Sacrifice of the Powerless

The powerful may do as they like. Who will apprehend them, successfully chasten them? Might does make right, if not quite rightly moral or ethical.

The powerless can do little to defend themselves against the power of those who wield it, for better or for ill. The defenceless, and that is most of us, have few skills and fewer yet of any mechanisms apart from protest, civil disobedience, defiance of authority, to bring attention to their plight or distress, or unease with the decisions of the powerful.

They do have the option of offering the ultimate sacrifice. It's a sacrifice quite unlike that espoused by Islamist jihadists for whom sacrifice equates with blessed martyrdom, eliciting from He on High plaudits and a place in Paradise, embellished by the presence of willing virgins. Those jihadists sacrificing their lives do it in a state of exalted purpose, submitting to the demands of the Divine Maker, in anticipation of His blessing and their rewards.

They are acting in a powerful way. They are subsumed by the passion of hatred, eager to deliver death as a means of proving their honour, their courage, their commitment to jihad, a holy war that consecrates their actions as one with the glory of God. They act from a position of strength, encouraged by their mullahs, their ayatollahs, their learned clerics who probe the scriptures to define and isolate commandments to go forth and murder in cause of the one True Faith.

The powerless use another instrument altogether. Their sacrifice is a purely personal one. They have no intention of sacrificing other, innocent lives alongside their own. Their protest is one of submission to a moral and ethical code not quite recognized by the greater society, but which impassions them to the point of personal extinction, as a personal protest.

Hunger strikers devote their passive protest, the inertia of losing their bodily functions to pain and starvation to prove their devotion to a cause held dear to their hearts. This is the instrument of protest taken by the weak, those without power, the disenfranchised, in a last desperate appeal for attention to their ignored cause. They offer themselves as hostage to the cause. Unassuaged, they forfeit their claim to life.

This is the ultimate political act of protest. With nothing left to barter for attention, help, commitment, they offer no resistance, merely the unconscionable realization by the onlookers that by their inaction they have condemned a living human being to death. Hunger striking is the ultimate form of blackmail, imposing upon the onlooker the mantle of reluctant enabler in a death pact.

The process, if not halted, is inexorable, as the body breaks down along with the spirit and the will to live. The striker becomes progressively weaker, unable to use all his faculties. He may no longer be able to walk on his own, use his vision or hearing as normal. Pain begins to evince itself as the central and peripheral nervous systems begin to fail, along with the heart, the kidneys and even that largest organ, the skin.

Physical failure, and mental incompetency results. A steely resolve, a hard and righteous belief in one's cause, leading to the ultimate commitment; to cease existing in a common cause with those who are suffering, are oppressed, for whom the striker mounts his protest. The message is a powerful one; the weak transcending his weakness.

Despite the power of the message to move us all to compassion and caring, the protest will not necessarily result in vindication of the decision to hunger-strike. But it does represent the ultimate, and last resort of the desperate.