First They Came

A while back a friend sent me a copy of Martin Neimoller's poem. The mail came in the context of a discussion / impasse that started out with a bit of anti-catholic irreverence (on my part), and moved into a discussion of my apparent bigotry. She and I are still at a bit of an impasse (admittedly, my crap is involved) but it led me into some web surfing this morning about this particular work.

Wikipedia has some interesting things to say. That the McCarthy era Americans deleted the "communists" stuff is interesting and understandable. More interesting is that the piece did not, in some original forms, mention religion at all. Lots of links and analysis; apparently Neimoller worked on this theme a great deal in the 40's yet the formal piece did not coalesce until much later. The formal version endorsed by the Neimoller Foundation mentions communists, social democrats, trade unionists, and then "me". No Catholics. No Protestants. No Jews, even. This may be revisionism on the part of Niemoller's heirs, surely he was mentioning the Jews (and Jehovah Witnesses) in his speeches that explore this theme in the 40's.

Wikipedia translates the piece from the NM site thus:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent; I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent; I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

While wikipedia is never a sure source, the translation looks reasonable to my untrained eye; I ran the NM site text through Alta Vista's translator and it came out close enough.

According to Franklin Littell, Martin Niemoller , when asked about the addition of the Roman Catholics (the dissing of which started this whole dogmatic pileup), commented, "I never said it. They can take care of themselves."

Weirdness. This is such a pervasive piece of modern prose - odd that it has evolved and been adopted in the name of so many causes, and that its most common / accepted incarnation is not really what it was at the start.