Sympathy for the Oppressed

There are no persons across the annals of history that garner more sympathy than the oppressed. As Americans, we are brought up to revere justice and equality and to despise and rebuke injustice whenever we see it, no matter how innocuous. How much more our disgust when we read about innocent people across the human drama that have been killed or enslaved by evil men? Some of our earliest stories concern injustice and the fight for freedom. We bind up our hopes and desires in oppressed characters in our histories; our very identities are found in stories of defiance in the face oppressive authority in the name of justice and liberty. From the Hebrews of Egypt to the American Revolution, the story is as old as time and as fresh as a sunrise. So great is our reverence for this narrative, and so vigilant is our watch for its repetition, that we often find ourselves seeking our own oppressors, even when they may not exist. We will chase that ghost of tyranny like a rabid dog on a hare, with all the sureness of our freedom-fighting forebearers, and any who deny the existence of our oppressors must be blind at best but more likely they are complicite in our oppression! Very quickly, that ghost must possess corporeal form, for we must have something to lash out against lest our tyrants go on oppressing. The last generation may have been fine towing the line in the name of peace, but we can no longer tolerate oppression, peace be damned.

In the bloody century that was the 20th, we witnessed a nearly endless tumult of change at the cost of millions of lives. One might be quick to point to the massive wars as the main impetus for these losses, and while the numbers who died during the myriad conflicts is staggering, they are at least matched by the non-war deaths under oppressive regimes. The number of genocides, purges, and man-made famines during that century is shocking to the point of apathy. It has been claimed that the average person will meet roughly ten thousand people in their lifetime, a large number that is difficult to conceive of when we cycle through even mere dozens of faces in our minds. How can a person be expected to truly consider a loss of over 100 million people? But that is the low estimate for lives lost under oppressive regimes during the 20th century. These are people who starved to death because of criminally ineffective farming strategies, with some resorting to eating their own children before the end. Some perished in concentration camps designed to “re-educate” them, but in actuality these were places where torture and forced labor were used as vengeance against desenters. Still others were unceremoniously gunned down in the streets, burned alive in barns or churches, or hanged in town squares as a warning to potential rebels. No matter what terrible end, these were people who faced a bitter kind of oppression that took them before justice could be served, before liberty could be achieved through glorious revolution. And that staggering number of 100 million only represents the ones who died.

Oppression is not always so pointed as it is in the above examples. Many times the tyrant will see value in more subtle oppressions that break the spirit of their subjects. These tactics may include things like subversion through language and propaganda as long-haul strategies, all the way to strictly limited “freedoms” as a sort of pittance to stem the tide of revolution. When these strategies work they are diabolical in there effectiveness, for who can be more oppressed than a slave that does not know they are enslaved? This makes the vigilant all the more suspicious of oppression, as any of life’s difficulties could now be the result of systemic oppression. Even in a place like the United States, we are told that the oppression of Capitalism is felt by millions in the bottom rungs of society. Beyond that, the racial subjugation of generations passed is said to be alive and well in the systemic oppressions felt by minorities. Women, too, are oppressed, along with transgendered and nonbinary people, not to mention homosexuals. Sure, these people aren’t being ushered into concentration camps and they aren’t being executed in droves by jack-booted polizei, but they are no less oppressed. Right?

This rationale is not limited to those on the left either. Right leaning peoples have a near constant suspicion of government overreach, and the extreme right is more than convinced that a cabal of media, government, and finance has been in control for centuries. With every Twitter banning or Facebook censoring, hard-right people become more entrenched in their view that they are the ones being oppressed. For whatever arguments one might make about the legality of such censorship, these people believe that their rights are being violated. The truth of these suspicions notwithstanding, one thing is for sure, there is a section of the extreme right that has been waiting for an excuse to open their arsenals for a long time. Many of these people seem to make a sport out of conspiracy theory, “seeing through the lies” of any official statement or media release. Lies are oppression, and the government and media speak only in lies.

