Are you oppressed or an oppressor? We in Ireland often like to think of ourselves as the former (800 years and all that), prompting Prof Liam Kennedy to sarcastically ask in his book Unhappy the Land whether the Irish are in fact the MOPE (ie most oppressed people ever). Today, though, someone from abroad, perhaps a citizen of the Global South, might look at our successful role in the global capitalist system and ask when did the Irish change sides.
Most of us would deny that the country’s efforts to pull itself up by the bootstraps now mean we are oppressors. But our embrace of globalisation has seen us benefit from a series of systems that, in many parts of the world, are experienced as exploitation. As Dr Jack Davy writes in the opening to his new book We, The Oppressors:
“Oppressors are cruel and deny people their rights; they imprison, torture and murder people, and they do it for their own gain. They steal and cheat and kill. Maybe they enjoy it. We are not like them. Our families are not like them. Except that, without meaning to or realising it, we often are.”
It is a challenging claim and one that plunges Dr Davy, a senior research associate at the University of East Anglia in the UK, into a series of often heated debates that in sum constitute today’s culture wars.
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But topical though it is, his contribution to this discussion must go down as a swing and a miss. He gets off to a good start, setting out some interesting ideas in his introduction. But too often in chapters there is a jarring shift from a selection of historical examples to sweeping conclusions that the author might think prove his thesis but in fact only expose the failure to undertake the hard yards of demonstrating how he got there. In going for a sweep he has sacrificed depth. So in a book that abounds in examples of oppression, its fundamental drivers remain largely opaque.
An early and persistent problem is that Dr Davy never makes clear if he is tackling global systems of oppression or those within individual societies. Or, if it is both, show us how these interact. The “We” of the title is something of a mystery. Much of the focus is on the historical crimes of the US and Dr Davy’s own UK.
But he also provides plenty of examples of oppression within these societies to leave the reader wondering who he thinks should be shouldering responsibility for their misdeeds abroad. We might hazard a guess that it is white Christian men but, while race and gender are given plenty of space, class is woefully under-explored, which is strange given the book is alert to the potential oppressiveness of even “managed” capitalism. Is the English working class another victim of its country’s elite? Or must it share responsibility for its crimes of imperialism and capitalist exploitation? If the latter, how did the elite achieve this complicity and how is this pact maintained?
Questions like these hover over the text but are never really tackled in it.
Another issue is the book primarily focuses on the West. But there are also chapters on the horrors of Maoism in China and the oppressive theocracy of the mullahs in Iran. So Dr Davy is not blind to the reality that for all his focus on the US and UK, other systems in other parts of the world can also be oppressive. Maybe in these increasingly reactionary times there is a need in the Anglosphere to restate some obvious if contentious historical truths. Genocide? Bad. Ditto slavery, imperialism, patriarchy and unfettered capitalism. They are all here, rightly damned and damnable. This is a book to make the anti-woke brigade turn puce, but might just help one or two of them rethink their sentimental attachments to shameful historical myths.
A deeper exploration of the role of exploitation in history is only mentioned in passing. Acknowledging that even indigenous societies that Europeans encountered in the New World practised oppression, Dr Davy writes “the networks by which people oppress one another are a human constant”. This seems a pretty important point that a book about oppressors might have been explored more. Is some degree of oppression baked into human civilisation, a trade-off demanded by the systems we build to protect ourselves from anarchy?
Dr Davy believes so and concludes: “This is the essence of oppression: to identify how much is healthy and how we as a society should moderate its effects while retaining its securities,” he writes in his conclusion. If only he had spent more time and effort exploring how we might do this.
