http://www.lefteyeonbooks.com/2011/04/todays-pick-time-for-outrage-by-stephane-hessel/
Today’s Pick: Time for Outrage! by Stephane Hessel
Publisher’s description: “Stephane Hessel, Resistance fighter and concentration camp survivor, tells the young of today that their lives and liberties are worth fighting for. Remembering the ideals for which he risked his life, while never forgetting the evils against which he struggled, the now 94-year-old writer and diplomat calls on all of us to take back the rights that have slowly slipped away since the Second World War ended. As sales of this masterful polemic approach a million in France, it is published here for the first time in English. Published by Charles Glass Books, a new imprint of Quartet Books.” (more info)
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http://www.praguepost.com/opinion/7874-indignez-vous.html
Indignez-vous!
Excerpts from the once-obscure French political pamphlet that has become an international phenomenon
This is the ONLY FT we need in SGP! Fuck all the rest!
Posted: March 16, 2011
By Stéphane Hessel The Prague Post | Comments (0) | Post comment
Ninety-three years. I'm nearing the last stage. The end cannot be far off. How lucky I am to be able to draw on the foundation of my political life: the Resistance and the National Council of the Resistance's program from 66 years ago... I was in London, where I had joined de Gaulle in March 1941, when I learned that the council had put the finishing touches on its program and adopted it on March 15, 1944: a collection of principles and values for Free France that still provides the foundation of our country's modern democracy.
We need these principles and values more than ever today.
It is up to us, to all of us together, to ensure that our society remains one to be proud of: not this society of undocumented workers and deportations, of being suspicious of immigrants; not this society where our retirement and the other gains of social security are being called into question; not this society where the media are in the hands of the rich...
After 1945... the general interest had to be given precedence over particular special interests, and a fair division of the wealth created by the world of labor over the power of money... All of these social rights at the core of the program of the Resistance are today under attack.
They have the nerve to tell us that the state can no longer cover the costs of these social programs. Yet how can the money needed to continue and extend these achievements be lacking today, when the creation of wealth has grown so enormously since the Liberation, a time when Europe lay in ruins? It can only be because the power of money, which the Resistance fought against so hard, has never been as great and selfish and shameless as it is now, with its servants in the very highest circles of government. The banks, now privatized, seem to care primarily about their dividends, and about the enormous salaries of their executives, not about the general good. The gap between richest and poorest has never been so large, competition and the circulation of capital never so encouraged.
The motivation that underlay the Resistance was outrage.
We, the veterans of the Resistance movements and fighting forces of Free France, call on the younger generations to revive and carry forward the tradition of the Resistance and its ideas.
We say to you: Take over, keep going, get angry! Those in positions of political responsibility, economic power and intellectual authority, in fact our whole society, must not give up or let ourselves be overwhelmed by the current international dictatorship of the financial markets, which is such a threat to peace and democracy.
I want you, each and every one of you, to have a reason to be outraged...When something outrages you, as Nazism did me, that is when you become a militant, strong and engaged. You join the movement of history, and the great current of history continues to flow only thanks to each and every one of us. History's direction is toward more justice and more freedom - though not the unbridled freedom of the fox in a henhouse. The rights set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 are indeed universal. When you encounter someone who lacks those rights, have sympathy and help him or her to achieve them...
My long life has given me a steady succession of reasons for outrage... These reasons came less from emotion than from a will to be engaged and get involved... Mankind's responsibility cannot be left to some outside power or to a god.
On the contrary, people must commit themselves in terms of their personal, individual human responsibility... Hegelianism interprets the long history of humanity as having meaning: that of mankind's liberty advancing step by step. History is made by successive shocks, of confronting and overcoming successive challenges. Societies progress, and in the end, having attained complete liberty, may achieve a democratic state in some ideal form.
There is, of course, a conception of history that sees the progress of liberty, competition and the race for "more and more" as a destructive whirlwind. That is how a friend of my father described history... I am speaking of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin... For Benjamin, who committed suicide in September 1940 to escape the Nazis, history is an unstoppable progression from one catastrophe to the next.
