Monday 28 July 2014

सलाह - गिरिजेश



दुनिया में ख़ुशी बाँटिए, खुद ज़हर पीजिए;
हर एक ज़िन्दगी को ज़हर मत बनाइए।

गुर्राना-बड़बड़ाना छोड़ सम्भलिए जनाब;
ख़ुद अपने ही दिल-ओ-दिमाग को बचाइए।

लोगों की चूक देखिए, तो मुस्कुराइए,
आहिस्ता से अपनी सलाह देते जाइए।

अपनी नफ़ीस आदतों पे फ़ख्र कीजिए,
सबके हुनर समेट, बगीचे सजाइए।

वरना किसी के काम नहीं आ सकेंगे आप,
ग़ैरों को छोड़ ख़ुद पे ज़रा तरस खाइए।

(एक आत्म-कथ्य)
(चित्र साभार साथी Faqir Jay)

#कहीं_पर_निगाहें_कहीं_पर_निशाना ! रामदेव का नया कारनामा !

Photo: #कहीं_पर_निगाहें_कहीं_पर_निशाना ! 
रामदेव का नया कारनामा !
हजारों करोड़ों के घोषित और उससे अधिक अघोषित परिसम्पत्ति का साम्राज्य खड़ा करने वाले, योग विद्या, देशी दवाओं और आयुर्वेद के कुटिल व्यापारी रामदेव का एक और नया कारनामा सामने आया है !
'लुक हीयर-सी देयर' वाले आत्म-मुग्ध 'बाबा' की नज़रें शुरू से ही अधिकतम सम्पत्ति संचय पर ही रही हैं.
सम्पत्ति-संचय का अपना ही तर्क होता है.
सम्पत्ति-संचय की प्रवृत्ति वाले लोग सबसे पहले अपने निकटस्थ वफ़ादारों को ही अपना शिकार बनाते रहे हैं.
परफेक्ट बिज़नेसमैन रामदेव भी इसका अपवाद नहीं है. लोग उसे 'दामदेव' कहते रहे हैं.
एक विश्वस्त सूत्र ने बताया कि 'सलवारी बाबा' ने अभी-अभी अलग-अलग नगरों के अपने एक सौ कर्मचारियों को तकनीकी तरीके से छाँट कर काम से निकाल दिया है. 
बाबा के बिज़नेस-साम्राज्य के धूर्त प्रबंधकों द्वारा अचानक बेरोज़गार बना दिये गये हैं.
और इसके परिणाम-स्वरूप इस भीषण महँगाई के दौर में उन सब 'कार्यकर्त्ता' कहे जाने वाले अल्प-वेतनभोगी कर्मचारियों के घरों के चूल्हे एक साथ बुझा दिये गये हैं. 
ये सभी युवा गत अन्ना-रामदेव की जुगलबन्दी वाले आन्दोलन की उपज और विद्रोही रहे हैं. 
अभी तक इस 'बाबा' की नौकरी में इनको केवल रु. 5000/- प्रति माह मिलता रहा है. 
और इनमें से सभी ने बाबा को करोड़ों का बिज़नेस दिया है. 
अब ये बाबा के ख़िलाफ़ लड़ने का मन बना रहे हैं. 
उनके सम्पर्क सूत्र ने कहा कि ये मुझसे सम्पर्क करना चाहते हैं. 
मैंने उनको बता दिया कि इनके बीच से वे ही मुझसे सम्पर्क करें, जो क़दम पीछे न हटाने वाले लोग हों. 
अगर वे आर-पार लड़ने का मन बना चुके हों, तभी मुझसे सम्पर्क करें. 
वरना मैं दूसरों के शिकार को हाथ नहीं लगाता.
पूँजी के इन गुलामों की बेइंतेहा पैशाचिक हविश घिनौनी है. 
इनकी ऐसी काली करतूतों को देख-सुन कर इन धन-पशुओं से नफ़रत और बढ़ जाती है.
यह अमानुषिक व्यवस्था हर एक मुमकिन जायज और नाजायज तरीके से पूँजी के विस्तार करती जाती है.
और वहीं दूसरी ओर अपनी सेवा में लगे मासूम और मजबूर इन्सान का इस्तेमाल करके उसे कूड़ेदान पर फेंक देती है. 
मानवता का इस तरह भीषण शोषण, उत्पीड़न और अपमान करने वालो की इस जनविरोधी नरभक्षी व्यवस्था को चकनाचूर करना ही होगा. 
इसके बिना प्रत्येक इन्सान गरिमा के साथ जी नहीं सकता.
मानवता की मुक्ति के लिये ज़रूरी है कि धन-तन्त्र का नाश हो !
पूँजीवाद मुर्दाबाद !
इन्कलाब जिंदाबाद !!
रामदेव का नया कारनामा !
हजारों करोड़ों के घोषित और उससे अधिक अघोषित परिसम्पत्ति का साम्राज्य खड़ा करने वाले, योग विद्या, देशी दवाओं और आयुर्वेद के कुटिल व्यापारी रामदेव का एक और नया कारनामा सामने आया है !
'लुक हीयर-सी देयर' वाले आत्म-मुग्ध 'बाबा' की नज़रें शुरू से ही अधिकतम सम्पत्ति संचय पर ही रही हैं.
सम्पत्ति-संचय का अपना ही तर्क होता है.
सम्पत्ति-संचय की प्रवृत्ति वाले लोग सबसे पहले अपने निकटस्थ वफ़ादारों को ही अपना शिकार बनाते रहे हैं.
परफेक्ट बिज़नेसमैन रामदेव भी इसका अपवाद नहीं है. लोग उसे 'दामदेव' कहते रहे हैं.
एक विश्वस्त सूत्र ने बताया कि 'सलवारी बाबा' ने अभी-अभी अलग-अलग नगरों के अपने एक सौ कर्मचारियों को तकनीकी तरीके से छाँट कर काम से निकाल दिया है.
बाबा के बिज़नेस-साम्राज्य के धूर्त प्रबंधकों द्वारा अचानक बेरोज़गार बना दिये गये हैं.
और इसके परिणाम-स्वरूप इस भीषण महँगाई के दौर में उन सब 'कार्यकर्त्ता' कहे जाने वाले अल्प-वेतनभोगी कर्मचारियों के घरों के चूल्हे एक साथ बुझा दिये गये हैं.
ये सभी युवा गत अन्ना-रामदेव की जुगलबन्दी वाले आन्दोलन की उपज और विद्रोही रहे हैं.
अभी तक इस 'बाबा' की नौकरी में इनको केवल रु. 5000/- प्रति माह मिलता रहा है.
और इनमें से सभी ने बाबा को करोड़ों का बिज़नेस दिया है.
अब ये बाबा के ख़िलाफ़ लड़ने का मन बना रहे हैं.
उनके सम्पर्क सूत्र ने कहा कि ये मुझसे सम्पर्क करना चाहते हैं.
मैंने उनको बता दिया कि इनके बीच से वे ही मुझसे सम्पर्क करें, जो क़दम पीछे न हटाने वाले लोग हों.
अगर वे आर-पार लड़ने का मन बना चुके हों, तभी मुझसे सम्पर्क करें.
वरना मैं दूसरों के शिकार को हाथ नहीं लगाता.
पूँजी के इन गुलामों की बेइंतेहा पैशाचिक हविश घिनौनी है.
इनकी ऐसी काली करतूतों को देख-सुन कर इन धन-पशुओं से नफ़रत और बढ़ जाती है.
यह अमानुषिक व्यवस्था हर एक मुमकिन जायज और नाजायज तरीके से पूँजी के विस्तार करती जाती है.
और वहीं दूसरी ओर अपनी सेवा में लगे मासूम और मजबूर इन्सान का इस्तेमाल करके उसे कूड़ेदान पर फेंक देती है.
मानवता का इस तरह भीषण शोषण, उत्पीड़न और अपमान करने वालो की इस जनविरोधी नरभक्षी व्यवस्था को चकनाचूर करना ही होगा.
इसके बिना प्रत्येक इन्सान गरिमा के साथ जी नहीं सकता.
मानवता की मुक्ति के लिये ज़रूरी है कि धन-तन्त्र का नाश हो !
पूँजीवाद मुर्दाबाद !
इन्कलाब जिंदाबाद !! 


पहले वे कम्युनिस्टों के लिए आए - पास्टर निमोलर

____कविता और कवि-परिचय____ 

Photo: ____कविता और कवि-परिचय____ 
पहले वे कम्युनिस्टों के लिए आए 
मैं चुप रहा 
क्योंकि मैं कम्युनिस्ट नहीं था 
फिर वे ट्रेड यूनियनों के लिए आए 
और मैं चुप रहा 
क्योंकि मैं ट्रेड यूनियनिस्ट नहीं था 
फिर वे यहूदियों के लिए आए 
और मैं चुप रहा 
क्योंकि मैं यहूदी नहीं था 
फिर वे मेरे लिए आए 
और उस वक्त कोई दूसरा नहीं था 
जो मेरे हक में बोलता .
- पास्टर निमोलर

First they came for the Communists,
  and I didn’t speak up,
    because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
  and I didn’t speak up,
    because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
  and I didn’t speak up,
    because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
  and by that time there was no one
    left to speak up for me.
by Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945
(Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller)
Born 14 January 1892, Lippstadt, German Empire 
Died 6 March 1984 (aged 92), Wiesbaden, West Germany
Congregations served: St. Anne's in Dahlem, Germany
Offices held: President, Evangelical Church in Hesse and Nassau (1945–1961)
President, World Council of Churches (1961–1968)
Title - Ordained pastor
Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller (German: [ˈniːmœlɐ]; 14 January 1892 – 6 March 1984) was a German anti-Nazi, theologian and Lutheran pastor. He is best known for his statement "First they came ...".

Although he was a national conservative and initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler,he became one of the founders of the Confessional Church, which opposed the nazification of German Protestant churches. He vehemently opposed the Nazis' Aryan Paragraph, but made remarks about Jews that some scholars have called antisemitic. For his opposition to the Nazis' state control of the churches, Niemöller was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1937 to 1945. He narrowly escaped execution and survived imprisonment. After his imprisonment, he expressed his deep regret about not having done enough to help the victims of the Nazis. He turned away from his earlier nationalistic beliefs and was one of the initiators of the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt. From the 1950s on, he was a vocal pacifist and anti-war activist, and vice-chair of War Resisters' International from 1966 to 1972. He met with Ho Chi Minh during the Vietnam War and was a committed campaigner for nuclear disarmament.

Youth and World War I participation -
Martin Niemöller was born in Lippstadt, then in the Prussian Province of Westphalia (now in North Rhine-Westphalia), on 14 January 1892 to the Lutheran pastor Heinrich Niemöller and his wife Pauline (née Müller), and grew up in a very conservative home. In 1900 the family moved to Elberfeld where he finished school, taking his abitur exam in 1908.
He began a career as an officer of the Imperial Navy of the German Empire, and in 1915 was assigned to U-boats. His first ship was SMS Thüringen. In October of that year he joined the submarine mother ship Vulkan, followed by training on the submarine U-3. In February 1916 he became second officer on U-73, which was assigned to the Mediterranean in April 1916. There the submarine fought on the Saloniki front, patrolled in the Strait of Otranto and from December 1916 onward planted mines in front of Port Said and was involved incommerce raiding. Flying a French flag as a ruse of war, the SM U-73 sailed past British warships and torpedoed two Allied troopships and a British man-of-war.
In January 1917 Niemöller was navigator of U-39. Later he returned to Kiel, and in August 1917 he became first officer on U-151, which attacked numerous ships at Gibraltar, in theBay of Biscay, and other places. During this time the SM U-151 crew set a record by sinking 55,000 tons of Allied ships in 115 days at sea. In May 1918 he became commander of theUC-67. Under his command, UC-67 achieved a temporary closing of the French port of Marseilles by sinking ships in the area, by torpedoes, and by the laying of mines.
For his achievements, Niemöller was awarded the Iron Cross First Class. When the war drew to a close, he decided to become a preacher, a story he later recounted in his book Vom U-Boot zur Kanzel (From U-boat to Pulpit). At war's end, Niemöller resigned his commission, as he rejected the new democratic government of the German Empire that formed after the resignation of the German Emperor William II.

