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Quote of the Day: Side of the Oppressor
“Silence in the face of injustice is complicity with the oppressor” — Ginetta Sagan
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” — Desmond Tutu (more recent quote)
Young lefties are very into this stuff when they are talking about Trump and racial injustice and so on, but recently I made the connection to liberals of my parents’ generations who think SJWs are crazy but are not speaking up about it because they don’t want to be called racists. I think there are a lot of people in this category. They are hoping it will all blow over, but I fear it will not. I wonder what would be different if they shared their opinions more. I recently got into it on Facebook.
Parental Friend: My parents certainly weren’t hippies, but they were longtime liberal Democrats, anti-Vietnam and pro-Civil Rights; my mom took me downtown to see Martin Luther King speak when I was a kid. So we had a lot of the same political concerns. Today’s parents are as concerned as their kids are with such issues as racism and sexism, but most people over 30 roll their eyes whenever cultural appropriation is mentioned. We’ve spent our whole lives wearing ethnic clothes, eating sushi, doing yoga, and singing the blues. Nobody’s going to guilt-trip us into stopping.
Serif: I wonder why I don’t see more liberal pushback if everyone over 30 rolls their eyes over this stuff. Hoping it will disappear after they have more time to grow up? I doubt it.
Parental Friend: They don’t push back because it’s too easy to get a “racist” label these days if you speak out. People just keep their mouths shut and keep doing what they’re doing, in hopes that the fad will pass.
Serif: Yeah, that confirms what I figured.
Published in General
PARENTAL FRIEND – NAILED IT !!
We oldsters just unload when we’re together with other “safe” people. Yes. We hope it will blow over. Something’s going to go down hard and they’ll be a great sobering up as to what you need to whine about.
Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu, the Anglican Primate of southern Africa, today described the Russians as allies in the international campaign to end apartheid and said the Soviet Union had no selfish interest in the Southern African region.
”When someone gives you water because you are thirsty, you say thank you,” [Desmond Tutu] added. ”If you are given this water by a Communist, are you supposed to be so ungracious and ill-bred as to take the water and refuse to say thank you to your helper?”
[Link]
Not all of us have Desmond Tutu’s infinite ability to tell the good guys from the bad guys.
Boy, I thought the SJWs were wienies! These people need to grow up–why do they care what others call them? They were supposed to speak out against injustice in their younger days–and now they’re betraying everything they stood for back then by letting these young’uns act like fools and worrying about being called names. It’s a sad commentary. Thanks for the post, Serif.
Social Justice Warriors are the new oppressors. I’m speaking up about it right now.
This is an entry in our ongoing Quote of the Day Series. If you have a few quotations you might like to share and start a conversation with, you can sign up here.
Some ‘warriors’, these…Here’s a link to some actual ones. Thanks for this, Serif!
Courtesy of The Dersh:
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/1742/bishop-tutu-is-no-saint-when-it-comes-to-jews
Well, apart from the possibility that they might get called ‘racist’, what if their children no longer think they’re cool parents?
I agree completely with this. In fact, I feel this way.
Can you think of any comparable fads from ‘your day,’ as it were?
I blame the psychology movement for a lot of what’s happening out there. Yes, the way people think about other people has changed a great deal since I was a kid.
When I was a young person, the psychologists had made this brilliant discovery called “fulfilling the prophecy.” Their studies showed that when we labeled people “selfish” or “mean” or some other label popular at the time, the people eventually fulfilled the prophecy.
There began a great movement to get people to stop labeling people. It was a good thing. And as parents, we labeled the behavior, never the child. Society followed suit. It made sense to everyone. It also changed how we thought about people. We saw them as helpable (to coin my own word :-) ) and changeable.
Like people who are allergic to something but crave it, the very same psychologists busily developed massive people-labeling systems, even though they knew it was a bad idea.
The left is using these destructive labels because it shuts down debate instantly. We’re all afraid of being labeled.
Excellent post. You must be in the running for the brightest person in Waltham. :)
Well, at least the Waltham of my day.
Those today who do the labeling don’t just do that. They start Twitter campaigns against their enemies, they run them out of their livelihoods and sometimes their homes, they demonstrate on their lawns. Sometimes they start riots, and put their enemies in the hospital. How many black-owned businesses were destroyed in the aftermath of “Ferguson”, by the then-new “Black Lives Matter” movement?
The old left said “Come the Revolution” and “up against the wall!”
The Clash incorporated the Taxi Driver line in Red Angel Dragnet: “Someday a real rain is going to come…”
But who will be the rainmaker? And revolutions have a dangerous tendency towards everyone ending up against the wall, including the original revolutionary vanguard. Robespierre was rendered speechless by the kiss of Madame La Guillotine.
Years ago during my doctoral studies, a fellow graduate student lamented that a social revolution had not yet swept America. I told her that if such a revolution ever comes, she wouldn’t like the result.
Weird — I was going to go back and find that Dershowitz/Gatestone article about Desmond Tutu to re-post (anew) here in the thread, and lo and behold find that my earlier (02 Dec 2017) posting of same in another (related?) thread was somehow carried over (along with several other folks’ comments of similar vintage) to the initial set of comments in this new thread.
Is there some kind of “chaining” in the Ricochet site code that does this? I’m not upset, incidentally, but I *am* kind of taken aback.
This thread was started last December. It was just promoted late yesterday, which explains why it is suddenly active again, since it is at the top of the Main Feed. When a conversation is promoted, the date is reset.
The other change influencing younger generations is of course when the news doesn’t stop at reporting of events without expanding into a point of view by adding selectively-chosen “background.” Take for instance the recent story that the royal family had a baby the other day. That was accompanied by propaganda on how in the U.S. a couple would have to pay X amount for that, plus (horrors!) they would not have paid family leave afterwards, unlike in the other country. OK, maybe that’s a fact but it is 1) irrelevant with royals who don’t work anyway and 2) void of balanced analysis of total health care systems or their true costs. So here comes another label: Complain and you are called a “threat to the free press,” which has become entitled to operate without balance.
Just a nit: royals work very hard, indeed.
@iWe
royals work very hard, indeed
I suppose I stand corrected in part, but they don’t have to compete for that work, or operate with much fear or performance reviews, automation, or layoffs. The press doesn’t get readers thinking about that, or how many of them can everybody else afford.
True for now, and for this particular royal family. But you only have to go back a hundred years to see that for royalty, performance reviews can be quite harsh. Just ask Kaiser Wilhelm or Czar Nicholas II. Heck, just a few years before them, an Austrian Archduke got a bad performance review also.
I’m pretty sure that social revolutions have swept America on several occasions. Just not the one she wants. The one she wants would result in Utopia; which is to say a dystopian socialist hellhole beset by poverty and despair. That social revolution has only swept California.