tag:theconversation.com,2011:/id/topics/political-oppression-30360/articlespolitical oppression – The Conversation2022-10-12T13:03:45Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1911582022-10-12T13:03:45Z2022-10-12T13:03:45ZRussia is enlisting hundreds of thousands of men to fight against Ukraine, but public support for Putin is falling<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489232/original/file-20221011-11-ighiyh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A military cadet stands near a billboard promoting army service in Saint Petersburg on Oct. 5, 2022.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/military-cadet-stands-in-front-of-a-billboard-promoting-contract-army-picture-id1243742974">Olga Maltseva/AFP via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Even as Russia <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/10/10/world/russia-ukraine-war-news">intensifies its attacks</a> on Ukraine, its military appears to be suffering <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/uk-would-expect-see-indicators-any-russian-nuclear-activity-spy-boss-2022-10-11/">setbacks</a> – from <a href="https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-putin-6ef2407371c67f0736459378833fab7a">mounting casualties</a> to dwindling military supplies.</p>
<p>The Group of Seven countries – the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom – convened an emergency meeting on Oct. 11, 2022 <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/russia-ukraine-updates-g7-leaders-say-will-hold-putin-to-account-for-missile-strikes/a-63399139">and condemned</a> Russia’s recent missile strikes on Ukraine. The latest onslaught began on <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63192757">Oct. 9, 2022,</a> targeting Ukrainian civilian infrastructure and multiple cities. That may indicate a more <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/11/politics/putin-rage-against-civilians-analysis/index.html">brutal phase</a> of the nearly eight-month-long military adventure.</p>
<p>But even before those attacks rained down on Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed his insufficient military strength and authorized a partial draft on Sept. 21, 2022 of <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-partial-mobilisation-will-see-300000-drafted-defence-minister-2022-09-21/">300,000 men</a> to help Russia sustain what many experts consider an <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/08/vladimir-putin-war-russia-draft-asylum-refugee-ukraine">illegal offensive</a>. So far, Russia reports that an estimated <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-says-over-200000-drafted-into-army-since-putins-decree-2022-10-04/">200,000 new fighters have been drafted</a> into the military. </p>
<p>The draft has triggered a new wave of discontent across Russia. <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/border-fear-then-relief-men-fleeing-russia-2022-10-05/">Hundreds of thousands</a> of Russians have fled the country. There have also been multiple violent <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-military-recruitment-centers-attacked-amid-mobilization-pushback-11664190066">attacks on</a> Russian military recruitment centers.</p>
<p>The Kremlin has worked to subdue <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/more-than-1300-detained-anti-mobilisation-protests-across-russia-rights-group-2022-09-21/">anti-mobilization protests</a> and has arrested more than <a href="https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/09/27/why-don-t-russians-march-on-moscow">2,400 demonstrators</a>. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, <a href="https://www.levada.ru/en/ratings/">public opinion polls</a> by the Levada Center, Russia’s leading independent polling group, continue to show that Russians overwhelmingly support Putin and the <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/09/1127881">“special military operation,”</a> as he has called the war. </p>
<p>But as a scholar of <a href="https://www.thechicagocouncil.org/research/experts/arik-burakovsky">Russia and public opinion</a>, I think that public approval of the president and the assault on Ukraine is nevertheless shifting in light of the mobilization, as more families are torn apart by the hostilities.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489236/original/file-20221011-11786-26lqs2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Two young adult men stand looking at a phone in an airport, with rolling suitcase at their sides." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489236/original/file-20221011-11786-26lqs2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489236/original/file-20221011-11786-26lqs2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489236/original/file-20221011-11786-26lqs2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489236/original/file-20221011-11786-26lqs2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489236/original/file-20221011-11786-26lqs2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489236/original/file-20221011-11786-26lqs2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489236/original/file-20221011-11786-26lqs2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Russians arrive at an airport in Yerevan, Armenia on Sept. 21, 2022, the same day Russia announced a partial draft.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/russians-arrive-at-yerevans-zvartnots-airport-on-september-21-2022-picture-id1243408145">Karen Minasyan/AFP via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Most Russians still support the war</h2>
<p>Since the Ukraine invasion was launched in February 2022, Russians largely have been either sympathetic or apathetic toward the war. The public swiftly united behind Putin, and the war gradually became a backdrop to everyday life in Russia.</p>
<p>Nearly 50% of Russians polled have consistently said they <a href="https://www.levada.ru/2022/09/29/konflikt-s-ukrainoj-sentyabr-2022-goda/">“definitely” support</a> Russia’s military actions in Ukraine, another roughly 30% “rather” support them, and only 20% do not support them.</p>
<p>The population has mostly accepted the war based on an unwritten <a href="https://academic.oup.com/ia/article/87/6/1459/2449985">social contract</a> with the Kremlin, in which people obey the regime in exchange for better living standards and a lack of interference in their private lives. Russians generally feel more comfortable subscribing to prevailing narratives about the war espoused by Russian state media than grappling with <a href="https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/09/07/my-country-right-or-wrong-russian-public-opinion-on-ukraine-pub-87803">negative information and difficult news stories</a>.</p>
<p>When Russia annexed four eastern and southern Ukrainian regions on Sept. 30, 2022, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/extracts-putins-speech-annexation-ceremony-2022-09-30/">Putin spoke</a> publicly about what he called Russia’s Western enemies. He blamed them for propping up the “Kyiv regime” and staging “inhumane terrorist attacks” in Ukraine’s contested Donbas region. In doing so, Putin sought to justify the war’s resulting hardship by arguing that Russians are fighting for their survival.</p>
<p>Russians still overwhelmingly believe that the West is hostile to Russia and that the war is defensive. In August 2022, 71% of people surveyed said they hold <a href="https://www.levada.ru/en/2022/09/16/attitude-towards-countries-and-their-citizens/">negative attitudes</a> toward the United States, and 66% reported having negative views toward Ukraine.</p>
<p>Some sociologists contend that polls in Russia may not be fully reliable due to a range of factors, including <a href="https://ridl.io/on-the-harmfulness-of-russian-polls/">leading questions, incorrect wording</a>, <a href="https://ridl.io/can-you-trust-russia-s-public-support-for-a-military-operation-in-ukraine/">widespread indifference</a>, and <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20531680221108328">wariness</a> about criticizing <a href="https://www.ponarseurasia.org/is-putins-popularity-still-real-a-cautionary-note-on-using-list-experiments-to-measure-popularity-in-authoritarian-regimes/">Putin and the government</a>. </p>
<p>Other experts argue that surveys reveal mainly what people are <a href="https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/09/07/fresh-look-at-russian-public-opinion-on-war-in-ukraine-event-7935">willing to tell pollsters</a>, not necessarily what they truly think. </p>
<p>But new polls indicate an emerging shift in public attitudes. By breaking the impression of normalcy, the draft may be pushing more Russians out of their psychological comfort zone.</p>
<p>The percentage of Russians who say they intently monitor the situation in Ukraine <a href="https://www.levada.ru/en/2022/09/14/conflict-with-ukraine-august-2022/">slowly declined</a> after March 2022. But this trend recently reversed, and the proportion of Russians reporting they “very closely” follow the war <a href="https://www.levada.ru/2022/09/29/konflikt-s-ukrainoj-sentyabr-2022-goda/">rose from</a> 21% in August 2022 to 32% in September 2022. </p>
<p>The most common emotions evoked by the war are no longer national pride but rather “anxiety, fear, horror” and “anger, indignation,” people say in the latest polls.</p>
<h2>Shaking trust in the military</h2>
<p>Russians traditionally have <a href="https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2018/10/19/russians-now-trust-army-more-than-putin-opinion-a63246">considerable confidence</a> in their army.</p>
<p>A survey in December 2021 demonstrated that Russians <a href="https://www.levada.ru/en/2021/10/12/trust-in-public-institutions/">trusted the military</a> more than any other state institution or official, including the president. </p>
<p>Russian law requires all men aged 18 to 27 to serve in the military for one year. A poll in July 2021 showed that 61% of Russians felt that “<a href="https://www.levada.ru/en/2021/07/13/military-conscription/">every real man should serve in the army</a>.” Women chose this response more often than men, and the elderly chose this option twice as much as those of military age. </p>
<p>However, the war seems to have made Russians more <a href="https://cepa.org/article/russias-military-manpower-crunch-will-worsen/">reluctant to</a> serve in the army. Although the military typically meets its conscription targets, Russia did not meet its goals in a previous campaign to recruit more soldiers from April 1, 2022 to July 15, 2022. In that effort, the Russian Ministry of Defense sought to bring in <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-drafts-134500-conscripts-says-they-wont-go-ukraine-2022-03-31/">134,500 soldiers</a> but only enlisted <a href="https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2022/09/24/how-russia-is-conscripting-men-to-fight-in-ukraine">about 89,000</a>.</p>
