Diary of Anne Frank

51 readers

2 users here now

Personal Diary of Stephen Alfred Gutknecht.

Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/DiaryAnneFrank/

founded 1 week ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Diary of Anne Frank 2025, April 6, Sunday - "First they came for" types of people, but in the society it's more about first they came for compassion, then empathy, comprehension, understanding (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

4 comments fedilink hide all child comments

"First they came for" Als sie kamen lit. 'When they came', or Habe ich geschwiegen lit. 'I did not speak out'), is the poetic form of a 1946 post-war confessional prose piece by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984). It is about the silent complicity of German intellectuals and clergy following the Nazis' rise to power and subsequent incremental purging of their chosen targets.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Diary of Anne Frank
Sunday April 6, 2025

"They came for"

Much of it is systemic, it isn't even always about living human persons being the first / starting point of "coming for", but technology systems / venues of information. "I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result."

"They" don't even have to be alive anymore. It can be systems of faith and values that people follow from thousands of years ago. Dogma itself can be the threat. People become less and less attracted to education, teaching, sharing, learning, study of goodness, empathy, then comprehension, understanding.

“Hitlerism was a mass flight to dogma, to the barbaric dogma that had not been expelled with the Romans, the dogma of the tribe, the dogma that gave every man importance only in so far as the tribe was important and he was a member of the tribe.” ― Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, published 1955