The Granite Face Of Oppression.

What are the means of oppression in civil societies? Do the oppressors let the genie out of the lamp and start murdering at will?

Not quite.
While murder is always on the cards for those who do not conform, the real weapon at the disposal of oppressors is something that looks like (but isn't) indifference.

When we expect a fight, we are actually left with only boredom. Such boredom as makes us question whether there was a conflict at all, boredom that erases tension so fully that we are led to question ourselves, to question why we should question.

We are supposed to shrivel up and die.
The granite-face rarely shows any signs of life, and then only to our backs, lest we should realise we were right.

Oppression is a wall, a unity, a will to victory over all like us that encourages the few clowns who venture forth occasionally to torment us with their fraudulent sympathy and poisonous alliance; help, the more to enfeeble us.
And to question help?
Is to question common humanity.

When they take their rightful places in the wall, the wall between us and home, then we may wonder whether at all there was help.

But when the creatures of conformity see that we in turn are indifferent, then you see what led them to try and belong; the person you reflect to will feel the tables turned, and be brought back to their own distant defeat when that feverish, threatening indifference made them find the way to surrender, so as to feel the full kindness and welcome of the stinking sweat of the human crowd, a smell that has come to mean belonging.

And when you turn the tables on them, however fleetingly, you might see the human inside, struggling to belong to you instead.

But if you bring only freedom, you may find only hate.