Showing posts with label abolitionist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label abolitionist. Show all posts

Wednesday 11 November 2020

A Just Struggle.

          Anyone with a rational and objective mind who takes a look at the system that we presently live under, will admit that it fails dramatically to produce fairness, justice or equality to any acceptable degree. Our society is riven with injustice, inequality and by any measure lacks fairness. The divide between those with power and wealth and the ordinary individual, is an unbridgeable chasm. Opulence, pomp, privilege, power and wealth sit cheek-by-jowl with homelessness, hunger, poverty and deprivation, creating a vision that makes a mockery of "democracy" and human decency.
         However we are naive in the extreme if we believe that those who exploit and oppress us will, through dialogue and peaceful protest, willing give up their power and privileged position and abandon their obscene wealth in an attempt to make society a fairer and more just society. They will use whatever means available to them, to protect their wealth, power and privileges, be it by passing laws, backed up by force, or blood on the streets.
       We have to accept that those who hold that wealth, and power which endows them with privileges are our oppressors, who work hard at maintaining the unbridgeable chasm. As oppressors we have to treat them as such, we can't ask them to please give up your wealth, power and privileges so that we have a fair society, it won't work. Perhaps we should think hard about the words of Frederick Douglass, escaped slave, abolitionist, writer, and orator.

        “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, and it may be a physical one, or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any 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 with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of whom they oppress.” -Frederick Douglass

         Only a revolution will replace this greed driven economic system that degrades the human spirit and breeds inequality and injustice. However, you can't buy a revolution, you can't make a revolution, you have to be the revolution, and a revolution will not come with a bunch of roses in its hand.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk