Amidst the tyranny among us, let us not forget the terrible toll that SARS-COV-2 is having on the world and the United States. Click on the link for the most current data and information.
Lesson 13: Practice Corporeal Politics
“Power wants your body softening in a chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.”
Timothy Snyder, “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century,” 2017.
Corporeal means the temporal or physical, referring to the world of the senses. When COVID is in the rear view mirror, we will once again have more opportunities to get outside and interact with friends and family, and, as Dr. Snyder suggests, with unfamiliar people. with whom we share common concerns and feelings.
Let’s be clear that the Capitol Mob is not what Dr. Snyder is referring to when he says “put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people.” Those people gathered at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 might have thought that they were gathering to fight tyranny but in reality they were made tools of tyranny by a tyrant. That’s a discussion in other and for other posts.
Snyder’s point here is that `to bring about the change that you wish to see in the world you must be on the streets of the world to make that change happen. Social media can be used to organize, but, as we found out on the wrong side of this point, things become real when they are out in public.
The Twentieth Century example of this lesson was in communist Poland (remember the role played by Poland in ultimately defeating the Nazis in WW2?) in 1980-81. The Solidarity labor movement was made up of a coalition of workers, professionals, parts of the Roman Catholic Church, and secular groups.
When students protested in 1968, the communist government activated workers against the protesting students. The workers went on strike in Gdansk in 1970 and that strike was brutally suppressed. The workers were now the isolated group.
Realizing that a different strategy was needed to resist the communist regime, intellectuals and professionals organized a group to aid workers who had been abused by the government. This brought together people from both sides of the political spectrum as well as people of vastly differing religious beliefs, people who before would not have met each other, into a movement with a common purpose.
Polish workers once again went on strike in 1980. But things were different this time. The lawyers and the scholars joined with the hard hats and the labor union Solidarity was born. A free labor union and government promises to observe human rights came into existence.
Solidarity lasted only sixteen months, but during this time new connections and bonds were made among its 10,000,000 members. Even after martial law ended the movement in 1981, eight years later the communists turned to Solidarity to negotiate next steps for governance of Poland. Elections were called and Solidarity won those elections. Communism was coming to an end in Poland and throughout eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The Berlin Wall came down in November 1989.
Here in the United States, tyranny has been removed from the White House and its position of power between 2016-2020. But the struggle against tyranny remains very real. We must unify and take to the streets both literally and figuratively to protect our Democracy from the forces of tyranny. Always remember that our power lies in our cooperation and in our solidarity. College educated, not college educated, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, atheist, gay, straight, trans, Dodger fan, non Dodger fan. We are together in this.
