First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out --
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out --
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out --
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me -- and there was no one left to speak for me.
Many people have heard of this famous quotation, and it's probably been mentioned in blogs here on this site. But I wanted to point to it again, and you'll see why below. The passage is attributed to Martin Niemoller, the late German Protestant pastor who regretted that he and other intellectuals did not speak out earlier against the Nazis' persecution of the Jewish people, which led to the Holocaust. Niemoller eventually did become an ardent critic of Hitler, and for that, got seven years in a concentration camp. (He survived the camps and died in 1984.)
I instantly thought about Niemoller's quote when I saw Mike Weinman of the Ohio Fraternal Order of Police interviewed on the Rachel Maddow Show two nights ago. Weinman, a lifelong Republican, spoke of how he and other police officers - a typically conservative constituency - felt betrayed after Gov. John Kasich signed a bill stripping all state public employees of their collective bargaining rights. Watch:
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The money quote in that clip is of course, "Folks couldn't understand how our friends would do something like that to us." This is heart of the problem with working class people who have voted Republican and against their own interest for the last three decades. Mr. Weinman and others like him should have known better. Republican politicians - just about all of them millionaires - were never their friends. These working class voters were never going to be invited to the country clubs or the golf games or the fancy dinners. They were none other than useful pawns in the right wing movement's game.
While they were thinking the GOP were their friends, working class Republican voters stayed silent and happy while for years right wing politicians used policy to attack other groups - the poor, people of color, the disabled, the elderly, women, the LGBT community. These working class "folks " - the majority of them white - stood by, watched and even cheered, content in the (erroneous) belief that the GOP wasn't going to touch the benefits they had enjoyed since the New Deal. "We'll keep supporting Republicans," - they said to themselves - "as long as they go after people we don't like."
Unfortunately, the white working class in Ohio and around the country have now found themselves on the other end of the skewer. For when you tacitly support individuals who treat your fellow citizens unfairly and with contempt, those individuals in their quest for power will inevitably turn against you when it becomes advantageous for them. Fortunately for Mr. Weinman and Ohio's police officers, the last part of Pastor Niemoller's lament hasn't played out. When the state GOP went after their rights, 1.3 million Ohioans spoke up in outrage. I hope a lesson is being learned: never stay silent in the face of injustice done to others, because the oppressed could become you someday.