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Quoting Martin Niemoller is something that should be done warily. "They" - in the sense of the government - first came for the Communists in 1919, and lots of people spoke out. They even took to the streets and seized the government. If the Spartacist uprising in Berlin failed, that did not prevent the Communists and the Socialists from being the political majority until 1933. Niemoller ignores this inconvenient truth in his poem because he himself did "speak out" during this post-war period in Germany, but his speeches were against the Marxist Left and for the National Socialists. Niemoller was an early supporter of the Nazis, and so were many of the trade unions, whom the Nazis did not, in fact, "come for" at all. Hitler acknowledges that fact in Mein Kampf: "As things stand today, the trade unions in my opinion cannot be dispensed with. On the contrary, they are among the most important institutions of the nation's economic life. Their significance lies not only in the social and political field, but even more in the general field of national politics." Niemoller's actual quarrel with the Nazis only came when the National Socialists decided that Protestant and Catholic Churches should once again become part of a State Church. This was not, in itself, a dramatic departure from pre-WW I Germany practice where each regional church, whether Catholic or Protestants, depending on which was the majority religion - received subsidies form the government and were ruled by a regnal house that was part of the government. The greatest of all the dishonesties of this bold declaration of opposition is that it needed several revisions before it deigned to include the Jews. In his 1946 radio broadcast of his poem, Niemoller did not even mention the Jews. It is only in the English republication in the 1950s in the United States that they were added to the list of sanctified victims.

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I think this Eisenhower quote is apropos:

"Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present -- and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. "

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