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.
Toward a Peaceful Insurrection
I have noticed-and I am not the only one-the Israeli government’s reaction to the citizens of [the West Bank village of] Bil’in, who protest the wall each Friday by simply marching to it, without throwing rocks or using force. The Israeli authorities have described these marches as “nonviolent terrorism.” Not bad… One would have to be Israeli to describe nonviolence as terrorism, and above all one would have to be embarrassed by how effective it is in gaining the support and understanding of every enemy of oppression in the world.
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. For we are threatened by the most serious dangers, which have the power to bring the human experiment to an end by making the planet uninhabitable.
Still, it remains the case that there has been important progress since 1948: decolonization, the end of apartheid, the destruction of the Soviet empire, the fall of the Berlin Wall. The first ten years of the twenty-first century, in contrast, were a period of retreat, explicable in part by the American presidency of George W. Bush, September 11 and the disastrous conclusions that the United States drew from it, such as the invasion of Iraq . 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. We are at a threshold between the horrors of the first decade of the century and the possibilities of the decades to follow. Yet we must keep up hope-we must always hope. The previous decade, the 1990s, brought great progress: UN conferences like the one in Rio on the environment in 1992 and in Beijing on women in 1995. In September 2000, the 191 UN member states adopted the declaration on the eight Millennium Development Goals, initiated by Secretary General Kofi Annan, in which they agreed to cut worldwide extreme poverty in half by 2015. My deep regret is that neither President Obama nor the European Union has come forward with what should have been their contribution to a constructive phase based on fundamental values.
How should I conclude? By recalling again that on the sixtieth 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 (Lucie Aubrac, Raymond Aubrac, Henri Bartoli, Daniel Cordier, Philippe Dechartre, Georges Guingouin, Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont, Lise London, Georges Séguy, Germaine Tillion, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Maurice Voutey and myself) 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 United Nations 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 twenty-first century, we say, from the bottom of our hearts,
TO CREATE IS TO RESIST.
TO RESIST IS TO CREATE.
Charles Glass. On the American publication of Stéphane Hessel’s Indignez-vous!
Toward the end of 2010, a small book by a 93-year-old man unexpectedly reached the summit of the bestseller list in France . Indignez-vous! by Stéphane Hessel sold more than 600,000 copies between October and the end of December, propelling it above Prix Goncourt-winner Michel Houellebecq’s novel La carte et le territoire by several hundred thousand copies. Hessel had written other books. His publishers, the independent Indigиne Editions in Montpellier , far from Paris , had produced other volumes. But none had reached the public in such numbers. The book both reflected and anticipated the spirit of student demonstrations in France and Britain , as it did the wave of revolt now challenging dictatorships in the Middle East .
Hessel’s life would make a novel, although his story is too hopeful to be told by nihilist Houellebecq. His father, Franz Hessel, was a German Jewish writer who emigrated to France with his family in 1924, when Stéphane was 7. Franz’s friend Henri-Pierre Roché used him and his wife, Prussian beauty Helen Grund, as models for Jules and Kate in his 1953 novel Jules et Jim. This was the enchanting tale of a woman who loved and was loved by two men that was translated to the screen in 1962 by François Truffaut. Franz Hessel wrote novels in German and French. His admiration for France and French literature led him to produce, with the great German Jewish literary critic Walter Benjamin, the first German translation of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Stéphane grew up in a literary milieu that the German invasion of France shattered in 1940. After studying at the University of Paris ’s prestigious École Normale Supérieure, he served in the French Army during the Battle of France and, like more than a million other French soldiers, became a prisoner of war. Following his escape from a POW camp, he joined Gen. Charles de Gaulle and his small band of Free French résistants. Hessel’s was a rare act of patriotism when most of the French professed loyalty to Vichy leader Marshal Philippe Pétain and his policy of collaboration with Germany . The attitude of the majority of Hessel’s military colleagues found expression in the decision of a French court-martial that sentenced de Gaulle in absentia to death for treason. Hessel belonged to a tiny minority that was outraged enough to oppose Pétain’s New Order, which replaced “liberty, equality and fraternity” with “work, family and nation.”
While Stéphane was working with de Gaulle in London, Franz Hessel died in France. Stéphane parachuted into occupied France in advance of the Allied invasion of 1944 to organize Resistance networks. The Gestapo captured him and subjected him to the baignoire, a form of torture that would later be called waterboarding. He was transported to Buchenwald and Dora concentration camps, avoiding the gallows only by switching identities with an inmate who had died. While being transferred to Bergen-Belsen, he escaped.
Hessel became a diplomat after the war and was involved, along with Eleanor Roosevelt, in drafting the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Awards and honors followed, the most recent of which are the Council of Europe’s North-South Prize in 2004, the rank of Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor in 2006 and the 2008 UNESCO/Bilbao Prize for the Promotion of a Culture of Human Rights. Throughout his postwar life as a diplomat and writer, Hessel has retained the sense of indignation that drove him during the war. This book is a testament to his belief in the universality of rights, as his defense of Palestinians under Israeli occupation and of illegal immigrants in France attests. The popularity of this slim but powerful volume answered the public’s need for a voice to articulate popular resentment of ruling-class ruthlessness, police brutality, stark income disparities, banking and political corruption, and victimization of the poor and immigrants. Hessel had arrived in France when many of the French were decryi
ng Jewish immigration as the “threat from the East” (about which Joseph Roth wrote movingly at the time in essays later collected and published in the book The Wandering Jews). Of course, the real threat from the East was the Nazism that many on the French right admired as an antidote to what they perceived as the indiscipline of French society. Their intellectual heirs-echoing the earlier distaste for foreigners and for the ostensible fecklessness of the working class-hold positions of power in France today.