Weimar Republic and education as pastor -
On July 20, 1919 he married Else née Bremer (born July 20, 1890 – died August 7, 1961). The same year he began working at a farm in Wersen near Osnabrück but gave up becoming a farmer as he couldn't afford to buy his own farm. He subsequently pursued his earlier idea of becoming a Lutheran pastor, and studied Protestant theology at the Westphalian William's-University in Münster from 1919 to 1923. His motivation was his ambition to give a disordered society meaning and order through the Gospel and church bodies.
During the Ruhr Uprising in 1920 he was battalion commander of the "III. Bataillon der Akademischen Wehr Münster" belonging to the paramilitary Freikorps.
Niemöller was ordained on June 29, 1924. Subsequently, the united Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union appointed him curate of Münster's Church of the Redeemer. After serving as the superintendent of the Inner Mission in the old-Prussian ecclesiastical province of Westphalia, Niemöller in 1931 became pastor of the Jesus Christus Kirche (comprising a congregation together with St. Anne's Church) in Dahlem, an affluent suburb ofBerlin.

Role in Nazi Germany - 
Martin Niemöller, Adolf Hitler's 'Personal Prisoner' at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Like most Protestant pastors, Niemöller was a national conservative, and openly supported the conservative opponents of the Weimar Republic. He even welcomed Hitler's accession to power in 1933, believing it would bring a national revival. However, he decidedly opposed the Nazis' "Aryan Paragraph". In 1936, he signed the petition of a group of Protestant churchmen that sharply criticized Nazi policies and declared the Aryan Paragraph incompatible with the Christian virtue of charity.
The Nazi regime reacted with mass arrests and charges against almost 800 pastors and ecclesiastical lawyers. In 1933, Niemöller founded the Pfarrernotbund, an organization of pastors to "combat rising discrimination against Christians of Jewish background." By the autumn of 1934, Niemöller joined other Lutheran and Protestant churchmen such as Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in founding the Confessional Church, a Protestant group that opposed the Nazification of the German Protestant churches. The author and Nobel Prize laureateThomas Mann published Niemöller's sermons in the United States and praised his bravery.
However, Niemöller only gradually abandoned his national conservative views and even made pejorative remarks about Jews of faith while protecting—in his own church—baptised Christians, persecuted as Jews by the Nazis, due to their or their forefathers' Jewish descent. In one sermon in 1935, he remarked: "What is the reason for [their] obvious punishment, which has lasted for thousands of years? Dear brethren, the reason is easily given: the Jews brought the Christ of God to the cross!"
This has led to controversy about his attitude toward Jews and to accusations of anti-Judaism. Holocaust scholar Robert Ashley Michael notes that Niemöller's statements were a result of traditional antisemitism and that Niemöller agreed with the Nazis' position on the "Jewish question" at that time. Werner Cohn, an American sociologist, who lived as a Jew in Nazi Germany, also reports on antisemitic statements by Niemöller.
Thus, Niemöller's ambivalent and often contradictory behaviour during the Nazi period makes him one of the most controversial enemies of the Nazis. Even his motives are disputed. The historian Raimund Lammersdorf considers Niemöller "an opportunist who had no quarrel with Hitler politically and only began to oppose the Nazis when Hitler threatened to attack the churches." Others have disputed this view and emphasize the risks that Niemöller took while opposing the Nazis. Nonetheless, Niemöller's behaviour contrasts sharply with the much more broad-minded attitudes of other Confessing Church activists such as Hermann Maas. The pastor and liberal politician Maas — unlike Niemöller — belonged to those who unequivocally opposed every form of antisemitism and was later accorded the title Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.

Arrest and imprisonment - 
Arrested on 1 July 1937, Niemöller was brought to a "Special Court" on 2 March 1938 to be tried for activities against the State. He was fined 2,000 Reichmarks and received a prison term of seven months. As his detention period exceeded the jail term, he was released by the Court after the trial. However, immediately after leaving the Court, he was rearrested by Himmler's Gestapo—presumably because Rudolf Hess found the sentence too lenient and decided to take "merciless action" against him.[16] He was interned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1938 to 1945.
After his former cell-mate Leo Stein was released from Sachsenhausen to go to America, he wrote an article about Niemöller for The National Jewish Monthly in 1941.[2] Stein reports that having asked Niemöller why he ever supported the Nazi Party, Niemöller replied :
I find myself wondering about that too. I wonder about it as much as I regret it. Still, it is true that Hitler betrayed me. I had an audience with him, as a representative of the Protestant Church, shortly before he became Chancellor, in 1932. Hitler promised me on his word of honor, to protect the Church, and not to issue any anti-Church laws. He also agreed not to allow pogroms against the Jews, assuring me as follows: "There will be restrictions against the Jews, but there will be no ghettos, no pogroms, in Germany."
I really believed, given the widespread anti-Semitism in Germany, at that time—that Jews should avoid aspiring to Government positions or seats in the Reichstag. There were many Jews, especially among the Zionists, who took a similar stand. Hitler's assurance satisfied me at the time. On the other hand, I hated the growing atheistic movement, which was fostered and promoted by the Social Democrats and the Communists. Their hostility toward the Church made me pin my hopes on Hitler for a while.
I am paying for that mistake now; and not me alone, but thousands of other persons like me.

Later life and death -  
In late April 1945 Niemöller was transferred to Tyrol together with about 140 other prominent inmates, where the SS left the prisoners behind. He was freed by the Fifth U.S. Army on May 5, 1945. According to Lammersdorf, there had been some attempts to whitewash his past, which were, however, soon followed by harsh criticism because of his role as a NSDAP supporter and his attitude toward Jews. Niemöller himself never denied his own guilt in the time of the Nazi regime. In 1959, he was asked about his former attitude toward Jews by Alfred Wiener, a Jewish researcher into racism and war crimes committed by the Nazi regime. In a letter to Wiener, Niemöller stated that his eight-year imprisonment by the Nazis became the turning point in his life, after which he viewed things differently.
Niemöller was president of the Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau from 1947 to 1961. He was one of the initiators of the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, signed by leading figures in the GermanProtestant churches. The document acknowledged that the churches had not done enough to resist the Nazis.
Under the impact of a meeting with Otto Hahn (who has been called the "father of nuclear chemistry") in July 1954, Niemöller became an ardent pacifist and campaigner for nuclear disarmament. He was soon a leading figure in the post-war German peace movement and was even brought to court in 1959 because he had spoken about the military in a very unflattering way. His visit toNorth Vietnam's communist ruler Ho Chi Minh at the height of the Vietnam War caused an uproar. Niemöller also took active part in protests against the Vietnam War and the NATO Double-Track Decision.
In 1961, he became president of the World Council of Churches. He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1966.
Niemöller died at Wiesbaden, West Germany on 6 March 1984, at the age of 92.
Selected writings - 
• From U-boat to Pulpit, including an Appendix From Pulpit to Prison by Henry Smith Leiper (Chicago, New York: Willett, Clark, 1937).
• Here Stand I! with foreword by James Moffatt, translated by Jane Lymburn (Chicago, New York: Willett, Clark, 1937).
• The Gestapo Defied, Being the Last Twenty-eight Sermons by Martin Niemöller (London [etc.]: W. Hodge and Company, Limited, 1941).
• Of Guilt and Hope, translated by Renee Spodheim (New York: Philosophical Library, [1947]).
• “What is the Church?” Princeton Seminary Bulletin, vol. 40, no. 4 (1947): 10–16.
• “The Word of God is Not Bound,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin, vol. 41, no. 1 (1947): 18–23.
Exile in the Fatherland: Martin Niemöller’s Letters from Moabit Prison, translated by Ernst Kaemke, Kathy Elias, and Jacklyn Wilfred; edited by Hubert G. Locke (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., c1986).
____________________________________________

“First they came …” is a famous statement and provocative poem attributed to pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) about the cowardice of German intellectuals following the Nazis' rise to power and the subsequent purging of their chosen targets, group after group. There is some disagreement over the exact wording of the quotation and when it was created; the content of the quotation may have been presented differently by Niemöller on different occasions.

The text -
The best-known versions of the speech are the poems that began circulating by the 1950s. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum quotes the following text as one of the many poetic versions of the speech:
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.
Niemöller created multiple versions of the text during his career. The earliest speeches, written in 1946, list the Communists, incurable patients, Jews or Jehovah's Witnesses, and civilians in countries occupied by Nazi Germany. An English translation of Niemöller's speech for the Confessing Church in Frankfurt on 6 January 1946 is as follows:
When Pastor Niemöller was put in a concentration camp we wrote the year 1937; when the concentration camp was opened we wrote the year 1933, and the people who were put in the camps then were Communists. Who cared about them? We knew it, it was printed in the newspapers.
Who raised their voice, maybe the Confessing Church? We thought: Communists, those opponents of religion, those enemies of Christians - "should I be my brother's keeper?"
Then they got rid of the sick, the so-called incurables. - I remember a conversation I had with a person who claimed to be a Christian. He said: Perhaps it's right, these incurably sick people just cost the state money, they are just a burden to themselves and to others. Isn't it best for all concerned if they are taken out of the middle [of society]? -- Only then did the church as such take note. Then we started talking, until our voices were again silenced in public. Can we say, we aren't guilty/responsible? The persecution of the Jews, the way we treated the occupied countries, or the things in Greece, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia or in Holland, that were written in the newspapers
I believe, we Confessing-Church-Christians have every reason to say: mea culpa, mea culpa! We can talk ourselves out of it with the excuse that it would have cost me my head if I had spoken out.

