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Edited on Thu Sep-21-06 04:15 PM by Pamela Troy
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 did not speak out;
I was not a Jew.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.
Martin Niemoller
It was bound to happen sooner or later. Recently someone I was debating online finally just came out and denounced the Niemoller Statement, referring to it as “that infamous ditty” before hightailing it out of the discussion.
What startled me is not just the fact that he would dismiss what most of us were taught to regard as an important moral statement of the 20th century, but the language used. “INFAMOUS?” I first learned that word back when I was a kid watching late Saturday night Sci-Fi Theater. Someone said it to Peter Cushing in a Hammer film while Cushing was doing something literally monstrous. And of course, there’s the dismissive term “ditty” which, with those clipped “Tees,” would truly lend itself to dialogue directed in 1967 by Terrence Fisher. Can’t you just hear either Cushing or his partner in British righteousness, Christopher Lee saying it next to the bedside of a swooning Barbara Shelley? “She was a moral, godfearing woman until she heard that…(draw in breath, tighten lips, narrow nostrils in an expression of suppressed repugnance) “INfamous ditty…”
This minor incident prompted some unscientific research on my part, an exploration of how right-wingers have been dealing with the Niemoller Statement for the past few years. In fairness I should say that I don’t know whether or not this “infamous ditty” response is the start of a trend. It’s certainly true that the right wing has continued what I described some time ago as its serene “march into the far frontiers of the irrational,” which means the right-wing blogosphere – always ahead of the curve when it comes to high weirdness -- has already reached the gibbering, smearing-human-waste-on-the-walls, mailbox-attacking stage. Offline right-wingers have not shown much hesitation so far about moving through the barriers broken by their internet shock-troops, so I suppose it’s possible that outright attacks on Niemoller as a silly old fogy who didn’t know what he was talking about will begin appearing in Wall Street Journal editorials.
What a day or two of googling has revealed to me is that for the past few years, the right has been showing an increasing discomfort with this famous, succinct and profoundly inconvenient comment on moral indifference. And few prominent conservative columnists have picked more frequently and more nervously at the implications of The Statement than the National Review’s Jonah Goldberg.
His earliest assault on Niemoller that I found took place in 2002 when, in the course of defending Jose Padilla’s treatment, after making the obligatory claims that those in invoke Niemoller are “demeaning” the Holocaust and its victims, Goldberg went on to say: “These people, in effect, take Martin Niemoller's historic lament about the rise of the Nazi Party (‘They came for the Jews…’) and rewrite it to become, ‘First they came for the murderers and I did not speak up, for I was not a murderer. Then they came for the terrorists, but I said nothing for I was not a terrorist.’”
Actually, the Niemoller Statement most frequently is quoted as beginning with “First they came for the Communists.” That was, after all, the chronological order in which the groups cited by Niemoller were rounded up by the Nazis. But then, “Communists” would probably not sound quite as harmless as “Jews” would to Goldberg’s right wing readers, and the circumstances in which the Third Reich rounded up the Communists – in the wake of the Reichstag Fire, amid accusations that the Communists as a group were terrorists engaged in a dastardly plot to destroy the Third Reich – might screw up Goldberg’s mocking “first they came for the murderers” routine. It would point up the fact that the roundups were sold to the German people as a roundup of murderers, terrorists and arsonists, of underhanded subversives, of sneaking conspirators intent on raping Aryan women and subverting German culture. In short, Goldberg’s rewriting of the Niemoller doctrine here counts on his readers having only the most superficial grasp of its historical context.
Goldberg himself cannot claim to be unaware of that context. Months later, in February of 2003, he wrote a piece entitled “Comparing Saddam to Hitler is Justified” in which, while defending the equation of Hussein with Hitler, he correctly observed that “Hitler didn't murder 6 million Jews until well after WWII began.” It was only a brief glimmer of consciousness however, because after the invasion of Iraq, in a reversal only an online pundit could achieve without serious neck injury, he had this to say about comparisons of Bush to Hitler:
“Show me the camps. Show me the millions of people being gassed. Show me the tattoos on people's arms. Show me elderly Muslim men being beaten in the streets, their stores smashed, and books burned. Show me huge piles of emaciated bodies stocked high like cords of wood.”
