The
White Rose leaflets: Still relevant today
Richard
Parncutt
2021 June
The White
Rose (die Weiße Rose) was a German resistance group in Munich in
1942-43. Students Sophie Scholl, Hans Scholl, Christoph Probst, Willi
Graf,
and Alexander Schmorell, and a professor of philosophy and musicology,
Kurt Huber, wrote and distributed leaflets in
an attempt to undermine and overthrow the Nazis. Their
leaflets exposed not only the horror of Nazi militarism but also
the unprecedented and incomparable crime of the Holocaust at a time
when its full extent had not yet been revealed. The active members of
the White Rose were accused of treason and executed. Lest we forget.
Today, many of us are wondering how to respond to climate change. How
might we confront the governments and corporations
that despite decades of urgent warnings are still promoting the
extraction and burning of enormous quantities of fossil
fuel? What about the lies they are spreading in an attempt to justify
"business as usual"? How can that be stopped? Can we make a difference,
as individuals?
Global warming will cause the premature deaths of hundreds of
millions of people -- perhaps billions. But that is just one of
many global causes of preventable death. Millions are
dying each year in connection with poverty (hunger and curable disease,
violence). Hunger is affecting almost a billion people. That is a
consequence of a fundamentally unfair global
economic system that the rich countries could fix, if they
wanted to. The tax havens could be closed, exploitation of developing
countries by multinational
corporations could be stopped, international competition
and trade could be made fairer, development aid budgets could be
increased. Democracy, transparency and governance could be improved,
corruption reduced, and so on. But these things are not happening, or
if they are, the solutions that we are seeing are merely scratching the
surface. Any gains made are being destroyed by climate change. In
addition, millions die prematurely every
year from air pollution, pushed forward by the global automobile
industry, among other things. Millions of others die in connection with
smoking tobacco, encouraged by the global tobacco industry. Finally,
the
international arms trade is causing enormous death and
suffering by exacerbating existing conflicts.
We know that these things are happening, and we have known for a long
time. But many of us seem paralyzed, wondering
if or how we will find the courage to actually do something about it.
The people who will suffer most as a result of our apathy are children
in developing countries, at least half of whom will die prematurely as
a
result of climate change or one of the other listed problems, if things
continue as they are at the moment.
The courage that we need today to
protect the rights of two billion children in developing countries is
tiny by
comparison to the courage that Sophie Scholl and her friends found
during the Nazi terror. What is the matter with us?
Some pertinent extracts from the White
Rose Leaflets
The following is an extract from an English translation
of Leaflet 1 of the White Rose. The text becomes
relevant today if "German people" is replaced by "people of the world"
or better,
"well-educated upper and middle classes of the rich countries":
Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that
will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from
our eyes and the most horrible of crimes - crimes that infinitely
outdistance every human measure - reach the light of day? If the German
people are already so corrupted and spiritually crushed that they do
not raise a hand, frivolously trusting in a questionable faith in
lawful order of history; if they surrender man's highest principle,
that which raises him above all other God's creatures, his free will;
if they abandon the will to take decisive action and turn the wheel of
history and thus subject it to their own rational decision; if they are
so devoid of all individuality, have already gone so far along the road
toward turning into a spiritless and cowardly mass - then, yes, they
deserve their downfall.
Do we, too, deserve our downfall? Consider the following extract from
Leaflet 2:
Why do German people behave so apathetically in the face of all
these abominable crimes, crimes so unworthy of the human race? Hardly
anyone thinks about that. It is accepted as fact and put out of mind.
The German people slumber on in their dull, stupid sleep and encourage
these fascist criminals; they give them the opportunity to carry on
their depredations; and of course they do so. Is this a sign that the
Germans are brutalised 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? It seems to be so, and will certainly be so, if the German does
not at last start up out of his stupor, if he does not protest wherever
and whenever he can against this clique of criminals, if he shows no
sympathy for these hundreds of thousands of victims. He must evidence
not only sympathy; no, much more: a sense of complicity in guilt. For
through his apathetic behaviour he gives these evil men the opportunity
to act as they do; he tolerates this "government" which has taken upon
itself such an infinitely great burden of guilt; indeed, he himself is
to blame for the fact that it came about at all! Each man wants to be
exonerated of a guilt of this kind, each one continues on his way with
the most placid, the calmest conscience. But he cannot be exonerated;
he is guilty, guilty, guilty!