This speech was translated and published in English in 1947, but was later retracted when it was alleged that Niemöller was an early supporter of the Nazis.  The "sick, the so-called incurables" were killed in Action T4. A 1955 version of the speech, mentioned in an interview of a German professor quoting Niemöller, lists the Communists, socialists, schools, the Jews, the press, and the Church. An American version delivered by a congressman in 1968 anachronistically omits the Communists and includes the industrialists, who were not persecuted by the Nazis.
In 1976, Niemöller gave the following answer in response to an interview question asking about the origins of the poem. The Martin-Niemöller-Foundation considers 
this the "classical" version of the speech:
There were no minutes or copy of what I said, and it may be that I formulated it differently. But the idea was anyhow: The communists, we still let that happen calmly; and the trade unions, we also let that happen; and we even let the Social Democrats happen. All of that was not our affair. The Church did not concern itself with politics at all at that time, and it shouldn't have anything do with them either. In the Confessing Church we didn't want to represent any political resistance per se, but we wanted to determine for the Church that that was not right, and that it should not become right in the Church, that's why already in '33, when we created the pastors' emergency federation (Pfarrernotbund), we put as the 4th point in the founding charter: If an offensive is made against ministers and they are simply ousted as ministers, because they are of Jewish lineage (Judenstämmlinge) or something like that, then we can only say as a Church: No. And that was then the 4th point in the obligation, and that was probably the first contra-anti-antisemitic pronouncement coming from the Protestant Church.
Author -
Martin Niemöller was a German pastor and theologian born in Lippstadt, Germany, in 1892. Niemöller was an anti-communist and supported Adolf Hitler's rise to power at first. But when Hitler insisted on the supremacy of the state over religion, Niemöller became disillusioned. He became the leader of a group of German clergymen opposed to Hitler. In 1937 he was arrested and eventually confined in Sachsenhausen and Dachau. He was released in 1945 by the Allies. He continued his career in Germany as a clergyman and as a leading voice of penance and reconciliation for the German people after World War II. His statement, sometimes presented as a poem, is well-known, frequently quoted, and is a popular model for describing the dangers of political apathy.
Origin -
The statement was published in a 1955 book by Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, based on interviews he had conducted in Germany several years earlier. The quotation was circulated by civil rights activists and educators in the United States in the late 1950s. Some research traces the text to several speeches given by Niemöller in 1946. 
Nonetheless, the wording remains controversial, both in terms of its provenance, and the substance and order of the groups that are mentioned in its many versions. While Niemöller's published 1946 speeches mention communists, the incurably ill, Jews or Jehovah's Witnesses (depending on which speech), and people in occupied countries, the 1955 text, a paraphrase by a German professor in an interview, lists communists, socialists, "the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on", and ends with "the Church". Based on the explanation given by Niemöller himself in 1976, this refers to the German Protestant ('Evangelische') Church, and not to the German Catholic Church.
However, as claimed by Richard John Neuhaus in the November 2001 issue of First Things, when "asked in 1971 about the correct version of the quote, Niemöller said he was not quite sure when he had said the famous words but, if people insist upon citing them, he preferred a version that listed 'the Communists', 'the trade unionists', 'the Jews', and 'me'." However, historian Harold Marcuse could not verify that interview. Rather, he found a 1976 interview in which Niemöller referred to a 1974 discussion with the general bishop of the Lutheran Church of Slovakia.
Usages - 
PEARL HARBOR (April 27, 2009) Lt. Dennis Kelly reads an excerpt of the Rev. Martin Niemöller's poem during a Holocaust Days of Remembrance Observance service.
• At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., the quotation is on display in a variation that substitutes "Socialists" for "Communists". The Holocaust Museum website has a discussion of the history of the quotation.
• A version of the statement is also on display at the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, as well as the Virginia Holocaust Museum in Richmond, Virginia, the Holocaust memorial in Boston, Massachusetts, and in The Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.
• Lasantha Wickrematunge used the verse in his final letter to the people of Sri Lanka
• Jazz musician Charles Mingus recites a variation on the poem in his composition "Don't Let It Happen Here".
• The punk rock band Anti-Flag recites an abridged version of the poem in the song Exodus/Emigre.
• The Oi! band Oi Polloi uses the poem in their song "Bash the Fash".
• The Australian Sex Party references the quotation in their National Dress Like a Biker Day agitprop/political theater.
A few weeks ago, someone on alt.activism asked who said these words and what had happened to him. First, the version above is taken from an article on the 50th anniversary of the beginning of WW II that appeared in TIME Magazine, Aug 28, 1989. There are many versions of this poem floating around… by no means is this the authorative one. Similarly, the author of the poem is often not mentioned. On one level, that is not important. Indeed, Martin Niemoller was an outspoken advocate for accepting the burden of collective guilt for WW II as a means of atonement for the suffering that the German nation (through the Nazis) had caused before and during WW II.
On the other hand, I think that something is missed if one doesn’t understand that the words come from a man who also declared that he “would rather burn his church to the ground, than to preach the Nazi trinity of ‘race, blood, and soil.’”
Niemoller was tainted. He had been a U-boat captain in WW I prior to becoming a pastor. And he supported Hitler prior to his taking power. Indeed, initially the Nazi press held him up as a model… for his service in WW I. [Newsweek, July 10, 1937, pg 32]
But Niemoller broke very early with the Nazis. In 1933, he organized the Pastor’s Emergency League to protect Lutheran pastors from the police. In 1934, he was one of the leading organizers at the Barmen Synod, which produced the theological basis for the Confessing Church, which despite its persecution became an enduring symbol of German resistance to Hitler.
From 1933 to 1937, Niemoller consistantly trashed everything the Nazis stood for. At one point he declared that it was impossible to “point to the German [Luther] without pointing to the Jew [Christ] to which he pointed to.” [from Charles Colson, Kingdoms in Conflict]
He rejected the Nazi distortion of “Positive Christianity” (postulating the ‘special virtue’ of the German people), as opposed to “Negative Chistianity” which held that all people regardless of race were guilty of sin and in need of repentance. An excerpt from a sermon of his printed in TIME Magazine [Feb 21, 1938, pg 25-27]:
“I cannot help saying quite harshly and bluntly that the Jewish people came to grief and disgrace because of its own ‘Positive Christianity!’ It [the Jewish people] bears a curse throughout the history of the world because it was ready to approve of its Messiah just as long and as far as it thought it could gain some advantage for its own plans and its own aims for Him, His words and His deeds. It bears a curse, because it rejected Him and resisted Him to the death when it became clear that Jesus of Nazareth would not cease calling [the Jews] to repentance and faith, despite their insistence that they were free, strong and proud men and belonged to a pure-blooded, race-concious nation!
“‘Positive Christianity,’ which the Jewish people wanted, clashed with ‘Negative Christianity’ as Jesus himself represented it!… Friends, can we risk going with our nation without forgiveness of sins, without that so-called ‘Negative Christianity’ which, when all is said and done, clings in repentence and faith to Jesus as the Savior of sinners? I cannot and you cannot and our nation cannot! ‘Come let us return to the Lord!’”
And in a celebrated manifesto, produced and smuggled out of the country in classic Charter-77 style, and reprinted in the foreign press just prior to the 1936 Olympics, he along with 9 other pastors wrote to Hitler:
“Our people are trying to break the bond set by God. That is human conceit rising against God. In this connection we must warn the Führer, that the adoration frequently bestowed on him is only due to God. Some years ago the Führer objected to having his picture placed on Protestant altars. Today his thoughts are used as a basis not only for political decisions but also for morality and law. He himself is surrounded with the dignity of a priest and even of an intermediary between God and man… We ask that liberty be given to our people to go their way in the future under the sign of the Cross of Christ, in order that our grandsons may not curse their elders on the ground that their elders left them a state on earth that closed to them the Kingdom of God.” [from TIME Magazine July 27, 1936]
________________________________________
Rev. Martin Niemoller was protected until 1937 by both the foreign press and influential friends in the up-scale Berlin suburb where he preached. Eventually, he was arrested for treason. Perhaps due to foreign pressure, he was found guilty, but initially given only a suspended sentence. He was however then almost immediately re-arrested on Hitler’s direct orders. From then on until the end of WW II, he was held at the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps. Near the end of the war, he narrowly escaped execution. [from Charles Colson’s Kingdoms in Conflict]
________________________________________
After the war, Niemoller emerged from prison to preach the words that began this post, that all of us know… He was instrumental in producing the “Stuttgart Confession of Guilt”, in which the German Protestant churches formally accepted guilt for their complicity in allowing the suffering which Hitler’s reign caused to occur. In 1961, he was elected as one of the six presidents of the World Council of Churches, the ecumenical body of the Protestant faiths.
Niemoller emerged also as an adamant pacifist and advocate of reconciliation. He actively sought out contacts in Eastern Europe, and traveled to Moscow in 1952 and North Vietnam in 1967. He received the Lenin Peace Prize in 1967, and the West German Grand Cross of Merit in 1971. Martin Niemoller died in Wiesbaden, West Germany on Mar 6, 1984, at the age of 92. [from theEncyclopedia Britannica].
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

पहले वे कम्युनिस्टों के लिए आए
मैं चुप रहा
क्योंकि मैं कम्युनिस्ट नहीं था
फिर वे ट्रेड यूनियनों के लिए आए
और मैं चुप रहा
क्योंकि मैं ट्रेड यूनियनिस्ट नहीं था
फिर वे यहूदियों के लिए आए
और मैं चुप रहा
क्योंकि मैं यहूदी नहीं था
फिर वे मेरे लिए आए
और उस वक्त कोई दूसरा नहीं था
जो मेरे हक में बोलता .
- पास्टर निमोलर

First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
by Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945

(Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller)
Born 14 January 1892, Lippstadt, German Empire
Died 6 March 1984 (aged 92), Wiesbaden, West Germany
Congregations served: St. Anne's in Dahlem, Germany
Offices held: President, Evangelical Church in Hesse and Nassau (1945–1961)
President, World Council of Churches (1961–1968)
Title - Ordained pastor
Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller (German: [ˈniːmœlɐ]; 14 January 1892 – 6 March 1984) was a German anti-Nazi, theologian and Lutheran pastor. He is best known for his statement "First they came ...".

Although he was a national conservative and initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler,he became one of the founders of the Confessional Church, which opposed the nazification of German Protestant churches. He vehemently opposed the Nazis' Aryan Paragraph, but made remarks about Jews that some scholars have called antisemitic. For his opposition to the Nazis' state control of the churches, Niemöller was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1937 to 1945. He narrowly escaped execution and survived imprisonment. After his imprisonment, he expressed his deep regret about not having done enough to help the victims of the Nazis. He turned away from his earlier nationalistic beliefs and was one of the initiators of the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt. From the 1950s on, he was a vocal pacifist and anti-war activist, and vice-chair of War Resisters' International from 1966 to 1972. He met with Ho Chi Minh during the Vietnam War and was a committed campaigner for nuclear disarmament.

Youth and World War I participation -
Martin Niemöller was born in Lippstadt, then in the Prussian Province of Westphalia (now in North Rhine-Westphalia), on 14 January 1892 to the Lutheran pastor Heinrich Niemöller and his wife Pauline (née Müller), and grew up in a very conservative home. In 1900 the family moved to Elberfeld where he finished school, taking his abitur exam in 1908.
He began a career as an officer of the Imperial Navy of the German Empire, and in 1915 was assigned to U-boats. His first ship was SMS Thüringen. In October of that year he joined the submarine mother ship Vulkan, followed by training on the submarine U-3. In February 1916 he became second officer on U-73, which was assigned to the Mediterranean in April 1916. There the submarine fought on the Saloniki front, patrolled in the Strait of Otranto and from December 1916 onward planted mines in front of Port Said and was involved incommerce raiding. Flying a French flag as a ruse of war, the SM U-73 sailed past British warships and torpedoed two Allied troopships and a British man-of-war.
In January 1917 Niemöller was navigator of U-39. Later he returned to Kiel, and in August 1917 he became first officer on U-151, which attacked numerous ships at Gibraltar, in theBay of Biscay, and other places. During this time the SM U-151 crew set a record by sinking 55,000 tons of Allied ships in 115 days at sea. In May 1918 he became commander of theUC-67. Under his command, UC-67 achieved a temporary closing of the French port of Marseilles by sinking ships in the area, by torpedoes, and by the laying of mines.
For his achievements, Niemöller was awarded the Iron Cross First Class. When the war drew to a close, he decided to become a preacher, a story he later recounted in his book Vom U-Boot zur Kanzel (From U-boat to Pulpit). At war's end, Niemöller resigned his commission, as he rejected the new democratic government of the German Empire that formed after the resignation of the German Emperor William II.

