The man of ease, who, by his warm fireside,
To deeds of charitable intercourse
And bare fulfilment of the common laws
Of decency and prejudice, confines
The struggling nature of his human heart,
Is duped by their cold sophistry; he sheds
A passing tear purchance upon the wreck
Of earthly peace, when near his dwelling’s door
The frightful waves are driven – when his son
Is murdered by the tyrant, or religion
Drives his wife raving mad. But the poor man,
Whose life is misery, and fear and care;
Whom the morn wakens but to fruitless toil
Who ever hears his famished offspring scream;
Whom their pale mother’s uncomplaining gaze
For ever meets, anti the proud rich man’s eye
Flashing command, and the heartbreaking scene
Of thousands like himself: – he little heeds
The rhetoric of tyranny. His hate
Is quenchless as his wrongs: he laughs to scorn
The vain and bitter mockery of words,
Feeling the horror of the tyrant’s deeds,
And unrestrained but by the arm of power,
That knows and dreads his enmity. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab
There is no escape – man drags man down, or man lifts man up. Booker T Washington
You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him. Booker T Washington
King Arthur [grabs Dennis]: Shut up! Will you shut up!
Dennis: Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system.
King Arthur: Shut up!
Dennis: Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system. Help! Help! I’m being repressed! Monty Python and the Holy Grail 1975 starring Graham Chapman & John Cleese & Terry Gilliam & Eric Idle & Terry Jones & Michael Palin & Neil Innes Connie Booth et al, directors Terry Gilliam & Terry Jones
The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression. W E B du Bois
If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost. Michel Foucault
Bras are a ludicrous invention; but if you make bralessness a rule, you’re just subjecting yourself to yet another repression. Germaine Greer
There are men – now in power in this country – who do not respect dissent, who cannot cope with turmoil, and who believe that the people of America are ready to support repression as long as it is done with a quiet voice and a business suit. John Lindsay
As a tactic, violence is absurd. No-one can compete with the Government in violence, and the resort to violence, which will surely fail, will simply frighten and alienate some who can be reached, and will further encourage the ideologists and administrators of forceful repression. Noam Chomsky
My own feeling is that one should refuse to participate in any activity that implements American aggression – thus tax refusal, draft refusal, avoidance of work that can be used by the agencies of militarism and repression, all seem to me essential. Noam Chomsky
Killing is just superficial; it’s just the icing on the cake. I mean there’s plenty of repression short of killing. And it’s tough. People lose their jobs, they get blacklisted … There’s all kinds of ways of getting rid of people who are troublemakers from kindergarten up. And organising succeeds when people are willing to face those pressures and overcome them. And it’s hard to know what the secret is; sometimes people do it … For us it’s a picnic; what we call repression, in most of the world would be called a gift. I mean, go to a place like El Salvador and try to organise there; there it’s not a matter of they don’t like you; you end up in a ditch cut to pieces after torture – that’s what it means to organise there: they still do it, they keep coming back. Noam Chomsky, lecture Deterring Democracy, 1992
The Colombia operation illustrates other facets of the drug war. The military aid program for Colombia finances murderous and repressive elements of the military with ties to the drug business and landowners. Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy
On September 3rd, two days before President Bush’s dramatic call to battle, the army and the Department of Security Administration (DAS) ransacked homes of peasants in one region, arresting forty laborers ... In Medellin, seventy activists and civic leaders were arrested in poor neighborhoods. Elsewhere at the same time two union leaders, one an attorney for the union, were assassinated and another disappeared. ibid.
The result of the prevailing misery has been violence, including la Violencia of the 1940s and 1950s, which took hundreds of thousands of lives. ibid.
The repression launched by the Wilson Administration successfully undermined democratic polities, unions, freedom of the press, and independent thought, in the interests of corporate power and the state authorities who represented its interests, all with approval of the media and elites generally, all in self-defence against the ‘ignorant and mentally deficient’ majority. Much the same story was re-enacted after World War II, again under the pretext of a Soviet threat, in reality to restore submission to the rulers. ibid.
By very conservative estimates, Turkish repression of Kurds in the 1990s falls in the category of Kosovo. It peaked in the early 1990s; one index is the flight of more than a million Kurds from the countryside to the unofficial Kurdish capital, Diyarbakir, from 1990 to 1994, as the Turkish army was devastating the countryside. Noam Chomsky
What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing – the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation of others. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women
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
The spiritual master and head of state in Tibet is the Dalai Lama ... Even though the Dalai Lama is a man of peace, he speaks good English and is recognised for his statesmanship. He was refused an audience with Queen Elizabeth of Great Britain. However, the British Royal Family who have members that are active Freemasons greeted the leader of the murdering Communist Chinese government with a full state ceremony. Chris Everard, Illuminati II
The Free Tibet campaign is a worldwide movement of volunteers who wish to highlight the illegal killings and imprisonment of Tibetan people. The Free Tibet campaign displayed flags during the state visit of the Chinese premier in London. The Free Tibet flags were confiscated by British police officers. The peaceful protesters were often arrested and dragged away for no apparent reason; some were even assaulted and beaten by British police officers. ibid.
Sigmund Freud was quite correct to describe the religious impulse, in The Future of an Illusion, as essentially ineradicable until or unless the human species can conquer its fear of death and its tendency to wish-thinking. Neither contingency seems very probable. All that the totalitarians have demonstrated is that the religious impulse – the need to worship – can take even more monstrous forms if it is repressed. This might not necessarily be a compliment to our worshipping society. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great p247
They remained silent; afraid to trust their own intelligence, and the reason of this attitude was that they had to choose between the evidence of their own intelligence, and the stories told them by their masters and exploiters. And when it came to making this choice they deemed it safer to follow their old guides, than to rely on their own judgement, because from their very infancy and they had drilled into them the doctrine of their own mental and social inferiority. Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist
All they desired was to be left alone so that they might continue to worship and follow those who took advantage of their simplicity, and robbed them of the fruits of their toil; their old leaders, the fools and scoundrels who fed them with words, who had led them into the desolation where they now seemed to be content to grind out treasure for their masters, and to starve when those masters did not find it profitable to employ them. It was as if a flock of foolish sheep placed themselves under the protection of a pack of ravening wolves. ibid.
I hate America very deeply. The economic repression of the masses institutionalised. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy s1e7
From a young age we’re taught fidelity to the system and to the state … In almost every industrialised country in the world socialist parties have huge representations … but in America everyone knows that being called a socialist or a communist carried an immediate negative connotation. Abby Martin: The Empire Files: America’s Unofficial Religion: The War on an Idea, Youtube 2015
In the late 1800s there was an intense battle between organised labor and the country’s industrial capitalists. ibid.
It’s been a real battle with real weapons. ibid.
Repression … was reinforced by hired gangs and lynch-mobs. ibid.
But with the new law every single union officer was required to sign an affidavit pledging that they did not believe in socialism. If you did not sign, you lost your job. ibid.
Under the Smith Act it was deemed illegal for anyone to be a member of the communist party. ibid.
The old guard will use every weapon in its arsenal. ibid.