For any Establishment profiting off any status quo; the best way to protest injustice, is to shut the fuck up. It is to keep quiet, while you are being violated ad infinitum. It is to never entertain the thoughts of ever protesting.
For the establishment, there is no right way to protest. There is no good way to protest. There is no good place, or good time to protest. For them, the best protest, is no protest.
This is why the virulent and depraved racism of American white supremacy, is going bananas that Colin Kopernick is taking a knee at the National Anthem, in protest against the murder of Black men by American police.
Establishments are epicenters of power, wealth and privilege. They can be found across all facets of human endeavor. They could be confederations of iniquity; coalitions of prejudice; alliances of terror; institutions of State; or armadas of fanatical self-interest. Wherever they are found, they a confluence or a congress of interests. And they desire to subsist in being; by fossilizing into bureaucracies of hereditary mediocrity; managing power, on behalf of the elitist class, which has succeeded through any means, to corner power for themselves and their posterity, in a society.
Establishments dread change. They are control freaks. Anything they cannot control, they dread. That explains why most of them are suffocating conservatisms.
Since they dread change; any ripple of protest, is an existential threat to their privilege. The privilege that they were sired by, and marinated in, should never be allowed to escape their grasps; even if the whole world burns down to that end.
That was why Pharonic Egypt was repulsed by the independence agitations of the Jewish slaves; led by one of the Pharaoh’s sons, named Moses.
The Hebrew slaves, as has been recounted, and retold across generations of Jewish legends; were condemned to building Egypt her cities, financing her prosperity, funding her privilege; sustaining her leisure, and literarily kissing her ass. Remove that slave labour, and the central pillar scaffolding not only her riches and leisure, but the entire economic system; her opportunities for privilege and I may add, debaucheries, would all come tumbling down.
Egypt saw it as her divine right to enslave those. She never had a positive anthropology about them. No establishment thinks its slaves human. They invent fictions of Otherness, to justify their robberies and murder of those, too powerless to resist their marauding. Pharonic Egypt wouldn’t brook that affront on her privilege. She would kill to protect it.
Or die trying!
She had both coming,when she gave chase to the motley band of pilgrims enroute freedom. Pharaoh pursued that fleeing crowd; to the beaches of the Sea of Reed. There, the arrogance of oppression; suffered a mortal blow. Pharao‘s army drowned in the seas. That army perished; waterboarded by her greedy attachment to the profits of iniquitous inhumanity to fellow men.
Ancient Rome was decisively brutal in quelling rebellions. Any slave who dared think of protesting; would have the gory images of people, Rome crucified and their carcasses abandoned to the crows to feast on; harassing his waking hours, and stalking his sleep.
Imperial Rome also saw debauched emperors often lighting their garden parties, with the burning carcasses of human torches. Nero’s notoriety in this regard is nauseatingly sadistic. Nero’s nauseous pyromania, inflicted on people as punishment, prefigured the inquisitorial bonfires convoked off those accused of heresy, by the impious neurosis of the Christian Church.
The point is that the epochs, and times, and place are irrelevant. Establishments have the same DNA. They hate anyone who disagrees with the status quo, and seeks to change it. They hate protests. They hate protesters.
The American southern slave owners, were ready to fight a war, rather than let their African slaves go. They rose up and crushed the revolutions of Nathaniel Turner. They assembled an armada of strangulating privilege; and marched against the federal forces that had Abraham Lincoln as her Commander-in-Chief. They were ready to kill to sustain their privilege, or they would die trying. Both happened in no particular order.
They lost the civil war.
Only history and history‘s God knows, how many slaves were lynched, decapitated, quartered, castrated, lost their tongues, or tortured to death in slavery’s ghastly grottos; for daring to ask for their freedom; or that the massa stops raping his wife and daughters. Or that the massa loosens the yoke a bit?
Can you then imagine, what happened to those who protested their station? Tongues were cut off. Hands also. Many died with their privates stuffed in their mouths for daring to look the massa straight in the eye, when he talked to him.
