Gavin Aung Than is the artist who produces Zen Pencils. He uses pictures to bring art and ideas to life. The picture above is an excerpt taken from his August 20, 2018 strip at Go Comics. Here’s the next panel:
Zen Pencils, as the wiki entry describes it “feature illustrations taking on famous quotations and making a visual style to create a story, shown along with the quotes. Zen Pencils focuses on adding to renown quotes being developed into visual metaphors to make insightful comics for the public.”
The quote at the end of strip is:
”I choose my own way to burn.” — Sophie Scholl.
Look At and Read The Whole Thing.
I confess I had either not heard of or had forgotten who Sophie Scholl was. That she is not more widely known is an indicator of how much of what we know about the world ain’t so or is incomplete.
“The Good Germans” is a handy, sarcastic slur. I’ve used it and it has some validity when referring to people of “good will” who do nothing — but it is far from the whole story. Zen Pencils got me to look up Scholl — which was the point.
Sophia Magdalena Scholl (9 May 1921 – 22 February 1943) was a German student and anti-Nazi political activist, active within the White Rose non-violent resistance group in Nazi Germany.[1][2]
She was convicted of high treason after having been found distributing anti-war leaflets at the University of Munich (LMU) with her brother, Hans. As a result, she was executed by guillotine. Since the 1970s, Scholl has been extensively commemorated for her anti-Nazi resistance work.
The White Rose movement is another thing I had not really known anything about.
The White Rose (German: die Weiße Rose) was a non-violent, intellectual resistance group in the Third Reich led by a group of students and a professor at the University of Munich. The group conducted an anonymous leaflet and graffiti campaign which called for active opposition to the National Socialist regime. Their activities started in Munich on 27 June 1942, and ended with the arrest of the core group by the Gestapo on 18 February 1943.[1] They, as well as other members and supporters of the group who carried on distributing the pamphlets, faced show trials by the Nazi People's Court (Volksgerichtshof), and many of them were sentenced to death or imprisonment.
In every time and every place, people must choose what they will do and who they will be.
We live in a time when fear and anger are being used to divide us, intimidate us. To resist is to risk destruction; it can have consequences. “Fear is the mind-killer” — it paralyzes us and keeps us from acting. It’s an instinctive response to a threat. “If I keep silent, maybe this will pass over, leave me alone.” If it didn’t work at least part of the time, it wouldn’t be instinctive — but it is the cumulative “little death” that sets the stage for the Big Death.
We are born, we live for a time, then we die. What matters is what happens between those two endpoints. “The world is made by the people who show up for the job.”
Scholl showed up. If we can learn from her example, she did not die in vain.
Resist.