Weimar Republic and education as pastor -
On July 20, 1919 he married Else née Bremer (born July 20, 1890 – died August 7, 1961). The same year he began working at a farm in Wersen near Osnabrück but gave up becoming a farmer as he couldn't afford to buy his own farm. He subsequently pursued his earlier idea of becoming a Lutheran pastor, and studied Protestant theology at the Westphalian William's-University in Münster from 1919 to 1923. His motivation was his ambition to give a disordered society meaning and order through the Gospel and church bodies.
During the Ruhr Uprising in 1920 he was battalion commander of the "III. Bataillon der Akademischen Wehr Münster" belonging to the paramilitary Freikorps.
Niemöller was ordained on June 29, 1924. Subsequently, the united Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union appointed him curate of Münster's Church of the Redeemer. After serving as the superintendent of the Inner Mission in the old-Prussian ecclesiastical province of Westphalia, Niemöller in 1931 became pastor of the Jesus Christus Kirche (comprising a congregation together with St. Anne's Church) in Dahlem, an affluent suburb ofBerlin.

Role in Nazi Germany -
Martin Niemöller, Adolf Hitler's 'Personal Prisoner' at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Like most Protestant pastors, Niemöller was a national conservative, and openly supported the conservative opponents of the Weimar Republic. He even welcomed Hitler's accession to power in 1933, believing it would bring a national revival. However, he decidedly opposed the Nazis' "Aryan Paragraph". In 1936, he signed the petition of a group of Protestant churchmen that sharply criticized Nazi policies and declared the Aryan Paragraph incompatible with the Christian virtue of charity.
The Nazi regime reacted with mass arrests and charges against almost 800 pastors and ecclesiastical lawyers. In 1933, Niemöller founded the Pfarrernotbund, an organization of pastors to "combat rising discrimination against Christians of Jewish background." By the autumn of 1934, Niemöller joined other Lutheran and Protestant churchmen such as Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in founding the Confessional Church, a Protestant group that opposed the Nazification of the German Protestant churches. The author and Nobel Prize laureateThomas Mann published Niemöller's sermons in the United States and praised his bravery.
However, Niemöller only gradually abandoned his national conservative views and even made pejorative remarks about Jews of faith while protecting—in his own church—baptised Christians, persecuted as Jews by the Nazis, due to their or their forefathers' Jewish descent. In one sermon in 1935, he remarked: "What is the reason for [their] obvious punishment, which has lasted for thousands of years? Dear brethren, the reason is easily given: the Jews brought the Christ of God to the cross!"
This has led to controversy about his attitude toward Jews and to accusations of anti-Judaism. Holocaust scholar Robert Ashley Michael notes that Niemöller's statements were a result of traditional antisemitism and that Niemöller agreed with the Nazis' position on the "Jewish question" at that time. Werner Cohn, an American sociologist, who lived as a Jew in Nazi Germany, also reports on antisemitic statements by Niemöller.
Thus, Niemöller's ambivalent and often contradictory behaviour during the Nazi period makes him one of the most controversial enemies of the Nazis. Even his motives are disputed. The historian Raimund Lammersdorf considers Niemöller "an opportunist who had no quarrel with Hitler politically and only began to oppose the Nazis when Hitler threatened to attack the churches." Others have disputed this view and emphasize the risks that Niemöller took while opposing the Nazis. Nonetheless, Niemöller's behaviour contrasts sharply with the much more broad-minded attitudes of other Confessing Church activists such as Hermann Maas. The pastor and liberal politician Maas — unlike Niemöller — belonged to those who unequivocally opposed every form of antisemitism and was later accorded the title Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.

Arrest and imprisonment -
Arrested on 1 July 1937, Niemöller was brought to a "Special Court" on 2 March 1938 to be tried for activities against the State. He was fined 2,000 Reichmarks and received a prison term of seven months. As his detention period exceeded the jail term, he was released by the Court after the trial. However, immediately after leaving the Court, he was rearrested by Himmler's Gestapo—presumably because Rudolf Hess found the sentence too lenient and decided to take "merciless action" against him.[16] He was interned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1938 to 1945.
After his former cell-mate Leo Stein was released from Sachsenhausen to go to America, he wrote an article about Niemöller for The National Jewish Monthly in 1941.[2] Stein reports that having asked Niemöller why he ever supported the Nazi Party, Niemöller replied :
I find myself wondering about that too. I wonder about it as much as I regret it. Still, it is true that Hitler betrayed me. I had an audience with him, as a representative of the Protestant Church, shortly before he became Chancellor, in 1932. Hitler promised me on his word of honor, to protect the Church, and not to issue any anti-Church laws. He also agreed not to allow pogroms against the Jews, assuring me as follows: "There will be restrictions against the Jews, but there will be no ghettos, no pogroms, in Germany."
I really believed, given the widespread anti-Semitism in Germany, at that time—that Jews should avoid aspiring to Government positions or seats in the Reichstag. There were many Jews, especially among the Zionists, who took a similar stand. Hitler's assurance satisfied me at the time. On the other hand, I hated the growing atheistic movement, which was fostered and promoted by the Social Democrats and the Communists. Their hostility toward the Church made me pin my hopes on Hitler for a while.
I am paying for that mistake now; and not me alone, but thousands of other persons like me.

Later life and death -
In late April 1945 Niemöller was transferred to Tyrol together with about 140 other prominent inmates, where the SS left the prisoners behind. He was freed by the Fifth U.S. Army on May 5, 1945. According to Lammersdorf, there had been some attempts to whitewash his past, which were, however, soon followed by harsh criticism because of his role as a NSDAP supporter and his attitude toward Jews. Niemöller himself never denied his own guilt in the time of the Nazi regime. In 1959, he was asked about his former attitude toward Jews by Alfred Wiener, a Jewish researcher into racism and war crimes committed by the Nazi regime. In a letter to Wiener, Niemöller stated that his eight-year imprisonment by the Nazis became the turning point in his life, after which he viewed things differently.
Niemöller was president of the Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau from 1947 to 1961. He was one of the initiators of the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, signed by leading figures in the GermanProtestant churches. The document acknowledged that the churches had not done enough to resist the Nazis.
Under the impact of a meeting with Otto Hahn (who has been called the "father of nuclear chemistry") in July 1954, Niemöller became an ardent pacifist and campaigner for nuclear disarmament. He was soon a leading figure in the post-war German peace movement and was even brought to court in 1959 because he had spoken about the military in a very unflattering way. His visit toNorth Vietnam's communist ruler Ho Chi Minh at the height of the Vietnam War caused an uproar. Niemöller also took active part in protests against the Vietnam War and the NATO Double-Track Decision.
In 1961, he became president of the World Council of Churches. He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1966.
Niemöller died at Wiesbaden, West Germany on 6 March 1984, at the age of 92.
Selected writings -
• From U-boat to Pulpit, including an Appendix From Pulpit to Prison by Henry Smith Leiper (Chicago, New York: Willett, Clark, 1937).
• Here Stand I! with foreword by James Moffatt, translated by Jane Lymburn (Chicago, New York: Willett, Clark, 1937).
• The Gestapo Defied, Being the Last Twenty-eight Sermons by Martin Niemöller (London [etc.]: W. Hodge and Company, Limited, 1941).
• Of Guilt and Hope, translated by Renee Spodheim (New York: Philosophical Library, [1947]).
• “What is the Church?” Princeton Seminary Bulletin, vol. 40, no. 4 (1947): 10–16.
• “The Word of God is Not Bound,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin, vol. 41, no. 1 (1947): 18–23.
Exile in the Fatherland: Martin Niemöller’s Letters from Moabit Prison, translated by Ernst Kaemke, Kathy Elias, and Jacklyn Wilfred; edited by Hubert G. Locke (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., c1986).
____________________________________________

“First they came …” is a famous statement and provocative poem attributed to pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) about the cowardice of German intellectuals following the Nazis' rise to power and the subsequent purging of their chosen targets, group after group. There is some disagreement over the exact wording of the quotation and when it was created; the content of the quotation may have been presented differently by Niemöller on different occasions.

The text -
The best-known versions of the speech are the poems that began circulating by the 1950s. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum quotes the following text as one of the many poetic versions of the speech:
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.
Niemöller created multiple versions of the text during his career. The earliest speeches, written in 1946, list the Communists, incurable patients, Jews or Jehovah's Witnesses, and civilians in countries occupied by Nazi Germany. An English translation of Niemöller's speech for the Confessing Church in Frankfurt on 6 January 1946 is as follows:
When Pastor Niemöller was put in a concentration camp we wrote the year 1937; when the concentration camp was opened we wrote the year 1933, and the people who were put in the camps then were Communists. Who cared about them? We knew it, it was printed in the newspapers.
Who raised their voice, maybe the Confessing Church? We thought: Communists, those opponents of religion, those enemies of Christians - "should I be my brother's keeper?"
Then they got rid of the sick, the so-called incurables. - I remember a conversation I had with a person who claimed to be a Christian. He said: Perhaps it's right, these incurably sick people just cost the state money, they are just a burden to themselves and to others. Isn't it best for all concerned if they are taken out of the middle [of society]? -- Only then did the church as such take note. Then we started talking, until our voices were again silenced in public. Can we say, we aren't guilty/responsible? The persecution of the Jews, the way we treated the occupied countries, or the things in Greece, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia or in Holland, that were written in the newspapers
I believe, we Confessing-Church-Christians have every reason to say: mea culpa, mea culpa! We can talk ourselves out of it with the excuse that it would have cost me my head if I had spoken out.

