Genocide: The Background to Healing History’s Worst Crimes

© Richard Bolstad 2024
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The Aim Of This Essay

If you agree with what Israel has done in Gaza from October 2023 on, don’t bother reading this. I’m not being nasty by saying that: I simply didn’t write this essay for you. Likewise, if you agree with what the Serbs did at Srebrenica or what the Nazis did at Auschwitz and Warsaw, don’t bother reading this. I’m not trying to convert people who approve of these things. I want to speak to that part of humanity that can agree that what happened in these cases is deeply wrong, almost the most wrong thing that could happen (perhaps the only thing worse would be the extermination of an entire planetary ecosystem – “ecocide”). My professional work often focuses on helping people who have experienced genocide. I want to speak to people who are comfortable calling the events in Gaza, Srebrenica and Auschwitz “genocide”, and trying to understand three things:

1. How did a whole people decide to do that or collude with that?
2. How can we stop that happening again?
3. What does all that imply for how we treat the peoples who have survived an event like that already?

Millions of lives depend on us finding answers to these 3 questions, and the answers we have accepted previously are clearly inadequately aligned with reality because they seem to have had no effect on genocidal events, or even worse, they may have made genocide more likely. My discussion will focus on the answers of genocide experts such as Professor Amos Goldberg, Holocaust and genocide researcher at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, who argues that “in all these cases, the perpetrators of the genocide felt an existential threat, more or less justified, and the genocide came in response.” We must get better at removing this sense of impending collective doom, or this will repeat in our future and our children’s future. This article is not focused on “how” to do therapy to heal this. It is providing therapists with a radical set of social distinctions to enable them to effectively deal with genocide. To think about “how” to do the therapy based on these ideas, I refer you especially to our book “The Transcendence Process Guidebook”.

Why All the Research?: It really would not take long to say what I want to say here, if it were not for the fact that, in my experience saying these things online, many people reply without actually knowing the simplest facts of history. In my degree in History and Archaeology at Leicester University, I have learned to back up each claim with a reference, and the advantage of doing that here is to help people who may already “sort of agree” with me, but not know how to match the story of history that they grew up with, and the story I am telling here. Since an understanding of history is essential to working out what to do in future cases of impending genocide, I have taken the time to reference things. I plan to go on a long journey through various ways of thinking about the situation of genocide, especially about the genocide now occurring in Gaza. I have included all this thinking because I hope that readers will utilize this research in the service of their own methodologies of working with trauma. The various ways of thinking about genocide that I have explored here (comparison to individual homicide, neurological and genetic studies, placing genocide in the context of colonialism, and the study of genocide and especially the Holocaust itself) will hopefully be able to be utilized by many different therapists, using many different therapies. Because I want this to be especially relevant to the events in Gaza, I have also spent some space discussing what we might call genocide denial in Israel and the Zionist community. I think it is useful to know these facts, for the same reason that it is useful for people working with violent men to know how they usually deny responsibility for their actions. The aim is not to be able to argue with them, but simply not to get pulled into their confabulation, their justification, but to be able to see it for what it is. That, perhaps above all, is the lesson we learn from this tragic story. Their lies don’t matter. Their pain will keep impelling those lies until they heal. But we who do not get caught in the lies can face towards the future.

The Field of Collective Trauma Studies: My qualifications for writing anything about this are pretty basic. I am a full member of the New Zealand Association of Psychotherapists and have quite a lot of training in hypnotherapy and trauma recovery techniques, and I’ve trained emergency responders in post-genocide and genocide situations like Ukraine, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Middle East. Another field I have training in is history. My degree in History and Archaeology comes from Leicester University, and my archaeology fieldwork was done on the Island of Cyprus, the nearest country by sea from Palestine. The crossover between history and trauma psychology is the field of Collective Trauma, which is what my book “Transcendence” deals with. Key to that book, are the insights of Jeffrey Alexander, Professor of Sociology at Yale University and author of “Trauma: A Social Theory” in which he argues that social trauma is not a naturalistic phenomenon but a psycho-socially constructed experience, the effects of which depend on several variable ways in which a society re-presents events to themselves. This means we can look at Social Trauma in a similar way to how we look at individual trauma. And therefore we can learn from individual aggression (such as homicide), about social aggression (such as genocide). That’s where I will begin.

A Metaphor – When Men Kill Women: Fatal Peril

Fatal Peril – Decision Point: The enormity of genocide makes it seem immensely complex. However, one by one, a genocide is made up of individual human beings who decide to kill, in this case as many as they can of another community. By studying what happens when one person kills another, we get a sense of what happens inside a killer, and, potentially how to stop it. One of the problems that researchers report when they interview violent men to identify how they came to the decision to kill, though, is that in the time after the murder they are in denial, they are searching for a way to avoid imprisonment and they are in a process of changing their internal memory as they adjust to the enormity of what they have done. In particular, they distract the research by their own attention to the factors in their partner which they believe led to the event. A clearer picture can be gained from the kind of men identified as “at risk” of murder, due to their escalating violence against their partner, before any actual event. Here, we hear much clearer descriptions of the moments when they “snap”. “‘Manalive’, in San Rafael, California, regard this as the moment of ’fatal peril’ where the man’s male role belief system dies and he feels like ’a nothing’ or ’nobody’ who may as well be dead if he does not control [his partner] at this point. He sees her as the person who is killing him emotionally and uses this fear to justify his subsequent decision to be violent. Accounts of men killing their partners for trivial reasons, e.g. because he could not repair a vacuum cleaner, or felt criticised because his holiday photographs were of poor quality, become more understandable through this analysis. It is only methods consistent with a radical feminist analysis which focus solely on the man’s behaviour, his decisions and choices to be violent that facilitate a man in experiencing again the moments of fear without diluting the experience with debate about the partner’s behaviour.” (Teft, 1999, p. 15-16). “At the core of a man’s violence toward his partner is a belief system that he is “top of the human hierarchy,” says Sinclair. When a man’s “sense of expectation is most threatened,” he snaps, otherwise described as “fatal peril.”” (Knight, 2020).

Male Entitlement Increases Violence, Equality Decreases It: Marin and Russo (2003, p. 35) argue that this sense of “expectation of entitlement or privilege” is a key leverage point. “In the final analysis, however, striking at the core of male violence—at the androcentric assumption that males have a natural or God-given right to privilege and entitlement over women that justifies the use of force to achieve male goals—will be the key to preventing male violence against women.” If women having more rights was the cause of male violence, as many male writers have claimed, then we would expect violence levels to be higher in situations where equality is more established. The opposite is true (Marin and Russo, 2003, p. 28). Even within American society, the most dramatic declines in male violence occur at times and in sub-communities where women’s status is increasing fastest, where men cease to believe that they are entitled to power over others.

The “Inner Hit Man” on Automatic: Rachel Louise Snyder (Snyder, 2020, p. 145-146) says: “When a man’s belief system is challenged, he goes into fatal peril and that is the moment where violence is a choice. ManAlive uses a kind of hokey phrase for this moment: when a man’s “inner hit man” comes out and his “authentic self” disappears. A hit man operates in silence, alone. A hit man blends into a crowd, destroys people in stealth, then disappears. A hit man takes no responsibility. A hit man has no moral center. Jimmy points out to Doug that when he is in a moment of fatal peril, Doug is not only not noticing his partner, he is also no longer noticing himself, his own feelings, his own needs, his own body. He is simply reacting to the challenge that’s been made to his belief system, and it’s in this kernel of conflict where a decision to become violent or not resides.”

The Military and Women: It is a side issue for our main purpose here, but the metaphor between male violence and genocide is not merely a metaphor, for those in the armed services of a genocidal society. Rela Mazali (2003) studies the effects of Israeli militarism on young women, 1/3 of whom will be sexually assaulted. She notes that beliefs about male dominance are essential to military culture. She quotes Cynthia Enloe saying about the military “The ethos is masculine; but for that very reason women’s participation has been an essential ingredient. . . . Without women to objectify . . . these men’s military service would be less confirming of their manhood, perhaps even of their citizenship.” (Mazali, 2003, p. 43). Mazali concludes “What I’m trying to bring into view here is the fact that living within a war culture, the consciousness of each and every member of society is militarized to some degree. The presuppositions, what gets left out, what goes without saying, what remains unseen, are prescribed, circumscribed, by a deeply militarized socialization. The process of identifying and peeling off the militarized filters through which I have learned to see reality is possibly unending. I see this process as one of the most crucial aspects of my/our feminist, anti-militarist, anti-war action.” (Mazali, 2003, p. 48-49)

A Metaphor – The Neuroscience of Genocide

The Neurological Basis of Fascism: Now I plan to shift to thinking about social events again, but to use their basis in neuroscience. In the murderer’s psychology, according to these feminist authors discussed above, there are three factors that need to align in order to lead to homicide: the belief system that the perpetrator is “entitled” to rule, the process of “snapping” at a moment of “fatal peril” as assessed by that belief system, and the “hit man” modus operandi. These must have neurological correlates in the brain of the person who commits a homicide, and indeed we have a pretty good idea where those correlates are. There is a neuroscientific background to the formulation of beliefs and actions that support genocide (Németh et alia 2024, p. 3-5). Researchers note that susceptibility to over-simplified political ideologies (Donald Trump’s populism, and Fascism, for example) is heightened after an economic crisis (people are more likely to decide to collectively engage in war or genocide after an economic crisis). They propose a “Threat-based Neural Switch Theory”, in which stress downregulates cortex based planning and goal directed assessment of events, and opens emergency circuits which evoke habit-based responses at the expense of planning. This explains in the brain how “fatal” peril happens, as the person feeling more stressed cannot afford to devote mental energy to thinking through their goals and planning the best action, and opts to allow their habit-based responses to take over. Jost et alia (2014) surveyed the research on the neurobiology of political viewpoints. They noted studies, for example, that showed the amygdala is faster to activate this kind of emergency response to reports of danger from people not identified as in our own group.

Changes in The Brain In Genocide Trauma: Kuo et alia (2012) showed that while PTSD in combat veterans resulted in an increase in the volume of the amygdala, for those veterans who had traumatic events in their childhood, the result instead was a reduction of the amygdala volume. This suggests that the amygdala may be preset to ignore high stress events later in life, if the person experiences severe stress in early life. Experience of the holocaust in childhood is associated with lifelong changes in several regions in the brain. (Fňašková et alia, 2021). They found that, 70 years after the Holocaust, “Holocaust Survivors experienced significantly higher frequency of depression symptoms, posttraumatic stress symptoms, and posttraumatic growth, and lower levels of well-being. The MRI shows a lifelong neurobiological effect of extreme stress. The areas with reduced grey matter correspond to the map of the impact of stress on the brain structure: insula, anterior cingulate, ventromedial cortex including the subgenual cingulate / orbitofrontal cortex, temporal pole, prefrontal cortex, and angular gyrus.” Looking at the areas affected, we can speculate that the symptoms of PTSD and depression that these people experienced 70 years on were based in brain alterations. All the people studied had survived to old age of course, so they are a remarkably resilient subgroup. Furthermore, none of the people studied experienced starvation and many had been hidden throughout the time of danger, so the observed effects were a result of the collective trauma and not due to brain starvation. Ferren (1999) studied teenage survivors of the Bosnian genocide and found that while there was a large population with PTSD symptoms, the perceived self-efficacy of this group was higher than the non-traumatised. That is to say, they believed they could handle challenges more than usual, despite the fact that they had more disturbed symptoms. This tells us that often, symptoms of PTSD and apparent “resilience” occur together.