<p>The Russian military is now facing <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/world/europe/putin-russia-army-criticism.html">more criticism</a> – even from its supporters – because of its recent <a href="https://theconversation.com/ukraine-war-russias-problems-on-the-battlefield-stem-from-failures-at-the-top-189916">battlefield failures</a>. There is currently heightened concern among Russian elites about how the military is <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/09/29/world/russia-ukraine-war-news">mismanaging the draft</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/10/01/world/russia-ukraine-war-news">Russian troops retreating</a> from territories they previously occupied.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489235/original/file-20221011-23-gksapm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A large stage shows people from a distance, with two large screens on either side showing a middle-aged to older white man." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489235/original/file-20221011-23-gksapm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489235/original/file-20221011-23-gksapm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=335&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489235/original/file-20221011-23-gksapm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=335&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489235/original/file-20221011-23-gksapm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=335&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489235/original/file-20221011-23-gksapm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489235/original/file-20221011-23-gksapm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489235/original/file-20221011-23-gksapm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during a concert on Sept. 30, 2022, shortly after Russia annexed regions of Ukraine.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/russian-president-vladimir-putin-speaks-during-the-concert-in-support-picture-id1243625753">Contributor/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The future of Putin’s public approval</h2>
<p>Authoritarian leaders like Putin need to keep up the <a href="https://www.v-dem.net/media/publications/Working_Paper_132.pdf">appearance of popularity</a> to maintain unanimity and social consensus. It is difficult to predict whether Putin’s public support will remain strong enough for him <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691212463/weak-strongman">to remain in power</a>. </p>
<p>Putin’s <a href="https://www.levada.ru/en/2022/09/14/approval-of-institutions-ratings-of-politicians/">approval ratings</a> dropped from 83% in August 2022 to 77% in September 2022. Most Russians continue to believe the country is moving in the right direction, but public sentiment may change as more people are mobilized into the army.</p>
<p>Putin has <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/09/13/russia-ukraine-war-end-of-putin-predictions/">outlived many predictions</a> about his fall from power before, and the public may ultimately come to accept the mobilization. </p>
<p>Yet the regime becomes more fragile as public support declines. Resentment toward the Kremlin may <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/21/putin-just-called-up-young-men-war-hes-taking-big-risk/">increase as</a> more young men, who previously showed little interest in the war, worry about being sent to fight.</p>
<p>Most Russians expect the war to last at least <a href="https://www.levada.ru/2022/09/01/konflikt-s-ukrainoj-avgust-2022-goda/">another six months</a>, but it is unclear how much patience they will have as the bloodshed goes on, without a clear resolution in sight.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/191158/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Arik Burakovsky does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>While Russian public opinion polls show continued support for the war, there are questions about the polls’ reliability and indications that public approval of Putin is declining.Arik Burakovsky, Assistant Director, Russia and Eurasia Program, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1244692019-10-10T10:00:07Z2019-10-10T10:00:07ZWould you stand up to an oppressive regime or would you conform? Here’s the science<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/295044/original/file-20191001-173369-h1ze7k.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jasper Savage/Hulu/Channel 4</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="http://margaretatwood.ca/">Margaret Atwood’s</a> novel, <a href="https://theconversation.com/handmaids-tale-adaptation-takes-margaret-atwoods-narrative-to-ever-bleaker-destinations-95683">The Handmaid’s Tale</a>, described the horror of the authoritarian regime of Gilead. In this theocracy, self-preservation was the best people could hope for, being powerless to kick against the system. But her sequel, <a href="https://theconversation.com/review-the-testaments-margaret-atwoods-sequel-to-the-handmaids-tale-123465">The Testaments</a>, raises the possibility that individuals, with suitable luck, bravery and cleverness, can fight back.</p>
<p>But can they? There are countless examples of past and present monstrous regimes in the real world. And they all raise the question of why people didn’t just rise up against their rulers. Some of us are quick to judge those who conform to such regimes as evil psychopaths – or at least morally inferior to ourselves. </p>
<p>But what are the chances that you would be a heroic rebel in such a scenario, refusing to be complicit in maintaining or even enforcing the system?</p>
<p>To answer this question, let’s start by considering a now <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5014575_The_Logic_of_Appropriateness">classic analysis</a> by American organisational theorist James March and Norwegian political scientist Johan Olsen from 2004.</p>
<p>They argued that human behaviour is governed by two complementary, and very different, “logics”. According to the logic of consequence, we choose our actions like a good economist: weighing up the costs and benefits of the alternative options in the light of our personal objectives. This is basically how we get what we want.</p>
<p>But there is also a second logic, the logic of appropriateness. According to this, outcomes, good or bad, are often of secondary importance – we often choose what to do by asking “What is a person like me supposed to do in a situation like this”? </p>
<p>The idea is backed up by psychological research. Human social interactions <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/01/the-psychology-of-conformity/251371/">depend on our tendency to conform</a> to unwritten rules of appropriate behaviour. Most of us are truthful, polite, don’t cheat when playing board games and follow etiquette. We are happy to let judges or football referees enforce rules. A <a href="https://theconversation.com/conform-to-the-social-norm-why-people-follow-what-other-people-do-107446">recent study</a> showed we even conform to arbitrary norms.</p>
<p>The logic of appropriateness is self-enforcing – we disapprove of, ostracise or report people who lie or cheat. Research has shown that even in anonymous, experimental “games”, people will pay a monetary cost <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/415137a">to punish other people</a> for being uncooperative.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/295030/original/file-20191001-173337-1dfr87g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/295030/original/file-20191001-173337-1dfr87g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295030/original/file-20191001-173337-1dfr87g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295030/original/file-20191001-173337-1dfr87g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295030/original/file-20191001-173337-1dfr87g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295030/original/file-20191001-173337-1dfr87g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295030/original/file-20191001-173337-1dfr87g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Psychopaths?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">German Federal Archive (Deutsches Bundesarchiv)</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>The logic of appropriateness is therefore crucial to understanding how we can organise ourselves into teams, companies and entire nations. We need shared systems of rules to cooperate – it is easy to see how <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-belfast-riots-helped-us-shed-light-on-the-nature-of-human-cooperation-51423">evolution may have shaped this</a>.</p>
<p>The psychological foundations for this start early. Children as young as three <a href="https://www.eva.mpg.de/psycho/staff/tomas/pdf/rakoczyNorms.pdf">will protest</a> if arbitrary “rules” of a game are violated. And we all know how punishing it can be to “stick out” in a playground by violating norms of dress, accent or behaviour.</p>
<h2>Authoritarian regimes</h2>
<p>Both logics are required to create and maintain an authoritarian regime. To ensure that we make the “right” personal choices, an oppressive state’s main tools are carrots and sticks – rewarding conformity and punishing even a hint of rebellion. </p>
<p>But personal gain (or survival) alone provides a fragile foundation for an oppressive state. It is easy to see how the logic of appropriateness fits in here, turning from being a force for cooperation to a mechanism for enforcing an oppressive status quo. This logic asks that we follow the “rules” and make sure others do too – often without needing to ask why the rules are the way they are.</p>
<p>Regimes therefore supplement rewards and punishments with self-policed norms, rules and conventions. A “good” party comrade or a member of a religious cult or terrorist group will learn that they are supposed to obey orders, root out opposition and not question authority – and enforce these norms on their fellows. </p>
<p>The authoritarian state is therefore concerned above all with preserving ideology – defining the “right” way to think and behave – so that we can unquestioningly conform to it.</p>
<p>This can certainly help explain the horrors of Nazi Germany – showing it’s not primarily a matter of individual evil. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/insight-therapy/201012/you-are-conformist-is-you-are-human">famously argued</a>, the atrocities of the Holocaust were made possible by normal people, manipulated into conforming to a horribly abnormal set of behavioural norms.</p>
<h2>Would you rebel?</h2>
<p>So how would you or I fare in Gilead? We can be fairly confident that most of us would conform (with more or less discomfort), finding it difficult to shake the feeling that the way things are done is the right and appropriate way.</p>
<p>Just think of the fervour with which people can enforce standards of dress, prohibitions on profane language or dietary norms – however arbitrary these may appear. Indeed, we may feel “morally bound” to protect the party, nation or religion, whatever its character.</p>
