtful, thought provoking and action inciting analysis of how our world works. "Peerless examination of the rise of social movements against the global capitalist system, conducted by the leading exponents of the “world systems” perspective."  


Twenty years of La Fabrique
- A free reading.

Since 1998 the editor Eric Hazan has published radical-left political works including masterstrokes like the Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection and controversial titles like Houria Bouteldja’s Les Blancs, les Juifs et nous. In his two decades running La Fabrique, he has maintained an undimmed ambition for editorial independence, and his subversive power. 


This Is Not a Program
By Tiqqun 


Historical conflict no longer opposes two massive molar heaps, two classes—the exploited and the exploiters, the dominant and dominated, managers and workers—between which, in each individual case, it would be possible to differentiate. The front line no longer cuts through the middle of society; it now runs through each one of us... "
—from This Is Not a Program


Now
The Invisible Committee 2017

Now is the phantom chapter to the Invisible Committee's previous book, To Our Friends: a new critique from the anonymous collective that establishes their opposition to the world of capital and its law of labor, addresses current anti-terrorist rhetoric and the ferocious repression that comes with it, and clarifies the end of social democracy and the growing rumors of the need for a coming “civil war.” 


To Our Friends
The Invisible Committee 2015

A reflection on, and an extension of, the ideas laid out seven years ago in "The Coming Insurrection."

The Coming Insurrection
The Invisible Committee   2009


A call to arms by a group of French intellectuals that rejects leftist reform and aligns itself with younger, less formal means of resistance.  Perhaps the most widely read and seminal writing of resistance to appear in the last 30 years.

When they Came for Me: A Story of Too Little, Too Late.

In a recent online discussion about the 1946 film The True Glory, a joint U.S. / U.K. account of the Second World War in Europe, the conversation was frequently interrupted by a small groups of disruptive writers. One was Russian, one American, One Spanish and one from the U.K.. What was interesting, and frightening is that they were all outright fascists, though some preferred the term Nazi.. Though they frequently sidetracked into debates between themselves concerning national or ethnic honour, reminding me most of the few recorded comments between Mussolini and Hitler -- that is to say, guarded pleasantries followed by chest thumping self aggrandisement -- these online fascists actually had a united purpose in disrupting the conversation. They each believed that historians are liars or misled propagandists, and that the Western Liberal tradition whose highest expressions are to be found in the principles of individual liberty, freedom of speech, and constitutional democracy, are by nature a kind of delusional misrepresentation of what people really want and need. To these writers the phrase "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," the triumphal, hopeful maxim of the French Revolution, "belongs on the trash heap of history."

Reading hundreds, perhaps thousands of words of contra-factual nonsense was difficult, and the exchanges often descended into acrimony and obscenities, but it was illuminating nonetheless, with an awful luciferian light shining brightly into the dark recesses of that aspect of humanity we would oft as not favour remain hidden.

Some Themes:

A Russian telling us, in almost mystical language of the manner in which the strengths of Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Stalin are today incarnate in Vladimir Putin, a man he wrote, that would "again lead his nation across the world for glory and  greatness."

A Spaniard who decried the leadership lacking in his king, whom he described as a puppet in the hands of weak willed democrats and communists. His day would come.

The man from the UK who talked of anti-Shariah patrols in London, Liverpool and Manchester, aimed at enforcing a "proper English dress code". Their method was to tear scarves off Muslim women. He took great pride in a kind of foul inventiveness, for example, throwing rendered pork fat on shops doors frequented by Muslims, and then spray painting "Kosher" on the window. Some religious confusion there.

One of the American fascists, after first decrying the people's failure to rise up after the Oklahoma Federal Building bombing, declared that "We finally have a man we can vote for in Donald Trump." I'll admit, after taking a predictable amount of heat from this gang of public enemies, I was greatly relieved when another discussant came back with this wonderful adaptation:

"When the Trump crowd insulted the Mexicans,
I remained silent;
I was not a Mexican.

When they 'punched the protesters' in the face,
I remained silent;
I was not a protester.

When they came for the socialists and "freeloaders,
I did not speak out;
I was not a "freeloader."

When they wanted badges for the Muslims,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Muslim.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out."