It is true that the reasons for outrage today may seem less clear or the world more complicated... It is no longer a question of a small elite whose schemes we can clearly comprehend. This is a vast world, and we see its interdependence. We are interconnected in ways we never were before, but some things in this world are unacceptable. To see this, you have only to open your eyes...
The worst possible outlook is indifference that says, "I can't do anything about it; I'll just get by." ...
To the young, I say: Look around you, you will find things that make you justifiably angry - the treatment of immigrants, illegal aliens and Roma. You will see concrete situations that provoke you to act as a real citizen. Seek and you shall find! ...
I am convinced that the future belongs to nonviolence, to the reconciliation of different cultures. It is along this path that humanity will clear its next hurdle... In The Situation of the Writer in 1947, Sartre wrote, "I recognize that violence, manifested in any form, is a failure. But it is an inevitable failure because we live in a world of violence; even though it is true that recourse to violence to fight violence risks perpetuating it, it is also true that this is the only way to make violence stop."
To which I would add that nonviolence is a surer way to make it stop. One must not support terrorists, as Sartre did in the name of this principle during the Algerian War, or at the time of the attack on the Israeli athletes committed at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972. It doesn't work, and Sartre himself, at the end of his life, ended by questioning the meaning of terrorism and doubting its justification... We must realize that violence turns its back on hope. We have to choose hope over violence - choose the hope of nonviolence.
That is the path we must learn to follow. The oppressors no less than the oppressed have to negotiate to remove the oppression: That is what will eliminate terrorist violence. That is why we cannot let too much hate accumulate.
The message of a Nelson Mandela, a Martin Luther King Jr., is just as relevant in a world that has moved beyond victorious totalitarianism and the cold war confrontation of ideologies.
Their message is one of hope and faith in modern societies' ability to move beyond conflict with mutual understanding and a vigilant patience. To reach that point, societies must be based on rights whose violation prompts outrage - no matter who has violated them. There can be no compromising on these rights...
The Western obsession with productivity has brought the world to a crisis that we can escape only with a radical break from the headlong rush for "more, always more" in the financial realm as well as in science and technology. It is high time that concerns for ethics, justice and sustainability prevail...
Still, it remains the case that there has been important progress since 1948... The first 10 years of the 21st century, in contrast, were a period of retreat...We have had an economic crisis, but we have not initiated a new politics for economic development. Similarly, the Copenhagen Climate Conference of December 2009 did not result in genuine political action to save the planet... Yet we must keep up hope - we must always hope...
How should I conclude? By recalling again that on the 60th anniversary of the Program of the National Council of the Resistance, we veterans of the Resistance movements and the fighting forces of Free France from 1940 to 1945 addressed an Appeal to the young generation on March 8, 2004, in which we said, "Nazism was defeated, thanks to the sacrifices of our brothers and sisters of the Resistance and of the nations allied against fascist barbarity. But this menace has not completely disappeared, and our outrage at injustice remains intact to this day."
No, this menace has not completely disappeared. In addition, we continue to call for "a true peaceful uprising against the means of mass communication that offers nothing but mass consumption as a prospect for our youth, contempt for the least powerful in society and for culture, general amnesia and the outrageous competition of all against all."
To you who will create the 21st century, we say, from the bottom of our hearts,
TO CREATE IS TO RESIST.
TO RESIST IS TO CREATE.
- The author is a 93-year-old former leader of the French Resistance and concentration camp survivor. He went on to help draft the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights and serve as a French diplomat. Since its release in October 2010 Indignez-vous! has sold more than 1.5 million copies. The above excerpts are reproduced with the permission of Charles Glass and Quartet Books, which has published the entire pamphlet in English under the title Time for Outrage. The text was translated from French by Damion Searls. All omissions from the original are designated by ellipsis (...).