Cast a look at King Leopold II‘s Belgian Congo. Those native Congolese, who dared to refuse harvesting rubber for Leopold‘s men, had their wrists hacked off; or had the wrists, or arms of their daughters hacked off, and advertised to break their resistance and protest.
France on the other hand, never wanted to let Haiti go. That was her wealthiest overseas colony. She was plundering that country like a congenital rapist; and stripping her off of the fruits of her land, and the labours of her hands. France never liked Toussaint l‘ Overture. He not only protested too much, or only harassed the deaf ears of imperial France. He actually took up arms to fight off the oppressors. The revolution succeeded. But Napoleon eventually sent an Army for his head. He was captured and taken to a prison in France, where he died. He committed the greatest crime in empire‘s consideration; namely, daring to challenge empire.
For any oppressor; for any profiteer, whose vocation is parasitically living off, and leeching on others; for any establishment or citadel of power; which subsists on stolen legacies; exploitation and plunder; NOT-protesting is the best way, they recommend to anyone, who desires to know how to handle his enslavement.
The establishment cherishes this dogma.
The establishment has never liked anyone who protested. They have always complained: He is too loud. He is too opinionated. He insults us. He is too violent. He is non-violent. Etc. Even when she is raping you, the establishment wants you to shut up. That she is committing violence on your frame and psyche, never comes home to her consideration. The perpetrator wants the victim to swallow his violence in silence. And if you cannot keep silent, they would hate you with a murderous passion.
Martin Luther King Jr. was so hated by the establishment, while he protested the injustice that was Jim Crow and racial Segregation.This hate was so murderous, that at last they murdered him. Memphis, Tennessee was the crime scene.
The establishment loves public execution of dissidents. It buys her two values, for the price of one. It decimates the dissidence by not only killing off the immediate manifestation of the resistance; it also advertises the brutal celebration of violence, to which it is capable, whenever it is opposed.
It terrorizes anyone foolish enough to dare a future challenge to her power or patience
This frightens. It overawes. It devastates the mental universe of the people. It freezes them in an immobility, that is difficult to shake off. The toxic payload of that terror, weakens every ability to cobble up any resistance. It shocks the people into acquiescence, as it yanks all rationality off their lives, and conditions them into a debilitating masochism that facilitates their rape, without any ability to resist. This is one of the reasons why oppressive structures last. This is the reason why the Transatlantic slavery lasted over four centuries. It advertises and dispenses terror.
Jesus, too was hated, for protesting the preferential option that the rich and powerful have always reserved for themselves, at everybody else‘s expense. He was hated for challenging the establishment. That hate was so murderous that at last they crucified him.
They left him hanging in between thieves.
Mahatma Ghandi was hated and designated as a rabble rouser; by a British establishment that was on a jamboree plundering India like there was no tomorrow. That hate percolated into even a section of oppressed Indians themselves; schizophrenic about whether Gandhi was emasculating or empowering them. So much so that at last, it executed the Mahatma. In public! Through Indian hands.
For those privileged by every rotten status quo; the best and only acceptable way to protest your life of slavery to their caprice; is to open your legs wide, and in silence; while they rape you.
That is slavery 101.
The only acceptable way to protest, from their perspectives is never to think about rocking the boat. That only way, is for the victim of oppression to continue in his role as a Dalit, in that inescapable caste. It is for him to continue as a slave without a chance of manumission. It is for him to continue, as Fela Anikulapo Kuti would have it, “suffering and smiling”.
It is for the slave never to disturb his massa’s digestion by protesting the indignity of his station. It is for him never to disturb his Massa‘s sleep contemplating an escape. It is for the oppressed to keep on bearing the yoke patiently, and peacefully for life everlasting. It is for those scalded by plunder; whose mouths are being grated on the floor, by the obscene debaucheries of the privileged, to kiss the boots of their slavedriver, whenever their mouths gain any respite from being used to wipe the floor.
