There is a quote:
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
by Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945*
We were talking about supposedly "religious"
people who take delight in hurting others and
pointing out other's faults while not blieving they
have any. I am struck by the blatent arogance
of people who think doing nothing means they are
not supporting other's actions. As you can see
by the above quote, it is a dangerous and very
scary tactic. Doing nothing is making a choice
to do somthing...Would you not be better off
doing the right thing instead of nothing?
Then we discussed the fact that doing something
(i.e. the right thing) sometimes has consequences.
I paraphrased the above quote to show what the
ultimate consequenses were. Spriritual people who
believe that good must triumph over evil must take
action. It is simple. And, easier said than done.
* Rev. Martin Niemoller was protected until
1937 by both the foreign press and influential
friends in the up-scale Berlin suburb where he
preached. Eventually, he was arrested
for treason. Perhaps due to foreign pressure,
he was found guilty, but initially given only
a suspended sentence. He was however then almost
immediately re-arrested on Hitler’
direct orders. From then on until the end of WW II,
he was held at the Sachsenhausen
and Dachau concentration camps. Near the end of the war,
he narrowly escaped execution.
[from Charles Colson’s Kingdoms in Conflict]
After the war, Niemoller emerged from prison to preach the words that began this post, that all of us know... He was instrumental in producing the “Stuttgart Confession of Guilt”, in which the German Protestant churches formally accepted guilt for their complicity in allowing the suffering which Hitler’s reign caused to occur. In 1961, he was elected as one of the six presidents of the World Council of Churches, the ecumenical body of the Protestant faiths.
Niemoller emerged also as an adamant pacifist and advocate of reconciliation. He actively sought out contacts in Eastern Europe, and traveled to Moscow in 1952 and North Vietnam in 1967. He received the Lenin Peace Prize in 1967, and the West German Grand Cross of Merit in 1971. Martin Niemoller died in Wiesbaden, West Germany on Mar 6, 1984, at the age of 92. [from
the Encyclopedia Britannica].