Epigenetics and Holocaust Trauma: One of the key markers of traumatic emotional responses is the production of epigenetic alterations in the body cells. “Epigenetic” refers to the information that surrounds our genetic database for creating proteins our body needs. An epigenetic change such as a “methyl group” added to a set place on a person’s genes can prevent that gene producing a specific protein, creating a cascade of effects that leaves their entire hormonal system on a kind of “permanent alert”. Because the epigenetic change is stored even in the cells that produce offspring (sperm and ova) the “alert status may then be transferred to children that the person has. For example, research found that methylation on a specific genetic site “FKBP5” is higher than normal for Jewish holocaust survivors, but lower than normal for their children. (Kellerman, 2013; Yehuda et alia, 2016). Natan Kellerman explains, “Specifically, epigenetics may explain why latent transmission becomes manifest under stress.” It is important to emphasise that these epigenetic changes are not appropriately described as “damage” since obviously this is an adaptive mechanism that evolution has found useful for survival. When people experience a “major collective disaster”, it is useful that their children be born with an ability to be hyperalert. Of course, evolution would also provide mechanisms for calming down again ….

EMDR Based Treatment of PTSD Epigenetics: Amazingly, methylation on the “ZFP57” DMR  (Differentially Methylated region) on the human genome increases within a short time after successful Eye Movement (EMDR) psychotherapy for PTSD. One of the first studies showing this was done in 2019 at the University of Utrecht (Vinkers et alia, 2019). “We examined genome-wide DNA methylation profiles from blood before and after trauma-focused psychotherapy in both responding and non-responding PTSD patients as well as trauma-exposed controls. Significant DNA methylation findings from this treatment cohort were then related to the development of PTSD in an independent prospective military cohort before and after deployment.” The results: “Successful treatment of PTSD was accompanied by significant changes in DNA methylation at 12 differentially methylated regions (DMRs) in the genes…. In conclusion, this study demonstrates that successful psychotherapeutic treatment of PTSD is associated with specific DNA methylation changes. Of these epigenetic changes, the finding of ZFP57 methylation is the most consistent, as DNA methylation in this region decreases during the development of PTSD but increases following its successful treatment. This study is the first step to identify the epigenetic mechanisms underlying a successful treatment of PTSD.” (Vinkers et alia, 2021, Yehuda et alia, 2013, Ziegler et alia, 2016)

Mindfulness Based Treatment of BPD Epigenetics: A similar study showed successful results in the epigenetics of people diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, although over a longer time period. The researchers explain that the anxiety and aggression seen in Borderline Personality Disorder were known to have some environmental and possibly some epigenetic components: “M. Linehans’ model of a biosocial development suggests that BPD is a disorder resulting from biological vulnerability combined with harming environmental influences. A depreciating and emotionally unstable environment during childhood together with genetic vulnerability could result in the disturbances of emotion regulation which is typical for BPD (Crowell et al., 2009, Linehan, 1993). Whereas twin and family studies suggest a heritability of BPD between 35% and 65% (Distel et al., 2009, Torgersen et al., 2000), individual risk genes could not be identified for BPD thus far (Calati et al., 2013, Gunderson, 2009). Over the past years, evidence emerged that epigenetic mechanism play a major role in the mediation of genome–environment-interactions.” (Knoblich et alia, 2017). The Dialectical Behaviour Therapy used included:

• Core Mindfulness – training in accepting awareness of internal responses
• Distress Tolerance by using distraction, self-soothing, and assessment of the value of the reaction
• Interpersonal Effectiveness by using listening skills and gentle assertive communication
• Emotional regulation by naming and changing emotional responses.

We might consider these kinds of “psychotherapy” as retraining the brain to make goal directed and self-aware choices rather than emergency habit-based choices.

Making Sense of Past Collective Trauma

The One and Only Holocaust?: Even as we assess the political situation, Németh et alia (2024, p. 3) note that we use our level of stress to decide whether we can think through our choices, or whether we are better to respond with a “knee jerk” habit. That is to say, even after a Genocide, people are assessing how they think about the genocide and react to comments about it, based on their own stress levels. Genocide is a new word for the intentional destruction of a people, in whole or in part, first coined by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, as the second World War neared its end. Four years later the United Nations created a genocide convention, defining the new International Crime in law. The term Holocaust (“burnt offering” or “fully burnt up”, applied both to Jews and sometimes to others such as the Roma killed in Nazi genocides) and Shoah (a Jewish term for the genocide of the Jewish people) emerged later, being used in the Declaration of Independence of Israel in 1948, but only becoming established in international use in the 1960s (Alexander, 2012, p. 58). Because of pressure from Israeli writers to reserve the Holocaust as a “unique” once in history event, the word came to describe “the worst human history had produced” despite there having been many occasions during human history when a genocide had eliminated an even larger number of people (Alexander, 2012, p. 85-87). Alexander points out that while this exclusivity scores points for Jewish people (“No one had it as bad as us”) it also makes it more difficult to use it as a warning to prevent other similar events, because, after all, there can be only one Holocaust. To maintain the theory that it was the quintessential genocide of all time, we need to ignore and even hide evidence of any events that threaten this doctrine. In that sense its exclusivity simultaneously elevates it and makes it “meaningless”, “mythological”, or “history transcending”. This may be an example of stress levels pushing even people’s evaluation of the past collective trauma into a simplified emergency pattern, rather than choosing rationally.

Some of the Other Genocides: In real history, the Holocaust is one of many genocides perpetrated over the last 200 years, and there have been attempts by the international community to stop these since the late 19^th century. Honouring the exclusivity of the name “Holocaust”, the Ukrainian genocide initiated by Stalin, which killed perhaps 5 million people in 1932-1933, is referred to as the Holodomor (“Hunger death” – Applebaum, 2017). The ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people and the massacres of several Palestinian villages that ensured the remnants fled the territory desired by Israel in 1948 is called by the Palestinian people the Nakba (“catastrophe”) and an estimated 15,000 were killed in this process (Bashir and Goldberg, 2017). United Nations tribunals have declared various events since 1945 “genocides” (Totten and Theriault, 2019), including the massacre of the Tutsi people of Rwanda in 1994 (perhaps 800,000 killed), the massacre of the Bosnian Muslim people at Srebrenica in 1995 (8000 killed), and the massacre of Cambodian minorities between 1975 and 1979 (1.7 million killed). United Nations processes led to the setting up of two permanent courts: the International Court of Justice (a successor to the League of Nations PCIJ, set up in 1920, which manages disputes between nation states) and the International Criminal Court (established in 2002 by the United Nations International Law Commission to hear cases brought against individuals accused of crimes against International Law). Previous events that stand out as genocides include of course the genocide of the Native American peoples (the majority of the estimated 75 million native Americans were killed within a couple of centuries of European colonization – Smith, 2017, p. 9). Between 1885 and 1908, an estimated 10 million people were killed in the Belgian Congo, reducing the population by half (Hochschild, 1999). Closer in time to the Holocaust is the 1943 Bengal famine, which is now recognised as “anthropogenic” (caused by deliberate human choices of the British Raj) – it killed an estimated 3.8 million people. 

Who set up the ICC and ICJ?: When the ICC and ICJ initiated cases against Israel in early 2024, Prime Minister Netanyahu said this was “pure antisemitism” because “the court established to prevent atrocities like the Nazi Holocaust against the Jewish people is now targeting the one state of the Jewish people.” (Times of Israel Staff, 2024). NLP trained readers will note the syntactic ambiguity: is he saying that the court was set up to prevent atrocities like the one against the Jews in the 1940s or is he saying that the court is set up to prevent atrocities against the Jewish people, like the one in the 1940s? The irony he is suggesting is only really ironic if we assume the latter, but if confronted, he would, I’m sure, reassure us that he meant the former. The overall implication that the United Nations courts were set up by and to protect Jewish people especially is historically false, and in fact Israel does not even recognise the ICC, and specifically claims that it should not be hearing claims about events in Gaza or the West Bank because these are occupied by Israel. Because it supports the notion of the exclusive nature of the Holocaust, Israel is here resisting attempts to ensure that “never again means never again for anyone”: in this view of Netanyahu’s “never again” means never again will there be a Jewish Holocaust, and any international court should be set up with that intention as its primary aim. This is the latest example of Israeli politicians attempting to construct a story in history that places their own trauma centrally. Let’s look at how that happens.

Constructing Collective Trauma Memory: Gilad Herschberger presents a Jewish perspective on collective trauma such as the Holocaust, and he argues that collective trauma (as a stored memory event) has both adaptive and non-adaptive consequences. I quote his analysis extensively because it makes so many points that can be understood intuitively, and yet need to be referenced, as he does. He says: “Similarly, the dictum ‘never again’ referring to the Holocaust is understood by some Israeli Jews as a call to arms to ensure that the Jewish people will never face the threat of annihilation again. For others, this same history delivers the moral imperative that Jews, having suffered the consequences of extreme racial hatred, should be at the forefront of the struggle against all forms of prejudice and discrimination, and should be especially cautious to not victimize others (Bauer, 1979; Klar et al., 2013). Thus, there appear to be individual differences in the way group members remember collective trauma and in the meaning they derive from it. Social Representations Theory provides a framework to understand variations in the understanding of history and how these variations impact the construction of meaning. The study of social representations of history indicates a growing understanding that the collective representation of history does not necessarily reflect the historical truth, but rather is a combination of historical facts with shared myths and beliefs that are essential in forming and maintaining group identity (e.g.,  Reicher and Hopkins, 2001; Liu and Hilton, 2005).” (Hirschberger, 2018, p. 7-8)

Positive Intentions of Collective Trauma Identity: Herschberger summarises the positive effects of collective trauma identification thus: “For victims of collective trauma meaning is established by: (a) passing down culturally-derived teachings and traditions about threat that promote group preservation; (b) these traditions of threat amplify existential concerns and increase the motivation to embed the trauma into a symbolic system of meaning; (c) trauma fosters the sense of a collective self that is transgenerational thereby promoting a sense of meaning and mitigating existential threat; (d) the sense of an historic collective self also increases group cohesion and group identification that function to create meaning and alleviate existential concerns; (e) the profound sense of meaning that is borne out of collective trauma perpetuates the memory of the trauma and the reluctance to close the door on the past; (f) Over time collective trauma becomes the epicentre of group identity, and the lens through which group members understand their social environment.” (Hirschberger, 2018, p. 2)

