By Imlisanen Jamir
History has a way of mocking the living. The very practices once resisted often return, not through the same hand, but through another bearing friendlier colors. What was denounced as oppression in one age becomes embraced as virtue in another, provided it comes draped in familiar symbols.
This paradox is not new. Empires have always known that the language of loyalty can be more persuasive than the language of conquest. A foreign banner, when it resembles a community’s deepest identity, can be welcomed even while its weight mirrors the yoke once rejected. Domination, after all, is rarely judged by its methods; it is judged by whether it flatters the audience.
There is an irony that communities defined by their resistance to erasure can, in time, cheer for others wielding the same tools of exclusion. The boots may be different, the uniforms stitched in another style, but the footprints left behind are the same. One authority’s cruelty becomes another authority’s discipline. One ruler’s censorship becomes another ruler’s protection. What was tyranny yesterday becomes salvation today, so long as it wears the right crest.
It is tempting to believe that history’s lessons are linear, that suffering hardens people against its repetition. But memory does not always lead to vigilance. More often it sharpens selective sight. The tyrant nearby remains intolerable; the tyrant far away is tolerated, even celebrated, if his anthem sounds like a hymn already familiar. Symbols can conceal what reality lays bare.
The contradictions multiply. Communities that decry the arrogance of power at home can find themselves applauding power elsewhere. The arguments used against one oppressor are repeated in defense of another. This is less hypocrisy than a testament to the human instinct for belonging. People choose not always what is just, but what affirms who they are. If the banner of dominance resembles their own reflection, it ceases to look like dominance at all.
Such alignments reveal more than shifting politics; they expose the fragility of memory. To denounce one form of supremacy while applauding another is to prove how easily symbols override substance. It is not the structure of control that matters, but whether the song it hums is one the listener already knows. The melody disguises the machinery.
History will record the irony with cold precision: those who once cried out against exclusion now cheering its advance elsewhere, those who once demanded dignity for themselves now applauding its denial to others. The cycle repeats, not because people forget what it means to suffer, but because they remember only who caused it to them.
In the end, domination is never consistent in its disguise. Its colors change, its emblems shift, but its logic remains constant. What varies is the response: outrage when it wounds close to home, approval when it strikes somewhere else. That is the oldest lesson of politics, and perhaps the saddest. Oppression is intolerable—except when it arrives carrying a familiar banner.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