Daring to think of escaping from your slavemaster, is a capital offence. Any attempt to raise your voice leads at best to castration. Or at worst; decapitation! Banding together with others of similar fate, to seek better deals for your kind, places a bullseye on your back. It nominates you a candidate for lynching. Informing or educating other slaves, gains you admittance into a non-grata status of deadly consequence.
For the establishment, the best way to protest injustice is to shut up. Or, to go tell it to Jesus alone!
You either go cry to your pillow; or you go to pray.
This is why establishments of power love religion; promote it and supports it. When you pray, you do that on your knees. Nothing designates a slave more than that picture of one on his knees.
Slave masters and thieves love it, when their slaves or victims are off their feet. You cannot resist, when you are off your feet. You are factually powerless. Your posture and biology ensures that. In that posture, you are passive. You can only be a receiver of any action, which the one on his feet, is ready to dish out on you.
Religion seems to embody, and to encourage a slave-master relationship. Look at theologies of every religion. Man abdicates, surrenders, abandons, abnegates, and submits himself and his will, to that of a higher Master. Can you define slavery once more for me?
Can you now see why power loves religion? Religion canonizes power. It divinizes it. It elevates it to the ontological level. Power reaches its highest point in the amphitheaters of religion. That is why religions define God as „Omnipotentia“- All powerful!
This is why Voltaire contended that anyone, who can make you believe absurdities, will make you commit atrocities.
Jewish scribes deployed religion to unwittingly justify Saul’s genocide. The Amalekites were slaughtered into extinction, at his orders. The court scribe, who probably authored those books of Samuel, sounded like a minstrel of cant; a sycophantic cheerleader, building up his tunes to cheerlead a new King. This new power in town is most probably David. And he was essaying to justify Saul’s overthrow by David, by building up a case, to convict Saul of disobeying God.
The case he built was a moral monstrosity; that is chilling in its psychopathology. In an attempt to diss the Ancien Regime that was Saul, he revealed the cold-bloodedness of the heart that loves power.
Many people are sold on that ancient hagiography; that God ordered him to commit mass murder against the Amalekites. Is it not seriously baffling, that a god, who is so brutal and bloodthirsty, as to command mass murder; could go ahead to whine about petty thievery?
How could a god, who could order genocide without compunction; be angered so much by a conquistador behaving like one? Is it not manifest schizophrenia; that the only thing that annoyed that sociopathic God, was not even that people were massacred, or that human blood was spilled. But that Saul stole?
According to the Bible;
His only annoyance was that Saul did what every conquistador and mass murderer of history has done; namely slaughtering the men; to appease his thirst for blood and territory; appropriating the women for his loins and that of his soldiers; and capturing the resources for his treasury.
In the eyes of this god, Saul became an outlaw, when he decided to appropriate the choice heads of Amalekitan Oxen, and herds. He lost God’s favour when he decided to follow the vocation of a conqueror to its logical conclusion. Does the whole narrative not sound like a schizophrenic hit-job, commissioned on Saul, by someone in a hurry to ingratiate himself with the new regime? It reads like a Hollywood serial killer flick; where a serial killer was so animal friendly, he kills people with unemotional economy; but could be seen crying that a dog is starving. For this psychopath, killing a human person is sport. But a starving dog is an unforgivable sin.
This is how Abrahamic religions anthropomorphize their God. They made him a schizoid personality; displaying the worst strains of schizophrenic psychopathology. To that end, when sociopathic idiots of the Abrahamic religions are committing genocide and murder; throughout history; they have always attributed it to their inglorious and bloodthirsty Gods, giving them victory over their enemies. We saw that in ancient Jewish history. We saw that in the medieval inquisition and the witch-hunts of Europe. We are seeing that in ISIS reign of murder in Iraq today.
