By Al Jazeera English

The events in Tunisia, Egypt and other places like Albania, where we had our seminar only three months ago are happening so fast that it is hard to keep track. In case you missed the civil unrest, civil disobedience, people demonstrating against corruption, dictators, you can get some short summaries below.

 

But first, what is this all about? After all, one thing it certainly is about, is courage. We are talking in many instances, especially Tunisia and Egypt about dictatorships and the rule of fear – that is fearing anything that is not official doctrine because you or your relatives may be punished for voicing ‘wrong’ opinions, talking to ‘wrong’ people or somehow supporting ‘them’ either by trading with them, giving ‘them’ shelter, just being respectful towards ‘them’. ‘Them’ usually means political oposition but can also mean scapegoat groups, usually minorities like religious, racial, sexual minorities.

As I had to learn during my alternative civilian service in Germany a decade ago, minorities (in this case people with disabilities) also had hierarchies and grades of good and ‘bad’ levels of disabilities. For those interested part of this is called internalized stigmatization / discrimination.

This of course is not only true for disabled people but it is common for discriminated groups or in case of dictatorships, whole people. In these systems, courage in terms of authenticity is not valued highly by the government, conformity is much more favored, since it does not threaten the government and keeps a violent system stable.

To fight your own fear and stand up for your own belief and needs we need courage. So in which situations can we be afraid and need courage to stand up for ourselves? Modern societies and old ones as well provide us with many common roles we need to fight against. Here three examples:

  • slaves – they work for us and support us (can be the workers in the textile industry or in technological industries working for 60 hours per week or more for a bargain of money in unsafe conditions so we can buy our clothes cheaper, can be the low-paid streetcleaners which basically do earn less for hard work because their work is dirty and thus not respected to well [at least in Germany], can be the children working in the stores of their parents, can be women earning less for the same work [very common in Germany, where the average income for women for the same work is about 30% lower than that of men doing the same] and of course it can be the people with a skin-colour associated with negative attributes like dark skin was in the past and still is in many societies including societies mainly consisting of people with dark skin who then try to chemically bleach their skin or at least stay out of the direct sunlight)
  • jesters – they entertain us or are forced by us when we make jokes of them, laughing at disabled, old, gay, queer, blond, slow, very intelligent, beautiful, ugly people (really, the main category for this is mainly that they can be seen different and cultural violence maintains for these differences that it is acceptable and reasonable to be non-respectful). One of the worst parts is that if they then complain about the jokes being made at their cost, they are furthermore labeled as spoilsports, having a bad character, not understanding the joke (which boils down to being either stupid or asocial).
  • scapegoats – we put the blame, the hatred and disgust onto them and by that help us maintaining stability, because the problems within our society can then simply be blamed on them and the violent structures within society as a whole do not have to be challenged. These can be and often are the same groups, we use as jesters – actually making jokes about groups means devaluing them and that takes away empathy and understanding for their needs. That then can alienate these people from the majority and make it easy to use them as scapegoats because none of the majority will suffer directly from blaming them. Examples are religious groups, actually any kind of them, can be Christians, Muslims, Jews, whatever, they have likely all been blamed in the past – made easier because also in history most families usually shared the same religion. This is slowly changing and of course, due to this built history of scapegoating other religions and cultural violence maintaining the evil within these created huge rifts between members of the same families, villages, counties and countries.

For a lot of these situations it takes quite some courage and determination to even begin in small steps to question the role others force on oneself. First of all, even realizing that this is not what one wants or needs is the most important and often the most difficult realization – time and space for oneself to reflect and think about this is often rare for those oppressed and this is not an incident but it is often designed like that so that people do not think about that. Thinking about these questions would in many cases and for certain in dictatorial environments lead to thoughts of changing the system. And that threatens the established power and comfort of those at the top of the hierarchy.

When beginning to reflect that we are parts of power-systems, it becomes more and more evident that we all play a role in the social systems we are a part of. The main question to ponder about is do we want to have that exact role or would we rather prefer or need a different role to feel comfortable and able to live to our full potential as human beings!

Since this brings a social perspective, it brings both a task for us and a solution for this task:

The task: Create a way of living in society that enables everyone to live their potential and give them the possibility to satisfy their needs.

The solution: Protect and enable human rights for ourselves and others. Act courageous in the public so that it will lead to an improvement of the human rights of others (can but do not have to be in groups you are a member of) and inspire other people to do the same, thus changing the social system person by person. All these small steps of standing up for ones believes and needs require called moral courage.

And this is what can be seen right now by the people demonstrating on the streets for democracy (as a way of determining their future themselves and not have it dictated). This can be seen in the people in Cairo, Egypt standing on the Tahrir-square, escorting endangered journalists away if they are threatened by groups (as can be seen here for example, at about minute 1:40).

It is visible looking at the people in Albania demonstrating against blatant corruption of the political powers and for looking into claims of election fraud (though it seems that there this may protest may be used by the political opposition as a means to gain power themselves more than as an authentic support for the people of Albania). Some analysis and updates on the situation here and over here.

And by the people who started this recent chain of events from Tunisia. They managed to chase away their dictator (and thankfully they were not hindered by the military this time), inspiring social movements in many countries [and by that being banned from the news in other countries like China].  To quote two sources on the state of Tunisia and how it came to this situation:

“until January 2011 it also had one of the most repressive governments in a region full of police states, and levels of corruption among its elite that became intolerable once the economic malaise that has gripped southern Europe spread to the country, sending unemployment and public resentment skyrocketing.” [source: New York Times]

“Violent repression of protests over unemployment and lack of political freedom in the winter of 2010-2011 left dozens of people dead. But popular street protests continued and President Ben Ali went into exile in January 2011, his prime minister taking charge.” [source: BBC News]

More will have to be written on moral courage, especially on individual level but that I will have to leave for another article to write – for now I have still to prepare a presentation on the no-more-war group for the SCI German annual meeting. The following weekend the no-more-war group will meet in Milano, Italy for discussing our plans for this year, so I will be travelling a lot. Hope to bring some pictures from there :)

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