The White Rose

nobulart.com/the-white-rose/

Published :October 19, 2021•Updated :August 9, 2022

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On February 22, 1943 Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans, and Christoph Probst were
found guilty of treason against Germany. The three were beheaded the same day.
They were condemned as traitors for producing and distributing leaflets titled –
Leaflets of The White Rose – the name of their loosely knit group. Those leaflets
clearly and passionately explained the crimes being committed against millions of
innocent people in Europe and Russia by politicians acting in the name of the
German people. The leaflet was the sixth in a series that had been distributed over
a period of a little less than a year by various means throughout Germany.

The White Rose movement was intended to trigger an awakening by the German
people to their ability to positively influence society to become more humane. Their
rallying cry was “Freedom and Honor!” The White Rose advocated that German’s
proactively work towards creating such a society by rising up and refusing to
passively go along with the government that was staining the good name of the
German people. For daring to suggest that German’s act on their conscience
instead of mindlessly following the government’s directives, the people of The White
Rose were targeted by the German government to be ruthlessly hunted down, In
addition to the Scholls and Christoph Probst, Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf,
Professor Kurt Huber and Hans Leipelt were executed.

Whether explicitly or intuitively, The White Rose participants recognized that the
means used to achieve their desire to live in a society in which women, men and
children were respectfully treated and did not exist to be the tools of the
government needed to be consistent with that end. The men and women of The
White Rose did not engage in violence. Rather, they pursued their dream and
conveyed their message by distributing leaflets that expressed truths otherwise
unavailable to be read by the German people. In the midst of war torn Germany
they dared to go beyond exercising freedom of thought by exercising freedom of
association, speech and the press: for which some of them paid with their lives.

source : http://forejustice.org
reborn : https://t.me/JoinTheWhiteRose (Oct 19 – 48.8k subscribers)

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The reemergence of the White Rose movement reminded me of the writing of Hans
Sherrer in the form of his description of the origins of The White Rose above, and in the
short essay below, which I think has never had greater relevance than now. Every aspect
of our environment and our lives has been infiltrated and corrupted, empowered by our
willingness to participate in this anemic, drip-fed imitation of what life could be.
Participation in this faux democratic system does nothing other than legitimize and
empower tyranny.

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Voting Is An Act of Violence
by Hans Sherrer (1999)

Voting is the most violent act someone can commit in their lifetime.

This little noted anomaly about voting is directly related to the modern conception of
the State as an entity deriving its grant of authority to act from the consent of the
governed. The aura of legitimacy surrounding the government’s actions is
enhanced by the perceived role of voting as an expression of the “people’s will.”
Whether non-threatening or violent, the authority for each and every one of the
government’s actions is presumed to flow from the consent of the people through
the electoral process. School children are told this from their earliest years.

The idea the State derives its power to act from the consent of the people sounds
romantic. Few people, however, are aware that by definition the State’s power is for
the specific purpose of engaging in acts of violence. No grant of power is necessary
for anyone, or any organization to act peacefully. This is no secret among scholars,
and sociologist Max Weber’s definition of the State is considered one of the most
authoritative:

“A state is a human institution that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of
physical force within a given territory. … The state is considered the sole source of
the `right’ to use violence.” [1]

The legitimizing impact of voting on the government’s exercise of power intimately

involves voters in the use of that power. Which means that non-voters tend to
delegitimize the exercise of a government’s power as an expression of the “will of
the people.” So if no one voted in an election or only a small percentage of people
did, the government couldn’t profess to be empowered to act as an agent of the
“people’s will.” Without the protective cover provided by voters, the government
would have no pretense to act except as a law unto itself.

Consequently, the government’s actions and the voters who legitimize them are
linked together. Thus at a minimum, voters are spiritually involved in every act
engaged in by the government. Including all violent acts. This involvement in the
government’s violence isn’t, tempered by the nominal peacefulness of a person’s
life apart from voting. By choosing to vote a person integrates the violence engaged
in by the government as a part of their life. This is just as true of people that didn’t
vote for a candidate who supports particular policies they may disagree with, as it is
for those that did. It is going through the motion of voting that legitimizes the
government to act in their name, not who or what they vote for.

