Tag Archives: Martin Niemoller

#VanillaISIS, Y’AllQaeda, YokelHaram, al-Shabubba waging YeeHawd. Har har there but for the grace of an IQ go you.

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So where’s the solidarity? Yes the Bundy rancher insurrection is a fight for settler colonial privilege, Yes the hunter-soldierers are reenacting the Okies land rush of the Indian Territories. Yes this Cabelas militia is waging #YeeHawd against the gub’mint for every wrong reason. Such as, the God-given right to despoil the commons, and such as. But NO these paleoammosexuals are not “terrorists”. They can’t even pack their own lunch. What they are are dumbass carbon-bigfoots. Their hillbilly occupation is a sidearmed rebellion. That said, the camo-twits have declared war on the US government. That’s closer to the barricades than you’ve ever ventured.

Under cover of stupid, they’ve brought guns. It’s unbecoming but the strategy has averted a shutdown thus far. Guns speak truth to power in the language power understands. And the oafs are trying to protect the people’s land from the BLM. That’s your wet dream for stopping pipelines, fracking, and ecocide. Of course these yokels want to facilitate the plunder of nature, but that’s no different than the corporate media. They’re not villains, they’re the shills.

Please stop complaining that if these white privileged jerks were black they’d get the whipping they’d deserve. What are you, cheerleading for a violent authoritarian response?! Same as with rioting fratboys, you don’t have to love them, just don’t call for their smackdown. The police need to ease up with the heavy hand, not spread the brutality with equal opportunity.

Same as the drunk fratboys, these “patriots” have zero political awareness. They are no emergent right wing, they’re not fascists. The Bundy posse is to political movements what the Westboro Baptist Church was to activism. No resemblance. Poisoned apples to oranges.

Cliven Bundy, like Donald Trump, is a distraction from the real fascistm long firmly entrenched.

Of course these poachers should be run off public land, without a federal show of air suppremacy. Don’t echo the call for imperial airstrikes. Instead of igniting a Waco, let’s wait the yokels out, slap them with fines, expropriate their gear and put them in jail. Setting a forest fires should be severely punished. But don’t let me hear supposed anti-government social media pundits cry for the ass-kicking of these wannabe-brighter insurgents.

A regime which terrorizes the have-less with drones and death squads and war has no business defining what is and isn’t terrorism, least of all the push-back.

#NotMyRevolution #FuckYou. First they came for the dumb yokels, but I was not a dumb yokel so I said nothing. It’s not without irony that the point of Martin Niemoller’s lament escapes you.

First they came for the Communists, but we don’t like Communists…

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First they came for the Communists,?
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists,
?and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,?
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for me?
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
 
These famous words float an admonition, but isn’t it more likely an adage? They describe the passivity which permitted Hitler’s abuses, but could apply to the ordinary manifestation of totalitarianism. Has human nature yet learned except in hindsight? First they came for the Communists, but we all spoke out, the end. That’s because the big lie is “they.” Try substituting “we” and you see the tsunamic inevitability of mob ethnocentrism. First we came for the Communists, Trade Unionists, and Jews, then him, then her, pure fun until it was me. Oops.

This quote, spoken by German priest Martin Niemoll, features prominently in the US Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. When I saw it I made a note to look up what seemed a strange discrepancy. Curiously in their version, the first group to be targeted are Socialists, not Communists. I say curiously, because I wouldn’t bring it up if I didn’t think the distinction was very unfortunate.

There are several variations of this “poem” because Niemoll repeated it in many sermons and never wrote it down. Asked about it through the years, sometimes he included Jehovah’s Witnesses and gays, and omitted others. Never, however, did he fail to mention Communists, and never were they not the first.

Does it make a difference? If you consider that Communists are the beasts of burden for Socialism, yes. If there’s a boogieman of Capitalism, it’s not the straw man Socialist, it’s the grassroots, proletariat Communist. Socialists are the intellectuals. The far less palatable working class are the Communists. How unfortunate to scrub Niemoll’s warning of its authentic historical detail. The Nazis first came for the Communists.

Bed bugs have made a comeback in the lives of the American poor, lending an uncomfortable new relevance to a folk bedtime salutation. Imagine if we said “Goodnight, don’t let the butterflies bite.” That carries no folk wisdom whatever.

And so how perverse that a traditionally maligned group such as the Jews, firmly ensconcing themselves on Niemoll’s list, decide another unpopular group needn’t the same protection. Doesn’t it defeat the very threat the old priest wanted us to think about? Yes, each group is meant to represent people in general, universality. But it doesn’t work to say bunnies, or amiable characteristics, because then the prospect doesn’t make sense, our youngsters are made vigilant facing a direction from which an attack never comes.

If the exclusion of Communists was a concession to the perennial Red Scare climate of the US capitol, it sadly confirms why Martin Niemoll’s warning won’t find purchase. Even in a Holocaust Museum dedicated to “never again” coming after people based on their social group, some don’t care about looking out for the most vulnerable.

Imagine Niemoll’s dictum as paraphrased for the Hindu castes. Imagine the Brahmins reciting it, leaving off the untouchables.