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They didn't stop, they were stopped, at great cost. If they had been stopped sooner, the cost would have been less; if they had not been stopped in 1945, they would have kept going.
Or, we agree to resist oppression by anyone, gay or straight, black or white, red or blue, man or woman, against anyone else, while maintaining the distinction between the individual perpetrators and those who happen to share characteristics with them.
It's a nice thought, but I've spent too long watching oppression against straight whites defined as "anti-oppression" and resistance defined as "oppression". Human biology and psychology just doesn't work like that, and neither does it deal well with serious moral / status / resource conflicts. There is no way to make a system where everyone gets what they want AND nobody is oppressed.
For example, my existence as a misgenderer oppresses trans people, and their attempts to force me to use their preferred pronouns oppresses me. You, the all-powerful tyrant king, can of course swoop down and force us to play nice, but then you're oppressing both of us. Likewise economics, if you want to switch away from the culture war.
Yes, oppressors tend to lie about what they are doing.
Which is why degrowth is a very bad idea.
Only because some people want to oppress others.
Misgendering isn't something you are, it's something you do, to other people.
A policy of "Thou shalt use the exact pronouns specified; using they/them for a nonbinary person who prefers ze/zir is a banworthy/firable offence"? I would agree with you. "They/them for everybody", or "he/him for male-presenting/identified, she/her for female-presenting/identified, they/them for androgynous/non-binary" ought to be considered an acceptable compromise.
A policy of "If Alice and Barbara are equally female-presenting, both identify as female, and both have stated a preference for she/her, you do not refer to Alice as he/him, or as they/them while referring to Barbara as she/her, merely because Alice happened to be born with a dangly bit" is not oppression, because it is not oppression for Alice's genitals to be none of your business.
Says you. If I disagree about how female-presenting Alice is, or if actually I think that the biological sex of the person is relevant, we're going to have to have a fight about it. This is what I'm getting at. In practice, everyone wants to force their values on (oppress) other people some of the time. You can say it shouldn't be like that, but it is like that.
Bumping that up a layer of abstraction to force your system of conflict resolution on everyone doesn't actually help, it just obscures, because in practice it means some win and some lose on the concrete level but now you aren't allow to fight on the concrete level any more.
Also, I would like to point out that my deep cynicism on this subject stems, like @HonoriaWinchester, @SteveAgain and I suspect many others, from having done my best to live up to that poem and then having people I'd stuck up for turn on me the moment they had the chance. I am not inclined to try it again.
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