Genocide is a horrifying subject in its magnitude, being almost unfathomable to the sensible western mind. The idea that an entire race or class of people should be exterminated is not easily adopted, even theoretically. Much more difficult to imagine is the actualization of such an idea. How can someone go from a civilized, compassionate human being to a participant in genocide? It is likely that no singular reason will ever be wholly sufficient, but it seems that perceived victimhood is key for many participants. In Nazi Germany, propagandists convinced the German populace that the Jews caused the depression their nation experienced in the wake of World War I. They convinced them that Jewish bankers were taking control of their economies and diluting the purity of their bloodlines through interracial marriage. They convinced them that they were being oppressed by the Jews. In a similar fashion, communist revolutionaries in pre-Soviet Russia convinced many that the Kulaks were more like slaveowners than land owners. They were willing to believe that these people that employed them were actually robber barons, keeping them down, oppressing them. In both examples, we see ample evidence that people are willing to commit, or at least turn a blind eye toward the commission of any number of heinous acts if they believe the victims are oppressing them. Tyrants are the ultimate villains, and oppression is the ultimate sin. Oppressive tyrants cannot possibly be deserving of sympathy, and no act committed against a tyrant can possibly be sinful, no matter the horror.

If we Americans are being oppressed by the upper class capitalists, then why should they be allowed to go on oppressing us? If peoples of color, women, trans people, and other minorities are being oppressed by white males, then why should white males be allowed to go on oppressing those groups? If the deepstate is controlling our lives then they must be stopped! Why should they be allowed to silence us and manipulate the truth? The rhetorical ante, as it were, is raised by the day, and it would not be irrational to assume all manner of crime might be exacted upon members of the aforementioned groups if social media activists are to be believed. The dogmas preached by advocates of Critical Race Theory and the leaders of such activists groups as Black Lives Matter tell a dark tale of systemic oppression from all echelons of American government and society, and it should be of no surprise that violent groups like Antifa use such tales to spur their footsoldiers into action against the oppressors. People in Antifa staunchly believe that America is a fascistic despot state that needs to be cleansed by violent revolution, and who can blame them? Peoples of Color are facing oppression in our country, along with the myriad other minorities that suffer under the regime of capitalist, racist white men in America. Likewise, militant far right groups tout claims of censorship and authoritarianism like battle cries. Any who disagree must be brainwashed sycophants, furthering the will of some international shadow government. The American ideal is under attack from the socialist left, and they must be stopped. So far, the death toll at the hands of the counter-oppression remains low, but when “lives are at stake” there is no limit to the atrocities we can justify.

In the end, it is up to every individual to decide when the time for words is over and the time for action arrives. The Founding Fathers wrote, spoke, and debated over the cause of revolution, but they could not have won the war without regular people. Despite fear of death, over 231,000 men took up arms with the Continental Army, this not including the families of those men or the militia men who also fought. When we look back at this momentous choice, it is easy enough to say it was the right thing to do. In the same way that the Founding Fathers could not accomplish revolution alone, neither could Mao Zedong. More than 2 million people were behind the Red push to eliminate the nationalist Chinese forces under Chiang Kai-Shek. Again, these people risked death to further the aims of their party, each one making an individual decision to fight. Certainly, we can assume that there must have been coercion involved in both examples, but the fact remains that decision ultimately rests in the hands of the revolutionaries. Now, when we look at the outcome of the above examples, what do we see? One gave birth to the freest, most prosperous country the world has ever known, the other is a police state where freedom is given by the government and can be taken away at will. One ended with the birth of one of the greatest political documents ever written, the US Constitution. The other ended with massive purges under the same government that would kill tens of millions of its own people. Both countries are imperfect, and both were born from individual decisions. These individuals felt oppressed and decided to fight in order to stop it. The fruits of those decisions speak for themselves.

Each individual must reason with the problem of oppression and revolution. If we let them, words will fail and people will be faced with the decision to act once again. If that decision leads to violence, people will have to decide what rights they afford to their enemies. If those rights are few, people will have to decide if their enemies might live or die. If their enemies must die, people will have to decide to kill them. People will decide.