I use oppressors quite loosely here. Let’s define it as anyone who has structural power over you and people of your class, race, nation or culture. What I mean to say is, we will not not looking at individuals here (such as a teacher versus their student, or one individual oppressor in the privileged class versus an individual oppressed slave in the colony), but rather at relations playing out between one class and the other — the oppressor and the oppressed.
Relations such as colonialism, fascism, imperialism and capitalism tend to deify the oppressor, making him into a sort of godlike figure who is infallible.
I don’t think I’m saying anything new just yet.
Capitalism teaches us to look up to billionaires — we consider they’ve “made it”, they are “successful” because they own billions. In capitalism, which is a system that incentivizes the pursuit of profits, the only measure of success is understandably how much money you have in your bank account, how much you’ve been able to accumulate — and not only accumulate, but idly possess; money that you need not spend for survival but can hoard for yourself, without ever returning it in circulation.
When billionaires rack up divorce after divorce, when they come out as being manipulative freaks, when they market a dangerous product that injures customers…somehow that is not considered as part of their measure of success (or lack thereof).
They’ve already won capitalism by being billionaires, which we take as a signal that they must have done something right in their life to get to this point. Everything indecent they might have done gets brushed aside as we truly believe that they must be good people (or at least have done something right) if they are rich.
Likewise in the colonies, in a system which is based on the capture of new territory and the exploitation of that territory, your success was determined by how many slaves you owned, how many plantations and mines you possessed, or even how much land you’d “discovered” for your country.
I can name several colonial figures (generals or businessmen) who received medals and commendations for conquering and exploiting territory: Colombus, Cortés, down to Thomas Robert Bugeaud (known for his role in the initial colonization of Algeria), Dr. Livingstone and Cecil Rhodes.
In their time, they were considered successful men, much like we consider our Jeff Bezoses and Elon Musks successful : they were upright, respectable figures who advanced the nation’s designs. That they massacred thousands in doing so is only a detail.
This is by design, of course. Just like our billionaires, blemishes are secondary to the ideal person the State promotes, the one it needs to advance its interests. The one it wants you to be.
A literal personification which is reduced to a single trait: the conqueror. The profiteer. The exploiter.
The human still exists in his personal relations, but not in his relation to the State. Relating to the state, people are simply resources to serve a purpose. They advance the economy by toiling; they discover new land to conquer; they are placed to expand or shrink the government as needed.
Several authors have already pointed out how colonialism dehumanizes both the colonizer and the colonized, but I think it’s not solely colonization that does.
Any oppressive system does.
And perhaps this is made none clearer than by looking at the State of ‘Israel’. While Israel is a colonial state, it is specifically a settler-colonial state. In this form of colonialism, a population is transported to the colonized territory to replace and drive out the native population over time, settling over their lands in perpetuity (or attempting to). In comparison, “normal” colonialism understands that the colony is a colony, it is not a homeland, and the transferred settlers are there to serve the interests of the State back home; not create a new one out of thin air.
For years, we have heard that the IDF is the “most moral army in the world”. That it was the most “professional” army in the world. That Mossad is the most competent Intelligence agency.
October 7 shattered these lies into pieces in the span of a day. All we have seen come out of ‘Israel’s’ side since then is genocide, destruction, the killing of children, the maiming and killing of civilians for fun, and the settler-colonial plans they have for Gaza, turning an entire city into yuppie beach-front prime real estate. All of which the ‘Israelis’ gleefully upload to the Internet for the world to be horrified at.
I’ve talked before about settler psychology and that primer explains, for the purposes of this piece, how oppression dehumanizes the oppressor. He turns into a caricature of himself to serve the goals of the colonial State, being reduced to a simple, singular trait: the soldier. The killer. The torturer. The beast.
Less studied, perhaps, is the effect oppression has on the oppressed. History, after all, is written by the victors.
There can not be an oppressor without an oppressed, but not all oppressed people will live the exact same experiences. Some Palestinian children were killed before they had a chance at life and some are older than the State of ‘Israel’. Some Palestinians were driven to Gaza, others were born there. Some Palestinians live under constant bombings, others, in the West Bank, live through checkpoints, random night raids, and kidnappings.
Yet, they all carry within them the same kernel of trauma.
I’m not necessarily talking about the direct, conscious, willing actions the oppressor undertakes to try and dehumanize their victims (and thus demoralize and lower the resistance of the Palestinian people to make their colonial project easier and more palatable). Simply living in such a context, even if you yourself never had to interact with your opressor — as unlikely as that is — would imprint you with that trauma.
