CRY OUT!
INDIGNEZ VOUS!
By Stephane Hessel, 93
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Much the very last step. The end is not far away. What
chance to take this opportunity to recall what has served as
base for my political engagement: the years of resistance
and the sixty-six years program developed by the National
Council of Resistance! It was Jean Moulin that we owe,
through this Council, the meeting of all parts of occupied
France, movements, parties, trade unions, to proclaim their
adherence of the Fighting France and the only leader that it
is recognized: General de Gaulle. In London, where I had
joined General de Gaulle in March 1941, I learned that this
Council had developed a program, which was adopted in
March, 1944 and which porposed to Liberated France a set
of principles and values which supported the democracy of
Our modern country. Of these principles and values, is that
we need today more than ever. It behooves us all together to
ensure that our society is a society in which we are proud
of: not of this society of undocumented papers, expulsions,
suspicions against immigrants, not this society that
challenges pensions, the achievemnets of Social Security,
not this society where the media are in the hands of the
moneyed classes, all things that we would have refused to
endorse if we were the true heirs of the National Council of
Resistance. From1945, after a terrible tragedy, it was an
ambitious resurrection which engaged the forces present in
the Council of Resistance. Remember, then they created
Social Security as the Resistance wished, as the program
stated: ” A comprehensive plan for Social Security, to
ensure livelihoods for all citizens,
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in all cases or if they are unable to obtain them through
work “,” a pension to the old workers to assure a dignified
end of their days. “The energy sources, electricity and gas,
coal, the major banks were nationalized. That’s what this
program was still stating: “the return to the nation of the
major means of production, produced by common sources
of energy, wealth of the subsoil, insurance companies and
large banks; ” the establishment of genuine economic and
social democracy involving the eviction of large feudal
economic and financial that directed the economy. ” The
public interest must prevail over the interest individual, the
fair sharing of the wealth created by the world of work
override the power of money. The Resistance said ” a
rational organization of the economy to ensure the
subordination of special individual interests to the public
interest and free from the dictatorship introduced to the
professional image of fascist states”. A real democracy
needs a free press, and the Resistance knows this and states
“The press freedom, its honor and independence againt the
power of the State, the power of money and foreign
influences.” That is what turns further orders on the press in
1944. Yet that is what is now in danger. The Resistance was
calling for “an effective opportunity for all French children
to benefit from the most developed education”, without
discrimination, yet the reforms proposed in 2008 go against
this project. Young teachers, which actions I support, were
up to refuse to apply them and they saw their wages cut as a
punishment. They were outraged, have “disobeyed” and
found these reforms too far from the ideal of the republican
school, too much in the service of
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the money society and not enough developing the creative
and critical thinking. It is just the base of the social
conquests of the Resistance which is now in question (2) .
The reason of the Resistance was outrage.
We dare say that the State was no longer covering the
costs of these civic action. But how can it lack today the
money to maintain and extend these achievements while
production of wealth has increased considerably since the
Liberation period when Europe was ruined? If not because
the power of money, so fought by the Resistance, has never
been greater, insolent, selfish, with his own servants into the
highest echelons of the State. Banks are now privatized and
first show of their conscious dividends and high salaries of
their leaders, not the general interest. The gap between the
poorest and richest has never been so important, and the
race for money, the competition has never been so
encouraged. The basic pattern of resistance was indignation.
We, veterans of resistance movements and fighting forces
of Liberated France, we call the younger generations to
stand up, to transmit the heritage of the Resistance and its
ideals. We say take over, cry out! The political and
economic responsibles, the intellectuals and all society shall
not resign or be intimidated by the current international
dictatorship of financial markets that threatens the peace
and democracy. I wish you all, to each of you to have your
design indignation. Is invaluable. When something get you
outraged, as I was outraged by the Nazis, then you have to
become an activist, strong and committed. We joined the
stream of history and the mainstream of the history must
continue through each. And this trend is towards more
justice, more freedom but not this freedom of uncontrolled
fox in the henhouse. These rights, including the Universal
Declaration drafted the program in 1948,
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are universal. If you meet someone who doesn’t benefit of
those, help him to conquer them.
