When they came for the communists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a communist.
When they came for the socialists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a socialist.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews,
I did not speak out;
I was not a Jew.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

This poem was written by the Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller, a complex figure who was antisemitic and supported the Nazis until they turned against him, and imprisoned him. He became, later on in life, a world religious leader, a respected pacifist until his death in 1984. Its tone is far from idealistic – it is pragmatic, ironic, defeated, the antithesis of idealism. It is a confession.
His words are nagging at me, as I try to weave my way through themes of offensive cartoons, violence, religion, blasphemy and free speech.
When I was a rebellious teenager, I wore a large metal pink triangular badge, with a version of his poem inscribed on it, that included homosexuals in the list of groups that were taken. It is legitimate to do so, if only because by the time Niemöller was sent to Dachau in 1941, there weren’t many left alive there. They were the lowest of the low in the hierarchy of prisoners. The Third Reich’s Office for Combatting Abortion and Homosexuality, established in 1934, had been ruthlessly efficient. Himmler had ordered a “scientific” programme for the eradication of “this vice”. I’ve been to Dachau and seen the exhibition there; the photographs of the “experiments” are in my memory for life.
I’m trying to square in my mind the principle of free speech, the right to say anything I want, with the principles of tolerance and respect for people who are different to me. On an interpersonal level, it is a dynamic balance; the person who is truthfully blunt, bordering on psychopathy, saying whatever he feels like, may continually get into fights, and not have any friends. The person who forever dances around other people’s sensitivities, overly empathic, may lose all sense of identity, dignity and self-respect. It is, therefore, an issue of relationships, and the inevitable working compromises that people must make in order to get along. People may be willing to die and kill for their ideals, but only if relationships have broken down to such a sorrowful extent that a rallying cry is necessary to bring about change.
Vincent Browne in The Irish Times rightly mentioned the Gay News blasphemy case as being relevant to the current furore, where Mary Whitehouse successfully prosecuted the newspaper for publishing a lusty, pungent poem by James Kirkup called 'The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name'. Not only is it about a centurion having hot sex with a queer Christ, it’s a centurion having hot sex with a dead queer Christ. “I kissed his mouth/My tongue found his/bitter with death/I licked his wounds/the blood was harsh.” When I wanted to write about Jesus in these pages in 1994, I suggested that HP republish the poem in full to accompany my piece. It didn’t happen. I quite understood why, and nothing more was said about it. I honestly didn’t feel like going to the barricades over it. Sure, the poem has a queer shock-value, even to a pagan like me, and it highlights the suffering that queers endure(d) when they love(d). But, perhaps, Kirkup’s words were just too far ahead of their time. The poem was more like an angry hot poker stabbed into the painful Christian flesh/spirit wound, rather than a criticism or lament. We lost a damn fine newspaper as a result. Now, the poem is published in at least 68 places on the Web, according to Google.
The Mohammed cartoons are also Google-able. They, too, have a shock-value – if I were looking at them, and had an Islamic faith, I would be outraged. But you don’t need to be a believer; just a capacity to empathise with someone who holds some things sacred. I winced when I saw them. Especially as everyone knows, or should know, that in Islam, graphic portrayal of the human (let alone the divine) form has a taboo potency and meaning that is very different to that of the liberal European Judeo-Christian tradition.
It’s down to relationships, and how they have gone sour. The newspaper that published them in Denmark is the largest newspaper in the country, and is relatively conservative. It decided not to publish cartoons of Jesus Christ in 2003, on the grounds that its readers would not “enjoy them... they would provoke an outcry”. Two years later, it did not care about provoking an outcry among its Muslim readers. But, in this day and age, one has to suspect that there was a conscious or unconscious desire to do exactly that, by publishing the cartoons.
The editor refused to apologise then, nor could he express his appreciation the level of offence that Danish Muslims experienced. “Religion shouldn’t set any barriers” to the expression of satire, he said. The paper has since issued an apology, but too late. Too much hurt, humiliation, projection, and mistrust. Then, it became an issue that got politicised and globalized, and hot-headed young men lose their lives in the great World Split between Islam and the Infidels of the Godless West.
It starts local. It always does. If we attend to our interpersonal and inter-cultural relationships in our own neighbourhood, community and city, and come to some working arrangement with each other that shows we have respect for other traditions and that we don’t intend to offend, then we can ensure that something like the Danish Cartoons episode doesn’t happen in Ireland.
Oh, yes, I know why I’m thinking of Niemöller now. The violence on our streets at night, against gay men, is not being taken seriously by the general media. Recently someone has been arrested and charged with several assaults over the past year in the Christchurch area, including that of someone who was left in a coma last year. This good piece of detective work has gone unreported, apart from the local and gay press.
I don’t know whether there are any attacks on other minority groups happening to a similar degree. When I was at Kevin St Garda station after my attack in 2002, they told me that the assaults they dealt with had been usually racially motivated. Is this a pattern? If the main newspapers don’t report on a vicious serial attacker being arrested ,whose victims were gay men, then how do I know whether or not that the same sort of focussed hatred against other minority groups is happening or not? Are they feeling victimized or are they enjoying life in Ireland? Are they scared to go out at night? Do they know people who have been attacked?
It matters enormously because we need to know if there’s a problem with violence on our streets and intimidation before people in minority groups start getting angry as a community, and losing trust in the authorities, and picking fights. That’s when the real problems begin. Fire needs to be put out when it springs up, before the winds of world politics fan it into something unmanageable and chaotic. Before people get killed.