Are we, too, guilty if we do not wake up, raise our voices, and change
our ways? From Leaflet 3:
Many, perhaps most, of the readers of these leaflets do not see
clearly how they can practice an effective opposition. They do not see
any avenues open to them. We want to try to show them that everyone is
in a position to contribute to the overthrow of this system. It is not
possible through solitary withdrawal, in the manner of embittered
hermits, to prepare the ground for the overturn of this "government" or
bring about the revolution at the earliest possible moment. No, it can
be done only by the cooperation of many convinced, energetic people -
people who are agreed as to the means they must use to attain their
goal.
Will climate change develop
into a kind of Holocaust?
Environmental destruction of various kinds,
including carbon emissions and air/water pollution, are slowly but
surely destroying the complex ecosystems of Planet Earth.
The negative effects will be felt for thousands of years. Even if
warming can be
stopped at 2°C, the human death toll in connection with climate
change
will probably be about one
billion.
But very few of us are actively opposing the fossil fuel
industries and
other economic players who are profiting from environmental
destruction. Why are we so passive? Most of us risk nothing by
spreading
messages in social media, signing petitions, or attending
demonstrations. We risk nothing by severely cutting down on flying,
driving, and eating meat, and by not encouraging people to have
children.
On that score, there's no comparison with the White Rose.
Sophie Scholl and her friends were risking
their lives, and they knew it. That raises an important issue: Can an
unprecedented future tragedy can be compared with the Holocaust?
Holocaust comparisons are rightly taboo, because they risk trivializing
history's worst crime. But the Holocaust comparison taboo cannot
be an excuse not to act. The most important thing we learned from the
Holocaust is that each of us who
understands this problem has a personal responsibility to prevent
anything comparable with the Holocaust from ever happening again.
The Holocaust was worse than future climate change in the
sense that premeditated murder is worse than fatal neglect. But climate
change will probably be
worse than the Holocaust in the sense that a tragedy involving a
billion premature, preventable deaths is a hundred times worse than a
tragedy involving ten million deaths. In both cases, responsibility is
divided among large numbers of people, with big differences in
accountability between the most and the least influential players. In
both cases, the maximum number of deaths that could be attributed to
the actions of just one person, in a very rough order-of-magnitude
estimate, is one million.
Apart from that there are several interesting similarities between Nazi
Germany and today's rich countries as they struggle to mitigate climate
change and biodiversity loss. In both cases a large proportion of the
population understood the devastating dimensions of the problem, and
could reasonably foresee what might happen at the end, but did
practically nothing about it. Worse, many actively exacerbated
the problem in ways that could reasonably have been avoided. In
Nazi Germany, most people were supporting militarism and ethnic
cleansing in different ways, large and small. Today, a large proportion
of the middle class is flying, driving, eating meat, and supporting
conservative politics and fossil-fuel industries. Then and now, action
to solve the problem was inhibited by propaganda -- today, by climate
denial in media and politics.
Some people prefer to avoid Holocaust comparisons of this kind. They
ask: Isn't the present situation scary enough without breaking taboos?
Why not just talk about the enormous numbers of people that will
die prematurely due to climate change and the diverse ways climate
change will cause their deaths? Isn't that bad enough? Evidently, it is
not.
People have been talking about the devastating consequences of future
climate change in great detail for many years, using an
increasingly urgent vocabulary, but progress toward total global
emissions reductions is still practically zero. Meanwhile nothing could
be more
important and urgent than reducing total global emissions. With every
lost year we move closer to the precipice. By
stubbornly refusing to solve this problem, we are literally killing
hundreds of millions of future people.
That being the case, all possible reasonable strategies should be
tried out. If Holocaust comparison is what it takes to wake people
up and shake us out of our complacency, then it is what it is. Those
who appreciate the urgency of our current situation realise that we
need to try out all reasonable strategies. If human lives are our most
important
values, our most important goal is to reduce the future death toll from
climate change, by whatever means. Those who were killed in the past
cannot be brought back to life, but future people can be saved.
Besides, a discussion of this kind ensures that the Holocaust is never
forgotten, which is another important goal.
Acknowledgments. Thanks to
Martin Regelsberger and Steven Weiss for helpful comments. The opinions expressed on
this page are the
author's personal
opinions. Readers who know and care about this topic are asked to
contact the author with suggestions for
improving or extending the content:
parncutt at uni-graz dot at. Back
to Richard
Parncutt's homepage