Little wonder songs celebrating genocide like that of Psalm 136 v 10:22 are found in so many holy texts. Is that not the reason why scriptures across many religions are some of the bloodiest, most genocidal texts in world literature?
Totalitarianisms love religion too. They appropriate existing ones to their ends, or make themselves one.
That Constantine appropriated Christianity as the religion of Imperial Rome, is a move made to consolidate power. It was not actually the workings of divine designs, as Christian hagiographers would have us believe. That move was a classic instance of power conscripting religion for its own purposes. He did that to keep the fragile fault-lines in his domain under his control; in pursuance of self-perpetuation. He did that to keep the Hoi Polloi praying. That takes their eyes off the imperial debaucheries, and obscene privileges at court. Prayer and religion is deployed to give them answers to their queries on why they are poor. The answer is: it is God‘s will. And that forecloses any attempt at revolting against empire and emperor.
Many medieval emperors, Kings, Dukes and Duchesses towed this path. Many of them have “Defensor Fidei” emblazoned across their banners; while they were robbing lands; waylaying peoples, and oppressing their own peoples. Henry VIII was whoring to his heart’s content and decapitating his wives, as the head of the church of England.
The marriage between power and religion to keep the people from interrogating power, has been an eternal one, transcending cultures and places.
This explains why the debauched Sheiks of Saudi Arabia, would violate every tenet of Islam, whenever these royals are in Las Vegas, gambling and whoring to their heart’s content, while promoting a quasi-theocratic autocracy that is a dictionary definition of hypocrisy.
Not to be outdone in their unquenchable thirst for power, they build and decorate some of the most beautiful mosques and houses of Islamic prayer around the world. They do this so that the people, whom they are fleecing of every material advantage; would believe the nonsense that it is Allah that gives riches; and not an emplacement of social justice that creates an equitable society for everyone.
This is also the reason why Houphet Boigny after plundering Cote d Ivoire for many years could build the largest Church in the world in Yammoussoukro. So that the people he dispossessed and disenfranchised for decades could have a place to go and tell it to Jesus; instead of storming his Bastiles of his inglorious privilege, like the French did in 1789.
Establishments love religion.
Religion not only gives them a metaphysics of power; which canonizes their heist as of divine right. Little wonder the clergy belong to the estates of the Realm in feudal Europe. It also helps them in crowd control, while consolidating their epistemic totalitarianism over the people. Religion creates and peddles a slavish epistemology, which comports to the consolidation of privilege. It canonizes meekness and obedience to authority.
St. Paul wrote this out well in his letter to the Ephesians 16: 1ff: Slaves obey your masters as you would the lord. !!!
This is one of the most dastard destructions of human dignity, ever to grace the Holy writ. Some Exegetes will attempt a rationalization by claiming “sitz-im-leben”. That beautiful German phrase, meaning context; and used to denote contextualization in hermeneutics and exegesis. For these defenders of orthodoxy; Paul was a child of his times. And it would amount to an injustice, to judge him with parameters of another time.
To that I respond: he was pleading a religion that was to be relevant for life everlasting. So his appropriation of that authority to tell us that he was preaching a guy, who was the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and forever more; should have also endowed him with the prophetic clairvoyance,to know that slavery is evil no matter the epoch or times of history.
So for those who criticize people like Nnamdi Kanu for taking a stand that riles the establishment; they should remember that Martin Luther did not make friends with the Princes of the Church, and so many Kings of Europe, when he pinned his 95 thesis, at door of the Church in Wittenberg; decrying the simony and fleecing of the flock by the Church. The church like every other establishment, would have loved it, had he kept his mouth shut; and played along.
Since power is never given; no establishment will come to you, and hand over its privilege on a platter. And since every power is ontologically primed to corrupt its holders; if there are no checks; anyone whose ethical faculties is not a weathervane, knows that interrogating power at each turn is the only salvific lane for freedom.
Disobedience to tyranny remains obedience to God.
Gwazia ndi yard unu!