This means that the violence perpetrated by any one person pales in scope or
significance when compared to that which is authorized to be taken by the
government in the name of those who vote. The combined ghoulish violence of
every identifiable serial killer in American history can’t match the violence of even

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one of any number of violent actions taken by the government as the people’s
representative. A prominent example of this is the economic sanctions imposed on
Iraq after the Gulf war in 1991. These sanction prevented Iraq from rebuilding its
destroyed sanitation, water, and electric power infrastructure that were specifically
targeted by the U. S. military for destruction. Supported and enforced by the U. S.,
these sanctions are credited by UNICEF and other organizations with contributing
to the gruesome deaths of an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 children a month for over 8-
1/2 years. [2] All voters share in the government’s contribution to the unnecessary
deaths of these children caused by disease and a reduced standard of living. So
the over half-a-million deaths of innocent children in Iraq in the years after 1991’s
Gulf war are on the blood stained hands of every voter in the U.S.

The same dynamic of voter involvement in government atrocities is true of the many
hundreds of civilian deaths caused by the bombing of Yugoslavian cities in the
spring and summer of 1999 that the United States participated in. This was a small
scale recreation of the atomic bombing of the non-military cities of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in August 1945. Hundreds of thousands of innocent women, children and
old people were killed from the initial bomb blasts and the long-term effects of
radiation exposure. [3] Those bombings had been preceeded by the U.S. military’s
killing of many hundreds of thousands of non-combatants during the firebombings
of Tokyo, Hamburg, Dresden and Berlin. All of those people were killed in the name
of the voters that had elected the Roosevelt administration in 1944 by a landslide.
Voting, like a missile fired at an unseen target many miles away, is a long-distance
method of cleanly participating in the most horrific violence imaginable.

So declining to vote does much more than cause a statistical entry on the non-
voting side of a ledger sheet. It is a positive way for a person to lower their level of
moral responsibility for acts of violence engaged in by the government that they
would never engage in personally, and that they don’t want to be committed in their
name as a voter. Non-voting is a positive way for a person to publicly express the
depth of their private belief in respecting the sanctity of life, and that violence is only
justified in self-defense.

The social sphere in which most people live is notable for the level of peaceful
cooperation that normally prevails in it. The majority of people strive to better their
lives by working together with other people in the pursuit of their mutual self-
interest. [4] This community spirit of non-violent cooperation supported by non-
voting, stands in sharp contrast to the societal violence endorsed by the act of
voting,

ENDNOTES

[1] “Politics as a Vocation,” Max Weber, in “From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology,”
edited by C. Wright Mills, Oxford University Press, NY, 1946, p. 78.

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 [2] See e.g., “Sanctions of Mass Destruction,” John Mueller and Karl Mueller,
Foreign Affairs, May/June, 1999. vol. 78. no. 3, pp. 43-53; and, “U, S. Weapons of
Mass Destruction Linked to Deaths of a Half-Million Children,” in “Censored 1999:
The News That Didn’t Make the News – The Year’s Top 25 Censored Stories,”
Peter Phillips and Project Censored, Seven Stories Press, NY, 1999, pp. 43-46.

[3] See e.g., “Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb,” Ronald Takaki,
Little Brown & Company. Boston, 1995; and, “Hiroshima in. America: A Half Century
of Denial,” Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Avon, NY, 1996.

[4] See e.g., “The Evolution of Cooperation,” Robert Axelrod, Basic Books, New
York, 1984; “Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity,” John H. Holland,
Perseus Press, 1996; and, “Reputation: Studies in the Voluntary Elicitation of Good
Conduct,” edited by Daniel B. Klein, University of Michigan Press, 1997.

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