Black history month has passed and gone. Pride month is in full effect. One wonders what marginalised group will be put on the chopping block, the next witch to be burned at the stake, the next symbolic month that celebrates their plight.
In Europe, the most discriminated group are the Roma people - also known as the “gypsies”, but arguably, antisemitism is on the rise - largely thanks to Zionism, but I’ve also heard “the Jews run Hollywood” one too many times this year. I’ve sort of gotten re-woke, because I’ve also realised that I’ve failed one of my rhetorical heroes.
I watch Vaush (yes, I know - booo) and he recently had a video about using the pejorative “orc”. If you check my comments, in various Ukranian communities, you’ll see I’ve used that word a couple of times.
It speaks to a deeper issuer and a problem that is hard to focus on, simply because enemy mentality is on the rise, humanism is being subverted by naturalism, nationalist fascism is en vogue again. People are paying lip service to the honour system in a time of law and contracts.
I am a Norwegian. The first part of our constitution is weird, because it juxtaposes two things that could arguably be seen as opposed - since the former is traditionally associated with naturalism. “We hold that this country has it’s values and morals in its Christian and humanist tradition.”
I am a humanist, but in calling Russian conscripts “orcs”, I abandoned this philosophy in a moment of catharsis. I have also been telling people to help Russians, that common Russians abroad should be empowered to oppose the Russian, nationalist regime. There’s some cognitive dissonance in these stances.
I’m often drawn back to Martin Luther King when he spoke on non-violent protest. So many people flip on MLK when their violent revolutionary pops out of their gonads, when people with melanin content of the skin start to talk about Malcolm X and his attitude towards violent oppressors.
These people almost always forget Malcolm X’s journey to Mecca and his change in philosophy upon returning to the US, but he was also assassinated shortly after, which means there is more media about Malcolm X before he went to Mecca than after.
But what he saw, despite rampant Islamophobia in the west, was all kinds of people praying and worshipping together, albeit not in the colours of the rainbow, but at the time it was something so diametrically opposed to what he had experienced in the US that it inspired and moved him deeply. One wonders what he could have said and done if his life wasn’t cut short.
When MLK talked about non-violent protest, his stance was to not dehumanise your opponent, that the act of dehumanization makes you no better than your opponent, that you’ve intrinsically sacrificed your principles to fight the thing you might ultimately become.
MLK’s rhetoric is still being taught in Norwegian schools, in both English and Norwegian language classes, studied for his powerful rhetoric. But I hope that his message and the philosophy of stoic humanism sets it’s seed in the young mind, and I hope more people can see why dehumanization makes monsters of us all.
Thank you for reading.
My English is limited so I’m not sure I understood this essay correctly but I think it says that one should treat every single person as a person and not as something else which is what I absolutely agree with.
In Ukraine the government, bloggers and journalists are trying to make people think Russians are basically no more than objects. If you try to share a different opinion on it there, you can get in serious trouble. It’s a very big problem. Same with ultraconservative racists. You do not treat anyone as an object or anything else except for a human being, no matter the reason.
For example, I do not agree that alternative sexual orientations are normal/healthy but it doesn’t mean I can treat people that (falsely) identify themselves as LGBT not human beings. In this case I consider it a disease so I should consider them not just as human beings but ones that need even more attention and care. Same goes to every person with a serious disease such as AIDS or schizophrenia (there are more causes of discrimination of them though).
The case of people with dark skin is even worse. I don’t even know what is the reason of them being discriminated. What I know is some of my relatives think that dark skin is an indicator of a person with increased chance of becoming a criminal. This is prejudice (that is obviously bad and inhumane but also instinctive I guess). Some other people probably discriminate them just to keep themselves privileged or “to be like the crowd” idk.
In any given case, after some analysis, we can clearly see that discrimination is always an immoral and ultimately bad thing. However, the immorality of it can just have various, sometimes not obvious, forms in different cases.
What we should do is change our mentality to delete stupid discrimination from it. As civilized and intelligent beings we should just be “above it”. This means we should think instead of simply using reactions (usually wrong ones) we already have. This can make us more resistant to evil propaganda and negative social trends, as well as help to delete already formed wrong things in our mentality too.
But tbh idk if this world can change. It’s getting worse all the time and I’m very depressed because of it.