Two visions of History
When I try to understand what caused fascism, what caused
the invasion by it and by Vichy, I tell myself that the
wealthy, with their selfishness, have been terribly afraid of
the Bolshevik revolution. They have been guided by their
fears. But if today as then, a vocal minority stands, this will
suffice, we will leaven so that the dough rises. Admittedly,
the experience of a very old like me, born in 1917, differs
from the experience of young people today. I often asks
college teachers the opportunity to intervene to their
students, and I tell them: you dont have the same obvious
reasons for committing. For us, to resist, was not to accept
the German occupation, the defeat. It was relatively simple.
Simple as what followed, decolonization. Then the war of
Algeria. It was that Algeria became independent, it was
obvious. As for Stalin, we all applauded the victory of the
Red Army against the Nazis in 1943. But even if we had
knowledge of the great Stalinist trials of 1935, and even
whether to keep an ear open counterbalance to communism
for American capitalism, the need to oppose this intolerable
form of totalitarianism was an obvious move. My long life
has given me a succession of reasons to be indignant. These
reasons are born less from an emotion and more from a
concious commitment. Being young and very marked by
Sartre, a senior classmate. Nausea, The Wall, Being and
Nothingness were very important in shaping my thinking.
Sartre taught us to say: “You are responsible as
individuals.”It was a libertarian message. The
responsibility of man who can not rely on a power or a god.
Instead, we must
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engage on behalf of its responsibility as a human. When I
went to the École normale, in 1939, I entered it as a fervent
disciple of the Hegel, and I followed the Maurice Merleau-
Ponty Seminar. His teaching explored concrete experience,
that of the body and its relationship with the senses. But my
natural optimism, which means that everything is desirable
or possible, I was rather from Hegel. The Hegelianism
interprets the long history of humanity as having a
meaning: man’s freedom is progressing step by step.
History is made of successive shocks. The history of society
progresses, and then, man having reached its full freedom,
has the democratic state for ideal form. There are of course
other concepts of history. Progress made by freedom,
competition, the race “of more”, this may be experienced as
a destructive hurricane. Thus represents a friend of my
father, the man who shared with him the task to translate
into German In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. He is
the German philosopher Walter Benjamin. He pulled a
pessimistic message out of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus
painiting where the figure of angel opens his arms as if to
contain and repel a storm that he identified with progress.
For Benjamin, who committed suicide in September 1940 to
escape Nazism, the sense of history is the irresistible path of
disaster into disaster.
Indifference: the worst attitude
True, the reasons for outrage today may seem less net or the
world too complex. Who controls, who decides? It is not
always easy to distinguish between all the currents that
govern us. We are no longer dealing with a small elite
who’s actions we clearly understand. It’s s a vast world,
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we feel that it is interdependent. We live in an inter
connectivity that has never existed. But in this world, some
things are unbearable. To see this, we must look, search. I
tell young people: Look for a bit, you’ll find. The worst
attitude is indifference, saying “I can not do anything, I’m
doing my job. ” By having this, you lose one of the
components which is essential in humans. One of the
essential components: the faculty of outrage and its
consequence – commitment. We can already identify two
major challenges: 1.The huge gap between the very poor
and very rich and which continues to grow. This is an
innovation of the twentieth and twenty first century. The
very poor in the world today earn just two dollars per day.
