... fascism...

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Fri Apr 27 05:42:42 PDT 2001


On Wed, 25 Apr 2001, C. G. Estabrook wrote:


> Excellent sentiment, but I doubt Niemoeller ever said it, given his
> politics. Several attempts to source the quote haven't worked.

Peter Novick cites "Martin Niemoeller, Activist as Bystander: The Oft Quoted Reflection" in Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer, eds. _Jewish-Christian Encounters over the Centuries_ (New York, 1994)

One of the things about this quote is that it seems that almost everyone who uses it (at least in America) changes it -- not only as a parallelism, as Charles did (although that's been popular too) but also changing the original to better accord with what they think he should have said -- moving Jews from last to first, omitting the communists, adding Catholics and homosexuals, etc, depending on political context.

Michael

__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com



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