Stéphane Hessel can be reached at
[email protected]
Today’s Pick: Time for Outrage! by Stephane Hessel
Publisher’s description: “Stephane Hessel, Resistance fighter and concentration camp survivor, tells the young of today that their lives and liberties are worth fighting for. Remembering the ideals for which he risked his life, while never forgetting the evils against which he struggled, the now 94-year-old writer and diplomat calls on all of us to take back the rights that have slowly slipped away since the Second World War ended. As sales of this masterful polemic approach a million in France, it is published here for the first time in English. Published by Charles Glass Books, a new imprint of Quartet Books.” (more info)
Related Articles:
Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy by Ross Perlin
Today’s Pick: Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable
Today’s New Books 2/7
Today’s New Books
Denying Collective Bargaining Rights is not ‘Civil’
Today’s Pick: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions by Omar Barghouti
Today’s Pick: The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor: Birth of a New Workers’ Movement or the Death Throes of the Old? By Steve Early
http://www.praguepost.com/opinion/7874-indignez-vous.html
Indignez-vous!
Excerpts from the once-obscure French political pamphlet that has become an international phenomenon
This is the ONLY FT we need in SGP! Fuck all the rest!
Posted: March 16, 2011
By Stéphane Hessel The Prague Post | Comments (0) | Post comment
Ninety-three years. I'm nearing the last stage. The end cannot be far off. How lucky I am to be able to draw on the foundation of my political life: the Resistance and the National Council of the Resistance's program from 66 years ago... I was in London, where I had joined de Gaulle in March 1941, when I learned that the council had put the finishing touches on its program and adopted it on March 15, 1944: a collection of principles and values for Free France that still provides the foundation of our country's modern democracy.
We need these principles and values more than ever today.
It is up to us, to all of us together, to ensure that our society remains one to be proud of: not this society of undocumented workers and deportations, of being suspicious of immigrants; not this society where our retirement and the other gains of social security are being called into question; not this society where the media are in the hands of the rich...
After 1945... the general interest had to be given precedence over particular special interests, and a fair division of the wealth created by the world of labor over the power of money... All of these social rights at the core of the program of the Resistance are today under attack.
They have the nerve to tell us that the state can no longer cover the costs of these social programs. Yet how can the money needed to continue and extend these achievements be lacking today, when the creation of wealth has grown so enormously since the Liberation, a time when Europe lay in ruins? It can only be because the power of money, which the Resistance fought against so hard, has never been as great and selfish and shameless as it is now, with its servants in the very highest circles of government. The banks, now privatized, seem to care primarily about their dividends, and about the enormous salaries of their executives, not about the general good. The gap between richest and poorest has never been so large, competition and the circulation of capital never so encouraged.
The motivation that underlay the Resistance was outrage.
We, the veterans of the Resistance movements and fighting forces of Free France, call on the younger generations to revive and carry forward the tradition of the Resistance and its ideas.
We say to you: Take over, keep going, get angry! Those in positions of political responsibility, economic power and intellectual authority, in fact our whole society, must not give up or let ourselves be overwhelmed by the current international dictatorship of the financial markets, which is such a threat to peace and democracy.
I want you, each and every one of you, to have a reason to be outraged...When something outrages you, as Nazism did me, that is when you become a militant, strong and engaged. You join the movement of history, and the great current of history continues to flow only thanks to each and every one of us. History's direction is toward more justice and more freedom - though not the unbridled freedom of the fox in a henhouse. The rights set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 are indeed universal. When you encounter someone who lacks those rights, have sympathy and help him or her to achieve them...
My long life has given me a steady succession of reasons for outrage... These reasons came less from emotion than from a will to be engaged and get involved... Mankind's responsibility cannot be left to some outside power or to a god.
On the contrary, people must commit themselves in terms of their personal, individual human responsibility... Hegelianism interprets the long history of humanity as having meaning: that of mankind's liberty advancing step by step. History is made by successive shocks, of confronting and overcoming successive challenges. Societies progress, and in the end, having attained complete liberty, may achieve a democratic state in some ideal form.