Hessel writes in this book, “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 sixty-six years ago.” That program, declared on March 15, 1944, set out the wartime and, significantly, postwar goals of the Resistance. Defeating the Nazis and their French collaborators was only a stage, the combined Resistance declared, on the way to “a true economic and social democracy.” Hessel rejects the claims that the state can no longer cover the costs of such a program. It managed to provide that support immediately after the Liberation, “when Europe lay in ruins.” How could it not afford to do the same after it became rich? Similarly, in Britain the state paid for free universal education, including higher education, free universal medical care and other benefits that improved the health and well-being of the country’s children immeasurably after a war that left the nation bankrupt. Now, after half a century of prosperity and the accumulation of fabulous fortunes, the government says it can no longer pay for the social rights for which an earlier generation fought and for which it voted overwhelmingly in 1945. The British coalition government’s cuts in social benefits, its dramatic increase in the cost of university education and its transformation of the National Health Service into blocks of private trusts come in tandem with its absolution of the tax obligations of major corporations like Vodafone and its public subsidies to private banks. Outrage and indignation are not inappropriate responses.
Our politicians, guided by corporations and banks that rob the taxpayer when their business models fail, have revoked rights for which the anti-Fascists struggled. To erode these gains in France , Britain and the other countries that fought against the Nazis and Imperial Japan is to reject the gift of the wartime generation’s legacy. The countries that opposed the Germany-Italy-Japan Axis called themselves “the united nations” before they established the organization of that name. Franklin Roosevelt enunciated the Four Freedoms for which the American people were struggling: freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear. Roosevelt ’s ideals found their way into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people.…
The conscience of Stéphane Hessel was outraged, as it had been during the war, whenever the postwar world betrayed the Resistance program and the Universal Declaration. In France he found himself in the minority, as he had when he joined de Gaulle, who demanded the right of Algerians to govern themselves. More recently, he has called on Israel to grant Palestinians the right for which French men and women fought in 1944, for which Algerians struggled in the 1950s and ’60s and which Israelis claim for themselves: the right to self-determination and, thus, self-government and independence. To support those who seek this end, he has endorsed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement to sever economic collaboration with Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, all of which depend on the removal of indigenous inhabitants and are illegal under international law.
In France today, Hessel calls on the young, many of whom have already marched through the streets with their inchoate fury at President Nicolas Sarkozy’s “reforms.” They resent the balance Sarkozy is achieving between benefiting the banks while depriving the unemployed, the old, students, immigrants and the poor. Hessel’s call for a renewal of the spirit of the Resistance, albeit a pacific one, resonates in French traditions that immigrants embrace. It will do the same for youth in Britain and the United States , whom Hessel calls upon to remember their history and to defend its highest achievements.
Students at the École Normale invited Hessel to address them in Paris in January. Popular with young people throughout France , Hessel was likely to attract a full house. Then the authorities stepped in. Monique Canto-Sperber, the school’s director, withdrew the invitation and refused to allow Hessel to give an address. She objected to his insistence that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights applied as much to Palestinians as to the French. An ultra-Zionist French website, Des Infos, praised Canto-Sperber’s decision: “There are men and women in this country of intellectual courage. Mme. Monique Canto-Sperber, director of the École Normale Supérieure, is an example. She has on the afternoon of 12 January 2011 canceled a scandalous conference-debate.”
This may be the first time, in an ostensibly free country, that praise has been applied to the “courage” of canceling a debate. Such courage was not confined to the censorious director of the school. The Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France lauded those who favored suppressing Hessel’s right to speak. They included Minister of Higher Education Valérie Pécresse, self-styled philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut, Claude Cohen-Tanoudji and Arielle Schwab. The administrations at other colleges succumbed to the pressure and refused to allow Hessel to speak on their campuses.
Victory for free speech? In the bizarre world of what passes for philosophical discussion in modern France , to prevent someone from speaking could be nothing else. Canto-Sperber wrote in her book Moral Disquiet and Human Life, “Freedom of thought is the first precondition of any thought process.” Her students are free to think any thought presented to them by the lecturers she approves. What more freedom does their thought require? The reaction has been swift. Thousands of people have signed petitions demanding that Hessel be permitted to speak, and thousands more are reading this book.
In London , on the seventieth anniversary of de Gaulle’s “Appeal of 18 June” urging the French people to resist, Hessel said, “I was 23 in 1940, so needless to say that those five years really had a huge impact on me. This is a war that I experienced in many ways: as a simple soldier in 1939 and 1940 before the French Army’s defeat, as a trainee in the Royal Air Force, as a Free French fighter working in the secret services in London, as a Resistance fighter in France, as a prisoner at the hands of the Gestapo and then as an inmate in two concentration camps.… Of this long and arduous adventure, something clearly emerged: the need to give a sense to my life by defending the values that the Nazis had scorned-which led me to become a diplomat immediately after the war and to join the United Nations, where I contributed to writing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” Hessel’s polemic echoes de Gaulle’s words of June 1940: “Must hope disappear? Is defeat final? No!”
The old Resistance fighter is battling those who would deny him his well-earned platform. Having taken on the Nazis, survived two concentration camps and kept his mind and spirit intact for ninety-three years, he should easily defeat Sarkozy’s fonctionnaires and their apologists. The question before us is, Will we stand up to demand our own right to be heard?
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Time for Outrage! Page 2