Black history month has passed and gone. Pride month is in full effect. One wonders what marginalised group will be put on the chopping block, the next witch to be burned at the stake, the next symbolic month that celebrates their plight.
In Europe, the most discriminated group are the Roma people - also known as the "gypsies", but arguably, antisemitism is on the rise - largely thanks to Zionism, but I've also heard "the Jews run Hollywood" one too many times this year. I've sort of gotten re-woke, because I've also realised that I've failed one of my rhetorical heroes.
I watch Vaush (yes, I know - booo) and he recently had a video about using the pejorative "orc". If you check my comments, in various Ukranian communities, you'll see I've used that word a couple of times.
It speaks to a deeper issuer and a problem that is hard to focus on, simply because enemy mentality is on the rise, humanism is being subverted by naturalism, nationalist fascism is en vogue again. People are paying lip service to the honour system in a time of law and contracts.
I am a Norwegian. The first part of our constitution is weird, because it juxtaposes two things that could arguably be seen as opposed - since the former is traditionally associated with naturalism. "We hold that this country has it's values and morals in its Christian and humanist tradition."
I am a humanist, but in calling Russian conscripts "orcs", I abandoned this philosophy in a moment of catharsis. I have also been telling people to help Russians, that common Russians abroad should be empowered to oppose the Russian, nationalist regime. There's some cognitive dissonance in these stances.
I'm often drawn back to Martin Luther King when he spoke on non-violent protest. So many people flip on MLK when their violent revolutionary pops out of their gonads, when people with melanin content of the skin start to talk about Malcolm X and his attitude towards violent oppressors.
These people almost always forget Malcolm X's journey to Mecca and his change in philosophy upon returning to the US, but he was also assassinated shortly after, which means there is more media about Malcolm X before he went to Mecca than after.
But what he saw, despite rampant Islamophobia in the west, was all kinds of people praying and worshipping together, albeit not in the colours of the rainbow, but at the time it was something so diametrically opposed to what he had experienced in the US that it inspired and moved him deeply. One wonders what he could have said and done if his life wasn't cut short.
When MLK talked about non-violent protest, his stance was to not dehumanise your opponent, that the act of dehumanization makes you no better than your opponent, that you've intrinsically sacrificed your principles to fight the thing you might ultimately become.
MLK's rhetoric is still being taught in Norwegian schools, in both English and Norwegian language classes, studied for his powerful rhetoric. But I hope that his message and the philosophy of stoic humanism sets it's seed in the young mind, and I hope more people can see why dehumanization makes monsters of us all.
Thank you for reading.