<p>A small number of us, however, would rebel – but not primarily, I suspect, based on differences in individual moral character. Rebels, too, need to harness the logic of appropriateness – they need to find different norms and ideals, shared with fellow members of the resistance, or inspired by history or literature. Breaking out of one set of norms requires that we have an available alternative.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/296515/original/file-20191010-188783-bd8m5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/296515/original/file-20191010-188783-bd8m5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296515/original/file-20191010-188783-bd8m5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296515/original/file-20191010-188783-bd8m5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296515/original/file-20191010-188783-bd8m5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296515/original/file-20191010-188783-bd8m5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296515/original/file-20191010-188783-bd8m5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">People giving a Nazi salute, with an unidentified person (possibly August Landmesser or Gustav Wegert) refusing to do so.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">wikipedia</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>That said, some people may <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2190/Y7CA-TBY6-V7LR-76GK">have more naturally non-conformist</a> personalities than others, at least in periods of their lives. Whether such rebels are successful in breaking out, however, may partly depend on how convincingly they can justify to themselves, and defend to others, that we don’t want to conform.</p>
<p>If so, we would expect a tendency to adopt non-standard norms to be linked to verbal ability and perhaps general intelligence in individuals who actually rebel, <a href="https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/11/01/non-conformity-hidden-driver-behind-positive-relationship-between-iq-and-v">which there’s some evidence to support</a>. </p>
<p>How we react to unfairness may also affect our propensity to rebel. One study found that people who are risk averse and easily trust others are less likely to <a href="https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Justice-and-personality%3A-Using-integrative-theories-Colquitt-Scott/82286f777c859285ced18c2c0672a3856cefbef3">react strongly to unfairness</a>. While not proven in the study, it may make such individuals more likely to conform.</p>
<p>Another factor is social circumstances. The upper and middle classes in Germany during the 1920s-1940s were almost <a href="https://theconversation.com/rise-and-fall-in-the-third-reich-nazi-party-members-and-social-advancement-123297">twice as likely</a> to join the Nazi party than those with lower social status. So it may be that those who have the most to lose and/or are keen to climb the social ladder are particularly likely to conform. And, of course, if other members of your social circle are conforming, you may think it’s the “appropriate” thing to do. </p>
<p>Few will fight Gilead after carefully weighing up the consequences – after all, the most likely outcome is failure and obliteration. What drives forward fights against an oppressive society is a rival vision – a vision of equality, liberty and justice, and a sense that these should be defended, whatever the consequences.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/124469/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nick Chater receives funding from ESRC and EPSRC. He is a member of the UK Committee on Climate Change and a director of Decision Technology Ltd. </span></em></p>We all like to think of ourselves as heroes. But according to science, the vast majority of us wouldn’t be prepared to rebel against totalitarian rulers.Nick Chater, Professor of Behavioural Science, Warwick Business School, University of WarwickLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/946752018-04-19T05:45:09Z2018-04-19T05:45:09ZGreece’s Macedonian Slavic heritage was wiped out by linguistic oppression – here’s how<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215421/original/file-20180418-163966-z1yigh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Macedonian Slavic wedding in the Prespes region in the border between Greece and FYR Macedonia.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Culture_of_Prespes#/media/File:Wedding_in_Papli,_Prespes.jpg">Unknown via Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>If you’ve ever been to a traditional Greek celebration, you will have seen people joining hands and dancing in a circle following the same steps to the accompaniment of live music. You will also have heard songs sung in Greek as most traditional tunes go hand in hand with lyrics talking about love, emigration and rural life.</p>
<p>In the northernmost parts of the Greek regions of <a href="https://goo.gl/maps/DZSkxBr5Qg12">Western</a> and <a href="https://goo.gl/maps/ah8REu7m7Dk">Central Macedonia</a>, however, all the folk dances are instrumental tunes. Lyrics have been replaced by loud, brass and woodwind instruments like the cornet, the trombone and the clarinet. This is not some peculiar aspect of the local musical heritage. Traditional tunes in these regions had their own words – but they were in a language that the Greek state has tried to wipe out for nearly a century: <a href="https://www.ethnologue.com/language/mkd">Macedonian Slavic</a>.</p>
<p>After emerging victorious from two <a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Balkan-Wars-1912-1913-Prelude-to-the-First-World-War/Hall/p/book/9780415229470">Balkan Wars</a> in 1912 and 1913, Greece’s territory and population <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Balkan_Wars_Boundaries.jpg#/media/File:Balkan_Wars_Boundaries.jpg">expanded dramatically</a> by the addition of the lion’s share of the historic geographical region of Macedonia, the part found on the southern side of the Voras/Nidže and Belles/Belasica mountain ranges.</p>
<p>As is often the case in history, state borders did not coincide with linguistic ones. The so-called “New Lands” were a diverse mosaic of different linguistic groups, including <a href="https://search.proquest.com/docview/195175246/fulltextPDF/A1CAF7A739514F7BPQ/1?accountid=14987">260,000 people</a> who spoke varieties of a south Slavic language they called <em>tukasni</em> “local”, <a href="http://lacito.vjf.cnrs.fr/vient-de-paraitre/adamou_nashta.htm"><em>nashta</em> “ours”</a> or <em>makedonski</em> “Macedonian”. </p>
<p>These varieties, including the standardised version that is today the official language of FYR Macedonia, have similarities with Bulgarian – and <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1354-5078.1998.00389.x/full">many people in Bulgaria</a> view them as Bulgarian dialects. But sociolinguistics has shown that what counts as a language in its own right and what is seen as a dialect of a language are essentially decided by <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/01/difference-between-language-dialect/424704/">political rather than linguistic criteria</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215423/original/file-20180418-134691-1u4m8j0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215423/original/file-20180418-134691-1u4m8j0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215423/original/file-20180418-134691-1u4m8j0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=621&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215423/original/file-20180418-134691-1u4m8j0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=621&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215423/original/file-20180418-134691-1u4m8j0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=621&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215423/original/file-20180418-134691-1u4m8j0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=781&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215423/original/file-20180418-134691-1u4m8j0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=781&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215423/original/file-20180418-134691-1u4m8j0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=781&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ethnographic map of Macedonia, 1914.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/balkan_serbs_1914.jpg">Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1914.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>From an invisible language…</h2>
<p>For the Greek government, having people speaking Macedonian Slavic in its territory did not sit well with its national ideology. Signs of discomfort towards Greece’s new multilingual reality showed very early on. In 1920, the Greek statistical authority ran the first census after the country’s territorial expansion. A language question was asked but the data for the Macedonia division were never published. The <a href="http://dlib.statistics.gr/Book/GRESYE_02_0101_00011.pdf">language data for the Thessaly division</a>, however, record speakers of Macedonian Slavic, probably reported by seasonal workers from Macedonia who were in Thessaly at the time of the census. Greek authorities acknowledged the presence of Macedonian Slavic as a legitimate language but made a conscious effort to conceal the number of people who spoke it.</p>
<p>In the north of the country, authorities launched a massive Hellenising mission. Overnight, Madeconian Slavic names of people, <a href="http://pandektis.ekt.gr/pandektis/handle/10442/4968">places</a> and <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291318721_Singing_without_words_Language_and_identity_shift_among_Slavic_Macedonian_musicians_in_Greece">dances</a> were rendered into Greek by public servants. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iXCWKIubGcs?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>My own paternal grandfather’s family name became Karatsareas from Karachorov. My maternal grandfather’s one became Kantzouris from Kanzurov. The area of Karadzova was renamed Almopia with its main town of Subotsko becoming Aridaia. The dance Puscheno was called Leventikos or Lytos. The aim was to leave no visible trace of Macedonian Slavic in public records.</p>
<h2>…to a forbidden one</h2>
<p>In the 1930s and in a climate of <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Xoww453NVQMC&lpg=PR3&hl=de&pg=PR3#v=onepage&q&f=false">competing nationalisms in the southern Balkans</a>, the similarities between Macedonian Slavic and the languages of the then Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Kingdom of Bulgaria began to raise suspicions among Greek authorities about the national allegiance and “consciousness” of Macedonian Slavic speakers. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/who-gets-to-use-the-name-macedonia-a-decades-old-row-still-to-be-resolved-90708">Who gets to use the name 'Macedonia'? A decades-old row still to be resolved</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>In August 1931, Greek journalist and subsequent politician Periklis Iliadis called in his newspaper column for a ban on greeting in “Bulgarian” and publicly singing songs in languages other than Greek – two proposals that <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/714005461">Ioannis Metaxas’s fascist regime</a> promptly adopted. </p>
