In his book The Art of Being’, Erich Fromm said this:

Faith in life, in oneself, on others, must be built on the hard rock of realism; that is to say, on the capacity to see evil where it is, to see swindle, destructiveness and selfishness, not only when they are obvious, but in their many disguises and rationalisations.

And we’ve just seen undisguised evil in the premeditated murder of the Saudi reporter Jamal Kashoggi who in his death, has perhaps drawn more attention to everything that is wrong with the Saudi regime – especially with all power now being concentrated in the hands of one man – than ever he could have achieved in his life.

But then this is how most non democratic regimes operate nowadays. The Egyptian leader Al Sisi has had most of the Muslim Brotherhood murdered or imprisoned and Putin thinks nothing of killing off or imprisoning those who oppose him, and the good thing is that the world today is now standing up against this kind of evil . The tyrants in the world are discovering that they can no longer get away with blue murder without paying a price and this is a good thing.’

What Liberates?

The Oxford Dictionary defines liberation as: ‘the act of setting someone free from slavery, imprisonment or oppression’. Liberation, therefore, has both inner and outer dimensions which are intrinsically inter-related because if we are not free inside ourselves, it will inevitably limit our ability to live a liberated outer life, even if the society we live in is a relatively free one. The same can hold true the other way around as well. Many of us, therefore, need liberating not only…