French Hills Old Blue in the 2015 Campaign
France listens to former Resistance spy's call to get riled up
Stéphane Hessel, a 93-year-old former spy with the French Resistance, who survived the Holocaust and the Second World War by escaping from two Nazi prisons and a death camp, is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.
The former diplomat, who is also one of the last surviving authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, just shattered publishing records in France by writing a bestselling political pamphlet that tries to rally his countrymen round the battle cry Indignez-vous! ("Be Indignant!" or "Get Angry!")
His message, squeezed into a 32-page booklet with only 13 pages of text, sells for €3 (about $4) and calls on the French to react and resist in order to transform society."I would like everyone — every one of us — to find his or her own reason to cry out," Mr. Hessel writes.
"That is a precious gift. When something makes you want to cry out, as I cried out against Nazism, you become a militant, tough and committed. You become part of the great stream of history … and this stream leads us toward more justice and more freedom, but not the uncontrolled freedom of the fox in the henhouse."
The pep talk, coming from a charming distinguished old man with a track record of heroism and accomplishment, has struck a spark.
Produced by a tiny two-person publishing house in Montpellier, in the south of France, Indignez-vous! had an initial print run of only 6,000 copies. As of Jan. 12, French readers had snapped up nearly a million copies. Requests for translation rights have flooded in from all over the world.
Mr. Hessel says its success is "strange and unexpected." He didn't think the booklet would get more than a passing review or two.
Critics, initially, were not kind, describing it as "19 rambling pages of conversations with a sweet honourable old man" and saying it was poorly written, repetitive, unoriginal and simplistic.
But the work seems to have uncovered a deep national yearning for change, which means it could influence France's presidential elections, scheduled for May 2012.
"It means people in France are worried," Mr. Hessel recently told Radio France International. "They are worried about what is going on, which is not what they hope or expect. So if someone tells them in a few pages that they should really try and get indignant, it just hits the right note."
His reasons for indignation range from the growing gap between the very rich and the very poor to France's treatment of illegal immigrants, deportation of Roma, the need for a free press, a deteriorating environment, the plight of the Palestinians and cost-cutting attacks on the welfare system.
"It's true that reasons to cry out can seem less obvious today," Mr. Hessel writes.
"The world appears too complex. But in this world, there are things we should not tolerate.… I say to the young, look around you a little and you will find them. The worst of all attitudes is indifference."
Young people, he insists, can change society for the better if they recapture the wartime spirit of the French resistance to the Nazis, and use that anger to reject the "insolent, selfish" power of money and defend the social values of modern democracy.
The booklet does not suggest any specific solutions to the world's problems. Instead, Mr. Hessel says he merely wants to resurrect the spirit that energized the French Resistance in the war.
"I am not giving them a meaning, but I am saying, 'Do try to find for you what that meaning would be,' " he says.
Born in Berlin in 1917 to a Jewish family, he moved to France with his parents at age eight and became a naturalized French citizen in 1937.
When war broke out in 1939, he served in the French army, was captured but escaped from a prisoner of war camp. In 1944, he parachuted back into France, was betrayed to the Gestapo, tortured and sent to the Buchenwald and Dora death camps.
The day before he was scheduled to be executed, he switched identities with another inmate who had already died of typhus.
Then, while being transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, he escaped after jumping from a train.
After the Liberation, Mr. Hessel worked at the General Secretariat of the United Nations and was involved in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Though he is part Jewish, Mr. Hessel is a staunch critic of Israel. His booklet contains a denunciation of Israeli policies and accuses Israel of "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity."
French Jewish groups have condemned Mr. Hessel for his "fixation" on Israel and a spokesman for the Israeli embassy in Paris dismissed his booklet as "a literary fad which will have no effect on the real world."
But for now, Indignez-vous! is creating the sort of stir in France Emile Zola did in 1898, when he published J'Accuse!, a journalistic éxposé that charged the highest levels of the French Army with obstruction of justice and anti-Semitism in the wrongful conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus for treason.
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Source: https://nationalpost.com/news/world/france-listens-to-former-resistance-spys-call-to-get-riled-up
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