Stéphane Hessel, writer and inspiration behind Occupy movement, dies at 95
Hessel, resistance fighter, diplomat, writer of Time for Outrage! and co-author of Universal Declaration of Human Rights, dies
The French president, François Hollande, said of Hessel: 'He leaves us a lesson, which is to never accept any injustice.”
“From his childhood in Berlin and then Paris, where he was brought up by his writer and translator father, journalist mother and her lover in an unusual ménage à trois, to his worldwide celebrity at the age of 93, when a political pamphlet he wrote became a bestselling publishing sensation and inspired global protest and the Occupy Wall Street movement.
And then there was everything in between: his escape from two Nazi concentration camps where he had been tortured and sentenced to death, his escapades with the French resistance and his hand in drawing up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
Sometime between Tuesday and Wednesday, just a week after his last big interview was published, Hessel's long and extraordinary life came to an end. He was 95 years old, but as one French magazine remarked: "Stéphane Hessel, dead? It's hard to believe. He seemed to have become eternal, the grand and handsome old man."
Le Point magazine added that the man with an "old-fashioned politeness and elegance from another age" had "danced" with the best part of a century.”…Read the article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/27/writer-activist-stephane-hessel-dies-aged-95
*In Time for Outrage, he called for a new form of "resistance" to the injustices of the modern world.
He expressed outrage at the growing gap between haves and have-nots, as well the untold damage to the environment.
Hessel’s 32-page Time for Outrage (Indignez-vous in French) sold millions of copies in France, tapping into a vein of popular discontent with capitalism and transforming him into a legendry intellectual within weeks. Translated into English, the book became a source of inspiration for the Occupy Wall Street Movement and other subsequent movements.
Evil of Money
In the book, Hessel urges young people to take inspiration from the anti-Nazi resistance to which he once belonged and rally against what he saw as the newest evil: the love of Money.
'The book urges the French, and everyone else, to recapture the wartime spirit of resistance to the Nazis by rejecting the "insolent, selfish" power of money and markets and by defending the social "values of modern democracy".' -- Independent
'Indignez-Vous! is creating the sort of stir in France Emile Zola did in 1898, when he published J'Accuse!' --The National Post
'Like a song you hum or a film you recommend to friends, Indignez-Vous! crystallises the spirit of the time. To buy it is a militant act, a gesture towards community and participation in a collective emotion.' --Libération
'Indignez-Vous! is creating the sort of stir in France Emile Zola did in 1898, when he published J'Accuse!' --The National Post
'Like a song you hum or a film you recommend to friends, Indignez-Vous! crystallises the spirit of the time. To buy it is a militant act, a gesture towards community and participation in a collective emotion.' --Libération
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