Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears. Louis D Brandeis
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe. Frederick Douglass
Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. Frederick Douglass
We fight oppression and injustice with our comrades around the world. The Baader Meinhof Complex 2005 [Der Baader Meinhof Komplex] starring Moritz Bleibtreu & Martina Gedeck & Johanna Wokalek & Nadja Uhl & Simon Licht & Alexandra Maria Lara & Susanne Bormann & Bruno Ganz et al, director Uli Edel
You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him. Booker T Washington
We have to stop being divided and ruled by the fault-lines of religion and class and income-bracket and culture and country ... What we need is to stop cooperating with our own enslavement. David Icke
It may seem like the odds are stacked against us, but this is mere illusion. Great efforts have been made to suppress us, and to stifle out true power and potential, in order to control us. We’ve been conditioned into a state of perpetual apathy, distraction, fear and ignorance. We’ve been dumbed-down, brainwashed and misled. There has been an ongoing assault on our perception of reality, on our boundaries of possibility, and on our collective sense of self. Most importantly though, we have been divided. The oppression of the many by the few has only been possible because we’ve been manipulated into fighting amongst each other, over trivial differences such as race, gender, age and religion, to divert us from the fact that we’re all in the same boat – a boat which is rapidly sinking, and will continue to at an ever-increasing rate until we abandon our petty differences and preconceptions of each other, realise that we have the same enemy and start working together to take back responsibility and control of our own lives. John Nada, Wake Up Call
This system that seeks to enslave us is held together by the cooperation of ordinary people. ibid.
Our forefathers would think it is time for a revolution. This is why they revolted in the first place. They revolted against much more mild oppression. Ron Paul, US Senator
We do have common problems and common concerns. And above all, as Muhammad Ali has just said, we are all victims of the same system of oppression. And even though we may have different religious beliefs, this does not at all bring about a difference in terms of our concerns. Martin Luther King
You know my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled by the iron feet of oppression. There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November. There comes a time. Martin Luther King, Montgomery Bus Boycott speech December 1955
We must work passionately and unrelentingly for the goal of freedom, but we must be sure that our hands are clean in the struggle. We must never struggle with falsehood, hate, or malice. We must never become bitter. I know how we feel sometime. There is the danger that those of us who have been forced so long to stand amid the tragic midnight of oppression – those of us who have been trampled over, those of us who have been kicked about – there is the danger that we will become bitter. But if we will become bitter and indulge in hate campaigns, the new order which is emerging will be nothing but a duplication of the old order. Martin Luther King
Oppressed people deal with their oppression in three characteristic ways. One way is acquiescence: the oppressed resign themselves to their doom. They tacitly adjust themselves to oppression and thereby become conditioned to it. In every movement toward freedom some of the oppressed prefer to remain oppressed. Martin Luther King
To accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system; thereby the oppressed become as evil as the oppressor. Non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. The oppressed must never allow the conscience of the oppressor to slumber. Martin Luther King
The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people, but the silence over that by the good people. Martin Luther King
Eleven were killed. Hundreds more badly wounded. At least a hundred of the injured were women and small children. Peterloo struck old time radicals like Thomas Bewick with nauseated horror. Unnatural was the word which rang through the denunciations. Simon Schama, A History of Britain: Forces of Nature, BBC 2000
Thousands of people reacted to Peterloo by throwing themselves into campaigns of action. Crusades which they embarked on with religious fervour. Those that laboured for change did so now not only in secret political clubs, but in the light of churches and chapels. Their targets were unnatural institutions – the monopoly of the Church of England, the ban on Catholic voters in Ireland. In the manufacturing towns a hue and cry to have their own MPs ... In 1830 a new Revolution in France and a wave of violence in the English countryside meant the votes for change could not be postponed. The Whigs took office for the first time since before 1789 as the champions of reform without revolution. ibid.
Inequality and oppression were part of the natural order ordained by God. This was a class of staggering extremes. Robert Bartlett, Inside the Medieval Mind IV: Power, BBC 2008
A noble’s life was worth six times a peasant’s. ibid.
Serfs had to work on their lord’s lands ... For most serfs there was no escape. ibid.
Inequality was enforced by law. ibid.
For thousands of years there have been oppressors and oppressed; rich and poor; powerful and weak; and through all that time the first group have robbed the second. During all that time, too, people at the bottom have dreamt of a world where there would be no oppression but where people would live in peace without being robbed. Most of these Utopias were in heaven. The few that ever existed on earth were always in isolation from the real world.
In feudal times, there was less than enough to go round: nothing like enough, for instance, to feed everyone. If anyone was to progress at all from the lowest form of human life, they had to turn themselves into rulers, seize the land and steal a surplus from the people who tilled it. Obviously they could not do this as individuals. They had to band together into classes, to pool their resources with others so that they could more effectively rob the majority, or go to war with other rulers in other parts of the world. Paul Foot, The Case for Socialism 1990 ch1
It certainly was no good just thinking about a new society, or trying to attract others to it by example. Exploiters who amassed their power and wealth by robbing workers were not sentimental or namby-pamby about it. They would hold on to their wealth and power, if they had to, by force. They would never surrender that power and wealth, however intellectually or morally unjustifiable it was. It was up to the exploited class – the working class – to seize the means of production in a revolution. No one could do it for them. Socialism could not be introduced by Utopians, dictators, benevolent or otherwise, or by reforming intellectuals and politicians. The first precondition for socialism was that the wealth of society had to be taken over by the workers ...
While reforms are carried out in the name of workers by someone from on high, the muck of ages sticks to them. The hierarchies created by exploitation encourage even the most degraded and exploited worker to seek someone else whom he can insult and bully as he himself is insulted and bullied. In such circumstances, workers will take pride in things of which there is nothing to be proud: the colour of their skin, their sex, nationality, birthplace or God. These are selected for them by custom, inheritance or superstition, and have nothing to do with their abilities or characters. They are the muck of ages. How are they to be shaken off? Is someone else to do it for the workers? Or should they do it themselves, by organising their producing power, their own strikes, demonstrations and protests? ibid.
In Romania, the regime of Nicolai Ceausescu was briefly feted in the West because, allegedly, it challenged its Russian masters. Yet the Ceausescu regime had become a caricature of an exploiting tyranny. Ceausescu bent all his energies to storing up more wealth for himself, his family and his associates out of the surplus his government and secret police wrenched from the already impoverished Romanian workers and peasants. On his command, 80,000 people were forcibly moved from their homes to make way for the most grotesque and luxurious palace in all Europe. And this was merely the dictator’s second home! He selected from orphanages the cream of his secret police so that they could regard him and his wife as their Father and Mother. He sprayed them with privileges of every kind – the secret police were even better fed and clothed than the captains of industry. He published phoney statistics suggesting the economy was permanently growing and even rigged the weather reports. Workers’ resistance – such as the miners’ strikes in the early 1980s – was put down with the most appalling repression.
What Ceausescu did in Romania was only a more monstrous replica of what Honecker was doing in East Germany, Husak in Czechoslovakia or Zhikov in Bulgaria. Yet somehow socialists everywhere, duped by the old formulas of public ownership and ‘planning’, continued to pretend that these regimes were in some way ‘better’ or ‘more working-class’ than the regimes of the West.
The argument cut little ice with the oppressed people of Eastern Europe. On the contrary, as the repression and corruption grew, so the very notion of socialism, so repeatedly ascribed to the regimes themselves, became anathema. ibid. chapter 3