By Stephane Hessel
After 93 years, I'm near the end. The end for me and not far away. But still let me remind others that they acted based on my political commitment. These were the years of resistance to Nazi occupation - and the social rights program developed 66 years ago by the National Resistance Council.
Jean Moulin is a [member of the Council killed] to whom we owe as part of this Council, the unity of all elements of occupied France - movements, parties, unions - to proclaim their membership in the French fighter, and we owe this to the only leader who recognized him, General Charles de Gaulle. From London where I joined de Gaulle in March 1941, I learned that this Council has completed a program adopted it on March 15, 1944, which provides for France released a set of principles and values \u200b\u200bon which modern democracy would rest our country.
These principles and values \u200b\u200bwe need more than ever. Is until we see it all together, that our society becomes one of which we are proud of this society of immigrants without papers - expulsions, suspicious of immigrants. No question this society where social security and pension schemes and national health. This society where the mass media in the hands of the rich. Are things that we would have refused to give if we were the true heirs of the National Council of Resistance.
Since 1945, after a horrific drama [The War 2] was an ambitious revival of the society to which the same remaining quota of the Resistance Council was dedicated. Let's remind mientrsa created a program of national health and pension as the Resistance wanted, as the program stated, "a comprehensive national health plan and social security, aimed at ensuring that all citizens their livelihoods when they are unable to find a job, a pension that allows older workers to end their days with dignity. "
energy sources, electricity, gas, mines, large banks were nationalized. Now this was how the program recommended: "... a return to the nation of the means of production monopoilizados, fruit of joint work, sources of energy, wealth of the mines, companies insurance and large banks, the institution of a true economic and social democracy involves the departure of the great feudal economic and financial management of the economy. "
The public interest must dominate on special interests. The just man believes that the wealth created in the sphere of work to master the power of money.
Resistance proposed "rational organization of the economy by ensuring the subordination of special interest to the general interests, and the emancipation of the" slave " professional's dictatorship was instituted in fascist states, "I had used the interim government [for two years after of the war] of the republic as an agent.
A real democracy requires an independent press, and the Resistance knew, demanded, arguing "the press freedom, honor and independence of the state, the power of money and foreign influence." This is easing restrictions on the press since 1944. And freedom of the press is definitely in danger today.
The Resistenica requested a "real possibility for all French children benefit from advanced education" without discrimination. The reforms offered in 2008 are against this plan. Young male and female teachers, whose actions support, went so far as to refuse to implement them, and saw their salaries reduced as a punishment. Were outraged, "disobeyed", judging those reforms too far from the ideal of a democratic school, much to serve a trading company and do not develop sufficient critical and inventive mind.
All foundations of social conquest of the Resistance are threatened today.
The reason for the resistance: Outrage.
Some dare to say that the state can not afford these measures for citizens anymore. But how can today be a lack of funds to support and extend these gains if the production of wealth has increased considerably since the period of liberation when Europe was in ruins? Rather, the problem is the power of money, as opposed to the resistance and the great man selfish with their own servants in the higher echelons of the state.
re-privatized banks have proved to be more concerned about their dividends and high salaries of their leaders that the public interest. This disparity between the poorest and the richest has never been so big or amass wealth and competition as an incentive.
The basic reason for the resistance was the outrage!
We, the veterans of the resistance movements and combat forces of Free France, we call the younger generation to live, pass, the legacy of the Resistance and its ideals. We say: Take our place, Indígnense!
political leaders, economic and intellectual and society must not assign or allow the oppression of a dictatorship or real international financial markets that threaten peace and democracy.
wish for everyone to each have their own reasons for indignation. Is invaluable. When someone hits you as it was hit by Nazism, people become militant, strong and committed. They join this historic moment and great moments of history thanks must go to each individual. And this time leads to more justice, more freedom, but not the unlimited freedom of the fox in the henhouse. The rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 are just that, universal.
If you find a disadvantage, feel sorry for him but help him win their rights.
Two views of history
When I try to understand what caused fascism, it did so many were dominated by Hitler and the Vichy regime, I tell myself that the owners, with their self-interest were extremely frightened with the Bolshevik revolution. They were allowed to lead with their fears.