This speech was translated and published in English in 1947, but was later retracted when it was alleged that Niemöller was an early supporter of the Nazis. The "sick, the so-called incurables" were killed in Action T4. A 1955 version of the speech, mentioned in an interview of a German professor quoting Niemöller, lists the Communists, socialists, schools, the Jews, the press, and the Church. An American version delivered by a congressman in 1968 anachronistically omits the Communists and includes the industrialists, who were not persecuted by the Nazis.
In 1976, Niemöller gave the following answer in response to an interview question asking about the origins of the poem. The Martin-Niemöller-Foundation considers
this the "classical" version of the speech:
There were no minutes or copy of what I said, and it may be that I formulated it differently. But the idea was anyhow: The communists, we still let that happen calmly; and the trade unions, we also let that happen; and we even let the Social Democrats happen. All of that was not our affair. The Church did not concern itself with politics at all at that time, and it shouldn't have anything do with them either. In the Confessing Church we didn't want to represent any political resistance per se, but we wanted to determine for the Church that that was not right, and that it should not become right in the Church, that's why already in '33, when we created the pastors' emergency federation (Pfarrernotbund), we put as the 4th point in the founding charter: If an offensive is made against ministers and they are simply ousted as ministers, because they are of Jewish lineage (Judenstämmlinge) or something like that, then we can only say as a Church: No. And that was then the 4th point in the obligation, and that was probably the first contra-anti-antisemitic pronouncement coming from the Protestant Church.
Author -
Martin Niemöller was a German pastor and theologian born in Lippstadt, Germany, in 1892. Niemöller was an anti-communist and supported Adolf Hitler's rise to power at first. But when Hitler insisted on the supremacy of the state over religion, Niemöller became disillusioned. He became the leader of a group of German clergymen opposed to Hitler. In 1937 he was arrested and eventually confined in Sachsenhausen and Dachau. He was released in 1945 by the Allies. He continued his career in Germany as a clergyman and as a leading voice of penance and reconciliation for the German people after World War II. His statement, sometimes presented as a poem, is well-known, frequently quoted, and is a popular model for describing the dangers of political apathy.
Origin -
The statement was published in a 1955 book by Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, based on interviews he had conducted in Germany several years earlier. The quotation was circulated by civil rights activists and educators in the United States in the late 1950s. Some research traces the text to several speeches given by Niemöller in 1946.
Nonetheless, the wording remains controversial, both in terms of its provenance, and the substance and order of the groups that are mentioned in its many versions. While Niemöller's published 1946 speeches mention communists, the incurably ill, Jews or Jehovah's Witnesses (depending on which speech), and people in occupied countries, the 1955 text, a paraphrase by a German professor in an interview, lists communists, socialists, "the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on", and ends with "the Church". Based on the explanation given by Niemöller himself in 1976, this refers to the German Protestant ('Evangelische') Church, and not to the German Catholic Church.
However, as claimed by Richard John Neuhaus in the November 2001 issue of First Things, when "asked in 1971 about the correct version of the quote, Niemöller said he was not quite sure when he had said the famous words but, if people insist upon citing them, he preferred a version that listed 'the Communists', 'the trade unionists', 'the Jews', and 'me'." However, historian Harold Marcuse could not verify that interview. Rather, he found a 1976 interview in which Niemöller referred to a 1974 discussion with the general bishop of the Lutheran Church of Slovakia.
Usages -
PEARL HARBOR (April 27, 2009) Lt. Dennis Kelly reads an excerpt of the Rev. Martin Niemöller's poem during a Holocaust Days of Remembrance Observance service.
• At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., the quotation is on display in a variation that substitutes "Socialists" for "Communists". The Holocaust Museum website has a discussion of the history of the quotation.
• A version of the statement is also on display at the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, as well as the Virginia Holocaust Museum in Richmond, Virginia, the Holocaust memorial in Boston, Massachusetts, and in The Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.
• Lasantha Wickrematunge used the verse in his final letter to the people of Sri Lanka
• Jazz musician Charles Mingus recites a variation on the poem in his composition "Don't Let It Happen Here".
• The punk rock band Anti-Flag recites an abridged version of the poem in the song Exodus/Emigre.
• The Oi! band Oi Polloi uses the poem in their song "Bash the Fash".
• The Australian Sex Party references the quotation in their National Dress Like a Biker Day agitprop/political theater.
A few weeks ago, someone on alt.activism asked who said these words and what had happened to him. First, the version above is taken from an article on the 50th anniversary of the beginning of WW II that appeared in TIME Magazine, Aug 28, 1989. There are many versions of this poem floating around… by no means is this the authorative one. Similarly, the author of the poem is often not mentioned. On one level, that is not important. Indeed, Martin Niemoller was an outspoken advocate for accepting the burden of collective guilt for WW II as a means of atonement for the suffering that the German nation (through the Nazis) had caused before and during WW II.
On the other hand, I think that something is missed if one doesn’t understand that the words come from a man who also declared that he “would rather burn his church to the ground, than to preach the Nazi trinity of ‘race, blood, and soil.’”
Niemoller was tainted. He had been a U-boat captain in WW I prior to becoming a pastor. And he supported Hitler prior to his taking power. Indeed, initially the Nazi press held him up as a model… for his service in WW I. [Newsweek, July 10, 1937, pg 32]
But Niemoller broke very early with the Nazis. In 1933, he organized the Pastor’s Emergency League to protect Lutheran pastors from the police. In 1934, he was one of the leading organizers at the Barmen Synod, which produced the theological basis for the Confessing Church, which despite its persecution became an enduring symbol of German resistance to Hitler.
From 1933 to 1937, Niemoller consistantly trashed everything the Nazis stood for. At one point he declared that it was impossible to “point to the German [Luther] without pointing to the Jew [Christ] to which he pointed to.” [from Charles Colson, Kingdoms in Conflict]
He rejected the Nazi distortion of “Positive Christianity” (postulating the ‘special virtue’ of the German people), as opposed to “Negative Chistianity” which held that all people regardless of race were guilty of sin and in need of repentance. An excerpt from a sermon of his printed in TIME Magazine [Feb 21, 1938, pg 25-27]:
“I cannot help saying quite harshly and bluntly that the Jewish people came to grief and disgrace because of its own ‘Positive Christianity!’ It [the Jewish people] bears a curse throughout the history of the world because it was ready to approve of its Messiah just as long and as far as it thought it could gain some advantage for its own plans and its own aims for Him, His words and His deeds. It bears a curse, because it rejected Him and resisted Him to the death when it became clear that Jesus of Nazareth would not cease calling [the Jews] to repentance and faith, despite their insistence that they were free, strong and proud men and belonged to a pure-blooded, race-concious nation!
“‘Positive Christianity,’ which the Jewish people wanted, clashed with ‘Negative Christianity’ as Jesus himself represented it!… Friends, can we risk going with our nation without forgiveness of sins, without that so-called ‘Negative Christianity’ which, when all is said and done, clings in repentence and faith to Jesus as the Savior of sinners? I cannot and you cannot and our nation cannot! ‘Come let us return to the Lord!’”
And in a celebrated manifesto, produced and smuggled out of the country in classic Charter-77 style, and reprinted in the foreign press just prior to the 1936 Olympics, he along with 9 other pastors wrote to Hitler:
“Our people are trying to break the bond set by God. That is human conceit rising against God. In this connection we must warn the Führer, that the adoration frequently bestowed on him is only due to God. Some years ago the Führer objected to having his picture placed on Protestant altars. Today his thoughts are used as a basis not only for political decisions but also for morality and law. He himself is surrounded with the dignity of a priest and even of an intermediary between God and man… We ask that liberty be given to our people to go their way in the future under the sign of the Cross of Christ, in order that our grandsons may not curse their elders on the ground that their elders left them a state on earth that closed to them the Kingdom of God.” [from TIME Magazine July 27, 1936]
________________________________________
Rev. Martin Niemoller was protected until 1937 by both the foreign press and influential friends in the up-scale Berlin suburb where he preached. Eventually, he was arrested for treason. Perhaps due to foreign pressure, he was found guilty, but initially given only a suspended sentence. He was however then almost immediately re-arrested on Hitler’s direct orders. From then on until the end of WW II, he was held at the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps. Near the end of the war, he narrowly escaped execution. [from Charles Colson’s Kingdoms in Conflict]
________________________________________
After the war, Niemoller emerged from prison to preach the words that began this post, that all of us know… He was instrumental in producing the “Stuttgart Confession of Guilt”, in which the German Protestant churches formally accepted guilt for their complicity in allowing the suffering which Hitler’s reign caused to occur. In 1961, he was elected as one of the six presidents of the World Council of Churches, the ecumenical body of the Protestant faiths.
Niemoller emerged also as an adamant pacifist and advocate of reconciliation. He actively sought out contacts in Eastern Europe, and traveled to Moscow in 1952 and North Vietnam in 1967. He received the Lenin Peace Prize in 1967, and the West German Grand Cross of Merit in 1971. Martin Niemoller died in Wiesbaden, West Germany on Mar 6, 1984, at the age of 92. [from theEncyclopedia Britannica].
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

हे साहेब जी,


Girijesh Tiwari -
हे साहेब जी, तुमहि बतावउ,
तुम भगतन के, भगत तुम्हारे !
जो कुछ हौ, सब तुम्हरेहि कब्ज़े,
ई कइसे दिन आय तुम्हारे !

केतने 'अच्छे दिन' के लच्छन,
हम सब का तुम देखा रहे हौ !
हम अब केकरा के गोहराईं;
जिनगी माहुर भइल हमार,
हम तौ बिना मउत के मारे !

कवनउ राह बतावौ हमका,
चक्कर खाए अकिल हमार;
कइसे जीयब, कइसे खाइब,
अपनो मुँहवाँ खोलउ साहेब,
अब्बो कछु तौ बोलउ, साहेब !

नवमीत -
भक्त: प्रभु, सरकार आ गई। अच्छे दिन कब आएँगे?
साहेब: ये ले बाल्टी और पानी से भर के ला। जैसे ही भरेगी, अच्छे दिन आ जाएँगे।
भक्त: कोटि कोटि प्रणाम, प्रभु। कितना अच्छा वरदान दिया है आपने। अच्छे दिन आने वाले हैं। भज मन नमो नमो.. श्रीमन नमो नमो..
(बस भक्तजी तब से बाल्टी को भरने में लगे हुए हैं। आखिर अच्छे दिन इसी बात पर तो आने हैं)
Photo: भक्त: प्रभु, सरकार आ गई। अच्छे दिन कब आएँगे?
साहेब: ये ले बाल्टी और पानी से भर के ला। जैसे ही भरेगी, अच्छे दिन आ जाएँगे।
भक्त: कोटि कोटि प्रणाम, प्रभु। कितना अच्छा वरदान दिया है आपने। अच्छे दिन आने वाले हैं। भज मन नमो नमो.. श्रीमन नमो नमो..
(बस भक्तजी तब से बाल्टी को भरने में लगे हुए हैं। आखिर अच्छे दिन इसी बात पर तो आने हैं)

Ashwini Aadam – मैं अभी ज़िंदा हूँ.......

Photo: Ashwini Aadam –
मैं अभी ज़िंदा हूँ.......
--------------------
गर्म जमीन का सबसे सर्द हिस्सा 
मृत्यु का पूर्ण नैराश्य
पथरीली सतह पर टिमटिमाता है आशाओं का दीप 
भुरभूरी मिट्टी चाटती है मेरा सारा दर्द
मेरा अतीत,
कहीं आंसुओं की बहती एक छिपी सी धार 
होंठो की मुस्कान पर नमक छोड़ जाती है
सुनसान कमरे में दबे पाँव घूमती मेरी बिल्ली 
मैं ही हूँ उसकी चमकती आँखों की हिंसक तलाश 
उसकी गुर्राहट में प्रेम है मेरे मर चुके नाम का,
संगमरमरी दरारों में उग आई एक कतरा दूब 
या कोई जंगली नीला फूल गंधहीन 
कब्र के अंधेरों का सबसे सुन्दर प्रमाण है
न जाने क्यों अभी गर्म है 
मेरी मांस विहीन अस्थियों का नंगा पिंजर
जमीन के गड्ढे में गूँजता है झींगुरों का मादक स्वर
बुझे दिए में बाकी है कभी जलने के काले अवशेष 
उसे आँधियों का कोई डर नहीं है,
बड़ी दूर से ताकता है एक उदास देवदूत मुझे 
मैं बंधा हूँ किसी के स्वप्न से यहाँ
वहाँ नर्क की आग मेरी तलाश में शायद
क्रूर देवताओं तक पहुँच गयी है,
मैं आंसुओं का नमक 
बिल्ली के गले में बंधे घुंघुरू की रुनझुन
मेरे गुनाह इंसानी हैं तुम्हारी पाकीजगी के विरुद्ध
जन्नत के राजा थोड़ा इंतज़ार करो....
सबसे आसान है जिस्म का फना हो जाना
मेरी रूह अभी साँसे ले रही है,
--------------------------
कि मैं अभी ज़िंदा हूँ मेरी कब्र पर एक बिल्ली अभी भी बैठी है।       
– विचित्र आदम

मैं अभी ज़िंदा हूँ.......
--------------------
गर्म जमीन का सबसे सर्द हिस्सा
मृत्यु का पूर्ण नैराश्य
पथरीली सतह पर टिमटिमाता है आशाओं का दीप
भुरभूरी मिट्टी चाटती है मेरा सारा दर्द
मेरा अतीत,
कहीं आंसुओं की बहती एक छिपी सी धार
होंठो की मुस्कान पर नमक छोड़ जाती है
सुनसान कमरे में दबे पाँव घूमती मेरी बिल्ली
मैं ही हूँ उसकी चमकती आँखों की हिंसक तलाश
उसकी गुर्राहट में प्रेम है मेरे मर चुके नाम का,
संगमरमरी दरारों में उग आई एक कतरा दूब
या कोई जंगली नीला फूल गंधहीन
कब्र के अंधेरों का सबसे सुन्दर प्रमाण है
न जाने क्यों अभी गर्म है
मेरी मांस विहीन अस्थियों का नंगा पिंजर
जमीन के गड्ढे में गूँजता है झींगुरों का मादक स्वर
बुझे दिए में बाकी है कभी जलने के काले अवशेष
उसे आँधियों का कोई डर नहीं है,
बड़ी दूर से ताकता है एक उदास देवदूत मुझे
मैं बंधा हूँ किसी के स्वप्न से यहाँ
वहाँ नर्क की आग मेरी तलाश में शायद
क्रूर देवताओं तक पहुँच गयी है,
मैं आंसुओं का नमक
बिल्ली के गले में बंधे घुंघुरू की रुनझुन
मेरे गुनाह इंसानी हैं तुम्हारी पाकीजगी के विरुद्ध
जन्नत के राजा थोड़ा इंतज़ार करो....
सबसे आसान है जिस्म का फना हो जाना
मेरी रूह अभी साँसे ले रही है,
--------------------------
कि मैं अभी ज़िंदा हूँ मेरी कब्र पर एक बिल्ली अभी भी बैठी है।
– विचित्र आदम
_____________________


