It took him a long time to come around. Far too long. He was roused only slowly, reluctantly, and in a piecemeal way that muted and hobbled the effectiveness of his belated actions.
That’s what he says himself, with heartbreaking eloquence, in the short confession/warning that constitutes the only reason any of us remember his name. The “he” here is the Rev. Martin Niemöller, the man who wrote this:
First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.
This poem is regarded as Important. Everyone agrees about that, somberly nodding their heads that yesbutofcourse it is Very Important indeed. It is regarded with the same sort of mile-wide, inch-deep universal veneration and respect with which we regard, say, Martin Luther King Jr. It’s a thing we commend in the abstract, while subtly discouraging any engagement with it in the particular.
But it wasn’t abstract for Niemöller himself. It was specifically autobiographical. It was about his own complacency and complicity.
Niemöller was a U-boat veteran of World War I and a fervent, conservative German patriot. He became a Lutheran pastor and, as such, began his career as part of something like the Weimar equivalent of the religious right, initially supporting and celebrating Hitler’s rise to power in 1933.
Niemöller wanted to Make Germany Great Again. He was a court evangelical.
When he says “I was not a Communist,” he was understating the case. He was anti-Communist. He had no sympathy for them and was inclined to excuse and minimize what he was seeing because, in his view, they brought it on themselves. They broke the law, or what he thought maybe should have been the law. They were them, not us, not me or mine. So it wasn’t alarming.
And the trade unionists? Well, they were leaning Communist too, weren’t they?
Hitler’s “Aryan paragraph” is what finally roused Niemöller to shift from vague concern to something more like alarm. But even still he wavered and faltered. His alarm had to do with the fact that some of his fellow Lutherans might be affected by that. If “they came for the Jews,” that might include some of his fellow Christians who were of Jewish background. So even as he became alarmed and joined with others sounding the alarm, his resistance wavered with something like qualification.
That is what Niemöller ashamedly confesses in his famous poem. He’s not abstractly examining how “they” operated, he’s telling us how he enabled them to do so. The cry of his heart, which he repeated for the rest of his days, was the warning “Don’t do what I did.” He warned everyone, everywhere to speak out and speak up at the very earliest signs of danger. For Niemöller, there was no worry about speaking out too soon, only the deadly danger and abiding shame of speaking out too late.
And that’s where we differ from Niemöller, and why we respect the sentiments of his poem only in the abstract. Because we are far more concerned about the potential danger and shame of speaking out too soon. We do not wish to be seen by others as alarmists. Chicken Little. The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Etc. We are hyper-vigilant about never being perceived by others as hyper-vigilant.
The reasons for this inverted perspective are not altogether wrong. What happened to Niemöller and to his country was, after all, an extreme case, and extreme cases are, by definition, unusual. And there is a legitimately prudent concern about sounding a premature false alarm. If we go around quoting “First they came …” all the time, then no one’s going to listen to us if the time comes when it really needs to be said.
Again, that’s not altogether wrong. There’s something unseemly about the way it elevates concern for our own reputation above concern for whatever marginal groups might be in real jeopardy, but it’s not only about our reputation. It’s also about not wanting to mislead, about avoiding the potential false witness of a false alarm. I get that. I feel it. I understand.
And I understand, also, that we have not quite yet been faced with anything as explicit and unqualified as that “Aryan paragraph.”
We have, instead, a verbally incontinent president whose constant lies and outrageously strange statements rarely correspond to anything in the real world. Trump never stops talking, but he doesn’t always say what he means or mean what he says. So when someone like that talks about locking up journalists and political opponents, it’s not immediately clear whether his words should be taken literally or seriously. (That famous distinction “literally but not seriously/seriously but not literally” sounds nice, but means nothing when one attempts to apply it to a flip-flopping, babbling, bullshit-spewing narcissist like Donald Trump.)
If any other president in my lifetime — LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama — had publicly stated that he was determined to withdraw due process to non-citizens, we’d all be sounding the alarm at such a flagrantly anti-constitutional, lawless dismissal of the fundamental rights that embody the fundamental values we all claim to want for our country. But when Donald Trump says it — even when he says it repeatedly — we hesitate to respond. Surely he doesn’t really mean it? Let’s not be alarmist. Remember the Boy Who Cried Wolf.
We’re still more alarmed about the possibility of alarmism than about what we’re seeing — what we are undeniably, actually seeing unfold. They are coming for the immigrants. First for the illegal immigrants, because most Americans will respond to that the same way Niemöller responded to coming for the Communists.
But they are also coming for the refugees, for those lawfully seeking asylum, for legal immigrants who have committed any misdemeanors in their lifetime, for naturalized citizens.
They are doing this. They are coming for the immigrants.
First they came for the immigrants.
It is not too early to speak out. It is not premature. It is not alarmist.
Sound the alarm. Sound every alarm you have.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In