The liberal as oppressor and victim

The way in which liberal intellectuals try to impress their audience is rather paradoxical. They humiliate themselves and consider themselves to be very reprehensible. They constantly shout: 'We are oppressors! Unjust! Egoists! Shame on us!' They have a sense of eternal guilt about the wrongdoings of their early ancestors, and they don't want to hear anything about their good qualities. Even today they consider the West objectionable and reprehensible, guilty of all the suffering in the world.

At first sight all this seems very modest, but the tricky thing is that all these manifestations of guilt are at the same time a way of showing off. The liberal says: `Look here, how an evil oppressor I am!', but his real and hidden message is: 'Look here, how civilized I am, confessing my guilt. I am not that bad at all! On the contrary, strictly speaking I'm good and only those who deny their guilt are really bad.'

By loudly proclaiming his wickedness, the liberal proves how virtuous he really is; his guilt changes into moral superiority. The man who cries that men wickedly oppress women, tells at the same time that he isn't really one of them. His fellow men are oppressors, he himself is a good guy. The white man who cries that white people oppress their coloured fellow citizens, says at the same time: 'I don't belong to the oppressors, I am a good guy.'

Good by being bad, that's the liberal as oppressor. If he is lucky, the liberal can gain moral superiority not only by playing the role of oppressor, but also by playing the role of victim: homosexual, black, woman, disabled. As a victim he is virtuous in a different way: not by confessing his guilt, like the oppressor does, but solely by being a victim. He doesn't have to do anything but being a victim of oppression; that's enough to gain moral superiority.

The oppression the victim pretends to suffer doesn't exist, and so he is permanently looking for evidence of his oppression. It doesn't matter how faulty this evidence is: the intellectual as an oppressor will accept anything as proof of his own wickedness. He even helps searching for evidence. This gives him a kind of perverted pleasure: it's a way to demonstrate his goodness. The oppressor and the victim are each other's necessary complement. The oppressor needs the victim to demonstrate the wickedness - that is: the goodness - of the oppressor. In his turn the victim needs the oppressor, because the oppressor is the only one who will acknowledge him as a victim. That is: he is the only one who will recognize his moral superiority. The oppressor and the victim live in a symbiotic relationship; a crosspollination of goodness occurs.

The liberals play different roles at the same time. Some only play the role of victim: a black lesbian woman in a wheelchair for instance is a fourfold victim. Others only play the role of oppressor: a healthy white heterosexual male is a fourfold oppressor. Many liberals play both roles. A white woman for instance: as a woman she plays the role of victim, and as a white she plays the role of oppressor. Here we see two souls living in the same chest.

There are also people who don't wish to play their predetermined role: they refuse to play the game. The man who is predetermined to play the role of oppressor, but refuses to play his part, is banned from the intellectual community. He is called 'reactionary' or 'fascist'. One could think he's a threat to the system, but that is not the case. On the contrary, the oppressor needs the reactionary as badly as he needs the victim. The wickedness of the reactionary confirms the goodness of the oppressor who confesses to his guilt.

Then there is a special category: those who faithfully play their victim-role, but refuse to play their part of oppressor. For instance: a white homosexual man who as a homosexual plays the role of victim, but refuses as a white male to play the role of oppressor. He is half good, half reactionairy. The liberal gets very confused by this kind of person: they don't fit into his system.

But the liberal gets really scared by the people who are predetermined to play the role of victim, but bluntly refuse to do so. This way, the oppressor loses his necessary complement, and so he loses his ability to demonstrate his goodness. This can cause an existential crisis. The victim also loses ground: he turns out to be an ordinairy fraud. For instance: the Asians in the West are by the colour of their skin predetermined to play the role of the victim, but they bluntly refuse to do so. Margareth Thatcher, who never spoke a word about the 'disadvantaged' position of women, is another example. These people, who don't play the rules of the intellectual game, scare the hell out of the liberal. The only thing left to do is: pay no attention to these people and hope that nobody else does.

Bart Croughs

Webmaster: P.A. Croughs

This document was created with the assistance of
WebMania!™ 1.5a (Unregistered) - ©1995,96 Q&D Software Development - http://www.q-d.com