Identity Issues for Perpetrator Communities: Hirschberger notes that trauma in communities, like trauma in individuals, is an identity level issue, both for those who have been labelled “victims” and those labelled “perpetrators”. He says about identified “perpetrators groups” that: “For members of perpetrator groups, collective trauma represents an identity threat (Branscombe et al., 1999), as it creates tension between the desire to view the group in a positive light (Tajfel and Turner, 1979), and the acknowledgment of severe moral transgressions in its past. The inability to reconcile the character of the group in the present with its character in the past may motivate group members, primarily high identifiers, to perceive an historical discontinuity of the group that serves to distance present group members from past offenders (Roth et al., 2017). Sometimes this discontinuity is reflected in the motivation to close the door on history and never look back (Imhoff et al., 2017), and sometimes the thorny chapters of a group’s history are glossed over creating an uncomfortable gap in collective memory – an absence suggesting a presence. Members of perpetrator groups may deal with the dark chapter in their history by thoroughly denying the events, disowning them and refusing to take any responsibility for them. But, more often than not, reactions to an uncomfortable history will take on a more nuanced form with group members reconstructing the trauma in a manner that is more palatable, and representing the trauma in a manner that reduces collective responsibility. In some cases, the dissonance between current group values and past behavior are so great that disaffiliation from the group remains the only viable option ( ˇCehaji´c and Brown, 2010; Hirschberger et al., 2016b).” (Hirschberger, 2018, p. 2)

Germany as “An Aggressor Through The Ages”: For Jewish people, Germany is of obvious interest in this context. Hirschberger discusses the different Jewish approaches to the German people: “Germany has undergone significant transformation and a conscious effort to sever any continuity between Germany today and the Third Reich (Hein and Selden, 2000). Many of Germany’s neighbors such as France (Hanke et al., 2013) and Poland (Imhoff et al., 2017) seem to recognize this transformation, and are able to separate the Germany of the past from that of the present. Israeli Jews, however, show a more ambivalent reaction, and a greater reluctance to close the book on the Holocaust and achieve closure; they are also more likely to conflate the past with the present, such that their attitudes toward contemporary Germany are contingent on their attributions for the past (Imhoff et al., 2017). Because the Holocaust is but the tragic climax of centuries of German and European anti-Semitism, many Jews are reluctant to let go of the past, and when engaging with contemporary Germans even on issues unrelated to the past, the Holocaust is often implicitly present (Imhoff, 2009)…. Some, attributing an internal essence have described Germans as an “aggressor throughout the ages” (Hearnshaw, 1940), and as having a set of permanent characteristics that underlie their aggression…. Another attribution that places the onus on the situation and not the group suggests that historical crimes are the end result of extremely harsh social and economic conditions that facilitated the rise of aggressive dictators (Imhoff et al., 2017). Historian Christopher Browning invokes the social psychological processes of conformity, compliance, and pluralistic ignorance to explain the transformation of ordinary men to mass murderers (Browning, 1992).” (Hirschberger, 2018, p. 5,8)  

Perpetrator Denial: Hirschberger warns that an over-empathic description of the situation could also have its risks, because it allows people to pretend that nothing bad happened. This is a risk which I mentioned in relation to individual homicide by violent men: “These different attributions underlie different representations of history, and these different representations have a profound influence on the meaning derived from the trauma. Attributing perpetrators’ behaviors to an internal, evil essence highlights the moral distinction between victim and perpetrator, and consolidates the morally superior position of the victim group; it also allows victims to avoid the uncomfortable question of whether they would have behaved similarly under similar conditions. For perpetrator groups, however, this attribution is extremely threatening; it leaves the group forever guilty of the past, with each generation carrying the burden of their ancestors’ crimes; it also forestalls any process of change, as changing the inner essence of the group is near impossible. To reconstruct a meaningful and positive group identity in the aftermath of group wrongdoings, members of perpetrator groups are motivated to attribute historical crimes to external, uncontrollable circumstances (Imhoff et al., 2017), a process that corresponds to the ultimate attribution error (Pettigrew, 1979) – a group level attribution error wherein people tend to attribute negative in-group behavior to external causes. This absolves them from the burden of guilt; allows them to draw a clear distinction between current group members and past members; and most importantly enables them to formulate a social representation of the group that isolates the dark episode as an uncharacteristic failing. In the words of Alexander Gauland, Germany’s far-right AfD leader, “Hitler and the Nazis are just bird shit on the 1000 years old successful German history.” ” (Hirschberger, 2018, p. 8)

Memory Wars: “Social representations of history, therefore, are not merely attempts to understand what happened, but are building blocks in the construction of social identity. The intergroup animosity that existed during the trauma is often replaced with memory wars over the attributions made for the trauma and the significance of the trauma for the image of both victim and perpetrator groups. These tacit memory wars that take place between victim and perpetrator groups and within each one of these groups constitute an ongoing struggle with a troubling history and the inter- and intra-group negotiation of collective meaning.” (Hirschberger, 2018, p. 8). Jeffrey Alexander ( 2012, p. 97) gives many examples of these memory wars, the following one from an Israeli newspaper, Haaretz. “Yad Vashem [the Holocaust museum in Israel] has fired an instructor who compared the trauma of Jewish Holocaust survivors with the trauma experienced by the Palestinian people in Israel’s War of Independence. Itamar Shapira, 29, of Jerusalem, was fired before Passover from his job as a docent at the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, after a teacher with a group of yeshiva students from Efrat made a complaint. Shapira had worked at Yad Vashem for three and a half years . . . Shapira confirmed, in a telephone conversation with Haaretz, that he had spoken to visitors about the 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin. He said he did so because the ruins of the Arab village, today a part of Jerusalem’s Givat Shaul neighborhood, can be seen as one leaves Yad Vashem. “Yad Vashem talks about the Holocaust survivors’ arrival in Israel and about creating a refuge here for the world’s Jews. I said there are people who lived on this land and mentioned that there are other traumas that provide other nations with motivation,” Shapira said. “The Holocaust moved us to establish a Jewish state and the Palestinian nation’s trauma is moving it to seek self-determination, identity, land and dignity, just as Zionism sought these things,” he said.”

Siege Mentality: The example of Holocaust memory brings us to a key issue about Israeli experience. “A rigorous analysis of the Israeli ethos as revealed in public polls, literature, films, holy books, school books, media commentaries, and leaders’ expressions indicates that Israeli Jews believe that the world is against them (Bar Tal & Antebi, 1992). In the words of Liebman (1978), “Jewish tradition finds Antisemitism to be the norm, the natural response of the non-Jew… The term ‘Esau hates Jacob’ symbolizes the world which Jews experience. It is deeply embedded in the Jewish folk tradition.” (p. 44). We would like to suggest that the described characteristic reflect the Siege Mentality, defined as a mental state in which members of a group hold a central belief that the rest of the world has highly negative behavioural intentions towards them (see Bar-Tal, 1986). … For example, in a survey of the national sample, performed in January 1988, 50% of the respondents believed that “The whole world is against us” and 63% believed that “Israel is and will continue to be ‘a people dwelling alone’” (Arian, 1989)” (Bar Tal & Antebi, 1992b, 634-635).

Other Examples of Siege Mentality: “These beliefs are not unique to Jews or Israeli Jews, but characterize various groups in the past and present. For example, the Albanians for years have continued to believe in a “capitalistic-revisionist blockade and encirclement” (e.g. Marmullaku, 1975; Pollo & Puto, 1981). White Afrikaners, especially of Dutch descent, perceive themselves as a group driven with its back to the wall by the hostile world (e.g. Johnson, 1977). Similar beliefs characterised the Japanese in the 1930s, following their military action in Manchuria (e.g. Crowley, 1966; Morley, 1974) and the Soviets, following the international intervention during the Russian civil war in 1918-1919 (e.g. Fischer, 1951; Kennan, 1960).” (Bar Tal & Antebi, 1992b, 635). A similar Siege Mentality experience was produced in Germany after the Treaty of Versailles was forced on the country by the allies at the end of the First World War. Many German people became convinced that the humiliation, massive reparation costs and loss of land that resulted from this “Diktat” were caused by the betrayal of International Jewish bankers. Hitler said (Speech on the Treaty of Versailles, April 17, 1923, Quoted in Rogers, 2000) “The Treaty was made in order to bring 20 million Germans to their deaths and to ruin the German nation.” “The Siege Mentality conception describes an important cognitive state of a group which has an effect not only on the group’s life but also on its intergroup relations. The conception suggests that members of a group who believe that other groups have negative intentions toward them may develop negative attitudes and mistrust toward the out-groups. They also may develop sensitivity to cues indicating negative intentions emitted by the out-groups. In addition, the group members may press for cohesiveness and unity in order to withstand the possible threat from the world. Finally, they may take drastic measures, even out of the range of the accepted norms for the intergroup behaviors, to prevent possible danger and avert the threat (for details, see Bar-Tel, 1986; Bar-Tal & Antebi, 1992).” (Bar Tal & Antebi, 1992b, 642-643).

Effects of Siege Mentality on Israeli Society: “The key to understanding … lies in the essence of Israel as a siege society. The Holocaust trauma of World War II and the existence of Israel at constant war with its neighbors have developed a consciousness of victims and an ethos that responds to a threat situation. The constant vigilance against catastrophe is not just a reaction but a means of construction of collective memory, a sense of uniqueness and distinction from other nations (Bar-Tal 2007; Bar-Tal and Antebi 1992). Israeli cultural militarism is one of the by-products of the siege mentality. Each idea goes through a sieve that examines its importance for survival. Examples include encouraging childbirth as creating reserves for the armed forces, glorifying the image of the warrior leader, and sanctifying fallen soldiers (Ben-Ari 2018; Mazali 2003). One of the characteristics of a siege society is the unification and solidarity toward the external threat. It also works the other way around; constructing a phenomenon as an external hazard is a means to maneuver people toward cohesion and joint action. For example, Israeli political elites often quote Iranian calls to exterminate Israel in a nuclear war as a mobilization act (Mandelzis and Peleg 2017).” (Kertcher and Turin, 2020, p. 585)

Effects of Colonialist Beliefs and “Entitlement”

Imperialism – Someone Must Be The Hammer: In the homicides perpetrated by individual men, we noted the importance of the belief system of entitlement. What men reacted to was not the actual situation they faced, but the sense of humiliation when they did not get what their belief system suggested they should get. We see the same thing with genocide and the belief systems of the great imperialist powers. Obviously, Hitler’s fury at the humiliation after defeat in the First World War was partially based on the impoverishment, in real terms in Germany. But he also claimed “Germany was humiliated…. He who will not be a hammer must be an anvil. An anvil we are today, and that anvil will be beaten until out of the anvil we fashion once more a hammer, a German sword!” (Speech on the Treaty of Versailles, April 17, 1923, Quoted in Rogers, 2000). In Hitler’s belief system, countries are either hammers or anvils; the notion that some countries are destined to hammer others, to rule others, is called Imperialism. What the theory of male dominance is for the individual relationship, the theory of imperialism is for relationships between cultural groups. Many historians would describe the entire last 600 years as an age of European imperialism. John Hobson, in his 1902 book “Imperialism: A Study” noted that “Imperialism has been adopted as a more or less conscious policy by several European States.” Imperialism was not considered a “bad” thing by these states, but actually a sign of “modernism” – the world was being guided to a better future by the wiser European states.

Imperialism and Colonialism: The Palestinian American writer Edward Said (2014, p. 45-46) “As I shall be using the term, ‘imperialism’ means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory; ‘colonialism’, which is almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on distant territory.” When we look at those countries that have a siege mentality, we see that they are countries engaged in making sure they are a “hammer” rather than an “anvil”. The belief in their right to colonize other countries is the exact equivalent of the violent man’s belief in his right to control his partner, and this analogy has been made repeatedly in feminist literature. Shene Mohammad Ahmed (2018, p. 1) says “Women in the colonized countries are doubly colonized, once by the imperial power and by the male-dominated society”. She continues to refer to “Said’s theory of orientalism, in which he categorized the world into self or the occident which stands for the West and the orient or other which stands for the East: the occident is the center, while the orient is the margins or peripheries. This “self” and “other” mentality that many colonizers take with them into a new country.”

