{"id":1933,"date":"2015-02-26T18:17:00","date_gmt":"2015-02-27T02:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/?p=1933"},"modified":"2015-03-05T18:18:47","modified_gmt":"2015-03-06T02:18:47","slug":"thoughts-on-oppression","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/?p=1933","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on Oppression"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have mixed feelings about this term. I just gave a talk on \u201coppression\u201d<\/a> and emphasized the milder forms. The term is evocative. I certainly concede that \u201coppression\u201d is an apt word when it comes to a wide variety of political policies or social norm enforced by mobs or the police who are willing to use violent means to obtain their ends. However, it is misleading because it misdirects the kinds of micro-quasi-oppressions that require slavishness or the collaboration of the oppressed to be effective.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve found a number of words that relate and may be equally potent for the mid-range of mild to moderate oppression: Entitlement, empowerment, marginalization, privilege\u2014these words seem closer to the point, more mid-level. They demand a bit more rational analysis.<\/p>\n

Oppression is associated semantically with more direct violence, but much of the phenomena that happens that might be mis-classified under oppression. But nobody\u2019s stopping people from asserting their own authority and power! That\u2019s the problem.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that slave revolts have in history been put down ruthlessly and with great cruelty. It\u2019s also true that some slave revolts have succeeded. Short of official slavery backed by the power of the military, many small quasi-enslavements require the submission of the enslaved more than the power of the slaver. Women\u2019s liberation is often more in this direction, and that middle area or even milder is part of what I\u2019m talking about.<\/p>\n

In a hundred ways people imagined their powerlessness when in fact what\u2019s at stake, what\u2019s going on, is more that the fantasy that the mean ol\u2019 masters will reform rather than the daring that one must strike out and determine one\u2019s own destiny.<\/p>\n

Passover\u2019s coming. The Last Supper in Christianity may have been a Passover celebration. It\u2019s the oldest known ritual, celebrating the liberation of the Israelites or Hebrew Children\u2014note the infantilization there\u2014from slavery under the Pharaohs. It all may not have happened, you know. The whole story is about 400 years old, incorporated into the beginnings of the writings of the source history of the nation of Judea before it got conquered by the Persians\u2014the foundations of the quasi-theocracy of that tiny middle-eastern kingdom in the earlier part of the millennium before the common era. Legends were piled upon legends and it\u2019s pretty clear that these many stories were far from codified as a single text until maybe a century or two before the common millennium. A lot can happen during this transition. But okay, say it happened the way it is said to have happened. <\/p>\n

Even then, there\u2019s a deep lesson, mainly that the liberation from slavery was by no means a liberation from the slave mentality of the people. One story notes that one of the reasons the Hebrew Children wandered for 40 years in the desert was that Moses darn well knew these slave mentality parents didn\u2019t have the gumption to fight for what Moses called the promised land. (A friend offered another more orthodox reason about disobeying the Lord, but I chose to ignore it. I should confess that there are other interpretations, though! The one I\u2019m offering here is by no means standard. It\u2019s just interesting.)<\/p>\n

Please note that the Canaanites and other peoples had established themselves as peaceful entities, part of whom were the Phoenicians who had been colonizing trading centers around the Mediterranean, and this crazy outside tribe came riding up and proclaimed, \u201cOur God promised this land to us. Y\u2019all get out or we\u2019ll kill you!\u201d And they did, too, they slaughtered everyone, the cattle too! Why the cattle? God said kill the cattle. They were invaders as savage as Genghis Khan or Tamerlane. Of course we know them as the good guys because our majority religion derives from their religion and sacred book, so they must be blessed by the Judeo-Christian God, but back then there wasn\u2019t such a consensus and the future Israelite Tribes were the devil\u2019s band themselves.<\/p>\n

Read those early tracts and you get a neo-Fascist state that is totalitarian to the max, more than any modern totalitarian state. A totalitarian state is one in which the governing powers that be, in the Israelite case, the theocracy, backed by the civil power of the monarchy, had control over the totality of everyone\u2019s lives. Since these were\u2014they said\u2014God\u2019s rules, they were just carrying them out\u2014this theocracy are as most folks agree, good guys, good being God combined with an OO, as in \u201coooh, it\u2019s God, so it\u2019s Good, oooh\u201d which means \u201cDon\u2019t even question our authority or well kill you slowly and painfully by stoning you to death!\u201d  Oooh turns into owww pretty quickly.<\/p>\n

Alas, I have reflected on the history of my own people and have found it to be occasionally wise, and unfortunately victimized for the last 2\/3 of its existence, but in the early years they were a pretty nasty tribe to have as even distant neighbors. Self-righteous and destructive. It\u2019s appalling what thinking God is on your side can justify.<\/p>\n

Then comes Christianity, which is really a sort of reform Judaism at first, really just the teachings of a prophet who tried to emphasize the pro-social elements; then the prophet was deified; then kings used this Deity to be savagely nasty to neighbors. Folks were savagely nasty to each other and they had various rationales, from we are bringing civilization and order to we don\u2019t need no damn rationale, we\u2019re here and we\u2019re just damn well taking over. Give us your taxes. It was a phase in what later came to be called civilization. Actually, it was more civilized than all the conquered tribes who fought each other for all sorts of weaker reasons.<\/p>\n

The point is that there are about fifteen grades of civilization, and the first ten would be seen today as pretty savage. We\u2019re about the 12th and there are three grades beyond us. Maybe the numbers are wrong\u2014it doesn\u2019t matter. The point is that I\u2019m encouraging folks to dare consider that there well might be three levels of civilization beyond us as far as we are beyond, say, feudalism and kings and knights having at each other just to gain more land and taxes. And believe me, this level was more civilized than whatever bandit-gang-overlord was running things before them.  In this scene, the basis for the Holy Book of the West was born of the 6th through the 8th level of civilization. But people still harken back to it as a source of wisdom and goodness, which is why we\u2019re not 13th.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have mixed feelings about this term. I just gave a talk on \u201coppression\u201d and emphasized the milder forms. The term is evocative. I certainly concede that \u201coppression\u201d is an apt word when it comes to a wide variety of political policies or social norm enforced by mobs or the police who are willing to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1933"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1933"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1933\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1934,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1933\/revisions\/1934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}