It is dehumanizing to be oppressed not solely because you are being oppressed and Man yearns — and deserves — to be free, but because it imparts on you this trauma and relationship to your oppressor. Whether you realize it or not, and whether you have experience it first-hand or not.
It starts from the moment you are told to keep quiet when the colonial thugs drive into your town.
It starts from the moment you are scolded for speaking up to a soldier in an outburst of annoyance because he could have shot you and your family.
It starts when you see your fellow countryman lying in front of you, bruised and killed by the settler for not showing him the proper reverence, and your village treating it as a banal happening — a terrible event, but one that is so common to them, that it’s the opposite that would have actually surprised them.
I talked a lot about Palestine just now, but such events and sights were common in occupied Indochina — especially Vietnam — and were all carefully written down for posterity by Ho Chi Minh:
“Under the title ‘Colonial Bandits’ our comrade Victor Meric has told us of the incredible cruelty of a French administrator in the colonies who poured molten rubber into the genitals of an unfortunate Negress. After which, he made her carry a huge stone on her head in the blazing sun, until she died.
This sadistic official is now continuing his exploits in another district, still with the same rank.
Unfortunately, such odious deeds are not rare in what the good press calls ‘overseas France’.
In March 1922, a customs-house officer at Baria (Cochin-China) all but sent an Annamese woman salt carrier to her death because she had disturbed his siesta by making a noise outside the verandah of his house.
The best of it is that this woman was threatened with the sack from the construction yard she was working on if she lodged a complaint.
In April, another customs-house officer who took the place of the above-mentioned official, proved to be worthy of his predecessor for his brutalities.
An old Annamese woman, also a salt carrier, had an argument with a woman overseer regarding the stoppage of part of her wages. On hearing the overseer’s complaint, the officer, without more ado, took it upon himself to give the carrier two stinging slaps in the face. While the poor woman was stooping to pick up her hat, the civilizer, not satisfied with the slaps he had just given her, furiously kicked her in the lower abdomen, immediately provoking a great flow of blood.
When the unfortunate Annamese fell to the ground M. Sarraut’s collaborator, instead of succouring her, called for the village mayor to carry her away. This worthy refused. Then the officer called in the victim’s husband, who was blind, and ordered him to take his wife away. The poor old woman is now in hospital.
It’s odds on that, like their colleague the administrator in Africa, our two customs-house officers were not worried. They might even have received promotion.”
He wrote in Le Paria on July 1, 1922.
It’s in this relationship that we come to consider our oppressors as superior, in various ways.
We might not even realize we are even holding them to a lower standard than we do ourselves, glossing over their faults, and refusing to criticize them for various reasons.
Subconsciously, we are there dehumanizing ourselves. When we refuse to take a clear, solid line on such an oppressor, when we choose to tip-toe around “Yes, he’s done bad things, but…” we are dehumanizing ourselves. We are giving rationale to things which are admittedly not humane.
If we ignore class for a moment: look beyond our classification as oppressor and oppressed, and we hold that we are all humans amongst ourselves, that we are all of the same species, of the same brain and organs, of the same capabilities, emotions, skills and potential, then we can come to only one conclusion: the oppressor dehumanizes himself (by carrying summary punishments and torture for the slightest transgressions). And the oppressed is dehumanized through this treatment and through this relation with their oppressor.
Breaking free from the mold of oppression requires us firstly to recognize that our oppressors are not infallible, and it’s a big first step. We are taught, in one way or another, that our oppressors are always right as our superiors — after all, how else would have they achieved to become our oppressors if they were not better than us —, that they deserve your respect on this ground, and that it would be folly to try and upset the balance (the balance that plays in their favor) as they have all the guns, the soldiers, the wealth, the training, the experience, the allies… and you have nothing.
But they make mistakes too. They make mistakes all the time. They made many mistakes on October 7 and after. They made mistakes in Indochina. They made mistakes in China. They made mistakes in Cuba, in Russia. Beyond the dehumanization they inflict on themselves, oppressors remain humans and are not always right and correct in the way they go about things. The “crime” of Hamas — and of all maligned national liberation movements — is perhaps not to have dared take up arms against ‘Israel’; it’s that they dared proclaim their oppressors will not rule over their mind any longer, that they have outwardly and loudly rejected the premise of letting their oppressors inflict this fear upon them, and let Palestinians believe for one more moment that ‘Israelis’ are infallible.
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