I have finished my first two courses for my teaching certification. In case you were wondering what the schools' politics are, I was strongly encouraged to read Paulo Freire. As a good student and someone who tries to keep an open mind, I bothered to read two of his most famous books, Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Pedagogy of Hope, even though they were not formally assigned. The two things that really struck me about Pedagogy of the Oppressed were that it is simply a terribly written book and that very little of it actually has anything to do with education. Pedagogy of Hope is somewhat better in the sense that it is mostly understandable but it also has almost nothing to do with education. The book is best seen as a self-indulgent autobiography, focusing on the author's interactions with fans of Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Considering that most of Pedagogy of the Oppressed was not written for clarity, it is important to focus on those parts where Freire was remarkably clear.
Any situation in which "A" objectively exploits "B" or hinders his and her pursuit of self-affirmation as a responsible person is one of oppression. Such a situation in itself constitutes violence, even when sweetened by false generosity because it interferes with the individual's ontological and historical vocation to be more fully human. With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence? How could they be the sponsors of something whose objective inauguration called forth their existence as oppressed? There would be no oppressed had there been no prior situation of violence to establish their subjugation (p. 55).
Freire's universe was an utterly Manichean one in which people could be divided into oppressors and oppressed. This is not a world in which, to use Solzhenitsyn's term, the struggle between good and evil runs across every human soul. On the contrary, an oppressed person could never wrong their oppressor. Note how easy it is to be an oppressor. You do not even need to physically harm anyone; you simply need to get in the way of their self-expression. If we are to take Freire seriously, my parents oppressed me through the "violence" of regular bathing and underwear changing. By this standard, the only way for Freire's bifurcation of oppressor and oppressed can make sense is by declaring, a priori, that Freire's people are the oppressed and their opponents are the oppressors. We will then cherrypick the data to show how the members of the opposition are the oppressors while deciding that any contrary evidence is irrelevant since Freire's people are already oppressed and, therefore, can never be oppressors.
Freire's bifurcation into oppressor and oppressed takes a truly satanic turn once you realize that he actively justified literal physical violence as long as it was carried out by those people he thought were oppressed. Such acts are not only to be deemed non-violent but are actually manifestations of "love." According to Friere:
Yet it is - paradoxical though it may seem - precisely in the response of the oppressed to the violence of their oppressors that a gesture of love may be found. ... Whereas the violence of the oppressors prevents the oppressed from being fully human, the response of the latter to this violence is grounded in the desire to pursue the right to be human. As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized. As the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors' power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression (p. 56).
Keep in mind that Freire was not a pacifist. His praise of Che Guevara shows otherwise. So, when Freire talked about acting against oppression, he clearly meant to include killing. Not only did Freire believe that it was ok for his people to murder their opponents, anyone who did anything to get in their way, doing so not only did not violate their opponent's human rights but was an act of "love" that made them human once again.
Consider how this logic can be applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israelis are, by definition, oppressors because we are going to decide that the cause of the conflict was Palestinian refugees in 1948 and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. The mere existence of the State of Israel hinders the fullest expression of Palestinian national identity so any support for Israel is an act of violence against Palestinians. Nothing else matters because Palestinians are the oppressed. Therefore, nothing that they do, even the murder of children, can be considered violence. If Israelis die, they are only suffering the results of their being oppressors.
Since Israelis are the oppressors, they do not really count as human beings and have forfeited all claims to human rights. Hence it is not an act of anti-Semitism to call for the murder of Jews using the same tropes as Der Sturmer. On the contrary, it is an act of "love." It is only in death that the non-anti-Zionist Jew can be redeemed from the crime of Zionism and regain their lost humanity.
It is worth noting that Freire was at least nominally a Christian and worked for the World Council of Churches. One of the great lies of Christianity is that it is a religion of love in contrast to Judaism which is supposed to be the religion of judgment. It is precisely this Christian claim to love that has served to justify over a thousand years of oppression against Jews. Historically, Jews have long known that the truest expression of Christian love was to murder Jews.
One of the oddities of living in a post-Holocaust world is that it is precisely the more conservative branches of Christianity that are likely to have repented from this tradition of anti-Semitism. This is possible because of the doctrines of Original Sin and the divinity of Jesus. Original Sin makes it possible for Christians to imagine that they are not the hero of the story and are capable of doing truly terrible things, including crimes against the Jewish people. This is why Jesus, the true hero of the Christian story, needed to die on the Cross and not simply teach people to love their neighbors. No one, not even the most decent Christian, could ever fulfill that commandment.
If you believe that the main point of Jesus' ministry was that he was the Son of God and needed to die for the sins of the world as opposed to teaching people to love their neighbors, then there is little need to turn the Jews into villains. Jews in the first century CE may have been the most righteous and godly people to have ever walked this Earth. They still lacked Jesus and were therefore destined to fail. The moment you believe that the point of Jesus was to teach a new morally superior doctrine then the Jews need to become the villains. If Jesus taught people to be kind even to Samaritans and prostitutes, it must be that the Jews were mean fanatical people who hated Samaritans and stoned prostitutes.
Freire exemplifies a Christianity that has replaced the Cross with Marxist class struggle. What remained was his self-righteousness. He knew that he was one of the good guys of history because he cared about the downtrodden and oppressed. It never occurred to him that he could be the true face of evil, someone who could see murder and call it love.
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