Colonial Map 1492-2008

Extermination?: Colonialism depends on a kind of self-centred view of the world where the Imperialist centre is self and the rest of the world is “other”. The Japanese empire of the 1930s and the Russian empire of the 19^th century also promoted versions of this view, and were aware that they were struggling against the western European notion that Europe had a “manifest destiny” to rule the world (a term coined by John O’Sullivan as early as 1845, referring especially to the United States). Japanese philosophers at the time claimed that Japanese imperialism would eventually unify all East Asians into the Japanese “self” however: “Though not related to the conquered through blood ties, the conquering species allows the conquered to survive, and unifies it into itself through the mediation of the shared land.” (Tanabe, 1934–5, p. 160). European colonialists were less interested in assimilation of the conquered into their own group, at least at first. The New Zealand newspaper “The Times” (16 December, 1984) explained the relations between colonists and natives thus: “All questions between the British colonists of New Zealand and the Maoris are now merged into a war of sovereignty – probably of extermination (Orange, 1987, p. 159). However there were other choices available to the colonial powers that seemed both more humane and more practical.C

Assimilation – The Natives Live and Only Their Culture Dies: The counterbalance to the idea of actual extermination of colonised natives was “assimilation”, i.e. the extermination of the conquered people as a separate identity, a separate culture. Alan Lester discusses the way that New Zealand’s first colonial governor, George Grey shaped New Zealand policy towards assimilation. “Grey’s governmental practices, and his representations of them, established the terms upon which cultural genocide, with its logic of elimination, could be posited as a humane alternative to racial extermination. It shows that Grey’s promotion of amalgamation, articulated as a preferably cultural and social extinction over a physical one, went on to influence the highest levels of colonial administration.” (Lester, 2016, p. 492). Grey’s colleague, Oxford professor Herman Merivale, explained “‘By amalgamation’, Merivale continued, ‘I mean the union of natives with settlers in the same community, as master and servant, as fellow labourers, as fellow citizens and if possible as connected by inter-marriage’ (Merivale, 1861: 511). Here, in the 1861 edition of his Lectures, Merivale added a footnote: ‘This last kind of connection (of master and servant), has been carried out with more success in South Africa than in any other British possession’.” (in Lester, 2016, p. 503). Now days, all of this discussion about “what to do with conquered natives” sounds rather offensive. It is important to understand that it was not done in secret (this is not a conspiracy theory) but was done openly by people who truly believed in their own innate superiority, and the superiority of their culture. The fact that by exterminating native cultures, they would exterminate the sense of collective identity, the collective skills for trauma recovery and medicine, the practical skills for agriculture and pastoralism in local conditions, did not even occur to these people. The British Lord Rosebery described the British Empire as “the greatest secular agency for good the world has ever seen.” Victor Hugo declared France the saviour of nations and announced “France, l’univers a besoin que to vives!” The Kaiser in Germany declared “Der alte gute Gott has always been on our side.” (Hobson, 1902, 162-163)

Characteristic Claims of Colonists About Cultural Genocide: Each of the European colonies tended to develop similar methods of coping with the unexpected emotional shock of eliminating local cultures. These are comparable to the rationalizations that male perpetrators of violence provide when asked how they came to be violent.

1. Terra Nullis: Firstly, they tended to deny that the conquered cultures had existed at all. The colonists in Australia declared the land “terra nullis” (empty land: Reynolds, 1987, p. 12), the Boers in South Africa declared that the land was “vacant land” (Holden, 1866), the New Zealand land court in the 1860s declared all uncolonized land “waste land”. The principle was explained in “The Principle of International Law” by T.J. Lawrence in 1895, that “all territory not in the possession of states who are members of the family of nations must be considered as technically terra nullis and therefore open to occupation.” (quoted in Reynolds, 1987, p. 12).
2. Ancestral Rights: Secondly, they often developed a mythology that suggested that those native peoples found there were recent occupants and that in fact it was possible that their own (colonising) people had lived there in ancient times. In South Africa, the Boers claimed that the Bantu only moved into their as the same time as the Europeans (Holden, 1866). In New Zealand the story of an ancient Celtic New Zealand civilization predating the Maori was promoted even in the 21^st century, and Edward Tregear wrote a book in 1885 called “The Aryan Maori” claiming that the Maori were in any case just wandering Europeans (Howe, 2003, p. 42-48). The Mormon church claimed an angelic revelation of a Jewish and proto-Christian civilization which had existed in the Americas before the current Native Inhabitants, who were their degenerate descendants. In 1883 Joseph Smith wrote “By it, we learn that our western tribes of Indians, are descendants from that Joseph that was sold into Egypt, and that the land of America is a promised land unto them.” (Roper, 2003, p. 94). This implied that America was promised not merely to the Jews, but to the Christians, (and specifically the Mormon church).
3. Superior Race: Thirdly, they developed mythologies which explained that their conquest and destruction of the native populations was inevitable, both because of their moral, military and technological advancement, but also because the colonised peoples simply gave up and died at the sight of the advanced civilization. “When one race shows itself superior to another in the various externals of domestic life, it inevitably in the long run gets the upper hand in public life and establishes its predominance…. “Probably everyone would agree that an Englishman would be right in considering his way of looking at the world and at life better than that of the Maori or Hottentot, and no one will object in the abstract to England doing her best to impose her better and higher view on those savages.” (Hobson, 1902, 158, 160). The first Governor of California, Peter Hardenman Burnett explained in 1851 “That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected…. While we cannot anticipate this result but with painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert.” (Burnett, 1851)
4. Inevitable Response to Hostile Natives: Fourthly, they claimed that the natives were intent on exterminating the colonists, and had therefore to be exterminated themselves. In New Zealand, the confiscation of Maori land was done by claiming that Maori planned extermination of all settlers, a claim that the first colonist Premier, Henry Sewell, said was a “gigantic lie” (Orange, 1987, p. 167). In 1801, New South Wales Governor King gave an order that aboriginals could be shot on sight, without question, because the Aboriginal Bidjigal clan warrior Pemulwuy had led raids on local settlers. Lieutenant Governor David Collins later agreed that most of the attacks had been prompted by settlers stealing Aboriginal children as slaves (Kohen, 2005).

Historical Trauma: “The term “historical trauma” was initially coined in relation to understanding the traumatic experiences of holocaust survivors and the subsequent impact of those experiences on following generations (Brave Heart, 2000; Evans-Campbell, 2008). It has also been used in discussion of the intergenerational impact of Japanese concentration camps during WWII (Drinnon, 1987; Howard, 2008; Nagata, 1991). Brave Heart and DeBruyn (1998) argue that holocaust survivor literature provides analysis and applied knowledge that informs historical trauma theory for Indigenous peoples. It is powerfully argued by Indigenous scholars that the genocidal and ethnocidal acts perpetuated against Native peoples have caused intergenerational transfer of trauma similar to that of descendants of holocaust survivors (Brave Heart & DeBruyn, 1998; Duran & Duran, 1995). However, it is also clearly stated that there are critical differences with regard to Jewish and Indigenous experiences of historical trauma (Whitbeck, Adams, Hoyt & Chen, 2004). In particular it is important to understand that for Indigenous people we recognise that issues of historical trauma and loss are not seen as a singular event but are ongoing. What these authors highlight is that colonisation, by its very systemic and structural nature, includes multiple collective traumatic events that affect Indigenous peoples.” (Pihama, Cameron and Te Nana, 2019)

Colonial Trauma Effects: “Research highlights that there are multiple layers of historical colonial disruption experienced by Māori people, including acts of dispossession of lands and resources; the marginalisation and denial of language, culture and knowledge forms; the imposition of colonial gendered beliefs and practices; the entrenchment of the nuclear family; the widespread impact of disease, alcohol, Christianity, trade and muskets; the establishment of Western education systems grounded upon policies of assimilation and integration; and the institution of colonial governmental systems which subsumed Māori sovereignty and self-determination (Walker, 1996; Simon, 1998; Simon & Smith, 2001). Wirihana and Smith (2014) note that historical trauma for Māori began with the loss of entire communities with colonial contact and wars and has been maintained through social, cultural, economic, spiritual domination that is maintained and reproduced through legal imperialism. This facilitates the disruption of language, cultural practices and of the socio-cultural systems that ensured the wellbeing of whānau, including the rupturing of “the sacredness of relationships between men and women and destroyed the nurturing protective environments required for child rearing” (p.201). In exploring the impact of historical trauma on Māori it has become clear that the terminology associated with historical trauma theory is considered controversial in New Zealand. This is evidenced by the extreme reactions to Māori using the term “holocaust” in relation to the colonisation and traumatic events experienced by our tūpuna [ancestors] (Turia, 2000). Starblanket (2018) has provided significant argument that the intentional removal and displacement of Indigenous children from their communities is an act of genocide. This is also the situation in Aotearoa [New Zealand].” (Pihama, Cameron and Te Nana, 2019)

How Cultural Trauma Is Expressed: Pihama, Cameron and Te Nana refer to Lakota studies of the effects of all this: “The literature shows that among holocaust survivors and their descendants, and in Lakota people, the range of historical trauma responses observed include depression; psychic numbing; difficulty recognising and expressing emotions; low self-esteem; poor affect tolerance; anger; elevated mortality rates from suicide and cardiovascular diseases; self-destructive behaviour; and may include substance abuse and self-medication (Brave Heart, 1999; Brave Heart & DeBruyn, 1998). It is argued that the generations of Native American people who face collective historical trauma experience both its present impact and “historical unresolved grief,” where those generations experience a “pervasive sense of pain” and an “incomplete mourning of those events.”” (Pihama, Cameron and Te Nana, 2019). Lakota studies show that orthodox Western categories such as PTSD are not likely to capture the seriousness of the intergenerational cascade of trauma that is triggered by current events. “Brave Heart (2005) makes an important distinction, stating: “We are survivors of genocide. We may have a higher trauma threshold due to our severe chronic trauma so we may not fit the PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder) criteria … We are survivors of intergenerational trauma, not just traumas within our lifespan. Our culture and history also influence the way we show our symptoms and the way in which we manifest our symptoms. Our grief is different from the dominant culture’s grief (p.2-3).” (Pihama, Cameron and Te Nana, 2019)

The Soviet/Russian Case

Social Trauma and Repression: I want to look into two examples of genocidal attack from the current world events, a little more carefully, to see the traumatic community background. Firstly, Russia’s attempt to eradicate Ukraine. “Trauma in a person, decontextualised over time, looks like personality. Trauma in a family, decontextualised over time, looks like family traits. Trauma in a people, decontextualised over time, looks like culture.” – Resmaa Menakem, Trauma therapist and author of “My Grandmother’s Hands”. Alexander Ziperovich (Александр Циперович) explains the traumatic history of the Russian people in the 20^th century: “If there exists a single origin point for all the misery and death now enveloping Ukraine, it might be the gray stone edifice of the Lubyanka, that notorious Moscow address that served as the KGB’s headquarters and pretrial detention, and which is now the home of the FSB, formerly Vladimir Putin’s office. This is where the historian can begin to understand the disease afflicting modern Russia, and which is being inflicted on Ukraine through a botched war of national annihilation. It’s a disease of unchecked authoritarianism, first and foremost, that lethal virus that is dictatorship. ….  This was rivaled in sheer enormity perhaps only by the Nazis’ system of terror. But unlike Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Dachau, this grim history has been all but blotted out by the current regime, though it remains very much unforgotten, and unresolved. What does it mean when a country represses memories this dark?” He answers by quoting Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ““Why is Germany allowed to punish its evildoers and Russia is not? What kind of disastrous path lies ahead of us if we do not have the chance to purge ourselves of that putrefaction rotting inside our body? He warned us: “In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future.””