<p>In 1936, the governor-general of Macedonia issued order of prohibition 122770: “On the restoration of the uniform language”, banning the use of Macedonian Slavic in both public and private. People caught speaking Macedonian Slavic – sometimes by police officers eavesdropping through people’s windows – were dragged to military police stations where they were beaten and sometimes tortured. Those who had the money were fined. Teachers beat pupils who spoke Macedonian Slavic in class or in the playground – even when that was the only language they were able to speak. This happened to my maternal grandmother.</p>
<h2>A muted heritage</h2>
<p>In 1994, <a href="https://www.hrw.org/report/1994/04/01/denying-ethnic-identity/macedonians-greece">Human Rights Watch</a> called for Greece to end harassment of Macedonian Slavic speakers. In 1998, the <a href="http://www.icnl.org/research/journal/vol1iss1/cn_1.htm">European Court of Human Rights</a> ruled that Greece violated the right of its citizens to form associations by refusing them permission to establish a Macedonian Slavic cultural association. But these calls came much too late.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/214789/original/file-20180413-566-oe36es.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/214789/original/file-20180413-566-oe36es.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=531&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/214789/original/file-20180413-566-oe36es.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=531&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/214789/original/file-20180413-566-oe36es.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=531&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/214789/original/file-20180413-566-oe36es.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=667&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/214789/original/file-20180413-566-oe36es.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=667&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/214789/original/file-20180413-566-oe36es.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=667&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A guesthouse in Loutraki (Aridaia, northern Greece) bearing the Slavic name of the village, Pozhar. The letter Ž has been borrowed from the Latinic version of the Macedonian Slavic.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the face of the aggressive and violent oppression they suffered in the 1930s, Macedonian Slavic speakers developed a deeply ingrained fear of speaking their language in front of people they did not know and trust. They stopped singing their songs, playing only the traditional tunes of their musical heritage. With time, they started using Greek more to refer to themselves and the places where they were born and live. </p>
<p>Today, only older people speak the language. For younger people, it is more of a passive knowledge – a kind of heritage that will die out with the older generation and the only thing that will remain to remind them of it will be a handful of words and tunes to which young musicians do not know the words.</p>
<h2>Banning minority languages</h2>
<p>This sort of linguistic oppression is far from unique. Similar stories have been reported by speakers of <a href="http://www.thejournal.ie/readme/bliain-na-gaeilge-my-mother-made-a-choice-to-speak-to-us-in-her-mother-tongue-3951221-Apr2018/">Irish in Ireland</a>, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-19076304">Scottish Gaelic in Scotland</a>, <a href="https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmhansrd/cm100609/debtext/100609-0011.htm">Welsh in Wales</a> (read Susan Elan Jones’s comments in Column 377), <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/11893734/They-banned-us-speaking-Catalan.-Now-they-want-us-to-disappear.html">Catalan in Spain</a>, <a href="http://content.lib.washington.edu/aipnw/marr.html">Native American languages in the US</a> and <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-11-19/raja-australia-is-the-place-of-vanishing-languages/5101822">Aboriginal languages in Australia</a>. </p>
<p>It is sad that the efforts of state authorities to make speakers of minority languages assimilate to the majority language were for the most part successful. And alongside the languages, other expressions of culture are being lost, including place names, family names, songs, dances, games and traditions. Linguistic oppression and the consequences it has on speakers of minority languages and their cultural heritage have no place in a modern world where the <a href="http://www.un.org/en/events/culturaldiversityday/index.shtml">value of cultural diversity</a> is recognised.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/multilingualism-must-be-celebrated-as-a-resource-not-a-problem-90397">Multilingualism must be celebrated as a resource, not a problem</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/94675/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Petros Karatsareas receives funding from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust. </span></em></p>For the Greek government, having people speaking Macedonian Slavic in its territory did not sit well with its national ideology.Petros Karatsareas, Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics, University of WestminsterLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/840982018-01-25T11:39:28Z2018-01-25T11:39:28ZFor a North Korean refugee raising her kids in the UK, the past is never far<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/202896/original/file-20180122-182938-vzbc26.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Jihyun Park finds joy in the little things many take for granted, whether it's being able to drop her kids off at school or having family dinners. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Grace Park is an 8-year-old girl from Manchester, United Kingdom, who likes making colorful bracelets with plastic lanyards, playing games with her two older brothers, and writing poems for her mum. </p>
<p>The childhood of Grace’s mother, Jihyun Park, wasn’t so carefree. She grew up in Chongjin, North Korea, where political life begins at an age when children are supposed to be watching cartoons and goofing around with friends.</p>
<p>As an 8-year-old, the elder Park was tasked with memorizing the biographies of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il. She spent hours perfecting synchronized musical performances for the leaders’ birthdays and meticulously ironing her red scarf for school. On the playground, her classmates played war games and pretended to kill American soldiers.</p>
<p>Park has a <a href="https://www.amnesty.org.uk/north-korea-other-interview">harrowing</a> <a href="http://www.aprilmag.com/2017/04/17/jihyun-park-defector-refugee-survivor-freedom-fighter-north-koreans/">life story</a> that includes two escapes from North Korea, forced repatriation, torture in a North Korean political prison camp, and being sold into sex trafficking. Through unyielding perseverance, she made her way to the United Kingdom, where she now lives with her husband and three children. </p>
<p>As a U.S.-born Korean-American, I have been researching various aspects of North Korea, from the underground network of people <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/north-korea/2016-11-28/opening-north-korean-mind">who smuggle outside information into the isolated country</a>, to the <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300217810/north-koreas-hidden-revolution">country’s defectors</a>. </p>
<p>I first became aware of Jihyun Park’s remarkable story after reading about her online in 2014. When I learned she had children, I was particularly interested in what it was like to raise a child in a world that, compared to North Korea, has unparalleled freedoms.</p>
<p>So in October 2017, I met with Park at her home in Manchester. She talked about the joy she gets from being able to raise her kids in ways that would have been impossible under the shadow of political oppression. At the same time, there’s a real struggle to explain her past to her children – a life that differs so starkly from their own. </p>
<h2>Worlds apart</h2>
<p>As she prepared lunch for her two young children (the eldest is in college), Park told me that she would wake up as a child and never see her own mother. </p>
<p>Like most North Korean mothers, Park’s mother was required to tend to collective chores before her own household chores. While it was still dark outside, she would sweep the neighborhood roads before sweeping her own home. Even as a housewife, she never made lunch for her daughter because she had so many collective duties to perform – picking up trash, collecting wood and picking vegetables to meet the neighborhood quota to donate to the state. She never saw her daughter off at school. Nor did she ever pick her up. </p>
<p>Park said that she often thinks about this as she drops off and picks up her children from school. A simple daily task that so many parents take for granted (or begrudgingly do) wasn’t even possible in North Korea. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/202157/original/file-20180116-53302-s3aiv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/202157/original/file-20180116-53302-s3aiv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/202157/original/file-20180116-53302-s3aiv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/202157/original/file-20180116-53302-s3aiv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/202157/original/file-20180116-53302-s3aiv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/202157/original/file-20180116-53302-s3aiv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/202157/original/file-20180116-53302-s3aiv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/202157/original/file-20180116-53302-s3aiv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A group of North Korean women bow to a statue of the late leader Kim Il Sung, as another group sweep the stairs in front of the statue in Haeju, North Korea.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/North-Korea-Daily-Life/755c725c506b48e7aaa335a88b3e2726/12/0">AP Photo/Alexander F. Yuan</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Yet life in the United Kingdom hasn’t been without its own set of challenges.</p>
<p>When she first dropped off her daughter Grace at nursery school a few years ago, Park couldn’t communicate with the teachers about her toddler. When teachers tried to tell her that Grace had a good day or a challenging day, Park didn’t understand. For a young mother from North Korea, the language and cultural barriers resulted in a spate of misunderstandings and missed opportunities.</p>
<p>When Grace entered preschool, Park worried that she would be discriminated against. After all, she and her family were in “someone else’s country,” as Park put it; they were Asian refugees with little to no money. </p>
<p>But she was pleasantly surprised that Grace ended up meeting a diverse group of friends, some of whom were also refugees. Grace taught her fellow preschoolers how to say hello in Korean (“ahn-nyoung”) and Grace learned how to say a few phrases in Russian, Arabic, Urdu and Polish. </p>
<p>Today, Grace speaks English with a thick Manchester accent and speaks Korean with a heavy northeastern North Korean accent.</p>
<h2>The scars of the past</h2>
