cell913blog.com #9

 I have an instructor in the teacher training program at O.C.E. (Ontario College of Education), Joan Laird, now deceased, to thank for her challenging presence in the classroom and especially for a question she posed on a final examination:

Illustrate the exercise of power in all of the pieces of literature on the curriculum in this course

Open-ended, challenging, almost a ‘take-the-roof-off’ kind of question. And, not surprisingly, the question has stuck and has hung both on my psyche as well as in my public and professional career for six decades.

In the last post, questions of freeing the oppressed, AND, the oppressor, focused out attention. And this challenge is a gift of Nelson Mandela through his biography, Long Road to Freedom. Near the end of that tome, he writes:

I was not born with a hunger to be free. I was born free—free in every way that I could know. Free to run in the fields near my mother’s hut, free to swim in the clear stream that ran through my village, free to roast mealies under the stars and ride the broad backs of slow-moving bulls. As long as I obeyed my father and abided by the custom of my tribe, I was not troubled by the laws of man or God….It was only when I began to learn that my  boyhood freedom was an illusion, when I discovered as a young man that my freedom had already been taken away from me, that I began to hunger for it. At first, as a student, I wanted freedom only for myself, the transitory freedom of being able to stay out late at night, read what I pleased, and go where I chose. Later, as a young man in Johannesburg, I yearned for the basic and honourable freedoms of achieving my potential, of earning my keep, or marrying and having a family—the freedom not to be obstructed in a lawful life….But then I slowly saw that not only was I not free, but my brothers and sisters were not free. I saw that it was not just my freedom that was curtailed, but the freedom of everyone who looked like I did. That is when I joined the African National Congress, and that is when the hunger for my own freedom became the greater hunger for the freedom of my people. It was this desire for the freedom of my people to live their lives with dignity and self-respect that animated my life, that transformed a frightened young man into a bold one, that drove a law-abiding attorney to become a criminal, that turned a family-loving husband into a man without a home, that forced a life-loving man to life like a monk. I am no more virtuous or self-sacrificing that the next man, but I found that I could not even enjoy the poor and limited freedoms I was allowed when I knew my people were not free. Freedom is indivisible; the chain on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me….A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity. (P.623-624)

In the first half of the twentieth century, coming from a small African village and tribe, Mandela could and did ‘see’ the ‘chains’ that bound his and his people, and the forces (individuals, political parties, political ideologies and deep-rooted white supremacy) that, taken together in a gestalt, comprised what history knows as ‘apartheid’. Apartheid is a word derived from the French, ‘mettre a part’ meaning ‘separating or setting apart, and the application was based on racial or ethnic criteria. Tracing those ‘chains’ to a group of white men, joined in a political movement to uphold and sustain the separation they believed was both ethical and necessary, Mandela had a powerful, yet identifiable ‘enemy’ to convince of the deleterious impact of their policy, and their identity. A single policy, embedded in the history of South Africa, impacting a specific ‘colour’ of men, women and children, with a ready and receptive group of men women and children who identified with Mandela, and  with whom Mandela also identified, offers a far more ‘clear, unambiguous, and nefarious target’ for what became Mandela’s life work and effectively his identity, during his lifetime and for history.  Geographically, nationally, ethnically and historically ‘bound’ within a frame that is easily recognized and shared by those who consider themselves ‘oppressed’, the ‘freedom movement’ was able to attract new members, grow both strategies and tactics, set policies, and eventually reach out to the rest of Africa (must of it suffering under a similar kind of oppression) and eventually to the United Kingdom, the United States and the United Nations.

And it took all of the various changes in the law, and the compensating and often deceptive moves in response, along with the sanctions from outside, and the courage and determination of those in the ‘freedom movement’, including multiple charges, imprisonments, releases, and new charges and new incarcerations, and even resorting to the establishment of a military arm of the ANC, a move that was resisted for decades, until the failure to respond, to listen and to begin to ‘see’ the error of their ways in the National Party of various leaders actually forced such a move to violence and military action. This ‘rubicon’ decision, however, came only as a very last resort, and one that weighed heavily on the minds and hearts of Mandela and his colleagues.

Setting such a scene, to begin to unpack the various meanings, applications, definitions and pictures of oppression, is only to offer a starting point for our journey. Let’s look at the ways oppression has come to be applied today. Grievance, the intersection of an opposing and unacceptable view, from one who is already a political or a social or a business or a competitive enemy, in any theatre, has come to be deployed as a ‘conceptual bullet’ with which to attack that enemy, irrespective of whether the ‘opinion’ or even a single ‘word’ was uttered in malice, or in ambivalence or in a mis-understanding, or in a moment of nervous self-defence. The new ‘league’ of ‘freedom fighters’ has taken up the cause of ‘opposition to all forms of violence’, for example in public institutions. Raised voices, angry words, impatience and especially threats of any kind are considered sufficient for ‘security personnel’ to be brought into the scene, for the protection and safety of everyone. Domestic violence, for example, continues to call law enforcement personnel, and their formerly meager if any formal training in preparation for such calls, in a growing number of instances, in North America.

