Red tagging is for cowards

Bencyrus Ellorin .

RED TAGGING is a form of shame campaign meant to persecute a certain group for their beliefs and/or politics.

During the Dark Ages, “witches” were tagged. Red tagging is form of witch hunting.

Like the subject of red tagging, witch-hunts have no clear target. Unlike wildlife hunting, witches are not animals. They are mythical creatures taking the human or animal form or whatever.

Thus, so much subjectivity is involved in witch hunting. The target is tagged and eventually hit based on the hunters’ perception, and based on belief. Belief is something that cannot be objectified, debated upon.

At the onset of the cold war in the late 1940s to 1950s, an American senator from Wisconsin Joseph McCarthy went on a frenzy of accusing anyone he thought were communists. Later on, he was proven wrong and thus the term McCarthyism.

Communism is the objective, the society aspired by those who believe the root of social inequities is private ownership of almost everything. Because not everyone can have equal ownership of property, the society is divided into classes — the haves and have-nots. Karl Marx eruditely explained this in Das Capital. Freidrich Engels explained this in the book Origin of Family, Private Property and State. The two collaborated in the Communist Manifesto.

Both Marx and Engels were no monsters. Perhaps, cannot hurt a fly. They were intellectual giants. They were among the most influential sociology conflict theorists. They worked on Hegel’s, Hobbes’ earlier works, among others, and applied these on actual social relations and ground realities.

There may be anger in their works, understandably because they took on the experiences of the abused workers during the industrial revolution. They worked on social decadence themes like child labor, gender inequality and many more.

But the fathers per se of communism hadn’t taken up arms. They spent thousand of hours writing, expressing their ideas. They died with their pens, immortalized by their ideas.

Like Marx and Engels, today’s activists — people who work on advocacies for justices, freedom, democracy, are no witches. They are patriots. In fact, libertarian societies have emerged because of their undisputed arguments on class exploitation and oppression. The government’s armed forces are mandated to be the protector of the people from all forms of oppression and exploitation.

But as recent history and actual social reality tells us, you take on the themes of social justice, you are considered a threat to the ruling class.

In the absence of any acceptable reason, these protectors of the oppressive and exploitative classes make witches out of patriotic, freedom and justice loving people.

That is red tagging — cowardly, treacherous and unjust.

(BenCyrus Ellorin is a former journalist now engaged in PR and community development work.)