The Fake History of the Kievan Rus and Russia: In 2021, Vladimir Putin wrote his famous text “On the Historical Unity of the Russians and Ukrainians” (Putin, 2021). In this he claimed that the Russian and Ukrainian people were actually eternally one people, and that Russia was currently the inheritor of the “Kievan Rus” legacy, not Ukraine. This suggests that the Russian people are the real native people of Ukraine and the “Ukrainians” are a fake people with a pretend language, constructed by various western powers at various times in history. Kyiv (Київ, capital of Ukraine, called Kiev, or Киев, in Russian, founded 482 CE.) is, in this story, the quintessential Russian city. This is the usual spin of colonialists of course. The native people do not exist; the colonists were actually there before them. It suggests that all evidence of an independent Ukraine should be exterminated, a claim which of course is a call for cultural genocide. Володимѣръ Свѧтославичь – Volodymyr Sviatoslavych – a Swedish “Rus” ruler of Kyiv (978-1015 CE) in Ukraine, who took up (and just as casually abandoned) Christianity as it suited his empire building, has no historical connection to the Muscovy-based rulers of modern Russia (Snyder, 2018). Putin claims that Volodymyr (or Vladimir, as the Russians call him) was the originator of the Russian nation and spiritual founder of a tradition which Putin is now defending. In reality, the Kyivan Rus fragmented into a number of centres, and some of these Slavic centres e.g. Novgorod (Новгород, first mentioned 859 CE.), and later Moscow (Москва, first mentioned 1147 CE.), were transformed by the Tartar conquest of Russia, after which Muscovy (Моско́вия, the territory ruled from Moscow) acted as an agent of the Tartar or Mongol Khanate for centuries before creating a new capital at St. Petersburg and calling itself “The Russian Empire”, Российская Империя (Synyder, 2024). The Cambridge Annual Archaeology Conference summarise “The misuse of history by Vladimir Putin, with its claims to the Kievan Rus’ and erasure of Ukraine’s multi-cultural history in favour of irredentist claims can be seen as nothing short of frivolous and baseless. Ukraine’s history and culture are also being concretely threatened by the potential destruction of their material heritage, represented by museums, archaeological sites and historical buildings all over the country.” (Cambridge Annual Student Archaeology Conference, 2022). Historian Timothy Snyder explains “Kyivan Rus was in no way “Russia.” It was named after Vikings who became rulers. That name “Rus” came to be associated with the land and its people and with Christianity. But “Russia” as Putin is using it, when it refers to anything specific, is an empire founded in St. Petersburg (a city that did not exist at the time of Kyivan Rus) in 1721. That Russian Empire was named “Russian” precisely as a claim to lands and to history. But just because Peter the Great made a clever public relations decision half a millennium after the Mongols took Kyiv does not mean that there was a Russia when the Mongols arrived. There was not.” (Snyder, 2024)

Declarations of the Non-existence of Ukraine: On April 5, 2022, Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman, and former President Dmitry Medvedev posted on Telegram the following: “Ukrainian-ness, which is fueled by anti-Russian poison and is consumed by the lie concerning its own identity, — this is all one big fake. This phenomenon has never existed in history. And it does not exist now…. For the past 30 years, a passionate segment of Ukrainians has prayed for the Third Reich. Literally. Nazi symbolism that provokes disgust can be found on photos from practically every military unit in Ukraine taken by our army — there are banners, literature, posters. Even cups with swastikas! … It’s no wonder that, having transformed itself into the Third Reich, and having written into its history textbooks the names of traitors and Nazi henchmen, Ukraine will suffer the same fate. This kind of Ukraine gets what it deserves!… These difficult tasks cannot be completed instantaneously. And they will not only be decided on battlefields.” (quoted in Ibrahim, 2022). These denials of Ukraine’s existence, with calls for military conquest, were repeated, and followed up by mass civilian executions in the initial invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Notice the siege mentality that is being built in this story: Russia’s eternal enemy, the Nazis, is back, and must be defeated.

The Death Cult: Russian historian and sociologist Dina Khapaeva (Дина Хапаева, Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology) explains plans to canonize Ivan the Terrible and Russian dreams of destroying civilization in a suicidal nuclear war. Understanding this profound historical traumatization of the Russian people is a key to deciding how to respond to the rise of Russian fascism. Khapaeva explains (2023) ““The idea of a ‘death cult’ and a ‘purifying apocalypse’ has long been deeply integrated in the Putinist discourse. You’ll even find it in his speeches from the 2010s: ‘We [Russians] will go to heaven, while they’ll just croak,’ and ‘What good is a world without Russia?’” she said. Where does such self-hatred come from? In her book “The Future is History”, Marsha Gessen (Мари́я Ге́ссен) explains just the last 100 years of the story: a story like the stories of people trapped in Mao’s China (say Wild Swans) or in Hitler’s Holocaust camps (Sophie’s Choice). It is explicitly about psychological trauma: it is a biographical horror story. Hundreds of thousands of people tortured to death by Stalin’s insanity, including tens of thousands whose crime was to be the first torturers themselves. Thousands who denounced their friends and family and saw them horribly killed, and had to find a way to live with the meaninglessness of it all. And the vast trauma of all the Russian people who live to this day in fear of facing that very truth, and who continue to claim that Stalin was a hero, merely because, after starting World War 2 in league with Hitler, he was betrayed and ended up sacrificing tens of millions of Russians. To believe that this awful self-destruction was Russia’s gift to the world is sick beyond words.

Homo Sovieticus: This is an unacknowledged genocide, and Gessen (on a Russian passport herself) points out that the complete inability of Russians to acknowledge what happened is what creates the ongoing trauma. She tells how Carl Rogers was horrified by his visit to the Soviet Union in 1987. He found that even “psychologists” simply could not listen to each other (they just shouted each other down) and they appeared to live in a strange world of make believe where everything was simultaneously perfect (publicly) and a disaster (privately, especially in their marriages). Yuri Levada (Ю́рий Алекса́ндрович Лева́да) was the pioneering Soviet Psychologist who did the social research showing why. A personality type he called “Homo Sovieticus” had been shaped by the Soviet system and was now dominant. This personality type was expressed in a series of “games” of reality denial, and had its greatest fear as the humiliation caused by exposure of these pretenses. Putin famously said how humiliated he was when, as a KGB officer in Dresden, he suddenly realized that the USSR had abandoned him and he had no power over the locals. He had to confront the reality of empire: the local people hated him.

The Lie: “The Future is History” shows that modern Russian approaches to the world are still immersed in the ideological “doublethink” that survival in Soviet society required. For example, Gessen suggests that pretty much every Russian simultaneously knows that Russia is not in reality a unitary country but a vast empire held by brutal force (they are privately proud of this vastness, Gessen says), but almost no one can publicly acknowledge the political consequences, such as the destruction of regions, like Chechnya or Ukraine, that dare to rebel (Gessen, 2017, p. 47-66). Other writers point out that there is a Russian word “враньё” (vranyo) which refers to a lie that both teller and listener know is a lie, but which they pretend is true. The initial invasion of Crimea by the Russian Federation on 23 February, 2014 is an example of vranyo. “Overnight ten Russian military aircraft landed in Simferopol carrying paratroopers from the 76th Guards Division based in Pskov. By the following morning, servicemen in Russian uniforms without insignia had seized Crimea’s regional parliament and other key government buildings. They occupied the peninsula’s two airports and fanned out onto the streets of Simferopol and Sevastopol. Putin and Shoigu publicly and repeatedly denied that they were Moscow’s troops. ‘Anyone can buy Russian uniforms in a shop,’ Putin told Russian TV with his trademark smirk. The state-run Russian media, taking the cue, delightedly dubbed the mysterious troops ‘little green men’ and ‘polite people’.” (Owen, 2022, p. 100) The celebrations in Russia were intense, and within a few days, Putin said that “of course” the little green men were heroic Russian troops, and Crimea was an eternal part of the Russian territory.

The Cult of Cruelty: The new fascist anti-modernism of Putin’s ideologue, Alexander Dugin (Александр Гельевич Дугин), is both a result of this reality denial, and the attempted solution. Dugin “offered an alternative view of Russian history, in which a century and a half of Mongol-Tatar rule had been not an age of destruction but, on the contrary, a vital cultural infusion that set Russia on a special path, distinct from Europe’s… What Russia really needed to prevent an orange revolution, said Dugin, was a new oprichnina, the reign of terror for which Czar Ivan IV was remembered as the Terrible.” (Gessen, 2017, p. 237, 244). He is not alone of course, in saying this. “In 1994, a Russian Orthodox bishop named Ioann Snychov published a book called “The Autocracy of the Spirit.” In it, he argued that terror is the best way to govern the Russian people, using Ivan the Terrible as an example: the famously brutal 16th-century tsar, in Snychov’s telling, was a “naturally soft and gentle” ruler who suffered greatly when he had to dole out punishment. The sect Snychov founded advocates for the canonization of all of Russia’s leaders.” (Kharpaeva, 2023). This cult of the brutal ruler goes hand in hand with the centuries-old paranoia of Russian society (Livers, 2020; Yablokov, 2018). Tsarist Russia, remember, was the source of the “Protocols of Zion” (Протоколы сионских мудрецов) which Hitler used to evidence the eternal danger of Jewish people (Rothstein, 2006). “Russian history over the last few centuries has been filled with fears of conspiracy: Jews, Freemasons and Catholics have been considered major enemies (Davis, 1971; Bagdasarian, 1999). Furthermore, as in the USA, the messianic idea of the ‘City upon the Hill’ (Goldberg, 2001) and Moscow as the Third Rome (Duncan, 2005) provided fertile soil for suspicion and fear of others who wanted to prevent it from fulfilling its global mission. … In the USA, conspiracy theories normally emerge from grassroots movements and are kept at the margins of official political discourse. In post-Soviet Russia the political and intellectual elites are major producers and disseminators of conspiracy theories…. Conspiracy theories play a crucial role in Russia’s turn to authoritarianism and have served as a trigger for numerous public campaigns to justify repressive legislation.” (Yablokov, 2018, p.2, 4).

