It is nearly three quarters of a century since Bertrand Russell published his essay “The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed”, in which he denied—refuted would be perhaps too strong a word for it—the romantic notion that the oppressed are morally superior to their oppressors. Once the boot is on the other foot, the oppression often restarts, but in an opposite or different direction. Indeed, if oppression were a stimulus to virtue, it would be an argument in its favour, which is absurd. Pharaoh could have claimed that, by oppressing them, he was only trying to make the Jews good.
Bertrand Russell, of course, was not an infallible political commentator, or immune from foolishness, but in this little essay he was certainly on to something whose importance would only grow with time. Indeed, the supposed superiority of the oppressed is now so deeply entrenched, at least in the minds of many Western intellectuals, that it has become hereditary, like a moral peerage. If one’s parents, grandparents or great-grandparents suffered oppression, then one also suffered it and is thereby granted an extension of their moral superiority.
Where oppression becomes a badge of moral superiority, it is only natural, or human nature, that those who believe themselves to be morally superior—probably 90 per cent of the human race—should come to think of themselves as oppressed. After all, nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so, and oppression is in the eye of the victim of it. You are oppressed if you think you are.
The episode in England, in which the police at first arrested not a murderer, but the dying victim of the murderer, on the grounds that his murderer had accused him of racism, was the natural—I won’t say inevitable—outcome of the sacralisation, as it were, of racism as the vice of vices, as the crime of crimes, as the evil of evils. No doubt every age needs a vice, crime and evil that overtops all others and explains why the world is not merely imperfect but terrible. But unfortunately, the world is not so simple: vice, crime and evil are multiform, and the existence of one does not exclude the existence of another.
In England, at least,
and I suspect elsewhere, racism has become the prefect subject for witch-hunts.