Tag Archives: Non-Violence

The White Rose of Munich-Naiveté, The Futility of Sacrifice and the Unanticipated Value of Martyrdom

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Grab von Sophie und Hans Scholl und Christoph Probst, Weiße Rose, Friedhof am Perlacher Forst in München

Graves of the White Rose: Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl, Christoph Probst - source Wikimedia

I almost let this important anniversary slip by last Wednesday the 22 February, which marked the sixty-ninth anniversary of the executions of three members of the Nazi era White Rose resistance organization:  Hans Scholl, his younger sister Sophie, and Christoph Probst at Stadelheim Prison in Munich on that date in 1943.

I commemorate that event each year, usually by rewatching Marc Rothemund’s excellent 2005 film Sophie Scholl: the final days,  as a way to refresh my memory and my sense of moral outrage at the sad and tragic termination of one more example of German resistance to the Nazi regime under the heavy blade of the fallbeil.  As it turns out I spent that evening watching for the first time Margarethe von Trotta’s 2003 film Rosenstraße which depicts the events surrounding the 1943 Rosenstrasse Protests.  I’ve spent the last few days doing some reading and trying to put those two event into some kind of a context.

I’m going to try to keep this from turning into a couple of movie reviews, though obviously the direction of my thinking has been significantly impacted by the two films.

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And What Kind of Troll are You?

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Eventually someone will comment on one of our blog posts – it is possible – certainly it can’t yet be excluded from the realm of possibilities at least while the issue of having people actually reading the blog is still such an unsettled issue.  Never the less, the editorial staff of the Meme Merchants have been carefully examining the issue we have come to a few initial conclusions as to what may be going on.  The first most obvious issue is that at the current hit rate the blog has achieved up till now has not allowed the vapor pressure of the blog to reach the point necessary for spontaneous commenting to occur.  Another factor could be an insufficient number of nucleation sites available in the currently available raves to catalyze auto-comment formation, this could be do to inadequacies in editorial practice, or people are just hanging back while we get the administrative preliminaries of the blog out of the way – in other words people are waiting for the first REAL post to jump in and comment.  In the interest of exhaustive thoroughness the possibility of reader apathy was discussed, but tabled as unlikely.  A third and more disturbing possibility is that because Meme Merchants has not yet announced its Moderation Policy the few readers that we do have are hesitant to jump in and post a comment for fear or uncertainty over what may happen if they do.

Not to worry, there is no Moderation Policy here, or rather to say that our policy is no moderation.

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