IF WE HAVE TO FIGHT THE SYSTEM, WE WILL FIGHT THE SYSTEM – DR M’MEMBE

My good friend Mr Luxon Kazabu says I should not forget what happened to me under the PF and people like Kampyongo when I had not committed any crime. He says I am being naive or subjective.

Indeed, what happened under the PF was very bad and we should be on guard and very alert to ensure that it doesn’t happen to anyone in this country again. It’s very easy for everyone one of us to treat well, fairly those we love, our friends.

But the real test of our humanity comes in when it is our enemies involved – how we treat our enemies, those we most detest, those who committed crimes against us. It is very easy to love your friends; it is very difficult to love your enemies.

In biblical history, we were told that there were struggles even in heaven, among the angels – and if there were struggles in heaven, how can we fail to understand that there may be struggles on earth? What’s more, Jesus tells us we must love our enemies – he doesn’t say we mustn’t have enemies – and there’s no greater love for an oppressor than to prevent him from oppressing others.

I was taught that there was a constant struggle between good and evil, and evil had to be punished. Indeed, we must expose crime, and hunt down the criminal; but we should always remember that even in the case of crime, if it is attacked in sensational, lurid, and unfair fashion, the attack may do more damage to the public than the crime itself. And it is because I feel that there should be no rest in the endless war against the forces of evil that I ask that the war be conducted with sanity as well as with resolution. Neither arrests, detentions, destruction of my property nor the voice of insult has taught me to hate.

We who are revolutionaries, socialists don’t preach hatred as a philosophy, the philosophy of hatred. This doesn’t mean that we have any friendly feelings for the oppressive system or that we haven’t struggled as had as we can against it, but I think we have one supreme test, which is that we waged a struggle against them; we have suffered from all kinds of acts of cruelty, abuses and wrongs from them, yet when they are unfairly treated, we defend their human rights, we treat them with respect, we are considerate, because we don’t hate them.

What we repudiate and hate is the system. My interpretation – which I think is shared by many socialists – is that it is not a matter of hating individuals but of hating the iniquitous system of abuse, humiliation and exploitation that makes human beings to behave like wolves, jackals or hyenas; it is not hatred of the people.

What we are preaching is the repudiation, rejection and hatred of the system – hatred of injustice. We are not preaching hatred among human beings, because in the final analysis human beings are victims of the system. If we have to fight the system, we will fight the system. If we have to fight the men who represent the system we hate, we will do so.

Fred M’membe

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here