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Margaret Anna Alice's avatar

We are in the twilight described in the quote I opened “COVID IS OVER! … If You Want It” (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/covid-is-over-if-you-want-it) with:

“As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight. And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air—however slight—lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.” —Justice William O. Douglas

I recommend everyone familiarize themselves with Étienne de La Boétie’s prescient 1552 work, “The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude,” which I also quote in that piece:

“It is incredible how as soon as a people becomes subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and so willingly that one is led to say, on beholding such a situation, that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement. It is true that in the beginning men submit under constraint and by force; but those who come after them obey without regret and perform willingly what their predecessors had done because they had to. This is why men born under the yoke and then nourished and reared in slavery are content, without further effort, to live in their native circumstance, unaware of any other state or right, and considering as quite natural the condition into which they were born.”

de La Boétie offers the secret to escaping tyranny:

“You can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.”

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Sophia's avatar

Chilling to read this. My grandfather's sisters lived in Vienna during the war. Even though they weren't Jewish enough to get carted away, their Jewish last name made them fear they were potential targets. To be on the safe side, they burned family documents that showed the Jewish lineage in case the authorities broke into their home and snooped around. The history is there to learn from. So sad to see how soon people forget.

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