Cowardice and Oppression

       When you are the big dog on the block, it's easy to throw around the little guy. Always has been. It doesn't take much challenge to rough up the weak and the small.  It's easy, which is why it happens so much. If you want to take an evolutionary look at our species, humans clearly are a predatory species. We always have been, even down to our primal origins. We also were prey at one point. One of those strange species that has fit the role of both predator and prey throughout its history.

    Predators usually prey on the weaker and smaller. This is true when humans prey upon their own kind. "Picking on someone your own size" just takes too much work...and too much courage. Something human predators lack significantly. 

 Human predation of humans takes many forms. Bullying is one of them. Slavery is another. Oppression within any society is predatory at heart. Subjugation is an act of predation.  These things are predatory because they include a more physically and economically stronger person or people taking advantage of and exerting abusive control over others in order to extort resources, utility, or other forms of exploitation at the expense of the victim. Often violating dignity and liberty of the weaker and exploited persons. 

      This is naturally predatory. It often dehumanizes the victims into an artificial inferior state, and human predators reap either an economic, social, political, or even pleasure/gratification gain (or all of the above) by participating in this dehumanization and subjugation.  The only way oppression, slavery, bullying, and to a greater extreme genocide can be justified is through a superiority/inferiority relationship dynamic and the dehumanization of those deemed lesser and/or weaker.

      Oppressive regimes and nations do this all the time. Superiority complexes have to exist in order for oppression and subjugation to occur, and superiority complexes are easily formed in predatory humans. 

     Human predators and oppressive people are not necessarily renowned for their courage and bravery. Oppression is never an act of bravery since it preys upon the weaker and economically disadvantaged. Dehumanization is never an act of courage, because courage implies facing an opponent or enemy more powerful than you. This by default demonstrates the cowardice of oppression and predation, since the target of a predator is "the little guy." It doesn't take much intelligence either, or creativity. It just just takes brutality and selfishness.

      Oppression takes many forms. financial, psychological, physical, even things designed to be nurturing and healing like health care systems can be bastardized and turned into tools of oppression. Oppression, bullying, and subjugation occur in every society, everywhere, in its many diverse forms and constructs. The United States is no exception. Oppression here is just different than elsewhere. More deceptive and less obvious (not so much anymore, though). 

        Since oppression is an act of cowardice and devoid of economic and social creativity, only cowards and inept elites and leadership end up doing it. Since it is predatory in nature, it's like an act of cannibalism in spirit and metaphor, since you are preying on your own kind.

 Only nations run by cowards, inept leaders devoid of creativity, and run by the wolves practice oppression on its own people and subjugation of other sections of humanity. Wolves may be big and tough and scary, but they aren't notorious for bravery.