Skip to main content

Transforming the everyday tyrannies that destroy our souls


Tyranny often does its work on us through the normalization  of its methods.

It turns itself into the norm, its methods incorporated into our everyday behaviors and interactions.

We are turned into tools of the tyrannical structure, often through our consent to participate in it.

From the routine forms of participation in the everyday demands of tyranny to carrying out surveillance to  delivering punishment on behalf of the structure, we make ourselves as the instruments of tyranny.

We even feel glee doing the work of surveillance or doing the work of crafting out the right punishment to the non-believer.

Tyranny recruits into its structures the very best among us. Leading us to believe in its methods and its legitimacy. Cultivating in us the faith in the methods of tyranny as necessary responses to the non-believer.

To have the courage to reject the methods of tyranny is seen as an act of betrayal, therefore calling for legitimate responses of violence.

Tyranny is omnipresent in its reach. Its seduction lies in the promises it offers for opportunities, career progression, and movements up the ladder. Or for that matter, simply in the security of a routine job within the structures of tyranny.

Normative appeals to pragmatism are deployed by the tyrannical structure to recruit the instruments of the structure.

"I must compromise with tyranny so I can survive." The discourse of survival routinizes everyday participation in the techniques of tyranny. Workers, neighbors, friends are turned "on" each other, doing the work of the tyrannical structure just to survive.

One is led to believe, "You have no other options." This sense of having no other options makes the compromise with tyranny a necessity for survival.

Often we get very little in giving up our humanity to the methods of tyranny. What might look like the promise of security turns out to be the very basis for a precarious life. One compromise leads to the next and leads to the next.

The onslaught on our souls is a technique of tyranny, with the incipient message that to simply function, we must participate in the delivery of tyranny.

The recruitment of the decent, the human, the kind into its structures is essential to the survival of tyranny. Yet tyrannies are themselves precarious as they survive on the perpetuation of fear.

The recognition of the fear that drives tyranny is the basis for taking it down.

Popular posts from this blog

Zionist hate mongering, the race/terror trope, and the Free Speech Union: Part 1

March 15, 2019. It was a day of terror. Unleashed by a white supremacist far-right terrorist. Driven by hate for brown people. Driven by Islamophobic hate. Earlier in the day, I had come across a hate-based hit piece targeting me, alongside other academics, the University of Auckland academic Professor Nicholas Rowe , Professor Richard Jackson at Otago University, Professor Kevin P Clements at Otago University, Dr. Rose Martin from University of Auckland and Dr. Nigel Parsons at Massey University.  Titled, "More extremists in New Zealand Universities," the article threw in the labels "terror sympathisers" and "extremist views." Written by one David Cumin and hosted on the website of the Israel Institute of New Zealand, the article sought to create outrage that academics critical of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid are actually employed by universities in New Zealand. Figure 1: The web post written by David Cumin on the site of Israel Institute
Read more

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems wit
Read more

Disinformation, Zionist propaganda, and free speech: Far right cancel culture

Thursday October 12, 2023. The settler colonial occupation had unleashed its infrastructure of violence over the Palestinian people over a period of five days. Gaza was being indiscriminately bombarded, with mass civilian casualties that Amnesty International noted " must be investigated as war crimes ." At 3:32 p.m., my office phone rang. I was occupied and the call went to the voicemail. "Dutta, you are a murderous, f***ing, racist c***. Go back to where you belong...I will see to your termination in New Zealand." A couple of hours before that, an email had gone out from the Zionist Dane Giraud to the email listserv of the Free Speech Union, performed as a supposed apology for attacking my academic freedom. In the email, Giraud referred to my earlier b log post on the interlinkages between far-right Zionism, attacks on academic freedom, and the free speech union, noting how he had been enraged by the following statement on my blog: "I was therefore not surpri
Read more