Guest Post by Jesse
“We cannot speak to the conscience of the world when our own conscience is asleep.”
Carl von Ossietzky
“Only one who spent the years following the First World War in Germany can fully understand how hard a battle it was that a man like Ossietzky had to fight. He knew that the tradition of his countrymen, bent on violence and war, had not lost its power. He knew how difficult, thankless and dangerous a task it was. to preach sanity and justice to his countrymen who had been hardened by a rough fate and demoralizing influence of a long war.
In their blindness they repaid him in hatred, persecution and slow destruction; to heed him and to act accordingly would have meant their salvation and would have been a true relief for the whole world.
It will be to the eternal fame of the Nobel Foundation that it bestowed its high honor to this humble martyr and that it is resolved to keep alive the memory of his work.
It is also wholesome for mankind today, since the fatal illusion against which he fought has not been removed by the outcome of the last war.
The abstention from the solution of human problems by brute force is the task today as it was then.
Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years, 1956
“The German people slumber on in their dull, stupid sleep and encourage these fascist criminals; they give them the opportunity to carry on their destruction; and of course they do so. Is this a sign that the Germans are brutalized in their simplest human feelings, that no chord within them cries out at the sight of such deeds, that they have sunk into a fatal consciencelessness from which they will never, never awake?”
Sophie Scholl, The White Rose, Second Leaflet, Munich 1942
This time, we will not be silent.
Who will be among those who remember the moral imperative to speak truth to power, and nominate Julian Assange for the Nobel Peace Prize?
Continue reading “The Controversial 1935 Nobel Peace Prize For Speaking Truth to Power”
