Oppression is for Cool Kids

Here we see the latest victim in the eeeeeevil fascist Bush’s war against dissent in his never-ending quest to implement a fascist state.

It rocketed across the Internet a week ago, a startling newspaper report that agents from the US Department of Homeland Security had visited a student at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth at his New Bedford home simply because he had tried to borrow Mao Tse-Tung’s ‘’Little Red Book” for a history seminar on totalitarian goverments.

The story, first reported in last Saturday’s New Bedford Standard-Times, was picked up by other news organizations, prompted diatribes on left-wing and right-wing blogs, and even turned up in an op-ed piece written by Senator Edward M. Kennedy in the Globe.

Wow, that’s pretty bad, huh?  I mean, I have a copy of the Little Red Book, and even a statue of Chairman Mao, on display on a bookshelf in my apartment.  This concerns me greatly.  Are Bush’s fascist stormtroopers going to be kicking down my front door soon?

But yesterday, the student confessed that he had made it up after being confronted by the professor who had repeated the story to a Standard-Times reporter.

The professor, Brian Glyn Williams, said he went to his former student’s house and asked about inconsistencies in his story. The 22-year-old student admitted it was a hoax, Williams said.

‘’I made it up,” the professor recalled him saying. ‘’I’m sorry. . . . I’m so relieved that it’s over.”

What?  A left-winger lying about being oppressed?  What… what… what the hell is the world coming to?

Williams said the student gave no explanation. But Williams, who praised the student as hard-working and likeable, said he was shaken by the deception.

‘’I feel as if I was lied to, and I have no idea why,” said Williams, an associate professor of Islamic history. He said the possibility the government was scrutinizing books borrowed by his students ‘’disturbed me tremendously.”

I’ll tell you exactly why he did it, because this is a point I have made repeatedly for years.  The left views the world in terms of two groups, oppressors and the oppressed.  There is no middle ground, you are one or the other.  If you’re a middle class working Joe, you’re still an oppressor, because you buy products at Wal-Mart and other stores, and they’re made in Guatemalan sweatshops, where peasant labor is used.  Thus, by being a middle class consumer, you are unwittingly an oppressor.  The only people who aren’t viewed as oppressors are the very people who make this accusation, the radical lefties. 

So, if you are not an oppressor, you are therefore oppressed.  And who does the oppressing?  The powerful, the elite, the capitalists, the fascists, the government.  If your self-image and self-esteem depend on your identity as a member of the oppressed class, especially if you’re a radical lefty fighting against these classes, then the more oppressed you are the more important you inherently appear.  In other words, the more the powerful elites try to silence you, the more righteous your cause seems, because after all, why would the powerful elite try to silence someone unless they were speaking the truth?

This is a technique Michael Moore has turned into an art form, and his followers lap it up like cream.  (Well, organically-grown soy cream.  Anyone who drinks real cream is an oppressor of our animal equals.) Note the manufactured controversy when Disney refused to distribute his film.  Mikey claimed that the corporate elites at Disney were trying to “silence” his message in an election year, when the truth of the matter was that they had told him a year prior that they weren’t going to distribute it.  But the plan worked, and the false controversy made the front page of the New York Times, thus drumming up immeasurable levels of publicity. 

So why did this student lie?  Because, by doing so, he immediately elevated his status in the eyes of his professor and his peers.  In previous generations this student might have lied about the number of girls he slept with or how fast his car went or how high his GPA was or some other generally accepted measure of status.  But today, in the halls of left wing academia, it’s all about oppression.  The more you’re oppressed the more important you are.  Remember that black college professor who spray-painted racial slurs all over her own car, then claimed victim status?  Same dynamic at work.  When you’re a victim you’re oppressed, and when you’re oppressed you’re important and righteous.

The problem is that, despite the rhetoric we hear so often from the left, America is one of the least oppressive places in the world.  Without this actual oppression the left begins to collectively wonder what’s going on.  Aren’t we important?  Isn’t our message threatening to the fascist elite?  So they manufacture it, because the truth should always be subjugated to the higher moral purpose of increasing the status of the message and its messengers.

It’s worthwhile to note that this subjugation of the truth has been the hallmark of every totalitarian dictatorship in the history of mankind.  But somehow I doubt the lefties will be intellectually honest enough to admit that.