By Cliff Montgomery – Mar. 4th, 2013
Stéphane Frédéric Hessel died on February 26th. He was 95 years old. Many U.S. media outlets have ignored his passing.
To its credit, The New York Times published a rather fine obituary of the great man – but like most U.S. corporate media outlets, The Washington Post appears to have overlooked his passing altogether.
There may be a reason for this telling silence. Stéphane Hessel was one of the sparks that helped set the flame known as the global Occupy movement. He was one of those chiefly responsible for the resurgence of left-wing activity in recent years. And his personal integrity and dedication to human rights were beyond reproach.
“When one is received by the world in television studios, when one writes bestsellers, when one has baptized an international mobilization movement, does one still die?” asked Le Point magazine.
Born on October 20th, 1917, Stéphane Frédéric Hessel was a writer, an ambassador, a diplomat, a French Resistance fighter, a concentration camp survivor, and a leading global thinker on human rights.
Though Hessel was born in Germany, his family settled in France when he was eight years old. Hessel became a naturalized citizen in 1939.
Hessel bravely joined the French Resistance when Nazi Germany occupied his adopted homeland.
“As a prominent figure in the resistance, he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 and deported to Buchenwald and Dora concentration camps,” declared the London Guardian’s obituary on Hessel. He was forced to suffer waterboarding torture. The Nazis sentenced him to death.
“He escaped being executed at Buchenwald by exchanging identities with a prisoner who had died of typhus,” continued the Guardian, “and later escaped from Dora during a transfer to the Bergen-Belsen death camp. After fleeing his German guards, he met advancing American troops.”
“After the war, he worked with the US first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, in editing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” explained the Guardian.
At an age when others would have retired, Hessel continued to work for a more just world.
His later activism focused on a continuation of a vibrant left-wing social vision, the rise of economic inequalities in recent decades, and the conflict in Palestine. In 2011, Foreign Policy magazine named Hessel to its list of leading global thinkers.
But perhaps Hessel’s best-known act in the autumn of his life was to pen Indignez-vous! (which literally translates into ‘All of you should be indignant!’) in 2010. The little pamphlet (only a fraction of the pages contain actual text) sold 4.5 million copies around the world.
The small book has been cited as an inspiration for the world-wide Occupy movement, the Spanish Indignados (M15 movement) and numerous other political actions and activities.
The English translation of the pamphlet is often called Get Angry! Cry Out!
The American Spark offers the full English translation of this inspiring work to its readers.
