Oppression in History

"The great heights reached by men and kept, was not achieved by sudden flight, they while the others slept toiled upwards in the night". While Saint Augustine was directly referring to an uplifting of society, society will fall from great heights without constant toil. The failure to oppose of unjust laws doesn't merely allow things to remain the same over time, but causes a steady march into increasingly unjust laws. The acceptance of unjust laws allows [tyrants to] a structure that implements increasingly unjust laws until an intervening group pushes for reform.

A society tolerant of oppression can fall into a relationship referred to by Martin Buber as Ich-Es, or "I-It", where an individual or a small group would seen as an object to be used, and take utilized to meet an objective without regard to their welfare. It is difficult to understand how a large group can accept oppression from a smaller, even less powerful group without understanding the benefits offered to the oppressed.

In the late 1500's, England worked to conquer Ireland, and gain a legal right over her lands. England coerced the Lords of Ireland to give the rights of their lands to England in a program called "surrender and re-grant" with negotiations backed by military threats. The Lords had had all rights to their land, except that they weren't permitted to transfer ownership. In exchange for safety a pardon of dubious war crimes, the Lords were demoted from petit kings to English-style Nobles that were little more than managers of their ancestral lands. The Irish choose the limited power of their new titles rather than fight for the rights they previously had. Soon afterwards, the Lord Deputy of Ireland, an English representative for Ireland, ...

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...ssed reforms to transform the Congo into a model country. They built schools, hospitals, cured diseases, and passed economic reforms to develop the infrastructure. By the 1950, Congo nationalism had started to grow, and riots along with it. Belgium realized they couldn't control a country that was larger than itself from thousands of miles away, and they relinquished power in 1960.

History shows that unabated oppression creates a system of increasingly brutal oppression until they're pressured to reform. Even though the changes may be small and seemingly insignificant, over time they'll try to continue to increase what they can take from the oppressed until there's nothing more to take. Millions died in Ireland, and hundreds of thousands died in the Congo because too many people stood idle instead of fighting for an end to the unjust laws being forced on them.