There is, of course, a conception of history that sees the progress of liberty, competition and the race for "more and more" as a destructive whirlwind. That is how a friend of my father described history... I am speaking of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin... For Benjamin, who committed suicide in September 1940 to escape the Nazis, history is an unstoppable progression from one catastrophe to the next.
It is true that the reasons for outrage today may seem less clear or the world more complicated... It is no longer a question of a small elite whose schemes we can clearly comprehend. This is a vast world, and we see its interdependence. We are interconnected in ways we never were before, but some things in this world are unacceptable. To see this, you have only to open your eyes...
The worst possible outlook is indifference that says, "I can't do anything about it; I'll just get by." ...
To the young, I say: Look around you, you will find things that make you justifiably angry - the treatment of immigrants, illegal aliens and Roma. You will see concrete situations that provoke you to act as a real citizen. Seek and you shall find! ...
I am convinced that the future belongs to nonviolence, to the reconciliation of different cultures. It is along this path that humanity will clear its next hurdle... In The Situation of the Writer in 1947, Sartre wrote, "I recognize that violence, manifested in any form, is a failure. But it is an inevitable failure because we live in a world of violence; even though it is true that recourse to violence to fight violence risks perpetuating it, it is also true that this is the only way to make violence stop."
To which I would add that nonviolence is a surer way to make it stop. One must not support terrorists, as Sartre did in the name of this principle during the Algerian War, or at the time of the attack on the Israeli athletes committed at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972. It doesn't work, and Sartre himself, at the end of his life, ended by questioning the meaning of terrorism and doubting its justification... We must realize that violence turns its back on hope. We have to choose hope over violence - choose the hope of nonviolence.
That is the path we must learn to follow. The oppressors no less than the oppressed have to negotiate to remove the oppression: That is what will eliminate terrorist violence. That is why we cannot let too much hate accumulate.
The message of a Nelson Mandela, a Martin Luther King Jr., is just as relevant in a world that has moved beyond victorious totalitarianism and the cold war confrontation of ideologies.
Their message is one of hope and faith in modern societies' ability to move beyond conflict with mutual understanding and a vigilant patience. To reach that point, societies must be based on rights whose violation prompts outrage - no matter who has violated them. There can be no compromising on these rights...
The Western obsession with productivity has brought the world to a crisis that we can escape only with a radical break from the headlong rush for "more, always more" in the financial realm as well as in science and technology. It is high time that concerns for ethics, justice and sustainability prevail...
Still, it remains the case that there has been important progress since 1948... The first 10 years of the 21st century, in contrast, were a period of retreat...We have had an economic crisis, but we have not initiated a new politics for economic development. Similarly, the Copenhagen Climate Conference of December 2009 did not result in genuine political action to save the planet... Yet we must keep up hope - we must always hope...
How should I conclude? By recalling again that on the 60th anniversary of the Program of the National Council of the Resistance, we veterans of the Resistance movements and the fighting forces of Free France from 1940 to 1945 addressed an Appeal to the young generation on March 8, 2004, in which we said, "Nazism was defeated, thanks to the sacrifices of our brothers and sisters of the Resistance and of the nations allied against fascist barbarity. But this menace has not completely disappeared, and our outrage at injustice remains intact to this day."
No, this menace has not completely disappeared. In addition, we continue to call for "a true peaceful uprising against the means of mass communication that offers nothing but mass consumption as a prospect for our youth, contempt for the least powerful in society and for culture, general amnesia and the outrageous competition of all against all."
To you who will create the 21st century, we say, from the bottom of our hearts,
TO CREATE IS TO RESIST.
TO RESIST IS TO CREATE.
- The author is a 93-year-old former leader of the French Resistance and concentration camp survivor. He went on to help draft the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights and serve as a French diplomat. Since its release in October 2010 Indignez-vous! has sold more than 1.5 million copies. The above excerpts are reproduced with the permission of Charles Glass and Quartet Books, which has published the entire pamphlet in English under the title Time for Outrage. The text was translated from French by Damion Searls. All omissions from the original are designated by ellipsis (...).
Stéphane Hessel can be reached at
[email protected]