I am no lover of war. I grew up during America's "war on communism" in Vietnam, listening to the daily toll of American dead on the nightly news - but never the names or even numbers of the Vietnamese dead. I have lived through an unending succession of pointless military engagements. I am deeply cognisant that we have now been continuously at war in the Middle East since 1991. I have actively organised and protested against many of America's wars, police actions and interventions, but nonetheless there are moments when there is no choice. 

There are times when nations, whether pure in their intention or not, must act. While I believe it is true that WW II set America on a reckless course of intrigues and misuse of state power - what some call "endless war and debt"  I also believe that WW II was fought for a purpose far larger than the profits of bankers and munitions manufacturers. The film's images of people in Paris and Brussels filling the streets, dancing and handing flowers to Allied troops as they marched are real, as were the pictures of concentration camps filled with the dead and dying.

Yes, we need to be critical and careful of our government's intentions. We should by all means not succumb to jingoism and the meaningless, deceitful rhetoric that dominates American political discourse. But borders cannot define the limits of our concern, nor our actions when authority falls into insanity and murderous barbarism, as it did in Germany and Italy in the decades between the two world wars.. The words of Martin Niemöller, offered in a 1936 talk, stand as a stark witness against those who would say "Stay at home. Mind your own business. Avoid entanglements."

"When the Nazis came for the communists,

I remained silent;

I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,

I remained silent;

I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,

I did not speak out;

I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,

I remained silent;

I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me,

there was no one left to speak out."

"Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten,

habe ich geschwiegen;

ich war ja kein Kommunist.

Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten,

habe ich geschwiegen;

ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat.

Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten,

habe ich nicht protestiert;

ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter.

Als sie die Juden holten,

habe ich geschwiegen;

ich war ja kein Jude.

Als sie mich holten,

gab es keinen mehr,

der protestieren konnte."

For those who do not know this work, its author, Pastor Niemöller, a conservative Lutheran pastor and supporter of the Nazi regime publicly denied to support a single paragraph of the Nazi orders on "racial purity:" the Arierparagraph, or in English "Aryan Paragraph," which refused membership to various organisations, including his Church to so-called "non-Aryans," in other words, Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and other the Nazis believed inferior.

In April of 1937 he was arrested for his protests against this paragraph. Though released by a court 8 months later, he was re-arrested on the day of his release and sent without trial to a concentration camp. He was freed eight years later from Dachau in May of 1945. Of the 2720 Christian clergy confined at that camp, Paul Berben ["Dachau, 1933-45"] reports that 1034 died while under confinement. That's a far better rate of survival than Jews and many other categories of the innocent sent to the camps, but those who died, no matter their faith and race, were not martyrs. We should not, and must not take that false comfort from their murders.

The camp victims did chose to die for their god. They died because people who were able to stand up against tyranny chose to live in blindness rather than see the truth. They died because friends and neighbors preferred to be deaf rather than hear what was being said in the rallies and over the radio, and they died because as a nation, the German people were struck dumb, choosing to silence their own beating hearts, rather than speak the truth.

The victims did not die for their religion or their convictions. They died because their friends and neighbors failed them.  The German people could have said no in 1929 when President von Hindenburg allowed Hitler's predecessor to gut their parliament and by rule by decree. They could have said "no,' in 1933 when Von Hindenburg named Hitler as chancellor. They again could have said no to the Nazis a year later when Hitler seized the presidency from the hands of the then dead President Paul von Hindenburg, without the pretext of legal authority, combining both the presidency and chancellorship. There were dozens of moments when the German people could have stopped the Nazi Party, and did not.  By late 1934 it was too late. Even had one of the dozens of assassination attempts succeeded, another Nazi would have taken Hitler's place. Why did every remedy fail? Apathy, fear, distrust of democracy, etc., etc. Tens of thousands of pages have been written on the subject, but all the conjecture leads to a single answer. When they still had sufficient power, the German people chose not to act.

Pastor Niemöller, after the war, renounced not only his earlier support for the Nazi party, but also his own anti--semitism. He spent most of the remaining days of his long life helping Germany and the world remember. I just hope that in 50 or 75 years, no one is writing about the ways in which Americans were blind, deaf and dumb in the face of the political catastrophe that has fallen on us in these early, yet terribly dark and frightening days.

DHH