Hyperarousal: Sacha de Vogel notes that there is a strong belief in Russian society that nothing can or even should be done about this by the “common people”. “Culturally, the common belief that politics and governance are the concerns of those with power, not of regular people, has produced widespread apathy and what activists decry as learned helplessness: many Russians are simply not interested in protest.” (de Vogel 2023). All these elements of “Russian culture”, as expressed so explicitly in Putin and Dugin’s thinking, are not personal oddities, they are not random, and they are not evidence of some fundamental evil in the Russian psyche. Vranyo is the lying to oneself that enables a people to survive the unthinkable brutality of collective subjugation to Tartar Khans, Muscovite Tsars, Soviet Stalinist officials and Putin. The fear of public humiliation and the absolute paranoia promoted by Russian leaders is the creation of an eternal “terror”, an endless hyperarousal of the amygdala. Russian citizens may be the persecutors in Ukraine and Chechnya, where they have been clearly committing horrific war crimes (Matthews, 2022, p. 68), but they too live in a nightmare. Sadly, they believe their nightmare is “the human condition” or at least “the Russian experience of the human condition”, and that it is up to their leaders to “fix”. Similar analyses could be made of most cultures across the planet: Russian culture is just (in 2023) one of the most on-display.

The Palestinian/Israeli Case

Zionism – The Last Great Colonial Enterprise: In 1883, Isaac Rolf (Yitzhak Rülf) first advocated for the European Jewish population to escape persecution in Europe by moving to Palestine, adopting the Hebrew language, and establishing a separate state to be called Israel. This venture was known as Zionism, and had already been advocated by Christian fundamentalists for over 300 years, as a way of fulfilling Biblical prophecy (Hedding, 2010). Rolf said “For the time being we only talk on settlement and only on settlement and this is indeed our near aim. We talk only on that. But it must be clear as “England is only for the English, Egypt for the Egyptians, Judea is for the Jews.” In our land there is only room for us. We will say to the Arabs: move, and if they disagree, if they resist by force—we will force them to move, we will hit them on their heads and force them to move.” (in Pappe, 2008, p. 617). The “settlement” eventually agreed on was for Britain to divide in half its supervised “protectorate” of Palestine, and, under the United Nations, set up a Zionist state in half of it. This, of course, is why “In the moment British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour gave the Zionist movement his promise in 1917 to establish a national home for the Jews in Palestine, he opened the door to the endless conflict that would soon engulf the country and its people.” (Pappé, 2011, p. 43).  

Zionism – Wars and Massacres Are Inevitable: The original plan of the Zionist leaders, like Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, was to establish a Zionist state extending from Egypt to Syria and Iraq (the area promised by God to Abraham in Genesis 15:18). This would be a colonization plan like no other, because it was moving people into a very well established modern state (originally the Ottoman Empire). Ben-Gurion explained “We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai.” (David Ben-Gurion May 1948, to the General Staff, in Ben-Zohar, 1978). The Zionists were clear that this would require extreme violence. As early as 1923, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotisnky knew “There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs.  Not now, nor in the prospective future.  I say this with such conviction, not because I want to hurt the moderate Zionists.  I do not believe that they will be hurt. Except for those who were born blind, they realised long ago that it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting “Palestine” from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority. My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries.  I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent.” (Jabotinsky, 1923)

Zionist Colonialism – The Denial Begins: At this time, of course, before Israel exists, or in its first year, these men are speaking to Zionists, and there is no need to disguise the fact that 1) The country they plan on creating  state in is called Palestine. 2) Zionism is colonialism, modelled on all the well-known colonial precedents such as the USA, New Zealand, South Africa, Australia. 3) The Palestinians are the native population of Palestine. 4) The Zionists are planning to make war on and conquer all the surrounding Arab countries, once they establish a base in Palestine. 5) The Zionists expect violent resistance from the local people because they are invaders. The only debate, as is usual in colonial ventures, is whether they are best to kill all the natives, enslave them, or drive them out to surrounding lands. “Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.” (David Ben-Gurion, 1938, quoted in Flapan, 1979, p. 141). As we noted in the discussion of colonization in general, within a short time the new state of Israel would begin to deny all these statements, and even claim that anyone who says them must be a Jew-hating antisemitic. Remember that the standard denials used by colonialists are 1) Terra Nullis, 2) Ancestral Rights, 3) Superior Race, and 4) Inevitable Response to Hostile Natives. Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel as I write, says he “gave a knock-out blow to a CNN interviewer who told him the Palestinians claim Israel stole their land. “I told her it wasn’t their land,” he revealed to his supporters, and that until the start of the return of the Jews “there wasn’t a living soul here.” In a letter published yesterday in Ha’aretz, Netanyahu reiterates the claim that at least half the growth of the Arab population in the country, in the first half of the 20th century, was because of Arab immigration. And he adds: “Not only did the Jewish pioneering bring with it technological and medical progress and raise the life expectancy of all the population, it also brought masses of Arab immigrants.”” (quoted by Eldar, 2001). This laughable claim is based on an old slogan saying that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land” (a claim debunked by the quotes of the Zionist pioneers like Ben-Gurion above).

Mythological Links: By analogy my own Roma (Gypsy) genetic legacy gives me an ancestral link to land in North West India; the link is undeniable, but any claim of right to the land would be mythological, not historical. As a child, growing up in a Christian society in New Zealand / Aotearoa, “Jerusalem” and “Zion” (originally a hill in Jerusalem) were ever present. They featured in the stories told at Sunday School every Sunday. They featured in the songs we sung at school every school day at assembly, and in the readings which I myself gave often at those assemblies. They featured in the Hollywood movies we watched (Like Ben Hur), in the rock songs that we listened to (Boney M’s “By The Rivers Of Babylon”) and in the books I read (The Last Days of Pompeii, by Edward Bulwer Lytton, for example). The idea that in the final days of history, the “New Jerusalem” would come “down” from Heaven and was our destiny (Revelation 21:10-27) was instilled into me as surely as it is instilled into Jewish children that one day the Temple will be rebuilt there, and that perhaps next year they will meet there. However, as adults, we can all accept that we are probably not going to meet in Jerusalem next year – it’s expensive and there are too many of us; and the chances of a city descending from the sky and being large enough to house all the Christian faithful, are also low. The leaders of the Zionist movement (Christian and Jewish) are deliberately blurring these distinctions between metaphorical and mythological meaning on the one hand, and historical and practical reality on the other.

The History of Palestine and Jerusalem: As to the claims of Jewish ancestral rights in Palestine, mostly this disappears, on historical, archaeological and genetic examination, into the realm of mythology, much like all such colonial claims. The World Jewish Congress (2024) explains that anyone who denies that all Jews are indigenous to the land ruled by Israel is anti-Semitic. None-the-less, I think history and archaeology have a right to exist. This is close to my own area of specialty in Historical studies. A great deal of energy is placed, by Zionists in online social media, into “proving” that Palestine never existed and Israel always existed. Often the mention of an exterminated people called Asher-el on the ancient Egyptian Merneptah stele is used to justify the antiquity of the term Israel: this is archaeological overenthusiasm at best (Hjelm, 2016). The claim that the Palestinian people do not and did not exist is in itself a cultural genocidal claim, and so I will take some time here to counter it. What is extraordinary is that in terms of DNA, studies of ancient bones show that the modern Palestinians are essentially the same people who lived here in ancient Canaanite times: this is characteristic of most areas of the world most of the time: rulers change but farmers stay. This suggests that Palestinians’ ancestors were once identified as Christians (under the Byzantine empire) and once Jewish (under the ancient kingdoms of Judah and Israel), but originally Canaanite polytheists. European Jewish people have some DNA markers in common with the indigenous people of Palestine, but mainly are classified as European in terms of DNA markers. Of course Middle Eastern Jews (i.e. those who were living in Palestine before Zionism) are genetically much the same as Palestinians (Genetic info from Das et alia, 2017; Glausiusz, 2015. Note that genetic testing to prove ancestry is illegal in Israel). About the name of Palestine, much debated online: we could look at this following timeline of the history of Jerusalem in terms of how often the area has had a name like Judah / Judaea / Israel and how often it has had a name like Peleset / Palastu / Philistia / Παλαιστῑ́νη / Palestina / Palestine also. That would look pretty much like this chart except there would be a small section of the Roman occupation where it was called Judaea. It was called Palestine in most Roman times, in Byzantine, Crusader, all Muslim times, and in British rule. Before the Hasmonean kingdom (of Herod the Great) it was called Παλαιστῑ́νη (Palaistī́nē) in the Greek empires (Herodotus refers to it this way). It is called the lands of Peleset in New Kingdom Egyptian (pwr3s3tj) and Palastu or Pilistu in Neo-Assyrian. The Babylonians tended to group it all as part of Amurre (Amorite i.e. barbarian nomads).

See at bottom of Wikipedia article on Timeline of Jerusalem:

Jerusalem: Jerusalem, as noted in the Bible, was a Canaanite and Jebusite hilltop fort erected in honour of the Canaanite God Shalem, and as this following Wikipedia timeline shows, it has been controlled by people of the Jewish faith for a tiny fraction of its history. (Note that about the “United Kingdom of David and Solomon”, the Wikipedia article says “Jerusalem becomes the capital of the Kingdom of Judah and, according to the Bible, for the first few decades even of a wider united kingdom of Judah and Israel, under kings belonging to the House of David.” This phrasing is used because the evidence for the existence of this kingdom is not accepted by most archaeologists and historians. It is attested in Judaeo-Christian mythology) This is not to deny the Zionists claim to ancestral links entirely, merely to point out that the claim of the Palestinian people is dramatically more authentic.

Israel and Palestine Since 1948: The sad history of Palestine since the creation of the state of Israel cannot easily be summarised here. This is not because it is too complex (it is as simple as any other history of colonial ethnic cleansing). It is because the Zionist colonisers have spent a great deal of energy reframing the story and even burying evidence (by which I mean literally burying evidence in the form of bodies). The best way to handle this story is to refer readers to sources which take the time to explore this more carefully. These would include a couple of very important movie documentaries which collect visual evidence, and several books by historians from an Israeli or Palestinian background (the books listed are just examples to start with):

1. Movie – Tantura: Tantura is a powerful documentary movie by Alon Schwartz, available on Vimeo, about the massacres which occurred in hundreds of Palestinian villages in the “Nakba” as Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their country in 1948-1950. It interviews several Israeli military personnel about the mass rapes and killings, and the unmarked mass graves that hide the horrors in one example case. “In the 1990s, Teddy Katz, an Israeli graduate student, interviewed members of the IDF’s Alexandroni Brigade, the unit that carried out the massacre, and wrote a thesis based on their testimonies. He was destroyed for it, taken to court, forced to retract his thesis, and to apologize. He never got his degree. But nobody, before Schwarz, asked Katz to listen to those interviews. Armed with the tapes, years later, Schwarz returned once again to the members of the brigade, now close to the end of their lives, and asked them to speak about what one doesn’t speak about in Israel.” (Sperri, 2022). Their amused reminiscing about the massacre is shocking to say the least. It shows us that what we now call genocide was very much an issue from the start in Israel.
2. Movie – Israelism: Israelism is a documentary movie by Michael Margolis, looking at how Israeli propaganda, or “hasbara”, distorts history and builds a ruthless international movement to support the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Myriam Francois explains “In a new, controversial documentary film called Israelism, two young American Jews raised to unconditionally love Israel, experience a profound and life-changing awakening as they bear witness to the brutality of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. As they join a growing movement of young American Jews battling the old guard to redefine Judaism’s relationship with Israel, the protagonists take us into the battle over the very soul of modern Jewish identity.” (Francois, 2024)
3. Book – The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World: Avi Shlaim (2015) is Professor of International Relations at St. Antony’s College, Oxford. His own research exposed how Israeli terrorist attacks in Egypt, Iraq and other Arab countries provoked the Arab wars against Israel as early as the 1940s. He also looks here at the history of attempts to create peace, showing that, contrary to Israel’s claims, the Arab states have repeatedly stretched out a hand in peace and had it rejected. Israel has deliberately offered absurd “peace proposals” which it knows cannot be accepted by Palestine, and has worked to ensure its stated objective that, as the 1977 ruling Likud Party manifesto says “The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable… therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” (quoted in Khalidi, 2023).
4. Book – Ten Myths About Israel: Ilan Pappé is currently a Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Exeter. One of the most famous of Israel’s “New Historians”, he here answers the ten most common elements of Israeli propaganda. He reviews again the brutal colonial origin of Israel. He shows how Israel prepared for and took the opportunity of the 1967 war, by which it seized the lands that were supposed to be Palestinian territory, and created a military occupation of them. This allowed Israel to have one law for Israeli citizens and another law (military law) for the Palestinians. He shows how Israel is not at all a democracy, therefore, but a totalitarian and racist state where half the people have no say in their future. He shows how Israeli governments have openly used every peace process to sabotage chances of creating a Palestinian state that could be recognised by the world, and that could resolve this problem.  
5. Book – The Hundred Years War On Palestine: Rashid Khalidi is the great-great-nephew of the Mayor of Jerusalem who wrote in 1899 to the Zionists pleading for them to leave Palestine free. The book updates the story of Israel’s invasions of Lebanon, Egypt etc., and its occupation of the entire country of Palestine, against annual condemnation by the United Nations.

