“First They Came” is one of the most famous poems to emerge from wartime. A favourite of liberals, progressives, and leftists who use it as a shorthand to signal the virtue of self-reflection, it circulates widely in times of political turmoil. Here it is, in its entirety:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then 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 out for me
In its origins, this text was not a poem. What we see nowadays, floating around on our timelines and in countless articles, is a rendition of a speech first made by a German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller, in 1946. Delivered as a confessional, Niemöller was implicating himself in the atrocities of Nazi Germany by recalling how he and others had turned away from what they knew was happening, secure in the belief that they would be untouched. How Niemöller’s text was turned into a poem, and by whom, remains a mystery, but it has become a reminder: if we ignore what is done to others, we will end up in their position, with no one to speak up for us.
I think of “First They Came” often, not just because I see it everywhere, especially these days, but because I wonder about whom it leaves out and, more importantly, the conditions of their exclusion.
This past week, Donald Trump ordered more than 200 people to be placed on a plane towards El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison, Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT). He did this by invoking the relatively obscure Alien Enemies Act of 1798, and in defiance of a judge’s order to halt the deportations. The ramifications of all this, in terms of a potential constitutional crisis, are being examined and discussed in several places, but I want to focus on Trump’s justification for what was done: that these were the most violent and dangerous criminals, terrorists, and that they were all Venezuelan gang members. That fact is being disputed: at least one of the men is said to be an innocent restaurant worker who got swept up in the raid, and the families of many others have stepped up to insist that they are not criminals.
In his clarifying “Trust Me, You Want Due Process,” Nathan J. Robinson writes about the necessity of using established legal procedures to determine guilt:
The easiest argument to make for due process is that you should fight to protect it because someday you may want it yourself. If you are accused of a crime or the government wants to throw you out of the country and ruin your life, you will want your trial to resemble Boston Legal, not Kafka’s The Trial. You will want a good attorney and to have one provided for you if you can’t afford one. But I don’t want to make a pure appeal to self-interest here. You should believe in due process because you should care what happens to other people as well.
I am, of course, entirely in agreement here. Regardless of whether or not someone is a criminal, of the worst kind (however we define what that means), they are entitled to their day in court, something these men have been denied. (See, also, Guantánamo.) And I want to add, “What of the criminals?”
To return to “First They Came”: the poem, in listing the kinds of people “we” might ignore, is also a list of innocents. The Communist, the Socialist, the trade unionist, the Jew and, of course, whoever the speaker might be, the implied Me. It is taken for granted that they are only targeted because of who they are and, presumably, for their views on how the world should function (within specific political orders, through organising methods, or beholden to a particular religion). We are never asked to question their inherent innocence—the assumption is that all they did “wrong” in the eyes of an authoritarian regime was to be opposite its stated ideals, its vision of a perfect society, and it was deemed that they must disappear. In this, the “Me” is also, of course, innocent. Like the others, the “I” has no blemishes of character or ideology, but “I” will nevertheless be targeted and eventually destroyed because “I” failed to stand up for the others.
The impulse to always distinguish the good from the bad, the deserving from the undeserving, the “they” from the “us,” is a relentless one, even in the worst of times—or, perhaps, especially in the worst of times. In a recent NewsNation report on immigration raids in Chicago’s predominantly Latino Pilsen neighbourhood, a woman wants it known that all immigrants are not criminals, that people like her are not those who steal, kill, or rape. This is a familiar statement, one that immigrant communities find themselves forced to make in the midst of heightened surveillance and suspicion.
But, what if people are criminals? What if we placed them at the top of that list in “First They Came?” What if the poem began like this,
First they came for the Thieves,
And I did not speak out
Because I was a Thief
Then they came for the Murderer
And I did not speak out
Because I was a Murderer
And on down the line, listing the worst criminals we might think of. Instead of being asked to see ourselves as representative of our thoughts and our politics, what if we imagined ourselves as people who might, under any number of circumstances, have committed the most heinous of acts?
For now, we’re assured that “Venezuelan gang members” deserve to be stripped, shaved, chained, and forced to walk bent over, held down by guards who force them to crawl forward to the horrors that await them. This is a widespread attitude: I have lost count of how many times I have heard people—who claim left, progressive or liberal credentials—immediately distance themselves from torture victims if there is some proof that they might have been convicted of crimes. In such acts of disavowal, we fail to see how criminalisation is itself a process by which we are encouraged to disengage from a larger system of justice. The immigration rights movement, such as it is, has made no progress at all in the last few decades—which is why we are where we are now, watching the immigration sweeps in cities and towns, reacting to rather than preventing the raids. The one victory that activists can claim for themselves is the shift to using the word “undocumented” instead of “illegal,” to denote those without papers. But as I have pointed out, this was always a meaningless move, and never part of any robust political movement.
The Polis Project correctly points to the “spectacle-driven crackdown” in the recent expulsion of Venezuelans: the staging of torture is the point. It is not that the criminal is subject to torture, but that the spectacle of torture creates the criminal.
“First They Came” is a piece of its time, and a necessary reminder of how we have to speak up for others in the worst of times. But if we are to envision a just world, we have to consider how to account for all our selves: the ones who are harmed and the ones who harm others.
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See also:
“On Immigrants, Criminality, and Changing the Narrative“
“‘Undocumented’: How an Identity Ended a Movement
“DACA Was Always DOA: Let’s End It Now.”
As I was about to publish this, my friend W. posted “We Are All Criminals,” published in 2022, by Ayça Çubukçu, on Facebook. I like Jadaliyaa, some of the time, but I do wish they would pay writers. Still, the essay is worth reading.
Photo by Matthew Ansley on Unsplash
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