We can not let that gap widen further. This statement alone
should generate commitment. 2. Human rights and the state
of the planet. I had the chance after Liberation of being
involved in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights adopted by the United Nations, 10 December 1948
in Paris at the Palais de Chaillot. It’s under Chief Henri
Laugier, Assistant Secretary General of the UN, and
Secretary of the Commission on Human Rights That
together with others we were to participate in the drafting of
this declaration. I can not forget, in its development, the role
of René Cassin, curator National Justice and Education,
Government of Free France, in London in 1941, which was
awarded the Nobel peace in 1968, nor that of Pierre Mendes
France in the Economic and Social Council to whom the
texts that we developed were subjected before being
considered by the Third Committee of the ‘ General
Assembly, responsible for matters Social, Humanitarian and
Cultural Committee. The UN had fifty-four Member States
at the time, and I assured the secretariat. René Cassin was
the one whom we owe the term “universal rights
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and not” international “as suggested by our Anglo-Saxon
friends. For there is much at stake at the end of the War
World: emancipate from the threats posed to humanity by
Totalitarianism. To emancipate we must ensure that each
Member State of United Nations undertakes to respect these
universal rights. It is a way to defeat the argument of full
sovereignty that a State may assert while engaging in crimes
against humanity on its soil. This was the case of Hitler
who considered himself his own master and allowed to
cause genocide. The Universal Declaration owes much to
the universal revulsion against Nazism, fascism,
totalitarianism, and even, by our presence, the spirit of the
Resistance. I can not resist the urge to quote Article 15 of
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has
the right to a nationality ” and Article 22:” Everyone, as a
member of the society has the right to social security; and is
entitled to the satisfaction of economic, social and cultural
rights indispensable for dignity and the free development of
his personality, thanks to the national efforts and
international cooperation, taking into account the
organization and resources of each country.” And if this
statement has a declarative scope, and not legal, it has
nevertheless played a powerful role since 1948; we saw
colonized people in their grasp struggle for independence,
and stocked their minds in battle for freedom. I note with
pleasure that in recent decades have increased the number
of non-governmental organizations, social movements as
ATTAC (Association for the Taxation of Financial
Transactions
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), FIDH (International Federation of Human Rights)
Amnesty … who are acting and performing. It is obvious
that to be effective today, we must act in a network, take
advantage of all means of modern communication. For
young people, I say look around you, if you will find
themes that justify your outrage – the treatment made to
immigrants, undocumented migrants, Roma. You will find
concrete situations that lead you to give play to strong
citizen action. Seek and you shall find!
My indignation about Palestine
Today, my biggest outrage is for Palestine, Gaza,
Cisjordania. This conflict is the source of indignation. You
must read the report of September 2009 of Richard
Goldstone on Gaza, in which the South African judge,
Jewish, accuses Israel of committing “acts amounting to
war crimes and perhaps in some circumstances, crimes
against ‘ humanity “during its operation” Cast Lead ”
which lasted three weeks. I myself returned to Gaza in
2009, where I was able to enter with my wife through our
diplomatic passports in order to ‘ study firsthand what the
report said. The people who accompanied us have not been
allowed into the Gaza Strip. There and in the Cisjoradnia.
We also visited the Palestinian refugee camps set up in 1948
by ‘ UN agency, UNRWA, where more than three million
Palestinians hunted from their land by Israel are waiting for
a Return that is increasingly problematic. As for Gaza, is a
under the sky prison for a million and half Palestinians. A
prison where they survive. More than the material
destructions like the Red Cross hospital in Cast Lead, is the
behavior of Gazans, their patriotism, their love of the sea
and beaches, their constant concern for the welfare of their
children,
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countless, laughing, that haunt our memory. We were
impressed by their clever way to deal with all shortages
imposed on them. We saw them make the fault cement
bricks to rebuild thousands of homes destroyed by tanks.
We confirmed that there had been one thousand and four
hundred dead – women, children and old included, in the
Palestinian camp – during this operation ” Cast Lead ” by
Israeli army against only fifty wounded Israelis. I shared the
findings with the South African judge. That Jews could
commit themselves to war crimes, it is unbearable. Alas,
history gives little examples of people who learn from their
own history. I know that Hamas who won the recent
parliamentary elections was unable to avoid being sent
rockets on Israeli towns in response to the situation of
isolation and blockade in which Gazans are. I obviously
think that terrorism is unacceptable, but we must recognize
that when you are busy with military means infinitely
superior to yours, the popular reaction can not be nonviolent.
Is this what it’s for the Hammas to send rockets into
the city Sderot ? The answer is no. It does not help its cause,
but we can explain this gesture by the exasperation of
Gazans. In the concept of exasperation, one needs to
understand violence as a regrettable conclusion to an
unacceptable situation for those affected. So we can say that
terrorism is a form of ‘ exasperation. And that exasperation
is a negative term. It should not be ex-asperation, it must be
es-perer (hope). The exasperation is a denial of hope. It is
understandable, I would almost say it is natural, but so far is
not acceptable. Because that ‘ it does not provide the results
that may eventually produce hope.
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Nonviolence, the path we must learn to follow.
I am convinced that future belongs to non-violence, to the
reconciliation of different cultures. This is the way that
humanity must cross the next step. And, I agree with Sartre,
we can not excuse terrorists who throw bombs, they can be
understood. Sartre wrote in 1947: “I accept that violence
manifested in any form is a failure. But it is an inevitable
failure because we are in a world of violence. And it is true
that the use of violence is violence that is likely to
perpetuate, it is true that the only way is to stop.” What I
would add is that non-violence is a safer way to stop it. We
can not support terrorists as Sartre did on behalf of this
principle during the Algeria war or during the attack on the
Munich games in 1972, committed against Israeli athletes.