Fatal Peril in Genocide History

The Lakota: While the rulers and planners of colonial ventures usually understand very clearly that their plan necessitates the extermination of indigenous populations, common people do not so easily participate in genocide en masse. They need a trigger event which activates their sense that their own lives are at stake, unless they exterminate the “enemy”. In the United States, the Little Big Horn was such an event. The victory of the Lakota and other Plains nations at what they called The Greasy Grass, in June 1876, over Lt. Colonel George Custer’s 7^th Cavalry, killing over 270 men, led to the final “Indian wars”. The Lakota were overwhelmed militarily over the next year, threatened with starvation, forced to cede the sacred Black Hills to the United States, and relocated onto reservations in South Dakota. In 1890, near the Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, the reconstituted 7^th cavalry shot 300 men, women and children, acting on the fears of local settlers (an elderly Lakota leader named Black Coyote had his gun go off by accident, and soldiers didn’t stop shooting until there was no one left standing). Frank Baum, author of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” wrote in the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer of January 3, 1891, “The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands.” (Giago, 2014).

Bosnia-Herzegovina: Sometimes the trigger event can seem innocuous. “As the rise of Greater Serb expansions began to gain traction in February of 1992 a referendum on independence was held in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), 99.7% of voters voted “Yes”. The Bosnian Serb leaderships boycotted the referendum to prevent independence but independence was officially declared on 1 March 1992 and internationally recognised by April 1992. Shortly after the referendum, Serb forces seized the city of Sarajevo which would lead to a 4 year-long campaign of terror and persecution. From May 1992, Bosnian-Serb Forces under the command of General Ratko Mladić used shelling and sniping to target civilian areas of the city and key institutions, killing, wounding, and inflicting terror upon the civilian population. During this time, almost all of Sarajevo’s cultural, religious, and residential buildings were either partially or completely destroyed. From January to March 1993, the Bosnian-Serb Forces attacked the Cerska area in eastern BiH. Thousands of Muslims fled to the UN ‘Safe Areas’ of Srebrenica and Žepa in hopes of finding safety….  On 8 March 1995, Radovan Karadžić (the political leader of the Bosnian-Serbs), ordered the Serb Forces to eliminate the Muslim enclaves of Srebrenica and Žepa, escalating the “strategic objectives” of 12 May 1992. On 2 July 1995, Bosnian Serb Forces attacked the Srebrenica enclave. Over 7,000 Bosnian Muslim prisoners captured in the area around Srebrenica were summarily executed from 13 July to 19 July 1995.” (Remembering Srebrenica, 2021). When I taught in Sarajevo and Pale (Headquarters of Republike Srpske) a few years later, (before Radovan Karadžić was captured and convicted of Genocide) the explanation was still painted on a wall in Pale for visitors like me to see. In English it said “Peace = Death”. Karadžić and the other Serb leaders convinced the population that a Muslim invasion of Europe was immanent and they must exterminate the Muslims or die themselves. Amos Goldberg (2024) explains “Bosnian Serbs, with bleak past memories of persecution and murder from World War II, felt threatened. The complexity of the conflict, in which neither side was innocent, did not prevent the ICC from recognising the Srebrenica massacre as an act of genocide, which exceeded the other war crimes committed by the parties, since these crimes cannot justify genocide.”

Gaza: In Gaza, of course, the attack that Hamas called Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, on October 7, 2023, was a trigger event of similar nature. “Early on October 7, Hamas fighters stormed communities along Israel’s southern fence with Gaza. At least 1,139 people, mostly civilians, were killed in the attack, according to an Al Jazeera tally based on official Israeli statistics, and about 240 others were seized as captives.” (Al Jazeera, 2024) By the time of writing more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in response, and over a million people are estimated by the UN to be at risk of death by famine. “Two days after the Hamas attack, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel was “fighting human animals,” in announcing a complete siege on Gaza. Deputy Knesset speaker Nissim Vaturi from the ruling Likud party wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, that Israelis had one common goal, “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.” Israeli Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu, from the far-right Jewish Power party, suggested that Israel drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza and said there were “no uninvolved civilians” in the territory. Israeli soldiers caught on video made similar remarks as they sang and danced in the early days of Israel’s ground offensive.” On 29 October, Netanyahu publically urged IDF “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible”. The reference is to 1 Samuel 15:3 “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass”. (Goldenberg, 2024). These quotes and a great many others were brought to the attention of the International Court of Justice in the Hague on 29 December, 2023, as South Africa brought a case against Israel for genocide. On 26 January 2024, the court ruled that the case was plausible, and gave interim orders requiring Israel to ensure the safety of the people of Gaza. By that time, over 25,000 had been killed in a campaign whose ferocity was by now infamous (BBC News, 2024).

The Psychological Build up to Israel’s Genocide in 2023-2024

UN Confirms Gaza Genocide: As I write, there is a genocide actually occurring in front of the modern world, in Gaza. Experts in genocide studies, including Israeli experts, have commented very fully on this. Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, reported to the Human Rights Council at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, March 26, 2024, that “”I find that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the crime of genocide against Palestinians as a group in Gaza has been met…. I implore member states to abide by their obligations, which start with imposing an arms embargo and sanctions on Israel and so ensure that the future does not continue to repeat itself.” (Farge, 2024).

Yes, This is Genocide: Professor Amos Goldberg (2024), Holocaust and genocide researcher at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem says: “It is so difficult and painful to admit it, but despite all that, and despite all our efforts to think otherwise, after six months of brutal war we can no longer avoid this conclusion. Jewish history will henceforth be stained with the mark of Cain for the “most horrible of crimes,” which cannot be erased from its forehead. As such, this is the way it will be viewed in history’s judgment for generations to come. From a legal point of view, there is still no telling what the International Court of Justice in The Hague will decide, although in light of its temporary rulings so far and in light of increasing prevalence of reports by jurists, international organisations, and investigative journalists, the trajectory of the prospective judgement seems quite clear.”

Evidence Accumulating: Goldberg continues (2024) “The well-argued, and well-reasoned report by UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, reached a slightly more determined conclusion and is another layer in establishing the understanding that Israel is indeed committing genocide. Israeli academic Dr. Lee Mordechai’s detailed and periodically updated report [Hebrew], which collects information on the level of Israeli violence in Gaza, reached the same conclusion. Leading academics such as Jeffrey Sachs, a professor of economics at Columbia University (and a Jew with a warm attitude toward traditional Zionism), with whom heads of state all over the world regularly consult on international issues, speaks of the Israeli genocide as something taken for granted. Excellent investigative reports such as those [Hebrew] of Yuval Avraham in Local Call, and especially his recent investigation of the artificial intelligence systems used by the military in selecting targets and carrying out the assassinations, further deepen this accusation. The fact that the military allowed, for example, the killing of 300 innocent people and the destruction of an entire residential quarter in order to take out one Hamas brigade commander shows that military targets are almost incidental targets for killing civilians and that every Palestinian in Gaza is a target for killing. This is the logic of genocide.” The ICJ has a list of 500 examples of Israeli Genocide calls within the first months of the action in Gaza (Ghanem, 2024).

Genocide and Self Defence: Goldberg (2024) explains that self-defence is not only not a legal justification for genocide, it is the normal situation when genocide occurs. “Israelis mistakenly think that to be viewed as such a genocide needs to look like the Holocaust. They imagine trains, gas chambers, crematoria, killing pits, concentration and extermination camps, and the systematic persecution to death of all members of the group of victims to the last one. An occurrence like this has indeed not taken place in Gaza. In a similar way to what happened in the Holocaust, most Israelis also imagine that the victims collective is not involved in violent activity or actual conflict, and that the murderers exterminate them because of an insane senseless ideology. This is also not the case with Gaza…. However, although each case of genocide has a different character, in the scope and features of the murder, the common denominator of most of them is that they were carried through out of an authentic sense of self-defence. Legally, an event cannot be both self-defence and genocide. These two legal categories are mutually exclusive. But historically, self-defence is not incompatible with genocide, but is usually one of its main causes, if not the main one.”