But, now as then rises an active minority will suffice, we must be the yeast that makes bread rise. Certainly, the experience of a very old like me, born in 1917, is different from the experience of young people today. I often ask teachers the opportunity to interact with students and tell them: They have the same obvious reason to compromise. For us, resistance was not to accept the German occupation, defeat. This was relatively simple. Simple as that followed decolonization. Then came the war in Algeria.
was
Algeria must be independent, it was obvious. As for Stalin, we welcome the Red Army's victory against the Nazis in 1943. But we knew of Stalinist atrocities of 1935, even if it was necessary to keep your ears open to the community to make American capitalism, the need to oppose this intolerable form of totalitarianism had been established as a truism. In my long life I witnessed a succession of reasons to be indignant.
These reasons were born less than an emotion than a deliberate commitment. As a student of a normal school [a school teacher] was very influenced by Sartre, a fellow student. His "Nausea" [A novel], "The Wall" [a drama] and "Being and Nothingness" [a trial] were very important in the training of my mind. Sartre taught us "You are responsible as individuals." That was a libertarian message. The liability of a person can not be assigned by the power or authority. Rather, it is necessary to be involved in the name of one's responsibility as a human being.
When I entered the French École Normale Superieure, rue d'Ulm in Paris in 1939, I entered as a fervent adherent of the philosopher Hegel, and adhered to the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. His teaching explores the concrete experience of the body and its relations with the senses, a great feeling singular faced with a plurality of sensations. But my natural optimism that seeks all possible desirable, it took more to Hegel. Hegel interprets the long history of humanity as having a meaning: the freedom of man is progressing step by step. History is made of successive shocks and taking account of the challenges. The history of societies and therefore, progress, and finally the man has reached its full freedom, we have a democratic state in its ideal form.
This is certainly different understanding of history. He says that progress is made of "freedom," fighting for "always more"; this can be like if we lived in a devastating hurricane. This is how it represented a friend of my father, the man who shared with me an effort to translate the German "In Search of Lost Time" [novel] by Marcel Proust.
He was the German philosopher Walter Benjamin. Had developed a pessimistic view of a painting by Paul Klee, a Swiss painter, the "Angelus Novus", where the face of the angel opens her arms to hold and push a storm, he identifies with the progress. For Benjamin, who committed suicide in September 1940 to escape Nazism, the sense of history is the progressive domination of one disaster after another.
Indifference: The worst attitude.
is true that the reasons to be outraged today may be less clearly related and the world has become too complex. Who is doing the ordering, who decides? It is not always easy to differentiate between all the currents that govern us. We are not dealing with a small elite whose activities can be easily seen. This is a vast world in which we have a sense of interdependence. We live in an interconnected as never before. But in this world there are still things intolerable. To view, is good and necessary to look, look. I tell young people, and that's looking slightly what they will find. The worst attitude is indifference, saying "I can not do anything about that. I'll manage to succeed." For yourself include you in this, you lose one of the elements that make the human being: the right to be outraged and commitment is a consequence of the former.
Guys and Dolls [young people] can already identify two new challenges:
1. The large gap between the poorest and richest MSA and that continues to grow. It is an innovation of 20 and 21 centuries. The poorest in the world today earn just two dollars a day. The new generations can not let this gap becomes greater. Official reports alone should elicit a commitment.
2. Human rights and rule the world: I had the opportunity after the Liberation to participate in the writing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the Organization of the United Nations, December 10, 1948 in Paris at the Palais de Chaillot . Was principal private secretary of Henry Laugier, Assistant Secretary General of the UN and as secretary of the Commission on Human Rights, I participated with others in the drafting of this statement. I would not know how to forget the role in its development of René Cassin, who was national commissioner justice and education in the Free French government in London in 1941 and won the Nobel Prize in 1968, nor that of Pierre Mendes-France in the Economic and Social Council to whom we sent the drafts we produced before being considered by the Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural) of the General Assembly. It was ratified by all 54 member states of the UN session and I certified as a secretary.
René Cassin is to whom we owe the concept of "universal rights" instead of "international law" as it raised our American and British friends. This [universal rather than international] was key because, at the end of World War II, what was at stake was what was to be freed from the threats of totalitarianism that had weighed upon mankind.