Ashwini Aadam

यह है कविता ! शाबास !
हार्दिक बधाई !! आज तुम जीत गये !!!
अश्विनी!!
"बुझे दिए में बाकी है कभी जलने के काले अवशेष
उसे आँधियों का कोई डर नहीं है,"
---------
यह पंक्तियाँ मेरे गुरु की हैं जिस कविता पर उन्होंने ऐसा कहा उसका पोस्टर भी उन्होंने ही बनाया (आज पहली बार मेरी कविता के सन्दर्भ में) जिसे नीचे पोस्ट करते हुए उनसे संवाद को सार्वजनिक कर रहा हूँ एक और कविता के माध्यम से



मेरा रकीब
-------------------

हर बार तुम जलाते हो अपना एक कतरा लहू
मेरी आँखों में थिरक रही तुम्हारी हर मुस्कान
मैं जानता हूँ मार रही होती है तुम्हारे अंतस पर खीज के चांटे
आज भी तलाश ही लेते हो मात्रा दोष मेरे लिखे पन्नों मे
मेरी गलतियाँ उपलब्धियों से कही ज्यादा है
मेरे युवा बुजुर्ग तुम ऐसे क्यों हो??

मेरी विफलताओं का कारण पता है तुम्हे
यह भी कि अड़ियल गधा बिना लातों के नहीं चलता
तुम्हारी पुचकार मुझे तुम्हारी सनक ही लगती है
इस गधे को ढोते ढोते अपने कन्धों पे
बची हैं कितनी सीढ़ियाँ जो तुम हांफते चढोगे ???

"इब्नबतूता तान के छाता निकल गया बाजार में...."
याद हैं ये पंक्तियाँ???
कविताओं का मेरा प्रथम परिचय तुम ही तो थे
मेरा डर मेरी धृष्टता की आखिरी सीमा
जिसके आगे मैं विनम्र था अनुशाषित था
तुम ही तो थे,

मुझे तुमसे केवल डांट ही अच्छी लगती है
तुम्हारे थप्पड़ मेरे जीवन का आखिरी प्राप्य हैं,
सुनो !आज रुला दिया तुमने मेरी लफ्फाजी को अपने प्रोत्साहन से,
मुझे सुनना था तुमसे -
"गधे !यह भी कोई कविता है ,कविता वह जो झिलमिलाते हुए कथ्य को निरूपित करे"
अपनी ही सफलताओं का ढोल पीटोगे तुम
इतने आत्ममुग्ध तो कभी न रहे.....
मेरे दोस्त!
कुछ औषधिया कडवी ही रहें तो बेहतर
उनका मीठापन उन्हें निष्प्रभाव कर देता है,
तुम विशाल बरगद मुझे छाँव में ही पलने दो
मेरा होना मेरी सामर्थ्य नहीं
अंधड़ बरसातें और धूप झेलती तुम्हारी खुरदुरी पीठ की तपस्या है...
मेरा कुछ भी कभी मेरा नहीं
सिवा इसके कि मेरा रकीब तुम सा है ...

-निरीह आदम

'माल-ए-मुफ़्त - दिल-ए-बेरहम'

Photo: 'माल-ए-मुफ़्त - दिल-ए-बेरहम' 
ज्वलन्त तथ्य का प्रत्यक्ष प्रमाण देखिए - किसका है यह जनविरोधी 'धन-तन्त्र'!
Ravinder Goel - विकास के नाम पर एक सवाल सभी साथियों से -
उद्योगपतियों को विकास हेतु सरकारें बहुत रियायतें देती हैं - टैक्स माफ़ी, सस्ती ज़मीन और सस्ता कर्ज़ा. 
साथी अंदाज़ा लगाएं की टाटा को गुजरात में कार फैक्ट्री लगाने के लिए कर्ज़ा कितना सस्ता दिया गया होगा ! 
यह जानकर आपको आश्चर्य होगा कि गुजरात सरकार ने टाटा को मोटर फैक्ट्री लगाने के लिए 420 करोड़ रूपये मात्र 0.1 परसेंट या 10 पैसा प्रति सैकड़ा प्रति वर्ष पर उधार दिया है.
(मूल पोस्ट के संक्षिप्त रूप के साथ ही समाचार और उसके सार-संकलन)

"It is an agreement between two parties — the Gujarat government and Tata Motors, so it cannot be made public.'' - Saurabh Patel, industry and mines minister 

Nano plant: Gujarat govt admits giving loan to Tata Motors
TNN | Jul 23, 2014, 
GANDHINAGAR: For the first time, the Gujarat government officially accepted — on Tuesday — that it gave Rs 419.54 crore loan from the state budgetary resources to Tata Motors under its agreement with the company. Coincidentally, Tata Group chairman Cyrus Mistry met chief minister Anandiben Patel and top officials of the state government on Tuesday. 

Government spokesperson Saurabh Patel, who is in-charge industry and mines minister, said in the assembly that the state government had given Rs 419.54 crore soft loan at 0.1% interest to Tata Motors as the incentive for their Nano car plant in Sanand. He was replying to a starred question by Viramgam Congress MLA Tejashree Patel. 

The Congress MLA asked whether the state government plans to give the benefit of loan at 0.1% interest rate to small and medium industries. The minister avoided comment on this question and defended the government's decision. He said that earlier governments too have given tax deferment and tax exemption benefits to industries. The Congress MLA then added a question: Has the company violated its agreement with the government by using the land given by the state government for a different purpose? In his, reply the minister said: "There is no violation of the agreement.'' In response, Saurabh Patel said: "It is an agreement between two parties — the Gujarat government and Tata Motors, so it cannot be made public.'' 

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/.../artic.../38896463.cms

प्रिय मित्र, आइए विचार करें कि ऐसा क्यों होता है !
हर चुनावबाज़ पार्टी के सुप्रीमो और उनके सारे साथी - चमचे, गुण्डे, बाहुबली और दंगाई -सभी के सभी छोटे-बड़े नेता हर तरीके से प्रत्येक प्रिन्ट और इलेक्ट्रॉनिक ही नहीं समान्तर मीडिया पर भी हर चुनाव के पहले ख़ूब ज़ोर-ज़ोर से शोर मचाते हैं कि चुनाव 'जन-तन्त्र' का 'त्यौहार' है, कि वोट 'देना' आपका अधिकार और कर्तव्य दोनों ही है, कि हमारा देश दुनिया का सबसे बड़ा 'जन-तन्त्र' है. 

मगर सच क्या है !
क्या यह तन्त्र हमारा है ! 
क्या यह तन्त्र हमारी सेवा करता है ! 
नहीं, बिलकुल नहीं !!

इस तन्त्र की सच्चाई ऊपर के इस समाचार से ही उघड़ कर सामने आ जा रही है. यह तन्त्र और इसकी हर सरकार देश के सभी ग़रीबों को बार-बार महज़ धोखा देती रहती है. यह सफ़ेद झूठ बोल कर हर बार हम सब की आँखों में महज़ धूल झोंकती रहती है. 

वे हमसे लगातार कहते रहते हैं कि चाहे यह सरकार हो या वह सरकार - हर सरकार आपके वोट से ही बनती और गिरती है. मगर सच तो यह है कि हर सरकार 'धन-पशुओं' के एहसान से दबे नेताओं के ही द्वारा बनती और गिरती है. और इसीलिये चाहे जो भी सरकार हो - किसी प्रान्त की या केन्द्र की - वह पूरी वफ़ादारी के साथ प्रत्यक्ष और परोक्ष दोनों ही तरीके से सेवा केवल देशी-विदेशी 'धन-पशुओं' की ही करती है. 

इस सेवा के लिये सरकारी खजाने में अधिकांश पैसा मुख्य रूप से देश की जनता पर लगने वाले भारी-भरकम प्रत्यक्ष और परोक्ष टैक्स से ही आता है. और देश के सभी ग़रीबों का खून निचोड़ कर इकठ्ठा हुआ सरकारी ख़जाने का सारा माल चला जाता है या तो नेताओं-अफसरों-ठेकेदारों के काकस के पेट में या मुनाफ़ाखोर अमीरों की तिजोरी में. 

ग़रीब इन्सान हर बार केवल ठगा जाता है और फिर अगली बार ठगे जाने के लिये उसको बार-बार इन धूर्तों के द्वारा फुसलाया-बहकाया जाता है. जहाँ देश का अन्नदाता किसान छोटे-मोटे कर्ज के फन्दे में फँस कर आत्म-हत्या कर लेता है, वहीं देश का हर एक उद्योगपति न्यूनतम ब्याज पर कर्ज लेकर और अमीर बनता रहता है. ऊपर से तुर्रा यह कि गड़बड़ घोटाला का यह सारा अनुचित और अनैतिक मामला हर सरकार द्वारा गोपनीय बताया जाता है. 

हमारे देश के वर्तमान प्रधानमन्त्री 'साहेब' मोदी की यह सरकार भी दलबदलू नेताओं की भारी संख्या को खरीद कर, वर्षों से मीडिया में लगातार होने वाली विज्ञापनबाज़ी कर के, चुनावी मशीन में छेड़छाड़ कर के, जगह-जगह दंगाई माहौल बना कर धार्मिक आधार पर लोगों की भावनाओं को भड़का कर मतदाताओं के साम्प्रदायिक ध्रुवीकरण और विकास के फ़र्जी आँकड़ों का प्रचार करके लोगों को भरमा कर ही प्रचण्ड बहुमत से बनी है. पिछली देशद्रोही सरकार की काली करतूतों ने लोगों को जितना अधिक हताश किया था, उस हताशा ने भी लोगों को नेगेटिव वोटिंग के लिये उकसाया. विकल्प की हताश तलाश का लाभ भी सभी चुनावी गणितज्ञों की सारी भविष्यवाणियों को धता बता कर भा.ज.पा. को ही मिल गया. 

और अभी तक होने वाले सभी सरकारी फैसले साफ़ तौर पर समझाते जा रहे हैं कि इस नयी सरकार ने भी हर सरकार की तरह ही गद्दी पर बैठते ही अपने सभी कोरे चुनावी वायदों को तिलांजलि दे दी है और इसने भी पिछली सरकार के जूतों में ही अपने पैर घुसा लिये हैं. यह सरकार भी कांग्रेस के चरण-चिह्नों पर ही उससे भी अधिक तेज़ रफ़्तार से बढ़ चली है. आज हाल यह है कि ग़रीब ही नहीं मध्यम वर्ग के खाते-पीते लोग भी महँगाई डाइन की दहाड़ सुन कर त्राहि-त्राहि कर रहे हैं.

