First they came for the socialists…
Philip Roddis It’s ten to one you read in my title the opener to a much cited quote about Nazi Germany. And two to one that even if you couldn’t identify the author, Pastor Martin Niemöller, you could give an approximation of how the rest of it goes: I did not speak out because I was not a socialist…a trade unionist…a Jew… Though anchored in time and place, in history at its darkest, the pastor’s remorse – he was not speaking rhetorically but in penitence – points to a truth neither finite nor spatially bound but universal: what goes around comes around. To look the other way as others are cruelly treated is not only cowardly and immoral. It is dangerously myopic. No man, opined one of England’s finest poets, is an island. Ask not for whom the bell tolls. Then they came for the intellectuals… Mao targeted these. So, in more distilled and chilling form, did Pol Pot. And long before Hitler’s doctors injected the disabled – life unworthy of the name – with …