To become emancipated was necessary to obtain the UN member states a promise to respect these universal rights. This was a way of trying to circumvent the argument of "full sovereignty" while emphasizing that every nation is dedicated to cause violations against humanity on its own soil. Such is the case with Hitler who felt a higher power and authorized to cause a genocide. This universal statement owes much to the universal revulsion to Nazism, fascism and totalitarianism - and owes a lot, in our minds the spirit of the Resistance.
I felt the need to move quickly to avoid being deceived by the hypocrisy that existed in the composition of the UN, some claiming that these values \u200b\u200bwere already earned had no intention of promoting them faithfully - claiming that we tried to impose values \u200b\u200bin the statement.
I can not resist the desire to cite Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948): "Everyone has the right to a nationality." Article 22 reads: "Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to security social realization, through national effort and international cooperation in view of the organization and resources of each State, the satisfaction of economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality. " And while this statement has a declarative scope, not legal, has played an important role since 1948. This led to the colonized people to fight for their independence, that sown in their minds a battle for freedom.
Noto with satisfaction during the last decades there has been an increase in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and social movements such as ATTAC (Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and Citizen Action) or as the FIDH (International Federation of Human Rights) and Amnesty International who are active and competitive. It is obvious that effective today it is necessary to network, using all modern media.
Young People say: Look around, find issues to justify their outrage - facts about the treatment of immigrants, "illegal" gypsy. Find situations that lead them to strengthen citizen action. Seek and find!
My outrage at what is happening in Palestine.
Today my utmost indignation has to do with Palestine, the Gaza Strip and West Bank. This conflict is outrageous. It is absolutely essential to read the report from Richard Goldstone, September 2009, in Gaza, where a Jewish South African judge who claimed to be a Zionist even accused the Israeli army of committing "acts of war crimes comparable to and perhaps in certain circumstances, crimes against humanity "during its" Operation Cast Lead "that lasted 3 weeks.
I returned to Gaza in 2009 when I enter with my wife through our diplomatic, to study first hand what the report said. The people who accompanied us was not allowed to enter Gaza. There and in the West Bank. We also visited the Palestinian refuge established by UNRWA since 1948, where more than 3 million Palestinians were expelled from their land in Israel, still waiting for a return ever more problematic.
For Gaza, this is like a prison without roof and a half million Palestinians. A prison where people organize to survive. Despite the destruction and the Hospital of Crescent Operating by Cast Lead, is the behavior of its inhabitants, their patriotism, their love of the sea and beaches, its constant concern the welfare of their children, who are numerous and cheerful, which remain in my memory. We were impressed with how cleverly they faced all the shortcomings that have been imposed. We saw them make bricks, for lack of cement to rebuild thousands of homes destroyed by tanks. They confirmed to us that there were 1,400 dead - including women, children and elderly in the Palestinian camp - during the "Operation Cast Lead" conducted by the Israeli army, compared with only 50 people wounded on the Israeli side. I share the conclusions of the South African judge. That these Jews can, themselves, commit war crimes is unbearable. Ah, history does not give us enough examples of people who draws lessons from their own history.
Terrorist or exasperation?
know that Hamas [party of Palestinian freedom fighters], who has won the last legislative elections, can not help that rockets are fired at Israeli cities in response to the situation of isolation and blockade in which Gazans live . Naturally think that terrorism is unacceptable, but it is then necessary support (from the experience in France) that when the village is occupied by vastly superior forces themselves, the popular reaction can not be entirely peaceful.
Do you find it useful to Hamas firing rockets into Sderot [Israeli town just across the border with the Gaza Strip]?
The answer is no. This does not serve their purposes but that can explain this as a sign of the exasperation of the Gazans. Under the notion of exasperation, it is necessary to understand the violence as the regrettable conclusion unacceptable situations which have been subjected.
Therefore, they may call it, terrorism as a form of exasperation. And this so-called "terrorism" is a misnomer. You should not have to resort to this aggravation, but you have hope. The exasperation is a denial of hope. Understandably, I would say that it is almost natural, but it is still unacceptable. Because this is not allowed to acquire results that can possibly hope will eventually produce.
Nonviolence: The footpaths we must learn to follow.
