When we read or watch documentaries about the horrible stories of persecution of the Jewish communities in Germany, how they were suffocated in the gas chambers and then burned; how the Fascist Italian government banned them from holding any political postings and outlawed the marriage between an Italian Jewish and non-Jewish; how Jews and Muslims were forced to convert to Catholicism during the Spanish Inquisition; how Japanese were persecuted in the United States during and after the WWII; how the communist regime of Albania murdered arbitrarily innocent people – one of them was my grandfather, in order to spread terror and fear and make every citizen a member of intelligence services; how the Canadian government murdered barbarically the innocent children of our Indigenous brothers and sisters in order to educate the savages and to “kill the Indian in the Child” – as Johnny A. MacDonald postulated it, or the horrible atrocities committed by King Leopold II of Belgium, and many, many other despicable stories, we start to understand the reality that surrounds us. We start to understand what has preceded us.
In every time and place, always there is a group that has to be persecuted. The Government, or the powers it be, always have to find a group to fight against, to persecute them, to justify all the police brutality, all the oppressive laws and wholesale surveillance.
Hitler and Mussolini chose the innocent Jews, Johnny A. McDonald chose the innocent children of the Indigenous people in order “to kill the Indian in the child”, Enver Hoxha even killed arbitrarily in Albania, such as my grandfather etc.
Who are the persecuted people of our time?
Every individual who is independent, who seeks to live a normal life; who refuses to be an informal “friend of the state”; rather, chooses to be a formal law abiding citizen; who refuses to accept the unacceptable; who refuses to accept injustice; everyone who thinks independently and pursues an independent intellectual life; all these are to be persecuted in this time whenever they are by any government.
But why?
One main reason is that our modern governments are obsessed with ultra-control and plan everything; nothing has to happen unpredictably and unplanned. Therefore, free thinkers and independent voices are a real threat to such governments, except that this undermines the very thing what makes humans human, that is, thinking.
Who is right?
The History has shown that Jews were right, Indigenous people were right, the Congolese were right, the Albanian persecuted families were right. Therefore, the History will show once again that being a free and independent thinker – which is the most important faculty that makes us human, is the right thing.
To be on the right side is the most honorable thing one can do and live for. I choose to be on the right side and accept the same persecution done to our Jewish friends. They resisted and won; I will do the same.
Sabri Lushi