The Permanent Trauma: Goldberg also points out that the warning signs of impending genocide in Gaza had been obvious to experts for years. “In 2011, I had a short article  [Hebrew ההכרה בשואה היא החריג] published in Haaretz about the genocide in Southwest Africa, concluding with the following words: “ We can learn from the Herero and Nama genocide how colonial domination, based on a sense of cultural and racial superiority, can spill over, in the face of local rebellion, into horrific crimes such as mass expulsion, ethnic cleansing and genocide. The case of the Herero rebellion should serve as a horrifying warning sign for us here in Israel, which has already known one Nakba in its history.” Alexander (2012, p. 97-117) discusses how Israelis failed to heed Goldberg’s warning, because they converted the Holocaust into the one solitary moral comparison it was acceptable to make. Immersed in its story, they came to believe that anything else was justified because it could never be as bad as what they experienced. By doing this they converted the Shoah into a permanent trauma. He quotes Avraham Burg, once speaker of the Knesset and head of the World Zionist Organization, now a peace activist in “Combatants for Peace” as saying “the farther we got from the camps and the gas chambers, the more pessimistic we became and the more untrusting we became toward the world…. Occupation? You call this occupation? This is nothing compared to the absolute evil of the Holocaust!’ And if it is nothing compared to the Holocaust then you can continue. And since nothing, thank God, is comparable to the ultimate trauma, it legitimizes many things.” Elsewhere, Burg says (Schaevers, 2020) “The Shoah has become a prison from which Israel must free itself”

Israel – The “Primordial” Trauma Reactivated: Alexander (2012, p. 104-105) continues “The Israeli state, established on the blood sacrifice of its courageous but also often dangerously aggressive army, honored its soldier-martyrs and inscribed in historical memory the trauma-inspired lesson that only military strength could prevent Jewish defilement and murder from ever happening again. For the new nation’s first two decades, the historical record shows, the school textbooks of Israeli children were filled with deeply polluting descriptions of Arabs as savage, sly, cheaters, thieves, robbers, provocateurs, and terrorists. As one Israeli historian has suggested, during these early decades the national narrative hewed closely to the “tradition of depicting Jewish history as an uninterrupted record of anti-Semitism and persecution” (Podeh 2000: 75–6). The continuing Arab military campaign against Israel was represented inside this frame. Palestinian violence was analogized with pre-Independence “pogroms” against Jews, and Palestinian and Arab leaders were depicted as only the most recent in “a long line of ‘oppressors’ of Jews during the course of their history” (ibid.)”. Israeli leaders have deliberately aimed to suggest that the Holocaust has never, and can never end, and they arrange for young Israeli people to visit the death camps in Poland to ensure this. Friends in Israel have described these visits to me as a deliberate process of retraumatising, where children are warned not to leave their hotel because anti-Semitic Polish people might kill them, and not to eat the “disgusting non-kosher Polish food” (Feldman, 2002, p. 94). In 2001 the Minister of Education, Limor Livnat, explained “We shouldn’t suppose that we differ from our grandfathers and grandparents who went to the gas chambers. What separates us form them is not that we are some sort of new Jew. The main difference is external: we have a state, and a flag and an army: caught in their tragedy, they lacked all three” (quoted in Feldman, 2002, p. 84). Israel exists in a constant and deliberate reactivation of Trauma. This is why, when protestors chant “Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea”, Zionists complain that this is the same kind of trauma their ancestors have always faced. For a person engulfed in the Holocaust, the fact that 35,000 Palestinians including 15,000 children have been murdered … is really irrelevant because what counts is that these “cruel words” are evoking a far worse imaginary event in the past.

“Judenrat”, “Antisemitic”, “Self-hating-Jew” – the New Israeli Hate Speech: In 2004 and 2005, when the Israeli government attempted to remove illegal settlements from the Palestinian West Bank, the settlers dressed their children in Holocaust uniforms. The sobbing children asked the guards who came to remove their families to temporary accommodation “Have you come to take us to the gas chamber?” (Maariv, 2004). (Associated Press and Haaretz, 2005). One settler, Itzik Gabai, explained “”I can’t find any difference between what is happening to us now and what happened then [during the Holocaust],” The settlers referred to the soldiers moving them as Judenrat, a name used for those who colluded with the Nazis in the Holocaust (Maariv, 2004; Yediot Aharonot, 2005). The World Jewish Congress (2024) explains that anyone who disagrees with Zionism, anyone who accuses Israel of genocide, anyone who denies that all Jews are indigenous to the land ruled by Israel, anyone who wants Israel to adopt a policy that accepts Palestinians as equal citizens … is anti-Semitic. “Anti-Zionism and its inherent demonization of Jews leads to violence. When critics of Israel falsely accuse the world’s only Jewish state of committing a genocide against Palestinians, it cynically sets the stage for violence to be carried out against Israelis and Diaspora Jews.” As I write, this accusation points at almost the entire population of the world. What about Jewish people who disagree with Israel? By April, 2024, Pew research polls showed that 42% of American Jews aged under 35 said they thought Israel’s actions in Gaza were unacceptable, and 31% said Hamas reasons for fighting Israel were valid (Alper, 2024). Jews aged 50-64 were the only section of the Jewish population where over 50% had favourable views of the Israeli government. This growing section of the Jewish population who are non-Zionist are labelled “Self hating Jews” by the current government of Israel. Finlay (2005). This accusation was first used in English by Kurt Lewin in 1941 (at the time of the Holocaust), but has a long history in German language. Lewin suggested that any Jewish person who publicly criticises any aspect of Jewish culture does so because they are denying their Jewish identity. Finlay (2005, p. 202, 215) suggests that it “a lack of clarity over this issue means that the term is often used rhetorically to discount Jews who differ in their life-styles, interests or political positions from their accusers, and that such misapplications of the concept result from essentialized and normative definitions of Jewish identity….The Israeli peace group Gush Shalom, for example, which organized a boycott of goods produced by settlements in the Occupied Territories, were described as suffering from Jewish self-hate by a local Council spokesman, who said: ‘They run to the goyim to turn them against Israel. They’re the little Jew-boys that cooperate with the overseer. It gives legitimacy to antiSemitism. The anti-Semites say, “hey, we can say what we want about Israel, even the Jews do it”’ (Arnold, 1999)” Finlay argues that the very notion of Self-hating Jews itself is an anti-Semitic trope, from a time when Jewish people were considered to have more than the normal level of  psychiatric problems (Finlay, 2005, p. 208). These terms are in themselves self-hating, he argues, suppressing political discussion in a way that non-Jews do not feel the need to, because of a fear of persecution.

Psychological Aspects of Preventing Genocide: Example Choices

LaCapra’s Insights From Traditional Psychotherapy: Professor Dominick LaCapra is a Professor at Cornell University who specializes in the study of the Holocaust and “the uses of trauma theory and psychoanalysis for historical analysis.”  In his book “Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma” (2016) he suggests that a lot of the way people process experiences like the Holocaust actually replicates it in their lives (he uses the psychotherapeutic term “acting out” for this way of processing it). LaCapra argues that Zionism has used “History as Displacement” (2016), that Zionism has displaced the distress that survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants feel onto history, and then created a kind of “sacred canon” from that history (a set of things we are supposed to believe that are framed as eternal truths, instead of open to scientific questioning). He notes that a science pays little attention to its originators (No modern chemist cares more about what the early chemists thought about the table of elements, than about what we know now), but a pseudoscience is obsessed with its origins (alchemists search for ever older books with the belief that the best is in the past). He notes the tendency of German commentators on the holocaust, especially, to talk about the absolute importance of “keeping alive” the holocaust memory, which sounds like a noble plan, except that it attempts to stop history moving forward and it suggests that all distress is based in the inevitable continuing existence of the past. NLP Practitioners might find LaCapra’s language obscure, but his points are very much aligned with the way we think as NLP Practitioners working with individuals. He also quotes German historian Martin Broszat claiming “the liquidation of the Jews was only feasible during the period of time in which it actually was carried out specifically because that liquidation was not in the limelight of events, but rather could largely be concealed and kept quiet.” Sadly, I believe we have seen in 2024 that there is more than one way to “keep a genocide quiet”, and the claims of “self defence” and “antisemitism” work perfectly well for the purpose. In that sense, LaCapra helps us understand the social use of repression as “keeping genocide quiet”.

Gabor Maté’s Trauma Healing Model: Promised Land is a Jewish site that supports sharing the Palestinian experience. They note “Gabor Maté’s research on trauma and pain has created his unique perspective. Living in a family of holocaust survivors has helped him draw balance and empathy when observing the events of the Israel-Palestine conflict.” His stance on Gaza has been unflinching. “From someone with deep connections to the history of this situation,” Maté says he understands “the warmth that Jews have for Israel; I used to be in that same camp. I can understand, after the horrors of the Nazi genocide, how we desperately want some protection. I can understand all that. But none of the excuses what we are doing…there are no two sides…in terms of power and control and its pretty straightforward. There was a land with a people living there and other people wanted it, they took it over, and they continue to take it over, and they continue to discriminate against, oppress and dispose that other people.” (Promised Land, 2024). He says, even stronger, “In Israel-Palestine the powerful party has succeeded in painting itself as the victim, while the ones being killed and maimed become the perpetrators. “They don’t care about life,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says, abetted by the Obamas and Harpers of this world, “we do.” Netanyahu, you who with surgical precision slaughter innocents, the young and the old, you who have cruelly blockaded Gaza for years, starving it of necessities, you who deprive Palestinians of more and more of their land, their water, their crops, their trees — you care about life?” (Maté, 2014). And here is the important place I wanted to finish this discussion about the background to the genocide. “One could debate details, historical and current, back and forth. Since my days as a young Zionist and, later, as a member of Jews for a Just Peace, I have often done so. I used to believe that if people knew the facts, they would open to the truth. That, too, was naïve. This issue is far too charged with emotion. As the spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle has pointed out, the accumulated mutual pain in the Middle East is so acute, “a significant part of the population finds itself forced to act it out in an endless cycle of perpetration and retribution.”” (Maté, 2014). This article is background. It is important information for you to have, but Gabor Maté is emphasising that information is not healing. That is another story. That is also what our Transcendence Process is about….

Richard Bolstad Guides Through Julia Kurusheva’s Transcendence Process: To get the Guidebook click here!

How are we best to Respond After a Genocide?

It would be contrary to the principles expressed in these suggestions if I was to claim that these were a required program. I believe that these are principles that we learn from all this research. These are just my ideas.

Individually: Remember that Genocide tends to shift the brain’s assessment system, and we need to learn how to respond to a post-genocidal world, or we will unwittingly recreate the genocide in our lives. In the research by Knoblich et alia (2017) the aim was to change this response at the brain and epigenome level by four key methods. Individually, these, not aggression, overconfidence and suspicion, are the secrets to resilient and healthy emotional response, and have the power to change you epigenetically and in terms of neural connections:

1. Core Mindfulness – training in accepting awareness of internal responses.
2. Distress Tolerance by using distraction, self-soothing, and assessment of the value of the reaction.
3. Interpersonal Communication Effectiveness using listening skills and gentle assertiveness.
4. Emotional Regulation by naming and changing emotional responses using NLP style processes.

In Community: As a community, the way we respond to our shared experience is crucial. Community healing is as challenging as individual healing, and we can utilize already present models of this, like The Parent Circle in Palestine/Israel, like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, like Towards Understanding and Healing in Northern Ireland.

1. Narrative: Create a narrative of history where the genocide is one event in a story that can have a positive future. It is not an ongoing threat but a past event to be learned from.
2. Identity: Create an identity as a survivor rather than a victim. Expect a future where you can be open and trusting of human beings, and find allies amongst them, not a future based on fear of events repeating. Have an identity as a person who has learned how to feel good about themselves and shares that with others.
3. Expectations: A survivor community feels a sense of faith in the intrinsic goodness of humanity. They focus not on how to detect the collapse of that goodness, but how to identify its presence and build it.
4. Discriminate Map from Territory: Discriminate between fantasies, threats and perceived insults on the one hand, and events on the other. Decide which events are unacceptable in the world and defend all human beings from those events, using objective standards. Do not allow people to talk about the past as if it is continuous or eternal, and do not allow people to conflate present events with past events, or present interactions with other communities, with past interactions that happened with separate and past communities.
5. Mission: Create a community mission to help other different communities. Rather than an inward looking mission to save ourselves, create a mission to reach out in service of our ideals.
6. Truth and Reconciliation: Accept that others may in the past have been harmed by our actions as well, and commit to genuine, non-blame and non-guilt processes of acknowledgement and “making right” from both the previous “sides”.
7. Respect: Commit to a belief system which does not require our community to be respected more than other communities, to have more rights than other communities, to have more access to treasured resources than other communities. A belief system which does not depend on internal oppression or external oppression. Accept that the domination paradigm is in the past. Update community practices to the new cooperative paradigm.

Richard Bolstad

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