Swedish activist Greta Thunberg addressed the press on Oct. 5 after she was kidnapped and allegedly tortured by Israeli forces. As she spoke, a supporter yelled out, “heroes,” to which she quickly responded “No, not heroes, no. We are doing the bare minimum.”
In that statement, Thunberg is doing more than deflecting praise — she is issuing a profound correction to our framing of moral courage in the face of atrocity.
The Israeli regime allegedly illegally kidnapped Thunberg along with about 500 other peaceful activists, including Nelson Mandela’s grandson, Mandla Mandela, for exercising their rights as international citizens to deliver humanitarian aid to those facing the still ongoing systemic famine and genocide in occupied Palestine.
Her statement cuts to the heart of our collective failure: We have mystified resistance into something heroic to excuse our own inaction.
We have been sold a lie that standing up to fascism, oppression and genocide requires a special kind of courage or heroic gene. This narrative is not just sentimental — it is a strategic tool of the oppressor and a comforting blanket for the rest of us.
It allows us to believe that resistance is beyond our capacity, and our inaction is not a moral failure but a simple acknowledgment of our ordinariness. This internalized propaganda is designed to infantilize us, to make us believe we are not the “type of people” who can bring about change.
Let me be blunt: We don’t lack brave people. We just have an excess of cowards.
The very language of “bravery” is a trap. It absolves us of responsibility by framing action as something additional — a supererogatory act for the saintly and the strong-willed. This is a cop-out. Standing up to oppression is not an additional moral duty one must assume — it is the baseline requirement for claiming any morality at all.
We must reject and condemn the idea that complying with the status quo to stay safe is acceptable. We don’t need “unbiased” media — we need media to act with moral courage and speak the truth. We need institutions, like our very own Daily Free Press, to have the courage to not allow genocidal propaganda like referring to the ethnic cleansing in Gaza as the “Israel-Hamas War,” regardless of what the Associated Press suggests.
These are settled questions of international law and basic human morality, and we must demand that our leaders have the strength to say it like it is.
You do not need to be exceptional. You, that is anyone reading this article, have immense privilege and can make substantive material differences in the lives of people around you. You are either doing that to the best of your abilities, or you are actively choosing not to.
I think this is the core of what Thunberg meant. She was not being falsely modest. She was merely stating a fact: When you witness a genocide being broadcast on your phone, when you see people being starved and bombed with the complicity of your own government, the absolute least you can do is use your voice and your body to object.
To do less is to be complicit. To do the “bare minimum” is, in a world saturated with cowardice, a revolutionary act.
As a materialist, my analysis focuses on systems, not individuals. I generally avoid assigning personal blame for political failures. But this issue is transcendent — it is a fundamental moral crisis.
I am not critiquing those who are not acting, I am issuing a call to action directly to you — the person reading this from the very comfort of your privilege in the imperial core. If you see yourself as a person who cares about justice and human rights, you have a simple, non-negotiable duty: You must act on those beliefs.
Your morality is not a passive identity but an active commitment to audit your own cowardice relentlessly. And as comrades and members of a shared community, we have an obligation to push each other to be better.
You need not board a boat to Gaza to participate in resistance — the fronts of oppression are at your doorstep.
You have the power to disrupt ICE activities and protect your neighbors from state violence. You have the power to leverage your privilege, to choose a career that builds up your community instead of enriching the already rich and powerful. And you have the power to speak up and challenge the fascist ideology sweeping through our institutions, even when it means facing social consequences.
The ruling class is terrified of this power. Oppressors thrive on manufactured cowardice because they live in fear of the working class gaining consciousness of their power, unifying and mobilizing for their common good.
They invest immense resources in propagating the idea that their power is monolithic and that resistance is both futile and the domain of fanatics. They want you to believe that your choice is between quiet normalcy and reckless, heroic martyrdom.
This is a false binary. The real choice is between integrity and betrayal — between being the person you claim to be and being a coward who quietly assents to atrocity.
It was not easy for Thunberg to willingly subject herself to the alleged torture — the moral “bare minimum” rarely is. But it is the standard we have to hold ourselves to.
These basic standards of decency are the foundation upon which all movements are built, not by legendary heroes, but by ordinary people who finally decided that being a coward was a price they were no longer willing to pay.