My point is not to defend comparing Saddam to Hitler or Bush to Hitler. (I don’t think either comparison apt.) My point is to illustrate the manner in which the Niemoller Statement has been misused and deliberately misinterpreted by at least one pundit who should know better. There were, of course – as Goldberg knows -- not millions of people being gassed when the Communists were being rounded up in Germany in the wake of the Reichstag fire. There were not “huge piles of emaciated bodies stacked high like cords of wood.” Kristalnacht had not yet taken place. That was Niemoller’s point.
So the Niemoller Statement has remained, like Banquo at the feast, hovering on the periphery of our awareness whenever we hear about Jose Padilla, the detainees at Gitmo or, more recently, Maher Arar. Bush’s policy on torture and incarceration simply cannot be defended without the ghost of Martin Niemoller taking its seat at the table. Goldberg’s own awareness of it was again made painfully evident back in May of 2005 when he said on the National Review Online’s Corner, “Andrew Sullivan is casting himself as the pastor Niemoller of the blogosphere again.” What prompted this sneer were statements by Sullivan on torture and the recent scandal involving a discredited Newsweek story about American interrogators desecrating a Koran.
”What I find remarkable,” Sullivan had observed, “is that interrogatory abuse is now taken for granted, even by defenders of the administration.” Sullivan went on to quote Goldberg’s dismissive question “Were we unaware that interrogators at Gitmo aren't playing bean bag with detainees?’ and added. “So yesterday's outrage becomes today's world-weary assumption. This is how liberty dies - with scattered, knee-jerk applause.”
Andrew Sullivan does not mention Niemoller in the excerpt Goldberg cites, but what he is observing in Goldberg’s question about "playing bean bag" is exactly the kind of incremental tolerance for brutality that the Niemoller Statement addresses. Goldberg knows this. So like the guilt-ridden Macbeth, Goldberg tips his hand by leaping to his feet exclaiming “Never shake thy gory locks at me…” Goldberg is also using here a common last-ditch tactic of online right-wingers when faced with the indefensible. He’s painting the emulation of Niemoller, conscious or not, as a sort of hubris, as though by taking The Statement to heart, Sullivan is engaging in the unseemly posturing of a prude -- as opposed, I guess, to the unaffected, irrepressible Huck Finn honesty of those who, like Goldberg, don’t bother with those hoity-toity ethical niceties Niemoller seemed to consider so important.
Of course, it’s not just Goldberg who has been taking on Niemoller, but the examples I’ve cited here pretty much cover the approaches I’ve seen used by the right when trying to grapple with that pesky Statement. They rewrite it. Or they denounce its use as inappropriate because the death toll hasn’t yet reached 6 million. Or they ridicule the very notion of invoking it as an over dramatic bid for attention so irrational it barely warrants a response. All of these involve the flat rejection of what Niemoller was actually saying -- that part of your moral responsibility as a citizen is speaking out the minute your government starts abusing your neighbors, even if they are neighbors whom you dislike and with whom you have little in common.
How long can they keep it up? We’ve repeatedly predicted that the current administration and its apologists have finally hit bottom, but the plunge always continues. The Bush administration seems determined to plumb the absolute depths of what Americans are willing to tolerate, and as a result, the outlines of the Niemoller Statement are becoming clearer and clearer, the ghost less and less transparent. At some point it will have to be directly acknowledged, and either embraced at last or openly rejected.
Some prominent right-wing pundit may be working on that even now, composing a draft of a piece in which he or she “bravely” utters what the right has plainly been thinking now for the past five years – that Niemoller was a pest, a naïf, his statement too inconvenient, too unsatisfying for 21st century Americans. Look out for essays beginning with the writer opining that s/he is going to get lots of hate-mail, is going to be assailed for their words but must – alas! – speak out, utter truth to power no matter what the consequences!
If I were a betting woman, I’d put my money on Ann Coulter, John Derbyshire, or Rush Limbaugh. But I’m not a betting woman and, in spite of all that has been done or said in the past few years, I still can’t quite bring myself to believe it will ever come to that.
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