ऐसे में विचार करने का विषय यह है कि क्या केवल इस पार्टी की जगह उस पार्टी की सरकार बना देने से ही हमारे देश की सारी समस्याओं का समाधान हो जायेगा या आज के इस दमघोटू माहौल को बदलने के लिये देश के युवाओं को कुछ और सोचना और करना पड़ेगा. केवल सत्ता बदलने से ही समाज नहीं बदलता. समाज बदलता है समूची व्यवस्था बदलने से. और व्यवस्था वोट-बैंक बनाने वालों के नेतृत्व और कृतित्व से नहीं बदलती. इस आदमखोर दुर्व्यवस्था को ध्वस्त करके मानवीय गरिमा वाली जनपक्षधर सुव्यवस्था बनाने से. व्यवस्था बदलती है इन्कलाब से. 

इन्कलाब - जिसका सपना हमारे बहादुर, बलिदानी और समझदार पुरखों ने देखा था, इन्कलाब - जिसने धरती पर मज़दूर-किसानों के राज गढ़े थे, इन्कलाब - जिसने हर इन्सान को गर्व से सिर उठा कर जीने का माहौल दिया था, इन्कलाब - जिसके नाम से ही दुर्दान्त शोषक और अत्याचारी शासक थरथरा जाया करते हैं, इन्कलाब - जो बलिदान और ईमान के बिना नामुमकिन होता है, इन्कलाब - जिसको पलट कर पूँजीवाद की पुनर्स्थापना कर देने की सफल साज़िशें हो चुकी हैं, इन्कलाब - जिसका आयात और निर्यात नहीं किया जा सकता, इन्कलाब - जो अतीत की फोटोकॉपी नहीं हुआ करता, इन्कलाब - जो मासूम मेहनतकश की आँखों में चमक और दिमाग में जुनून बन कर दमकता है, इन्कलाब - जो पैशाचिक शोषण, अपमानकारी उत्पीड़न और तरह-तरह की नफ़रत के माहौल को नेस्तनाबूत कर देता है, इन्कलाब - जो धरती पर स्वर्ग की रचना करता है. 

वह इन्कलाब आप सब की बिखरी हुई अतुलनीय ताकत को एकजुट करके ही किया जा सकता है. इसलिये आप से अनुरोध है कि इन्कलाब की तैयारी कीजिए. उसके लिये आपस के हर विवाद से ऊपर उठ कर हर हाथ से अपना हाथ और हर कन्धे से अपना कन्धा मिला कर एकजुट होने की पहल कीजिए. देश के विराट जन-बल को सशक्त नेतृत्व और जन-प्रतिवाद को प्रबल स्वर दीजिए. आज भी खण्ड-खण्ड होकर बिखरी हुई इन्कलाब-पसन्द लोगों की संख्या समाज में सक्रिय किसी भी दूसरी ताकत से कम नहीं है. अगर सभी इन्कलाब-पसन्द साथी एक साथ जुट जायें, तो अभी भी हम संख्या और सामर्थ्य की दृष्टि से दूसरी सभी शक्तियों की तुलना में अधिक सबल ही साबित होंगे.

इन्कलाब ज़िन्दाबाद ! 
'धन-तन्त्र मुर्दाबाद !!
ढेर सारे प्यार के साथ - आपका गिरिजेश 

(प्रिय मित्र, अनुरोध है कि कृपया इस पोस्ट को अधिकतम मित्रों तक पहुँचाने के लिये जगह-जगह शेयर करके सहायता कीजिए, ताकि इस धूर्त 'धन-तन्त्र' की सच्चाई के बारे में सभी मित्रों का भ्रम टूट सके.)

ज्वलन्त तथ्य का प्रत्यक्ष प्रमाण देखिए -
किसका है यह जनविरोधी 'धन-तन्त्र'!
Ravinder Goel - विकास के नाम पर एक सवाल सभी साथियों से -
उद्योगपतियों को विकास हेतु सरकारें बहुत रियायतें देती हैं - टैक्स माफ़ी, सस्ती ज़मीन और सस्ता कर्ज़ा.
साथी अंदाज़ा लगाएं की टाटा को गुजरात में कार फैक्ट्री लगाने के लिए कर्ज़ा कितना सस्ता दिया गया होगा !
यह जानकर आपको आश्चर्य होगा कि गुजरात सरकार ने टाटा को मोटर फैक्ट्री लगाने के लिए 420 करोड़ रूपये मात्र 0.1 परसेंट या 10 पैसा प्रति सैकड़ा प्रति वर्ष पर उधार दिया है.
(मूल पोस्ट के संक्षिप्त रूप के साथ ही समाचार और उसके सार-संकलन)

"It is an agreement between two parties — the Gujarat government and Tata Motors, so it cannot be made public.'' - Saurabh Patel, industry and mines minister

Nano plant: Gujarat govt admits giving loan to Tata Motors
TNN | Jul 23, 2014,
GANDHINAGAR: For the first time, the Gujarat government officially accepted — on Tuesday — that it gave Rs 419.54 crore loan from the state budgetary resources to Tata Motors under its agreement with the company. Coincidentally, Tata Group chairman Cyrus Mistry met chief minister Anandiben Patel and top officials of the state government on Tuesday.

Government spokesperson Saurabh Patel, who is in-charge industry and mines minister, said in the assembly that the state government had given Rs 419.54 crore soft loan at 0.1% interest to Tata Motors as the incentive for their Nano car plant in Sanand. He was replying to a starred question by Viramgam Congress MLA Tejashree Patel.

The Congress MLA asked whether the state government plans to give the benefit of loan at 0.1% interest rate to small and medium industries. The minister avoided comment on this question and defended the government's decision. He said that earlier governments too have given tax deferment and tax exemption benefits to industries. The Congress MLA then added a question: Has the company violated its agreement with the government by using the land given by the state government for a different purpose? In his, reply the minister said: "There is no violation of the agreement.'' In response, Saurabh Patel said: "It is an agreement between two parties — the Gujarat government and Tata Motors, so it cannot be made public.''

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/.../artic.../38896463.cms

प्रिय मित्र, आइए विचार करें कि ऐसा क्यों होता है !
हर चुनावबाज़ पार्टी के सुप्रीमो और उनके सारे साथी - चमचे, गुण्डे, बाहुबली और दंगाई -सभी के सभी छोटे-बड़े नेता हर तरीके से प्रत्येक प्रिन्ट और इलेक्ट्रॉनिक ही नहीं समान्तर मीडिया पर भी हर चुनाव के पहले ख़ूब ज़ोर-ज़ोर से शोर मचाते हैं कि चुनाव 'जन-तन्त्र' का 'त्यौहार' है, कि वोट 'देना' आपका अधिकार और कर्तव्य दोनों ही है, कि हमारा देश दुनिया का सबसे बड़ा 'जन-तन्त्र' है.

मगर सच क्या है !
क्या यह तन्त्र हमारा है !
क्या यह तन्त्र हमारी सेवा करता है !
नहीं, बिलकुल नहीं !!

इस तन्त्र की सच्चाई ऊपर के इस समाचार से ही उघड़ कर सामने आ जा रही है. यह तन्त्र और इसकी हर सरकार देश के सभी ग़रीबों को बार-बार महज़ धोखा देती रहती है. यह सफ़ेद झूठ बोल कर हर बार हम सब की आँखों में महज़ धूल झोंकती रहती है.

वे हमसे लगातार कहते रहते हैं कि चाहे यह सरकार हो या वह सरकार - हर सरकार आपके वोट से ही बनती और गिरती है. मगर सच तो यह है कि हर सरकार 'धन-पशुओं' के एहसान से दबे नेताओं के ही द्वारा बनती और गिरती है. और इसीलिये चाहे जो भी सरकार हो - किसी प्रान्त की या केन्द्र की - वह पूरी वफ़ादारी के साथ प्रत्यक्ष और परोक्ष दोनों ही तरीके से सेवा केवल देशी-विदेशी 'धन-पशुओं' की ही करती है.

इस सेवा के लिये सरकारी खजाने में अधिकांश पैसा मुख्य रूप से देश की जनता पर लगने वाले भारी-भरकम प्रत्यक्ष और परोक्ष टैक्स से ही आता है. और देश के सभी ग़रीबों का खून निचोड़ कर इकठ्ठा हुआ सरकारी ख़जाने का सारा माल चला जाता है या तो नेताओं-अफसरों-ठेकेदारों के काकस के पेट में या मुनाफ़ाखोर अमीरों की तिजोरी में.

ग़रीब इन्सान हर बार केवल ठगा जाता है और फिर अगली बार ठगे जाने के लिये उसको बार-बार इन धूर्तों के द्वारा फुसलाया-बहकाया जाता है. जहाँ देश का अन्नदाता किसान छोटे-मोटे कर्ज के फन्दे में फँस कर आत्म-हत्या कर लेता है, वहीं देश का हर एक उद्योगपति न्यूनतम ब्याज पर कर्ज लेकर और अमीर बनता रहता है. ऊपर से तुर्रा यह कि गड़बड़ घोटाला का यह सारा अनुचित और अनैतिक मामला हर सरकार द्वारा गोपनीय बताया जाता है.

हमारे देश के वर्तमान प्रधानमन्त्री 'साहेब' मोदी की यह सरकार भी दलबदलू नेताओं की भारी संख्या को खरीद कर, वर्षों से मीडिया में लगातार होने वाली विज्ञापनबाज़ी कर के, चुनावी मशीन में छेड़छाड़ कर के, जगह-जगह दंगाई माहौल बना कर धार्मिक आधार पर लोगों की भावनाओं को भड़का कर मतदाताओं के साम्प्रदायिक ध्रुवीकरण और विकास के फ़र्जी आँकड़ों का प्रचार करके लोगों को भरमा कर ही प्रचण्ड बहुमत से बनी है. पिछली देशद्रोही सरकार की काली करतूतों ने लोगों को जितना अधिक हताश किया था, उस हताशा ने भी लोगों को नेगेटिव वोटिंग के लिये उकसाया. विकल्प की हताश तलाश का लाभ भी सभी चुनावी गणितज्ञों की सारी भविष्यवाणियों को धता बता कर भा.ज.पा. को ही मिल गया.

और अभी तक होने वाले सभी सरकारी फैसले साफ़ तौर पर समझाते जा रहे हैं कि इस नयी सरकार ने भी हर सरकार की तरह ही गद्दी पर बैठते ही अपने सभी कोरे चुनावी वायदों को तिलांजलि दे दी है और इसने भी पिछली सरकार के जूतों में ही अपने पैर घुसा लिये हैं. यह सरकार भी कांग्रेस के चरण-चिह्नों पर ही उससे भी अधिक तेज़ रफ़्तार से बढ़ चली है. आज हाल यह है कि ग़रीब ही नहीं मध्यम वर्ग के खाते-पीते लोग भी महँगाई डाइन की दहाड़ सुन कर त्राहि-त्राहि कर रहे हैं.

ऐसे में विचार करने का विषय यह है कि क्या केवल इस पार्टी की जगह उस पार्टी की सरकार बना देने से ही हमारे देश की सारी समस्याओं का समाधान हो जायेगा या आज के इस दमघोटू माहौल को बदलने के लिये देश के युवाओं को कुछ और सोचना और करना पड़ेगा. केवल सत्ता बदलने से ही समाज नहीं बदलता. समाज बदलता है समूची व्यवस्था बदलने से. और व्यवस्था वोट-बैंक बनाने वालों के नेतृत्व और कृतित्व से नहीं बदलती. इस आदमखोर दुर्व्यवस्था को ध्वस्त करके मानवीय गरिमा वाली जनपक्षधर सुव्यवस्था बनाने से. व्यवस्था बदलती है इन्कलाब से.

