And then they came for me.....

Lasantha Wickramatunge, a leading Sri Lankan journalist/editor of a newspaper was assassinated earlier this month. Circulating rapidly on the internet, is a posthumously published editorial piece written by him a few days before with instructions to be published if he was killed.

Reading it, I felt this could have happened in India or, indeed, anywhere else. Very moving, especially the poem he has quoted at the end of the piece written by Martin Niemoeller that goes like this:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I was not a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

Am sure most of us will relate to this, because isn't "not speaking out" something we have developed into a fine art?