Loaded Words

“Understand history before changing the world” should not be heard as a call to inaction. Rather, our deeds should be based not on ineffective idealism, but on appreciation of the likely outcome.

Once the Occupy Wall Street movement occupied our TV screens and social media in the summer of 2011, the related topics of informed dissent and civil disobedience gained new currency. We saw that we the people can change things. After all, Molly Katchpole shamed a bank into dropping excessive service charges!

We the people of Orange County, California shamed the legal system into taking action when homeless men were being murdered. Without public outrage, the investigations would have been back-burnered. Certainly without citizen involvement, the serial killer could have gone undetected.

We the people of these United States are reminded now and again of atrocities in remote places like Darfur, the Sudan, the Congo, Syria, Uganda. Once reminded, our better nature kicks in and we choose to do something about it. Whether Nicholas Kristof’s documentary The Reporter or Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 YouTube video, the visuals of children forced into service for a warlord, or villages burned on the whim of a megalomaniac, stir us, make us determined to change things. We’d like to shame those men committing crimes against humanity into stopping - and if they are incapable of shame, then prosecute them in an international court of law. Or both.

We the people are often lazy, or at least inactive. Kristof noted that an image of a single child suffering grave injury motivates people to action faster than an image of a thousand children being harmed. Maybe we feel overwhelmed when confronted with wrongs so great they seem impossible to correct. Maybe it’s hard to do something when we are working to pay the rent and put food on the table for our families. Maybe it’s difficult to choose one injustice out of the dozens of injustices that flood our television screens, computer monitors, and iPhones at any given moment.

But yet, we the people do try. We make a concerted effort on matters large and small. From organizing petition drives to joining protest marches, from writing letters to our Senators to volunteering for the Peace Corps, we the people take our right of free speech seriously. We the people can argue and debate louder than just about any nation on the planet. Although, we the people tend to care more about injustices in faraway places.

Michael Deibert, an author who writes about tyranny and genocide, took issue with the lack of historical context and inaccuracies in the Kony 2012 video. He did not dismiss the quasi-documentary out of hand, but used it as a teaching moment, encouraging people moved by the video to join groups on the ground, led by people with deep knowledge about the framework and constraints of the conflict in Central Africa.

In other words, Deibert encouraged his readers to go beyond a purely emotional response and embrace the elbow grease that effects the sort of change we say we want.

The debate Deibert described underscores the importance of the mission of the Center for White Rose Studies, preserving the memories of those who courageously opposed the crimes of National Socialism, using their lives and work as a springboard to address the issues of informed dissent in a civilized society. It is a debate over words versus deeds, violent versus non-violent protest, sword against pen. When we read the words of White Rose students, when we view their deeds; when we consider what others like Helle Hirsch, Arvid and Mildred Harnack, or Helmuth Hübener and his friends did and said - we draw from that knowledge to develop more effective means of righting wrongs in our own world.

The White Rose friends used a contemporary form of protest to make their point. Their leaflets would be the modern-day equivalent of a blog or Facebook page raising awareness, calling for action, yet doing little themselves. Had they lived in 2022, they might have Tweeted or managed a TikTok page, instead of duplicating leaflets on a hand-cranked mimeograph machine.

Vincent Probst, son of Christoph Probst, believed that White Rose resistance was too idealistic to be effective. Probst, together with Christian Petry, expressed this opinion in the German magazine Stern in 1968:

In one way, we see students of today who demonstrate on the streets do exactly the same as the students of the White Rose. We oppose the Establishment in the name of a concept of freedom that means little to our fellow citizens. They do not understand our opposition. But parallels between White Rose and us end here.

To begin with, the Establishment that is the target of non-parliamentarian opposition in 1968 is not a perfect dictatorship. … Second, White Rose resistance is the unadulterated fruit of German idealism; it cannot be said that only good deeds have been done in the name of that idealism. Today, we campaign against the American war in Vietnam and for comprehensive reform of our universities that will totally destroy the [current] hierarchical structure thereof. We have absolutely no connection to the German idealism [of the White Rose]. In contrast, we see the frail and ineffective liberalism of our day as trapped in idealistic arguments. Therefore, we oppose it as much as we oppose the authoritarian powers in our nation and society.

Let us no longer perform deeds in the name of this sort of idealism. Even the deeds of the White Rose - which essentially was an act of martyrdom - had a thoroughly apolitical character. Their dead are martyrs of noble sentiments, but did not die in a political battle.

Put aside for one moment the question of whether White Rose resistance was political - I happen to disagree with Probst and Petry on this point - and consider White Rose resistance from the vantage point of the Vietnam era. What did White Rose do? What didn’t they do? What were their shortcomings, or their strengths? How could they have made their noble idealism more effective?

When we talk out loud about these matters, we enhance our individual and group strategies for addressing injustices on our streets, in our hometowns, and across our nation. As we widen our horizons and look to other individuals or groups who said a similar but unique No, our strategies will improve.

Deibert’s “understand history before changing the world” should not be heard as a call to inaction. Rather, what we do and say will be more powerful if based on a wholesome appreciation of the likely outcome of our actions.

May our money always buy change. May our toil always yield fruit. And may our words always be fully loaded.