<p>Because Grace was born in the U.K., Park has struggled with how to tell her about her past and her home country without scaring or worrying her. </p>
<p>Two years ago, Grace noticed the deep scar on her mother’s leg and asked how mum got hurt. Park delicately tried to explain the torture she experienced in a North Korean political prison camp. (She was sent there as punishment for trying to escape the country in 1998.) </p>
<p>When Grace started watching some interviews and documentaries featuring her mother, much of it went over Grace’s head. But while watching <a href="https://www.amnesty.org.uk/north-korea-other-interview">an interview conducted by Amnesty International</a>, Grace did lean over and silently hug her mother.</p>
<p>Something must have resonated.</p>
<p>Other disconnects seem more difficult to overcome. Many kids are unable to appreciate a routine as commonplace and mundane as a family dinner.</p>
<p>But to Park, these dinners are filled with meaning: They’re when she feels the most blessed. Meal time with her family in North Korea was rushed. Bellies were never full, and if there were any talking, it would be her father sternly lecturing the family about politics.</p>
<p>Now she’s able to eat second helpings of tasty food, tell jokes and laugh with her children. When Grace does occasionally complain about the food, Park is quick to remind Grace that they have relatives in North Korea who are never able to eat until they’re full. </p>
<p>“So why can’t we send them food?” Grace and her brother wonder. </p>
<h2>Communication breakdown</h2>
<p>How does a mother raised in a totalitarian state explain North Korea’s political situation to her young daughter? Where to begin? Why <em>can’t</em> they send them food? </p>
<p>Grace has asked several times to make a phone call to her aunties and uncles in North Korea. Or they could use Park’s phone to FaceTime them. Or at least email them pictures for Christmas. </p>
<p>When Park tells her daughter that their aunts and uncles don’t have internet, Grace suggests communicating “the old-fashioned way” – handwriting a letter, sticking a stamp on the envelope, and dropping off the letter at their local post office. Maybe they’ll write back and send them pictures of their families in North Korea?</p>
<p>Grace and her brother do recognize Kim Jong Un. When his image appears on television, they giggle and make fun of his weight and his hairstyle. They also blame Kim Jong Un for their mother’s scar on her leg, and for not being able to call their relatives in North Korea. But Grace and her brother still don’t seem to grasp why they can’t just pick up the phone and call their relatives.</p>
<p>Park told me that the challenge of explaining her life and the country she is from extends beyond educating her children. With her newfound freedom, she feels the moral duty to be the voice of millions of voiceless North Koreans to anyone who will listen. </p>
<p>To ensure that future generations don’t forget the tragic experiences and memories of North Korean citizens, she founded <a href="https://www.facebook.com/SteppingStones527/">Stepping Stones</a> in 2017. The nonprofit organization raises awareness about human rights violations in North Korea, with a specific focus on women and children. The group is lobbying to make Feb. 17 an international day to remember all North Korean citizens who have been oppressed by the North Korean regime. (Stepping Stones chose this date to coincide with the day that the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on North Korea’s Human Rights released <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/CoIDPRK/Pages/CommissionInquiryonHRinDPRK.aspx">their report</a> in 2014.)</p>
<p>In the meantime, Grace continues to live life like an ordinary kid. She rides her bike, makes glittery bracelets, and runs around with her classmates. Her days are filled with crayons, coloring books, play dates and fuzzy hairbands. </p>
<p>It’s a childhood couldn’t be any more different from her mother’s.</p>
<p>For that, Park couldn’t be more grateful.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/t6xIUyh3Wqg?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A short video featuring Jihyun Park and her daughter Grace.</span></figcaption>
</figure><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/84098/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jieun Baek does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Jihyun Park escaped North Korea and is now living in Manchester. But how to explain her scars to her children? Or why they can’t call their relatives still living in North Korea?Jieun Baek, PhD candidate in Public Policy, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/744952017-03-14T07:34:28Z2017-03-14T07:34:28ZThousands flee violence and hunger in Venezuela, seeking asylum in the United States<p><em><strong>This article (originally published with the title “‘Are you afraid to go home?’: Venezuelans top list of US asylum seekers as thousands flee” on March 14 2017) has been updated to reflect the latest developments in Venezuela’s ongoing crisis.</strong></em></p>
<hr>
<p>The crisis in Venezuela continues to worsen. President Nicolas Maduro has announced that the country will <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-39726605">withdraw from the Organisation of American States</a> – a regional body that has pressured his administration about its democratic and human rights obligations – and opposition leaders have called for yet <a href="http://efectococuyo.com/politica/por-elecciones-limpias-y-contra-el-golpe-de-estado-marchara-la-oposicion-al-cne-y-al-tsj-1m">another mass protest</a> demanding free and fair elections.</p>
<p>The situation has gotten so desperate that, in 2016, Venezuelans became the <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/23/news/economy/venezuela-us-asylum-refugees/index.html">top US asylum-seekers</a>, having <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/08/04/venezuelan-asylum-applications-to-u-s-soar-in-2016/">surpassed Guatemalans, Salvadorans and Mexicans</a>. Venezuelan asylum claims <a href="http://bigstory.ap.org/article/venezuela-now-leads-us-asylum-requests-crisis-deepens">increased 150%</a> from 2015 to 2016.</p>
<p>Though Venezuela does not publicly circulate emigration information, estimates suggest that between <a href="https://www.yoemigro.com/venezolanos-emigrantes-donde-estan/;%20http://www.visionglobal.info/de-los-casi-2-millones-de-venezolanos-que-han-emigrado-del-pais-el-90-son-profesionales/">700,000 and two million Venezuelans have emigrated since 1999</a> </p>
<p>In 2015, 197,000 Venezuelans lived in the US, according to a recent <a href="http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/data/estimates2/estimates15.shtml">United Nations study</a>. Other major host countries were Spain (151,594 Venezuelan residents), Italy (48,970), Colombia (46,614) and Portugal (23,404). </p>
<h2>A deepening crisis</h2>
<p>Venezuela is in the midst of a <a href="https://theconversation.com/in-venezuela-christmas-is-a-luxury-few-can-afford-70707">severe national crisis</a>, with millions of citizens impoverished by the <a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/03/what-s-behind-the-drop-in-oil-prices/">drop in international oil prices</a>, a reduction in imports, scarcity of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/world/americas/dying-infants-and-no-medicine-inside-venezuelas-failing-hospitals.html">food and medicine</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/world/americas/nuevos-billetes-venezuela-new-banknotes.html?_r=0">hyperinflation</a>. </p>
<p><a href="http://prodavinci.com/blogs/seguridad-ciudadana-en-venezuela-donde-esta-la-crisis">High crime</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/political-dialogue-is-a-lost-art-in-venezuela-and-the-vaticans-intervention-wont-help-68906">poliarsation</a> and <a href="http://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias/2013/12/131203_venezuela_corrupcion_trasnparencia_dp">corruption</a> have deepened this troubling scenario. </p>
<p>The result is a society that’s paralysed, disillusioned and desperate. These circumstances have driven thousands of precariously employed, hungry and frustrated Venezuelans to emigrate. Whether by land or by sea, they are fleeing – many to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/hungry-venezuelans-flood-brazilian-towns-as-threat-of-mass-migration-looms/2017/01/01/39f85822-c6d1-11e6-acda-59924caa2450_story.html?utm_term=.9252e32e6baf">neighbouring countries such as Colombia and Brasil</a> – seeking a better life.</p>
<p>State repression is also, without doubt, a cause of the exodus from Venezuela. Nearly 30 people <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-39726605">have been killed</a> since protests against the Maduro administration began in March. In 2016, according to a <a href="http://runrun.es/nacional/actualidad/293713/foro-penal-venezolano-reporto-2-732-arrestos-politicos-en-2016.html">report by the Venezuelan Penal Forum</a>, the country saw 2,732 political arrests in 2016. (In comparison, Cuba had <a href="http://www.politifact.com/global-news/statements/2016/mar/22/raul-castro/are-there-political-prisoners-cuba/">about 97</a> political prisoners in 2016 and <a href="http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/32043-beyond-innocence-america-s-political-prisoners-and-the-fight-against-mass-incarceration">the US</a> had a similar number.) </p>
<p>The report describes three types of political prisoners in Venezuela: those who present a political threat to the government; those who do not themselves present a threat but are arrested to send a message to their followers and other opposition members; and those who do not constitute a political threat of any sort but who are detained to support the regime’s political narrative. </p>
<p>In Venezuela today, state terrorism is used to stoke <a href="https://informe21.com/blog/pedro-sotillo-bolivar/terrorismo-de-estado-en-venezuela">fear among citizens</a>. Prosecuting dissidence has become <a href="http://tbinternet.ohchr.org/Treaties/CCPR/Shared%20Documents/VEN/INT_CCPR_CSS_VEN_20686_S.pdf">official policy</a>. </p>
<h2>Immigration past, emigration present</h2>
<p>Venezuela’s current flow of <a href="http://prodavinci.com/blogs/la-vida-bajo-amenaza-por-leonardo-padron/">emigrants and activists</a> belies the country’s historic immigration pattern. Over the past seven decades, Venezuela has welcomed numerous waves of foreigners, most of them hoping to take part in the nation’s 20th century oil bonanza. </p>
<p>From 1948 to 1958, some 400,000 immigrants arrived from southern Europe. These Spanish, Portuguese and Italian migrants filled demand for labour in Venezuela’s agriculture, construction and industrial sectors. By 1970, another 298,000 intellectuals, professionals and other high-skilled workers had come from elsewhere in South America, fleeing <a href="http://www.ub.edu/geocrit/sn-94-46.htmhttp://www.unive.it/media/allegato/dep/n_1speciale/01_Gonzalez.pdf;">military dictatorships</a>. </p>