This is not efficient and Sartre himself eventually wonder at
the end of his life on the meaning of terrorism and
questioned its reason. “Violence is not effective, “ is far
more important than whether we should condemn or not
those whodeliver it. Terrorism is not effective. In the
concept of efficiency, I choose a non-violent hope. If there
is a violent hope is in the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire:
“That hope is violent ” not politics. Sartre, in March 1980,
three weeks before his death, said: “We must try explain
why the world of today, which is horrible, is only one
moment in a long historical development, that Hope has
always been one of the dominant forces of revolutions and
insurections, and how I still feel that hope is my conception
for the future. We must understand that violence turns his
back on hope. And that he preferred hope, the hope of nonviolence.
This is the path we must learn to follow. From
either side of the
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oppressors or of the oppressed, we must come to a
negotiation to remove the oppression; it is thereby to no
longer have terrorist violence. Therefore we must not let
accumulate too much hate. The message of Mandela, of
Martin Luther King finds its relevance in a world which has
exceeded the comparison of ideologies and totalitarianism
conqueror. This is a message of hope in modern societies’
capacity to overcome conflicts by mutual understanding and
vigilant patience. If so, if based on rights, the violation of
them should provoke our indignation. There is not
compromise on these rights.
For a peaceful uprising
I have noted – and I’m not the only – the Israeli government
response to the fact that every Friday citizens of Bil’id will
come, without throwing stones without using force, to the
wall in protest. The Israeli authorities have called the march
of “non-violent terrorism.” Not bad … It was Israel to
called the terrorist nonviolent. They were especially
embarrassed by the efficiency of non-violence that is
committed to ensuring it raises the support, understanding,
support of all those who in the world are the enemies of
oppression. Productivist thinking, driven by the West, led
the world in a crisis that we must avoid a radical break with
the headlong rush of “growing” in the financial field but
also in science and technology. It is high time for the sake
of ethics, justice, sustainable balance become prevalent. For
the most serious risks we face. They can put an end to the
human adventure on a planet that it can make it
uninhabitable for man.
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But it remains true that important progress has been made
since 1948: decolonization, the end of apartheid, the
destruction of the Soviet empire, the fall of the Berlin Wall.
On the contrary, the first decade of the twenty first century
was a period of decline. This fall, I explained it in part by
the U.S. President George Bush, September 11, and
disastrous consequences as ‘ have drawn the United States
in this military intervention in Iraq. We had this economic
crisis, but we did not further initiated a new policy
development. Similarly, the Copenhagen summit against
global warming didn’t permited to engage in a genuine
policy for protecting the planet. We are at a threshold
between the horrors of the first decade and opportunities in
the following decades. But hopefully, there’s always hope.
The previous decade, the 1990s, had been of great progress.
The UN has been able to convene conferences like those of
Rio on Environment in 1992, that of Beijing on Women in
1995 and in September 2000, at the ‘ initiative of Secretary
General United Nations, Kofi Annan, the 191 member
countries adopted the statement on the “Eight Millennium
Development Goals” by which they undertake to halve
poverty in the world by 2015. My great regret, is that
neither Obama nor the EU has so far been manifested with
what should be their contribution to a constructive phase,
pressing the fundamental values. How to conclude the call
to outrage? Recalling further that, on the occasion of the
sixtieth anniversary of the National Programme Resistance,
we said March 8, 2004, we veterans Resistance movements
and fighting forces of Free France (1940-1945), although
that “Nazism was defeated, thanks to the sacrifice of our
brothers and sisters of the Resistance and the UN against
Fascist barbarism
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But this threats not disappeared totally and our anger
against Injustice is still intact. No, this threat has not
disappeared completely. Also, we call today to a real
peaceful insurrection against the means of mass
communication that do not offer a horizon for our youth,
mass consumption, the contempt for the weakest, and
culture, generalized amnesia and excessive competition of
all against all. ” To those who will make the twenty-first
century, we say with our affection : “CREATE is to resist.
RESIST IS TO CREATE. “