The women, and all of the data demonstrates that men are the perpetrators of almost each and every incident of domestic violence, are, in those instances, being oppressed, by what most can and would agree are oppressors. Power sharing, as a model of ‘working things out’ has failed, and the reasons for this breakdown are both numerous and complex. In saying that, we are not excusing or even hinting at tolerance for such domestic abuse. Those who have suffered physical, emotional, psychological and separation abuse in childhood, after decades of re-opening that chapter of their lives, know, in many cases, that their abusers are/were/continue to be extremely troubled, and that trouble, in many instances is deeply buried in self-loathing. While it is a cliché to say ‘hurt people hurt people’…it is a cliché because it is true.

Oppressors, too, come out of political and ideological ‘training’ and ‘brain-formation’ that deeply embeds fictions like the fiction of eliminating fascism from Ukraine that has and does grip the Russian tyrant. There is clearly a blind-spot in his psychic memory and cognitive apparatus that denies both history and contemporary Ukraine, whose leader is a descendent of Holocaust victims. The word ‘fascism’ is now so currently ubiquitous in public parlance, that anyone who attempts to seek and control others is instantly dubbed a fascist. A recently deceased infamous and yet highly successful and for some, even more highly inspiring, basketball coach in the NCAA, Bobby Knight, used profanities, threw chairs at a ‘blown’ referree’s call, and eventually was removed from his long tenure with the Indiana Hoosiers before moving to Texas Tech.

The current governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, from the eyes of the mayors of both Chicago and New York, is oppressing their respective cities with plane-loads and bus-loads of immigrants, whether legal or not, from the Texas border. And, in line with that perceptions, Abbott himself is accusing the President, Joe Biden of oppressing his state with borders that have been over-flowing with thousand of wannabe American citizens, all or most of them escaping another level of oppression from their own native countries in Central and South America.

We all share a  ‘western’ cultural identification of a person’s name with both our worst examples of public action and attitude, and our determination to attach responsibility to  the name of an obvious ‘enemy’  for anything and everything that is ‘wrong’ (from our perspective) in our world.  It is not incidental to note that  the United States is, and has been for decades, if not from the beginning of the American war of independence, co-dependent on guns, not only literally but also, and more seriously, as a metaphor of the power they need to ‘defend and protect’ their families. It is ironic, too, that a nation so co-dependent on guns (illegitimately justified by the Second Amendment, a rational for an independent militia, in a long-past historic time) has become the victim of its own oppression. Having ‘set the fire’ of gun ownership as a personal right, (with now more than 300,000,000 guns owned by Americans) and then spread that ‘gospel’ around the world, under the banner of ‘protecting’ the national security of allies, while padding the revenue and the future of the military manufacturing industry in the United States, the Americans are then having to tamp down military violence in the rest of the world, as pseudo-mediator, when those very violent uprisings, invasions, terrorist plots and assassinations are often accomplished with American weapons. The blood of the Americans is on every one of those devices! And, simultaneously, while trumpeting the pursuit of freedom at home and abroad, the Americans are both oppressor and oppressed at home.

The propaganda power and influence of the NRA (National Rifle Association) once funded by millions if not billions of volunteered cash, has so deeply instilled the ‘right to arms’ in every American home that even ‘stand-your-ground laws’ permitting their use in the event of a perceived threat have been passed and called into question in various states. Is there a parallel between the culture fixated on guns and a law-enforcement cadre, many of whose personnel are themselves dependent on the power both of their uniforms and the weapons that hang from their holsters? Is the killing of many black and minority mostly men, by law enforcement, another example of the oppression of a cultural psychic, and social and cognitive conviction that weapons buy security? And, also is omIsrael now harvesting the deeply dark and demonic ‘beneficence’ of the American military support, every year for decades, including nuclear weapons, in a drama in which the benefactor is also, ironically and paradoxically, the oppressor?

And, continuing along that geopolitical meme, are Netanyahu and Putin both scheming with war, excessive and unjustified both in its inception and its extensive duration, to pave the way for a return of the now appeached, displaced, disgraced and indicted former U.S. president, in the hope that his re-election will benefit both of their nefarious plots at domination, of the Palestinians on the one hand, and of the Ukrainians on the other? And, is such a never-to-be-spoken conspiracy also being joined by Xi Jinping, to ‘dethrone’ the Americans and democracy itself from the pedestal it has say on for decades?

Oppression, in the form of corporate malfeasance, is also among our contemporary public issues, given the highly and richly funded campaigns to thwart all international efforts at taming the global warming and climate change ravages already confronting the planet seemingly everywhere. Fossil fuel corporations, including coal and oil and gas are deeply embedded in their pursuit of profit (justified again by their provision of well-paid jobs) while actively and demonstrably contributing millions of tonnes of toxic carbon dioxide into the shared and singular atmosphere.

As one of those children who, while physically and emotionally abused by an oppressor mother, (who also had considerable contempt for her deceased father and husband), and for many decades, failed to take note of the time and place of those incidents, (in the absence, both physically and supportively of my father), I can only too late better understand how his ‘emotional and physical absence’ offered a free and clear playing field for the oppression. And so, ironically, he too, perhaps involuntarily and with considerable impunity at the time, was an oppressor-enabler. Of course, legally and even morally and ethically, in our literal, empirical world, he never laid a hand on anyone, yet was an active (if passive) participant in the oppression. And to conflate ‘child abuse’ with oppression, is another of those ‘dots’ we are reluctant, if not defiantly refusing to connect.

How can we continue to fail to connect those dots?