<p>In the 1980s, 800,000 immigrants flocked to Venezuela from <a href="http://www.redalyc.org/html/360/36090205/">neighbouring countries</a> – particularly from Colombia, then suffering the worst of <a href="https://theconversation.com/advice-for-colombia-from-countries-that-have-sought-peace-and-sometimes-found-it-67419">its armed conflict</a>. These new arrivals, who took jobs in the service sector, agriculture and industry, <a href="http://www.portafolio.co/internacional/sueno-venezolano-inmigrantes-colombianos-41708">are now fleeing impoverished Venezuela to return home</a>.</p>
<p>Sometimes, from here, it can seem as though the entire population – fed up with shortages of medicine and food, with crime and with the political trajectory of the nation – wants to leave. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/160605/original/image-20170313-9634-g0ptfa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/160605/original/image-20170313-9634-g0ptfa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160605/original/image-20170313-9634-g0ptfa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160605/original/image-20170313-9634-g0ptfa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160605/original/image-20170313-9634-g0ptfa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160605/original/image-20170313-9634-g0ptfa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160605/original/image-20170313-9634-g0ptfa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Venezuelan asylum claims dropped 2006-2008, when oil wealth allowed citizens to apply for visas instead.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">US Dept. Homeland Security; Refugee, Asylum, and Parole System; Executive Office for Immigration Review</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This graph shows Venezuelan asylum claims in the US over the past 13 years. The ups and downs correspond to particular sociopolitical junctures in the US and Venezuela alike.</p>
<p>The current <a href="http://www.elnuevoherald.com/noticias/mundo/america-latina/venezuela-es/article100717922.html#storylink=cpy">wave of out-migration</a> can be traced back to 1998, when the <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/320659">election of president Hugo Chávez</a> sent the wealthy packing. Bankers, captains of industry and merchant class, escaping the febrile environment that lead to an oil strike in 2002 and attempted coup d'etat in 2003, left for the US and Spain. </p>
<p>A second wave of émigrés was compelled by Chávez’s Bolivarian government to abandon the domestic oil and gas industry. Between 2003 and 2008, many highly skilled industry professionals left Venezuela, lured away by multinational companies such as <a href="http://www.petroguia.com/pub/article/detalles-de-la-demanda-de-exxonmobil-contra-venezuela">ExxonMobil and Chevron</a>, then in legal proceedings against the Venezuelan state. </p>
<p>Between 2008 and 2012, Venezuelans with a second passport, a university degree and family abroad finally pulled up stakes, generally “returning” to <a href="http://www.2001.com.ve/en-la-agenda/152389/en-venezuela-son-mas-los-que-se-van-que-los-que-regresan.html">the homelands of their parents and grandparents</a>. The current uptick in asylum requests begins in 2009, reflecting the reduction in oil revenues in Venezuela and, perhaps, also the <a href="http://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias/2014/11/141118_eeuu_obama_reforma_migratoria_anuncio_tsb">beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency</a> after he promised not to prioritise the deportation of undocumented immigrants who had committed no crime. </p>
<p>But it really takes off after president Nicolás Maduro <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/world/americas/venezuelans-vote-for-successor-to-chavez.html">assumed office in 2013</a> as successor to Chávez. During the social upheaval that followed in 2014 and 2015, <a href="http://www.abc.es/internacional/20150218/abci-aniversario-encarcelamiento-leopoldo-lopez-201502171218.html">three young people were killed</a> in protests and dozens arrested. This was the beginning of the crisis that drove Venezuela to top the list of countries of origin for US asylum-seekers.</p>
<p>The cancellation of a <a href="http://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-37723172">proposed referendum to recall</a> president Maduro surely compelled even more people to make this risky choice.</p>
<h2>Are you afraid?</h2>
<p>Still, immigration is not asylum. Every asylum claim must have a political basis. No other motive for fleeing – be it hunger, sickness, joblessness, or poverty – counts. </p>
<p>To qualify for asylum in the US, the applicant must demonstrate “<a href="https://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/refugees-asylum/asylum/questions-answers-credible-fear-screening">credible fear</a>” of returning to their home country – fear of being persecuted by the government based on one’s political or religious beliefs, nationality, race or membership of a particular social group. </p>
<p>The Department of Homeland Security’s <a href="https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2015">2015 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics</a> reports that from 2006 to 2015, 8,757 Venezuelans sought US asylum. Of those petitions, 6,773 were granted – a <a href="https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2015/table17">77% affirmation rate</a>. </p>
<p>This high approval rate for Venezuelan asylum seekers, combined with country’s current crisis – in which the right to political dissent and freedom of expression have been criminalised – suggest a high probability that today’s refugees will also be found to have credible fear.</p>
<p>But first they must get into the country. In mid-2015, US border officials in Florida began <a href="http://www.diariolasamericas.com/florida/cancelan-visas-y-obligan-regresar-su-pais-12-venezolanos-miami-n4101435">refusing admission to Venezuelan airline passengers</a>. “Are you afraid to live in Venezuela?” Customs officials would ask, attempting to identify potential asylum seekers entering the country on a tourist or business visa. If they answered yes, they were turned back. </p>
<p>As Jose A. Iglesias wrote months later in Miami’s <a href="http://www.elnuevoherald.com/noticias/mundo/america-latina/venezuela-es/article94025222.html">El Nuevo Herald</a> newspaper, “A majority of Venezuelans, being honest, must answer affirmatively to this question, given the high crime, repression and political violence that imperils the country.”</p>
<p>Interrogations in US Customs <a href="http://vanguardia24.com/impactante-residentes-venezolanos-en-estados-unidos-son-perseguidos-por-inmigracion-candentes-detalles/">continue to be reported on social media</a>. Thus is the state of Venezuelans today: credible fear at the US border, credible fear back home.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/74495/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Emilio Osorio Alvarez does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Venezuelans, fleeing hunger and repression at home, have surpassed Central Americans as the top US asylum-seekers.Emilio Osorio Alvarez, Professor of Migration and Population Studies, Universidad Central de VenezuelaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/722712017-02-02T23:28:24Z2017-02-02T23:28:24ZTo resist Trump’s tyranny, just don’t comply<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155125/original/image-20170201-12678-c0zfvi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Just say no! Tyranny depends on mass subservience.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/noradbase/32298137402/">Alek S./flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This article is part of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/democracy-futures">Democracy Futures</a> series, a <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/democracy-futures/">joint global initiative</a> with the <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/">Sydney Democracy Network</a>. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>After his unexpected election win, the immediate question was what would US President Donald Trump actually <em>do</em>? Would his administration be as confused as his speeches or as cunningly effective as his campaign?</p>
<p>In the interim, far from “draining the swamp”, he has <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/politics/donald-trump-administration.html">assembled a team</a> of billionaires, family and members of the far-right.</p>
<p>On his inauguration – just as they were <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/22/trump-inauguration-crowd-sean-spicers-claims-versus-the-evidence">lying</a> about the size of the audience – LGBT rights, health care, civil liberties and climate change disappeared from the White House homepage. The latter was <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/trump-officials-suspend-plan-delete-epa-climate-web-page">scrubbed</a> from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) website too.</p>
<p>Rounding out his <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/27/donald-trumps-first-week-power-executive-orders-tweets-president/">first week in office</a>, Trump signed a litany of executive orders: <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/01/23/can-president-trumps-executive-order-unravel-the-affordable-care-act/?utm_term=.2d6e6a075796">scaling back</a> parts of his predecessor’s Affordable Care Act, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/23/us/politics/federal-hiring-freeze.html?_r=0">freezing federal hiring</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/01/24/trump-gives-green-light-to-dakota-access-keystone-xl-oil-pipelines/?utm_term=.d0ccbda45fe6">greenlighting two oil pipelines</a>, <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/president-trump-administration-orders-epa-media-blackout-contract-freeze/">halting payments to the EPA</a> and imposing a media blackout on it; and <a href="https://theconversation.com/donald-trumps-ban-will-have-lasting-and-damaging-impacts-on-the-worlds-refugees-72001">denying entry to refugees</a> and immigrants from <a href="http://www.npr.org/2017/01/31/512439121/trumps-executive-order-on-immigration-annotated">certain Muslim-majority countries</a>.</p>
<p>He called for a shutdown of parts of the internet in the name of fighting terror. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/yfEG4oWz5AY?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Donald Trump argues for ‘closing the internet up’ to counter terrorism.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2017/01/26/politics/donald-trump-mexico-import-tax-border-wall/">20% tariff</a> on imports from Mexico would pay to “build that wall”. Trump also claimed that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/26/donald-trump-torture-works">torture “works”</a>. </p>
<p>In short, Trump seems ruthlessly efficient, wiping out America’s progressive legacy with deft pen-strokes of his grasping, little hand.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CZkopd9m1lw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The Project’s Waleed Aly lists everything President Trump has done in his first week of office.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Servitude under Trump</h2>
