a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Just as the youth-led revolts in the Middle East were cooking up, and the Tunisians were getting ready to blow the lid off the pot,  a small book published by a small publishing house in Montpellier hit the best-seller list in France. More than half a million French bought it. Young readers, especially, were happy to have a renowned 93-year-old veteran of the Resistance, Stephane Hessel, writing directly to them and encouraging them to, as his title put it: Indignez-vous! Get Angry!  Get Outraged!

At age 23,  Hessel, son of a German Jewish family that had immigrated to France when he was 7, graduated from the Ecole  Normale  Superieure and joined the French Army. Like more than a million other French soldiers engaged in the 1940 Battle of France, he ended up in a German POW camp. But when he was able to escape the camp, he chose a path very few French soldiers took: he joined the London-based Free French, the resistance group led by Gen. Charles de Gaullle. De Gaulle, meanwhile, had been sentenced to death in absentia by a French Army court. The General, the court had determined, was a traitor to the Vichy regime of the Marshal, Philippe Petain, who had led the French into their ignominious collaboration with the Nazis.

Stephane Hessel was well launched upon his long and distinguished career as an indignant man. The next phase came as he parachuted into France in 1944 to help the Resistance organize networks for supporting the planned Allied invasion. This time, it was the Gestapo that took him prisoner,  tortured him, and then shipped him off to Buchenwald. Later,  he was transferred to Bergen-Belsen, from which he finally made his escape –having taken the identity of another Jew who had died there.

After the War, Hessel found a  professional channel for his indignation.  As a diplomat, he joined the group around Rene Cassin, France’s delegate to the committee, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt,  which drafted the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Hessel brought to this drafting work his commitment to the program that the National Council of the Resistance had issued on March 5, 1944, which called for “a true economic and social democracy” in France. That, too, was a universal program:  health care for all,  education and higher education for all,  financial support in times of need, government  housing schemes, pensions, nationalization of industries using resources belonging to all the French. In his book, Hessel applauds the students and teachers who took to the streets in 2008 to protest their government’s recession-inspired  proposal for cutting back and dumbing down  the universal education system. Why should a recession brought about by financiers and industrialists be taken out on children and their teachers? Why should anyone believe that the state could not afford to fulfill its promises to its citizens when it had not tried raising tax revenue  from the top earners? Why should a wealthy sliver of the population be allowed  to destroy a social democratic state?

For the entire post-war period, Stephane Hessel has worked for “a true economic and social democracy” in France. While Nicolas Sarkozy has been at the helm and the tide of anti-immigrant,  neo-fascist voters off to his right has risen further, Hessel has grown indignant again. He sees so many French, particularly those at the top of the economic pyramid, failing to recognize the rapidly growing inequality in the country, and failing to recognize how it is connected to the anti-immigrant fervor. When he was an immigrant boy,  ‘foreigners out!’ was the cry,  leveled at German Jewish leftist families like his own, but mostly at poor Jews fleeing poverty and pogroms in eastern Europe. Now, most of the  attacked are  poor Muslim workers from North Africa and the Middle East.  Hessel’s manifesto Indignez-Vous! calls upon the young of France to remember the Resistance heritage and offer a “a true economic and social democracy” to those who come seeking asylum,  employment,  safety for their children,  freedom, as well as to those born in France.  “Liberty, equality, fraternity.”

On the world stage,  Hessel continued to work with the Human Rights Movement. Between 2002 and 2009, he made six trips to Gaza and the West Bank, “to see with my own eyes,” he says, the human rights situation there and to report on it. His indignation was roused again by the conditions in which the Palestinians have been and are living in Gaza and the West  Bank –like people in a  vast  POW camp, established in 1948 and administered ever since by the Israeli Army. His 2009 visit convinced him of the accuracy of Judge Richard Goldstone’s report to the UN. Goldstone had concluded that the Israeli soldiers had committed “actions amounting to war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity.” They killed 1400 people,  including many women  and children,  with bombing and straffing tactics like those now being employed by Lybian soldiers and mercenaries against Lybian civilians –to the outrage  of the whole world.  “For Jews themselves to perpetrate war crimes is intolerable,” Hessel writes, outraged.  “Unfortunately, history gives few examples of people who learn the lessons of their own history.”

Indignez-Vous! is not about to let any lesson of post-war history go unlearned by the young. Hessel is a spirited teacher –a preacher, really, in the non-violence  mode of Martin Luther King, Jr., but with the Universal Declaration as his sacred book.  “We must realize that violence turns its back on hope. We have to chose hope over violence –chose the hope of non-violence. That is the path we must learn to follow…Societies must be based on rights whose violation prompts outrage –no matter who has violated them. There can be no compromising on these rights…”

Indignez-vous! recognizes clearly that the war-time anti-Nazi resistance movements  in Europe  are paradigmatic for the youth-revolts of the post-war world.  A nation that has become corrupt and authoritarian –in the extreme,  totalitarian—is the first target of youth-revolts;  but it is in their dynamic to be cosmopolitanly social democratic.  When they come into their group-consciousness, the young reach outward,  toward unity with the young everywhere—future to future, as it were.  (And when they do not establish this generational “we, “ and become instead factionalists or nationalists, their movements quickly fragment and dissipate.)  Hessel was very proud of Rene Cassin for advocating that  the word “Universal” be in the title of the 1948 Declaration,  rather than the word “International,” which had been proposed by “our Anglo-American friends”(that is, the United States and Great Britain). “International” was less of a challenge to national sovereignty.  But Cassin knew that if a “United Nations” was going to emerge as truly a union of nations, the nations in it could not be encouraged by their Rights document to worship their own boundaries and interests, or to leave any people without nationality, stateless as the Palestinians were then and have been since 1948.

The young people now fighting in the Middle East–as non-violently as their dictators allow, and as violently as they must to see the day when they have “the hope of non-violence”—have already heard the imperative Indignez-vous!  But it’s a good thing that the book is there for when they have time to read, and to draft the programs and declarations that might bring into existence new nations, and possibly even a new federation of new nations in their region. Imagine a Middle Eastern Union or Federation forming as the European Union has, or as a United States of South America might,  or a United States of the Americas—all steps in the direction that all the youth revolts tend: toward unities that do not eliminate cultural and political diversity but rather thrive on everything social and political that brings forth equality, social and political.

Imagine an Israeli youth movement forming –the seeds of it already exist—inspired by the Tunisians, the Egyptians, inspired by the Stephane Hessels of the world, the cosmopolitan Holocaust survivors.  Such a youth movement  could direct  outrage at the Israeli government for its failure to make peace with the Palestinian people and support their right to nationality under Article 15 of the Universal Declaration. The Israeli young would then find themselves in unity of political purpose with the young across their region –and no longer locked defensively in their exclusionary nation-state,  fearing destruction as their elders do.  Imagine the young soldiers in the Israeli Army who  refused to fire on unarmed civilians in Gaza and the West Bank reaching out to their  counterparts in Egypt and thinking “we” do not murder our neighbors on the command of old generals and old authoritarian politicians. “We” will be the new beginning.  Imagine the Middle Eastern  Union with its federation headquartered in a city like Brussels, for centuries a cross-roads of trade and a home for people of many language, cultures and religions; a city like Cairo, or, say…Jerusalem.

[Note: extracts of Hessel’s memoir/manifesto can be found in English in the March 7/14 issue of The Nation, with an introduction by Charles Gross. Indignez-Vous in French can be ordered through chapters.indigo.ca. Hessel’s blogs are on Huffington Post.  ]