By USTAZ MARK BANG
This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong that will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows or with both.
The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted in the North and held and flogged in the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get.
If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labour, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if need be, by our lives and the lives of others. Freedom is not an either/or, all-or-nothing equation.
It doesn’t rely on equality. Freedom is taken in degrees of movement and degrees of decision-making, and it is constrained by responsibility. If you are free to harm me, then I am not free of your threat. To optimize freedom so that we all have enough of it, we don’t need equality; we need compassion. If you care about people, you set them free. If you don’t care about anyone but yourself, you oppress.
There can never be absolute freedom because your personal freedom is not mine. We can distribute freedom though—and we should—in the way that we treat one another.
Well, historically speaking, I would say it has been true more often than not. Because the oppressed are rarely freed peacefully, by the end of the process they have more force than their ex-oppressors and a lot of anger, hatred, and fear. A false dichotomy is soon established: “You’re either with us or with them,” and “they” are very evil people who used to oppress “us,” and they will oppress us again if we give them the chance.
It’s happened in Iraq after 2003; some of the Shi’ites who were oppressed by Saddam (a Sunni himself) started taking revenge against all Sunnis. You can hear them saying it even now after 15 years: “If the Sunnis get the power again, we will go back to Saddam’s time; they won’t allow us to visit our shrines and carry out our rituals.” And that’s basically the platform most of the Shi’ite politicians campaign on.
I have also read about an Iranian man (a liberal, I think) who was once imprisoned in the same cell as Khomeini. He said they didn’t agree on everything, politically, but they were very close friends. They eventually got out; Khomeini led the revolution and put his friend back in jail.
More recently, it’s happened twice in Egypt during the so-called “Arab Spring.” Islamists (among many others) were oppressed; there was a revolution; Islamists got into power, and they started oppressing others. A few months later another revolution/coup happened, and the guy who led that (an army man) is now oppressing people again.
But the most famous example, in my opinion, is the communist revolution. Animal Farm gives a great look into that. But it doesn’t have to be true. It hasn’t always been true, even historically. Look at Europe, for example (Western Europe at least). There used to be a lot of oppression, but somehow they managed to break out of that vicious cycle.
Because people—especially those attracted to power—have an almost preternatural need to rule and control.
Ernest Adams has given a very nice—brief—historical treatment already, but suffice to say, people have over millennia evolved from brutes who needed to be alert and strong all the time to stay alive, into tribes of collective power, to more complex societies with some at the top and others below. I am neither an anthropologist nor an evolutionary biologist, but I suspect that evolution has bred into people a survival ‘gene’ to look to bend to the collective will of those around them.
This is true—to the best of my knowledge—in every single civilisation in the world. The Japanese have a saying, “A nail that stands out will get hammered in.” The result is an external and internal pressure to conform to the desires of the mob. And who controls the mob? In the end, those who seek power seek to control. This is true whether it’s your freedom to marry whomever you please (the so-called ‘small government conservatives’ have no problem making laws against you in this case) or whether it’s your desire to do with your property and money as you see fit (in which case, the ‘liberals’ will have a talk with you).
Those who seek to rule need subjects. Another reason is that we live surrounded by many others. This is not the old West any more. YOUR freedom often comes in conflict with the freedoms of others. Even the most libertarian people recognize that we need laws.
EVERY law is, in essence, a curtailment of freedom. And again, those who make the rules (whether it’s King Friday the 13th or the Judean People’s Populist Front) are going to give up their power quite grudgingly. “Public Staunchest Ally.”
The writer of this article is a human rights activist, writer, and professional teacher.