Late last year a pamphlet called Indignez-vous! became a bestseller in France. It’s written by Stéphane Hessel, who as a French soldier was captured by the Nazis in 1940, escaped a POW camp, joined the RAF and then de Gaulle in England, parachuted into France ahead of D-day, was captured and tortured by the Gestapo, was imprisoned and sentenced to death at the Buchenwald concentration camp, and escaped again. After the war he became a diplomat and worked with Eleanor Roosevelt to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
In Indignez-vous! Hessel writes that the Resistance was not simply a fight against fascism, but also for a more just world, and that what we have now — an undemocratic world where a few people who are richer than God pull all (or most of) the strings, to the extent that governments can decimate services for ordinary people without requiring any sacrifice from the masters of the universe — is in many ways a reversion to fascism, and that to accept this situation without resisting is to spit on the graves of several million people who died so that this would not happen again. This was written several months before Occupy Wall Street began.
The frightening thing about this argument, and about the Occupy movement, is that it basically rejects the democratic processes we have now. There’s no point making demands to Congress, because Congress is permanently in thrall to the masters of the universe and is never, ever, going to take any real steps toward a more just and democratic country. Why should they? In the 2010 Congressional elections, over two-thirds of campaign contributions came from 0.25% of the population. That’s clear — but where do you go from there? It’s not something I want to think about.
A PDF of Indignez-vous! in the original French is here. I don’t think a complete English translation exists online, but it’s on Amazon for $8 under the title Time for Outrage.