इन्कलाब - जिसका सपना हमारे बहादुर, बलिदानी और समझदार पुरखों ने देखा था, इन्कलाब - जिसने धरती पर मज़दूर-किसानों के राज गढ़े थे, इन्कलाब - जिसने हर इन्सान को गर्व से सिर उठा कर जीने का माहौल दिया था, इन्कलाब - जिसके नाम से ही दुर्दान्त शोषक और अत्याचारी शासक थरथरा जाया करते हैं, इन्कलाब - जो बलिदान और ईमान के बिना नामुमकिन होता है, इन्कलाब - जिसको पलट कर पूँजीवाद की पुनर्स्थापना कर देने की सफल साज़िशें हो चुकी हैं, इन्कलाब - जिसका आयात और निर्यात नहीं किया जा सकता, इन्कलाब - जो अतीत की फोटोकॉपी नहीं हुआ करता, इन्कलाब - जो मासूम मेहनतकश की आँखों में चमक और दिमाग में जुनून बन कर दमकता है, इन्कलाब - जो पैशाचिक शोषण, अपमानकारी उत्पीड़न और तरह-तरह की नफ़रत के माहौल को नेस्तनाबूत कर देता है, इन्कलाब - जो धरती पर स्वर्ग की रचना करता है.

वह इन्कलाब आप सब की बिखरी हुई अतुलनीय ताकत को एकजुट करके ही किया जा सकता है. इसलिये आप से अनुरोध है कि इन्कलाब की तैयारी कीजिए. उसके लिये आपस के हर विवाद से ऊपर उठ कर हर हाथ से अपना हाथ और हर कन्धे से अपना कन्धा मिला कर एकजुट होने की पहल कीजिए. देश के विराट जन-बल को सशक्त नेतृत्व और जन-प्रतिवाद को प्रबल स्वर दीजिए. आज भी खण्ड-खण्ड होकर बिखरी हुई इन्कलाब-पसन्द लोगों की संख्या समाज में सक्रिय किसी भी दूसरी ताकत से कम नहीं है. अगर सभी इन्कलाब-पसन्द साथी एक साथ जुट जायें, तो अभी भी हम संख्या और सामर्थ्य की दृष्टि से दूसरी सभी शक्तियों की तुलना में अधिक सबल ही साबित होंगे.

इन्कलाब ज़िन्दाबाद !
'धन-तन्त्र मुर्दाबाद !!
ढेर सारे प्यार के साथ - आपका गिरिजेश

(प्रिय मित्र, अनुरोध है कि कृपया इस पोस्ट को अधिकतम मित्रों तक पहुँचाने के लिये जगह-जगह शेयर करके सहायता कीजिए, ताकि इस धूर्त 'धन-तन्त्र' की सच्चाई के बारे में सभी मित्रों का भ्रम टूट सके.)
________________________

किसका है यह तन्त्र !
किसके हैं ये बैंक !!
किसकी है यह सरकार !!!
किसानों को क़र्ज़ के फन्दे में फँसा कर उनको आत्महत्या करने पर मजबूर करने वाले इस 'धन-तन्त्र' के दोहरेपन को इस ख़बर में देखिए और सोचिए कि क्या कभी किसी 'धन-पशु' ने भी क़र्ज़ के फन्दे के चलते आत्महत्या की है. अगर नहीं, तो क्यों !
Ravinder Goel - "धन्ना सेठों को एक और तोहफे की तैयारी
आज खबर छपी है की करीबन 7 लाख करोड़ बकाया टैक्स राशि वसूली नहीं जा सकती. मतलब अब इसे माफ़ करने की तैयारी करनी चाहिए. अब यह तो बताने की जरूरत शायद नहीं पड़ेगी कि टैक्स की बकाया राशि किसकी देनदारी है या होगी.
पढ़िए पूरी खबर"
Around 90 per cent of Rs 6.7 lakh crore tax arrears cannot be recovered
By TNN | 25 Jul, 2014,
Data shows that at the end of 2012-13, tax demands raised by authorities, but not realized added up to nearly Rs 5 lakh crore.
NEW DELHI: The government may be budgeting for tax arrears of Rs 6.7 lakh crore but top government officials admit that it is virtually impossible to recover nearly 90 per cent of the money which authorities had claimed as unpaid taxes.

Sources, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said nearly 37 per cent of the arrears shown by the income tax authorities are related to Hasan Ali Khan, the Pune-based businessman, who is accused of money laundering and stashing $8 billion (around Rs 48,000 crore at current exchange rate) into Swiss Bank accounts.

But despite being under investigation for several years, the tax department and the Enforcement Directorate has not made much headway in the case.

Then, there is the late Harshad Mehta, who was main accused in the 1992 stock market scam. Going by tax department's claims, Mehta owes the government close to Rs 35,000 crore but now the special court trying the cases is left with few assets that would help the Centre realize the amount.

Data released by the government shows that at the end of 2012-13, the latest period for which numbers have been made public, tax demands raised by authorities, but not realized added up to nearly Rs 5 lakh crore.

Nearly 84 per cent of this amount, which is around Rs 4.14 lakh crore, was on account of direct taxes, official data revealed.

Of this amount, Rs 2.6 lakh crore was on account of income tax, while Rs 1.5 lakh crore was being disputed by companies.

Indirect tax claims not realized were estimated at nearly Rs 79,000 crore with customs at Rs 37,800 crore, service tax at Rs 30,400 crore and the remaining Rs 10,500 crore on account of customs duties.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/finance/around-90-per-cent-of-rs-6-7-lakh-crore-tax-arrears-cannot-be-recovered/articleshow/38987920.cms

Around 90 per cent of Rs 6.7 lakh crore tax arrears cannot be recovered - The Economic Times
economictimes.indiatimes.com

शहीद-ए-आज़म भगत सिंह ने कहा था – "आओ मुकाबला करें !"

Photo: शहीद-ए-आज़म भगत सिंह ने कहा था –
"उसे यह फ़िक्र है हरदम, नया तर्जे-जफ़ा क्या है?
हमें यह शौक देखें, सितम की इंतहा क्या है?

दहर से क्यों खफ़ा रहे, चर्ख का क्यों गिला करें,
सारा जहाँ अदू सही, आओ मुकाबला करें।

कोई दम का मेहमान हूँ, ए-अहले-महफ़िल,
चरागे सहर हूँ, बुझा चाहता हूँ।

मेरी हवाओं में रहेगी, ख़याल की बिजली,
यह मुश्त-ए-ख़ाक है फ़ानी, रहे रहे न रहे।"

तर्ज़-ए-ज़फ़ा (अन्याय), सितम की इंतहा (अत्याचार की सीमा ), दहर (दुनिया), ख़फ़ा (क्षुब्ध), चर्ख (आसमान), ग़िला (शिकायत), जहां (संसार), अदू (दुश्मन), मुश्त-ए-ख़ाक (मुट्ठी भर मिट्टी), फ़ानी (नश्वर)

"उसे यह फ़िक्र है हरदम, नया तर्जे-जफ़ा क्या है?
हमें यह शौक देखें, सितम की इंतहा क्या है?

दहर से क्यों खफ़ा रहे, चर्ख का क्यों गिला करें,
सारा जहाँ अदू सही, आओ मुकाबला करें।

कोई दम का मेहमान हूँ, ए-अहले-महफ़िल,
चरागे सहर हूँ, बुझा चाहता हूँ।

मेरी हवाओं में रहेगी, ख़याल की बिजली,
यह मुश्त-ए-ख़ाक है फ़ानी, रहे रहे न रहे।"

तर्ज़-ए-ज़फ़ा (अन्याय), सितम की इंतहा (अत्याचार की सीमा ), दहर (दुनिया), ख़फ़ा (क्षुब्ध), चर्ख (आसमान), ग़िला (शिकायत), जहां (संसार), अदू (दुश्मन), मुश्त-ए-ख़ाक (मुट्ठी भर मिट्टी), फ़ानी (नश्वर)

रमज़ान में रोटी !

Photo: रमज़ान में रोटी !
रोटी और संसद – धूमिल 
"एक आदमी
रोटी बेलता है
एक आदमी रोटी खाता है
एक तीसरा आदमी भी है
जो न रोटी बेलता है, न रोटी खाता है
वह सिर्फ़ रोटी से खेलता है
मैं पूछता हूँ –
'यह तीसरा आदमी कौन है ?'
मेरे देश की संसद मौन है।"

रोटी से खेलने वाले तीसरे आदमी के बारे में 
जो सवाल संसद से धूमिल ने पूछा था, 
उसका जवाब वक़्त ने दे दिया. 
उसका नाम है – शिव-सेना का अन्ध-हिन्दूवादी नेता ' !!

(17 जुलाई को दिल्ली के नवमहाराष्ट्र सदन में हुई घटना असामाजिक, असभ्य और ग़ैरक़ानूनी है क्योंकि जनता के निर्वाचित प्रतिनिधि राजन विचारे ने एक सरकारी कर्मचारी के मुंह में जबरन रोटी ठूंसने की कोशिश की, जैसा टीवी चैनलों ने दिखाया. 
यह घटना निंदनीय और घृणित हो जाती है जब उस कर्मचारी का नाम अरशद ज़ुबैर होता है, और चल रहे रमज़ान के महीने में वह रोज़ा रखे हुए होता है.
उसका नाम सरकारी वर्दी पर लिखा होता है लेकिन वहां मौजूद 11 सांसदों में से एक भी उसे पढ़ नहीं पाता, पढ़ना नहीं चाहता.)


रमज़ान में रोटी !
रोटी और संसद – धूमिल
"एक आदमी
रोटी बेलता है
एक आदमी रोटी खाता है
एक तीसरा आदमी भी है
जो न रोटी बेलता है, न रोटी खाता है
वह सिर्फ़ रोटी से खेलता है
मैं पूछता हूँ –
'यह तीसरा आदमी कौन है ?'
मेरे देश की संसद मौन है।"

रोटी से खेलने वाले तीसरे आदमी के बारे में
जो सवाल संसद से धूमिल ने पूछा था,
उसका जवाब वक़्त ने दे दिया.
उसका नाम है – शिव-सेना का अन्ध-हिन्दूवादी नेता ' !!

(17 जुलाई को दिल्ली के नवमहाराष्ट्र सदन में हुई घटना असामाजिक, असभ्य और ग़ैरक़ानूनी है क्योंकि जनता के निर्वाचित प्रतिनिधि राजन विचारे ने एक सरकारी कर्मचारी के मुंह में जबरन रोटी ठूंसने की कोशिश की, जैसा टीवी चैनलों ने दिखाया.
यह घटना निंदनीय और घृणित हो जाती है जब उस कर्मचारी का नाम अरशद ज़ुबैर होता है, और चल रहे रमज़ान के महीने में वह रोज़ा रखे हुए होता है.
उसका नाम सरकारी वर्दी पर लिखा होता है लेकिन वहां मौजूद 11 सांसदों में से एक भी उसे पढ़ नहीं पाता, पढ़ना नहीं चाहता.)

"ये सच है कि शिवसेना का रवैया मुसलमानों के प्रति कठोर रहा है. ये भी सच है कि प्रवीण तोगड़िया जैसे नेताओं के ज़हरीले बयान नज़रअंदाज़ किए जाते हैं. लेकिन ये भी उतना ही सच है कि हम भी हर घटना को हिंदू-मुसलमान के नज़रिए से देखने के आदी हो गए हैं. ये नज़रिया शिवसेना के व्यवहार से भी ख़तरनाक है...."http://beyondheadlines.in/2014/07/editorial-2/

रोज़ी (रोज़ा) रोटी, सेना और मीडिया