I am convinced that the future belongs to non-violence, reconciliation of different cultures. It is by this means that humanity will enter its next stage. But I agree with Sartre: We can not excuse the terrorists who throw bombs, but we understand. In 1947, Sartre wrote: "I recognize that violence in whatever form it may manifest itself is a setback. But it is a setback inevitable because we are in a violent world. And if it is true that the risk of resorting to violence is permanent, it is also true that it is the sure way to make it stop. "
This add that non-violence is a sure way to make violence stops. One can not tolerate terrorism, using Sartre or the name of this principle, during the Algerian war and during the Munich Olympics in 1972 in an assassination attempt against the Israeli athletes. Terrorism is not Sartre himself productive and ask at the end of his life on the meaning of violence and doubt his rationale.
However, proclaiming "violence is not effective "is most imporant to know whether or not one should condemn those who engage in this. Terrorism is not effective. The notion of effectiveness, not bloody hope is necessary. If there is hope violent, is Appollinaire William's poem "Hope is violent" and not politics.
Sartre, in March 1980, three weeks before his death said: "We must try to explain why the world today, is horrible, it's just a moment in a long historical development, that hope has always been a dominant force in revolutions and uprisings and how I still feel hope as my conception of the future.
must understand that violence is opposed to hope. It is necessary to prefer hope, hope over the violence. Non-violence is the way we learn to follow. Also the oppressors.
is necessary to come to negotiations to remove the oppression, this is what will allow no more terrorist violence. Therefore we must not allow to accumulate too much hate.
The message from Mandela and Martin Luther King finds its relevance in the world that has passed the confrontation of ideology [ie Nazism] and totalitarianism Conqueror [ie Hitler]. This is also a message of hope in the capacity of societies Conflict Modern overcome through mutual understanding and patient monitoring. To reach this point it should be based on rights, rather than violations, whoever the author, it should cause our indignation. We must not compromise these rights.
For a peaceful uprising.
I appreciated, and I'm not the only, the Israeli government's reaction time by the way that every Friday the citizens of Bil'in protest without using stones or force to the separation wall. Israeli officials described this as a "bloodless terrorism." This is a good thing ... You must be a non-Israeli to qualify as terrorist violence. It is particularly necessary to be uncomfortable [as it was for the Israelis] for the effectiveness of non-violence, which is to bring support, understanding - the support of everyone in the world are the enemies of oppression.
productivist thinking, driven by the West led the world into a crisis that should come through a radical break with the concept of "growing" not only in finance but also in the domain of science and technology. It is time that the concerns about ethics, justice and sustainable balance (economic and environmental) prevail. Because they are the most serious risks that threaten us. They can end the human adventure on Earth, which can become uninhabitable for humans.
But the fact remains that the most important progress was made after 1948 [the year of the founding of the UN and the Declaration of Human Rights]: decolonization, the end of apartheid, the destruction of the Soviet empire, the fall of the Berlin Wall. On the other hand, the first ten years of this century was a period of degeneration. This degeneration is explained in part by the George Bush presidency, the events of Sept. 11 and disastrous consequences that involve the United States, such as military intervention in Iraq.
We have this economic crisis, but not yet started a new development policy. Similarly, the Copenhagen summit on climate change was not a real policy for the preservation of the planet.
We are on the threshold between the terror of the first decade and the possibilities for the decades that follow. But the needed hope, is always necessary. The previous decade of the nineties, has been a time of great progress. The United Nations had the wisdom to call as the Rio conference on environment in 1992, and Beijing on women in 1995. In September 2000, at the initiative of Secretary UN chief Kofi Annan, the 191 members adopted a declaration "8 millennium goals for development" that promised to significantly reduce world poverty by half by 2015.
My regret is that neither Obama nor the EU are committed to what should be its contribution to a constructive phase, based on fundamental values.
Conclusion.
How to conclude this call to the outrage? Still saying that on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the program of the National Council of Resistance said the March 8, 2004 - are veterans of the resistance movements and forces battle of Free France (1940-1945) - which is certainly "Nazism was defeated, thanks to the sacrifice of our brothers and sisters of the Resistance and the United Nations against fascist barbarism. But this threat has not disappeared and our anger injustice remains intact. " No, this threat has not disappeared completely. Call a real peaceful uprising against the mass media not to propose as a goal for our youth other things that are not mass consumption, contempt for the weak and to the culture, generalized amnesia and excessive competition of all against all. "
To all the people who make the twenty-first century I say with affection:
CREATE IS RESISTING; RESIST IS TO CREATE.
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