<p>For many who oppose this suite of unnerving policies, the question is how can Trump be <em>legitimately</em> resisted?</p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tienne_de_La_Bo%C3%A9tie">Étienne de La Boétie</a> – the 16th-century French judge and writer – offered a simple, yet elegant <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=6o-8P3iqf7IC&pg=PA15&lpg=PA15&dq=like+a+great+Colossus+whose+pedestal+has+been+pulled+away%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=z8cLUWoT_t&sig=9R0u9Ymtm0pyvOxLLJKwLkqlb9s&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiKnoiDi-vRAhWCE5QKHVQsCMsQ6AEIJjAC#v=on">answer</a>: withdraw support so that “like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away”, the all-powerful ruler is forced to “fall of his own weight and break in pieces”.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155120/original/image-20170201-12681-l548s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155120/original/image-20170201-12681-l548s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155120/original/image-20170201-12681-l548s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155120/original/image-20170201-12681-l548s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155120/original/image-20170201-12681-l548s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155120/original/image-20170201-12681-l548s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155120/original/image-20170201-12681-l548s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Étienne de La Boétie (1530–1563) was a founder of modern political philosophy in France.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikipedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>La Boétie reasoned that the rule of any government acting tyrannically would abruptly end as soon as its subjects withdrew their active support, for such power only comes from the “<a href="https://mises.org/library/politics-obedience-discourse-voluntary-servitude">voluntary servitude</a>” of its subjects. The tyrant has “nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you”. </p>
<p>Given that governments rule by a very few – the ruling class and its functionaries – they are highly susceptible to non-co-operation of the people. </p>
<p>La Boétie’s essay, <em>Discours de la servitude volontaire</em> (Discourse on Voluntary Servitude), is his greatest contribution to political thought. It remains relevant, 440 years after it was published, in an age when the public’s understanding of political resistance to institutionalised authority is <a href="http://www.startribune.com/house-hearing-ends-amid-protest-after-bill-cracking-down-on-demonstrators-moves-forward/411660166/">largely quarantined</a> by anti-protest and anti-assembly powers.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155123/original/image-20170201-12681-1rhhnsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155123/original/image-20170201-12681-1rhhnsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1015&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155123/original/image-20170201-12681-1rhhnsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1015&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155123/original/image-20170201-12681-1rhhnsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1015&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155123/original/image-20170201-12681-1rhhnsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1276&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155123/original/image-20170201-12681-1rhhnsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1276&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155123/original/image-20170201-12681-1rhhnsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1276&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">La Boétie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Étienne de La Boétie/Wikipedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The essay concerns tyranny – the rule of one. America is still a democracy, of course, though it is <a href="https://theconversation.com/american-elections-ranked-worst-among-western-democracies-heres-why-56485">now openly</a> “<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com.au/economist-intelligence-unit-downgrades-united-states-to-flawed-democracy-2017-1?r=US&IR=T">flawed</a>”, with some pointing to its emergent <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746">oligarchy</a>. At the same time, attacks on the media, lying to the public, denigrating facts/science, scapegoating minorities and nepotism are all hallmarks of tyranny. </p>
<p>The notable feature of La Boétie’s political theory is that the origin of tyrannical power is irrelevant: whether by election, inheritance or force, if rulership is oppressive, it is tyrannical.</p>
<p>La Boétie interrogates the mind of the ruler and the subservient, and the strategies to overcome this relation of servitude. His second key insight flows from his counter-intuitive analysis of this dynamic. He does not place political agency or power in the hands of the tyrant, but in the people themselves. He <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=6o-8P3iqf7IC&pg=PA46&lpg=PA46&dq=Poor,+wretched,+and+stupid+peoples+you+let+yourselves+be+deprived+before+your+own+eyes.&source=bl&ots=z8cLUWpU-v&sig=etUzfHpXdgP3BEFI91rwSZI2GYc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjb4oaVj-vR">rails</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, you let yourselves be deprived before your own eyes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>All your “misfortune” descends “not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is”.</p>
<h2>Responsibility for freedom is our own</h2>
<p>La Boétie is unremitting in his criticism of servitude – the servile are “traitors” to themselves. They give tyranny its “eyes” to surveil, its arms to beat and its feet to trample freedom. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, La Boétie intends his work not to cajole but to awaken these voluntary servants to the understanding that their own liberation is in their power. As he <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=6o-8P3iqf7IC&pg=PA46&lpg=PA46&dq=Poor,+wretched,+and+stupid+peoples+you+let+yourselves+be+deprived+before+your+own+eyes.&source=bl&ots=z8cLUWpU-v&sig=etUzfHpXdgP3BEFI91rwSZI2GYc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjb4oaVj-vR">writes</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>You can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This principle of non-co-operation forms the root of civil disobedience movements today. If tyrannical commands cannot be enforced without subjects to do the enforcing, then withdrawal of both <em>consent</em> and <em>action</em> is a pragmatic, peaceful and legitimate means for conventional politics to resist even the most narcissistic of wig-wearers today.</p>
<p>And we can point to real-life heroes acting out this defiance today: <a href="http://www.salon.com/2017/01/26/the-twitter-rebellion-badlands-national-park-is-the-latest-national-park-to-defy-president-trump/">Badlands National Park</a> breaking its gag order to tweet facts of science, or NASA with its <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-nasa-twitter-resist-national-parks-climate-change-rogue-a7546666.html">Rogue 1</a> doing the same.</p>
<p>At the same time, reliance on individual action can be confused and contradictory. For example, the <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2017/01/28/politics/donald-trump-travel-ban/">battle at the airports</a> over the Muslim immigration ban now seems to be between federal customs and Department of Homeland Security agents enforcing the executive order, and those following the Federal Court order barring deportations. The separation of powers is reliant on people serving this separation. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155119/original/image-20170201-12681-vuote7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155119/original/image-20170201-12681-vuote7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155119/original/image-20170201-12681-vuote7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155119/original/image-20170201-12681-vuote7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155119/original/image-20170201-12681-vuote7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155119/original/image-20170201-12681-vuote7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155119/original/image-20170201-12681-vuote7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">People gathered at airports around the US to protest Trump’s ban on immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Livingston/flickr</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>La Boétie was quick to realise that the key question is not how tyrannies remain in power, but why subjects do not withdraw their support. Fear and ideology, self-interest and habit all conspire so that the many acquiesce in their own subjection. In Trump’s oft-tweeted word: <em>Sad!</em></p>
<p>So, while acts of peaceful withdrawal should be enough to cripple any oppressive regime, La Boétie’s thesis holds only on the condition that <em>the many</em> oppose <em>the one</em>.</p>
<h2>Clinging to the tyrant</h2>
<p>Here we run into two major problems. Some people lack the critical distance from their social order to question it. More problematic are those who benefit from Trump’s rule. </p>
<p>For La Boétie, this class is the <em>most</em> dangerous. Those who “cling to the tyrant”, who take “the bait toward slavery”, offer him their loyalty in return for institutionalised bribery (including, in today’s idiom, state contracts, tax breaks, administrative assistance and positions of influence). This 1% become the willing hands of tyranny, reaching throughout society.</p>
<p><a href="https://libcom.org/files/Landauer_Revolution_and_Other_Writings.pdf">Gustav Landauer</a> calls this the “internal flaw”, that the people who “feed” tyranny “must stop doing so”. At this point, however, La Boétie leaves us with pure voluntarism as some rational hope against tyranny.</p>
<p>But even this idea can be educative. Much has been made of the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/21/us/politics/richard-spencer-punched-attack.html">punch on Richard Spencer</a>, the neo-Nazi who <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/richard-bertrand-spencer-0">advocates “ethnic cleansing”</a>. Some say that, rather than street violence, resistance must instead go “high”. Having a grandfather who was tortured by the SS, I am less sanguine. Spencer and his ilk promise horrific violence on a mass scale. Believe them. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aFh08JEKDYk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Richard Spencer, the man credited with coining the term “alt-right”, is punched in the head while talking with a reporter.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Nevertheless, such punches seem very ineffective in making allies of centrists against Trump. For those who find such acts of resistance unsavoury La Boétie presents an effective middle ground. You don’t have to do anything: just don’t comply, <em>ever</em>. This principle could even appeal to libertarians.</p>
