Jean Ziegler: The world’s conscience is dead
Jean Ziegler has died. The “world’s conscience from Switzerland” (TAZ) is dead. Hardly anyone embodied this “world’s conscience” as intensely, for as long, or as convincingly as the Swiss sociologist, politician and champion of social justice.
Jean Ziegler was committed to fighting for the poor at the UN from the richest country in the world, Switzerland. He fought against the “cannibalistic world order” in which, to this day, more than a billion people have no chance of a life of dignity. “These poor people are not starving to death; we are murdering them,” he also said on my “Querdenker” programme on 3sat.
Ziegler’s prominence and his incomparable ability to name injustice for what it is made him a champion for a better world. He “encouraged people not to resign themselves to things that one must not resign oneself to. That was his most important ability and his greatest achievement. In this way, he also revitalised the office of UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, which he took over in 2000. Ziegler’s most famous quote dates from this period: “A child who dies of hunger today is being murdered.” (TAZ 11 June 2026).
His political assessments were not always correct. For far too long, he turned a blind eye to the human rights violations committed by the mass murderer Pol Pot in Cambodia, the dictator Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, or the misanthrope Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. He later apologised for this. He condemned Putin’s aggression in Ukraine from the outset, without overlooking the mistakes of NATO’s blind eastward expansion.
Jean Ziegler never tired of pointing out the scandal that, in our wealthy world, tens of thousands of people starve to death every day. In this world of the super-rich and tech billionaires, the death of a “world conscience” is particularly painful. Yet at the moment, it looks as though Pope Leo XIV might be able to replace this missing “conscience of the world from Switzerland”.
- Jean Ziegler „Trotz alledem – Warum ich die Hoffnung auf eine bessere Welt nicht aufgebe“ | Penguin 2025 | Leseprobe als PDF
- Jean Ziegler „Was ist so schlimm am Kapitalismus?: Antworten auf die Fragen meiner Enkelin“
- Vis-à-vis: Jean Ziegler | n „Vis-à-vis“ befragt der Publizist Frank A. Meyer einen prominenten Gast zu seiner Person und aktuellen Themen. Diesmal dabei: Jean Ziegler.3sat/SRF
