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Why are we featuring men in Nazi uniforms at the top of this page ? Because it is worth remembering, as we slip into the same state of sleep as the German people once did, that dissent from evil is a universal duty . . . |
"We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience.The White Rose will not leave you in peace!" |
(Leaflet 4's concluding phrase, which became the motto of the White Rose resistance). |
Why we are remembering the heroes of The White Rose |
Fascism was the new costume worn by an ancient monster, dressed in the flags of darkness. It emerged from fear and humiliation, poverty and despair; and offered the people the vision of a simple world, in which order and ecstacy would go hand-in hand. The roots of nazism were no more complex; they had been planted and nurtured by the men who feared the onset of a real democracy; a state where they would have no more power than the poorest man, and where the accumulation of obscene wealth at the expense of others - as it can only ever be - would be seen as criminal, if not impossible.
At the end of the Great War (1914-18), which now seems so far away; the peoples of Europe - and by that, I mean the mass of the population without more wealth than they needed to live - were tired of the aristocrats and industrialists. These two classes of people had spent the past 200 years creating the edifice of ‘sham democracies’ that disguised the nature of industrial serfdom with laws and financial deception that left the populations of Western Europe with a greater poverty than had ever been known in the history of mankind. After brutalising their own populations, through disposession from the land; enforced labour in mines and workhouses, even of women and children; it was easy to despatch them in prison ships - or see them flee of their own accord - to the lands of others, where they would then subject those people to greater suffering that had been inflicted on them.
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