<p>So while La Boétie offers us no panacea for freedom, especially in overcoming political structures of tyranny, he helps jar our thought into recognising that it is <em>we</em> who can act for <em>our</em> freedom. To this end, he offers a legitimate means for even the most apolitical subject to resist: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The problem today is that many are willing to serve in their own oppression and even more willing to serve in the oppression of others. So the real question he leaves us with is: what are we to do against the willing servants of tyranny?</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mu_hCThhzWU?wmode=transparent&start=90" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Has the strategy that Michelle Obama advocated at last year’s Democratic National Convention worked?</span></figcaption>
</figure><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/72271/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Shannon Brincat does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The origin of tyrannical power is irrelevant: whether by election, inheritance or force, if rulership is oppressive, it is tyrannical. And the way to beat it is deceptively simple: refuse to comply.Shannon Brincat, Research Fellow in International Relations, Griffith UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/640312016-08-17T19:00:42Z2016-08-17T19:00:42ZUnder the Influence of … Paul Stopforth’s Biko painting called ‘Elegy’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/134410/original/image-20160817-3597-1t5w78l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Paul Stopforth (b. 1946) 'Elegy' (1980). Graphite and wax on paper on board: 149 x 240 cm
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy Durban Art Gallery</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In our weekly series, “Under the influence”, we ask experts to share what they believe are the most influential works of art in their field. Here, artist/academic/forensic practitioner Kathryn Smith explains why she believes Paul Stopforth’s “Elegy” (1980) is hugely influential.</em></p>
<p>“Elegy” is a postmortem portrait of South African Black Consciousness activist <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/stephen-bantu-biko">Stephen Bantu Biko</a> (1946-1977) by <a href="http://paulstopforth.com/">Paul Stopforth</a> (b. Johannesburg, 1945). It is executed in graphite powder painstakingly polished into layers of Cobra floor wax from which countless hair-fine excisions then excavate the figure from its ground.</p>
<p>Measuring 149 x 240 cm – near life-size – it hovers between drawing, photography, sculpture and painting, demonstrating kinship with all these media and yet claiming a singular materiality. </p>
<h2>My relationship with the work</h2>
<p>The work was completed in 1980, three years after Biko’s violent death in police custody. It was purchased by the <a href="http://www.durban.gov.za/city_services/parksrecreation/durban_art_gallery/Pages/default.aspx">Durban Art Gallery</a> in 1981, where I first encountered it as a young child.</p>
<p>I have a distinct recollection of being drawn towards the surface of this phantom image. Of it filling my child-self’s visual field from above as I tried to make sense not of what, but how it was: it was obvious to me that whoever this man was, he was not asleep. And why did the light in the picture seem so off, seeping out from this body’s darkest parts like a photograph gone wrong?</p>
<p>As with the series of smaller, more fugitive drawings of Biko’s hands and feet that preceded this monumental study, “Elegy” was made with direct reference to the forensic photographs of his postmortem examination, given to Stopforth by the Biko family’s lawyer. There can be no doubt that it borrows from religious iconography, presenting Biko as a secular martyr (the clue is in the title). </p>
<h2>Why it is/was influential</h2>
<p>Art historian Shannen Hill suggested in her 2005 article “Iconic autopsy: postmortem portraits of Bantu Stephen Biko” (published in a special edition of the journal <a href="http://www.international.ucla.edu/africa/africanarts/">African Arts</a>) that Stopforth’s graphic techniques “disrupt detached viewing”. Our experience is a kind of looking that is tactile, penetrative, what I would call a forensic gaze.</p>
<p>Forensic photographs embody a beguiling paradox: they perform as evidence, yet they are not self-evident. We demand that they act as arbiters of empirical data, while knowing they are technological constructions that require expert interlocution to reveal their truths.</p>
<p>“Elegy’s” impact on my childhood idea of what art could be – do even – was utterly formative, not least because it was through an embodied connection with an image that I later learned of the existence and significance of its subject. </p>
<p>“Elegy” could be said to represent the critical coordinates of my creative and intellectual life, which has been consistently involved with ideas of the body as image and as experience, evidence and affect, absence and presence. </p>
<p>My praxis is now bifurcated between my experimental (and perhaps even impolitic) interests as an artist, and my professional responsibilities as a forensic practitioner. It requires of me, among other things, to recreate convincing facial images for deceased or disappeared individuals who cannot be otherwise legally identified, in the hope that they might be.</p>
<p>This work feeds the tensions I perceive between conceptions of identity and technologies of identification, the revelatory and obfuscatory powers of archives, and the capacity of objects to be simultaneously loquacious and mute. So it is productive to think through “Elegy” as a sort of conceptual and ethical compass. </p>
<p>Did this image subconsciously navigate my earliest tussles with school teachers who insisted that my mutual inclination towards both visual art and forensic pathology was at worst impossible and at best, deeply conflicted? Did it silently guide me, many years later, from Durban to Johannesburg, and to the <a href="http://wsoa.wits.ac.za/fine-arts/">Wits Fine Arts</a> department, where I would encounter an influential tutor who insisted the opposite, and who showed me how it could be so?</p>
<p>That tutor was <a href="http://mg.co.za/article/2013-01-18-obituary-colin-richards-1954-2012/">Colin Richards</a> (1954-2012). I would later discover that he’d had his own powerful encounters with images of Biko’s body, twice. The first was while working as a medical illustrator at Wits in the late 1970s. The second was as a deliberate confrontation with his perceived complicity in the administration of Biko’s death. The outcome he presented as the multi-part work, “Veils” (1996).</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/134412/original/image-20160817-3583-i26tse.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/134412/original/image-20160817-3583-i26tse.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/134412/original/image-20160817-3583-i26tse.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/134412/original/image-20160817-3583-i26tse.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/134412/original/image-20160817-3583-i26tse.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/134412/original/image-20160817-3583-i26tse.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/134412/original/image-20160817-3583-i26tse.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Colin Richards (1954-2012) - ‘Veils’ (1996). Mixed media.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of the author</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Here Richards employs a representation of the Biblical “<a href="http://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/mysterious-veil-veronica-masterpiece-or-miracle-004917">veil of Veronica</a>”, a piece of cloth onto which the face of a suffering Christ was reportedly imprinted. As an analogue “print” made directly from a source, it is considered to be the first photograph. On his recrafted veils, Richards instead imprinted facsimiles of images of the cell in which Biko was tortured, and two macroscopic pathology photographs which do not identifiably belong to a specific body (yet they are Biko). </p>
<p>In an interview with Richards in 2004, he suggested to me that “Illustration is a hinge between the linguistic and the visual, and it can turn many ways”. This is particularly true of forensic images. Their simultaneous ability to be authoritative and obtuse is the source of their potency and fallibility. </p>
<p>Public memorialisation of the dead pivots on a core ethical decision: whether to respect personal privacy through maintaining anonymity, or to name. The dead cannot give informed consent. Publishing images of corpses is regarded as something which requires very careful management, lest such dissemination is seen to either objectify or profit from the deceased. Like public shaming, such exposure can turn many ways. And that line is thin indeed.</p>
<p>The figure in “Elegy” is not visually identifiable as Stephen Bantu Biko. This has two possible effects, neither of which are easy: sublimating his identity counts as yet another violation of the historical specificity of Biko as an individual. Protecting his identity could be considered a sensitive choice – a tactical dehumanisation, if you will.</p>
<h2>Why it is still relevant</h2>
<p>In many ways, “Elegy” tests the very limits of representational politics. After all, it’s yet another instance of a violated black man represented by his social and political opposite, an artist who embodies Apartheid’s privileged classes, specifically the white, patriarchal subject position it worked to strengthen and maintain.</p>
<p>Should this difficulty make us avert our gaze or even more seriously, reject the image? I cannot, because its effect on me now is as potent as it was three decades ago: the sharp, sour shock of touching your tongue on a battery.</p>
<p>Significant events are unlikely to rise to public consciousness without a visual record, and recent events in South Africa - such as the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/marikana-massacre-16-august-2012">Marikana massacre</a> where police killed 34 striking mineworkers - have demonstrated the extraordinary productive and destructive power of images. A direct response to the atrocities of its moment, “Elegy” reflects on political oppression, those tasked with propagating the abuse of state power and those set up to bear such abuse. It represents processes of concealment and revelation with very real social and political consequences.</p>
<p>Yet images like this are not stable; their significance is neither continuous nor equivalent. They are ciphers for what it means to be human and vulnerable within a social and political regime in which not all bodies are considered equal, and where a state under threat resorts to covert and fatal tactics.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/64031/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kathryn Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Works like “Elegy” are ciphers for what it means to be human and vulnerable within a social and political regime in which not all bodies are considered equalKathryn Smith, Visual/forensic artist, PhD researcher, Liverpool John Moores UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.