Letter from the grave

Read this letter from an assassinated journalist

Letter from the grave

People often ask me why I take such risks and tell me it is a matter of time before I am bumped off. Of course I know that: it is inevitable. But if we do not speak out now, there will be no one left to speak for those who cannot, whether they be ethnic minorities, the disadvantaged or the persecuted. 

An example that has inspired me throughout my career in journalism has been that of the German theologian, Martin Niemoller. In his youth he was an anti-Semite and an admirer of Hitler. As Nazism took hold in Germany, however, he saw Nazism for what it was: it was not just the Jews Hitler sought to extirpate, it was just about anyone with an alternate point of view. 

Niemoller spoke out, and for his trouble was incarcerated in the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1937 to 1945, and very nearly executed. While incarcerated, Niemoller wrote a poem that, from the first time I read it in my teenage years, stuck hauntingly in my mind:
  First they came for the Jews
  and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.
  Then they came for the Communists
  and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.
  Then they came for the trade unionists
  and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.
  Then they came for me
  and there was no one left to speak out for me.