Hurt People Hurt People
Over the generations, the evil that countries and people do lives after them. Examples of this are found in the history of both the Ukraine and the Israeli/Gaza conflict. Peoples of both areas are left with anger and hate because of horrible injustices they have suffered and the terrible destruction they have undergone. Those feelings get passed on from generation to generation and can be re-invoked. The terror and trauma that were caused by both Hitler and Stalin’s genocides are directly linked to everything that is going on now in both the Ukraine and the Israel/Gaza conflicts.
In 1932–33, the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, killed 3.9 million people in Ukraine, then under Soviet control, in an engineered famine called the Holodomor. Many of the survivors of this famine survived by cannibalism. It was an attempt to eradicate an entire class, the small land-owning farmers who made up 80% of its population, to secure grain for the Soviet Union, collectivize farmland and eradicate anyone who did not want to have their farm collectivized. Survivors were traumatized and that trauma is felt and exploited on the geopolitical stage today. US neocons know that as long as they continue to send weapons to Ukraine, Ukrainians will keep fighting Russia to their last, as many of them view, correctly or incorrectly (I can’t judge that), Putin as Stalin and Russia as the USSR due to the wounds of having their separate national identity violently exterminated.
Not only is this wound being exploited now, but it was badly exploited during World War II in Nazi-occupied Ukraine. The Nazis sought to expand the genocide of the Jewish people as part of their Eastward expansion. Through feats of propaganda, the Nazis were able to convince people that to be a Jew was to be a communist and vice versa, and that the people/ideology that starved the Ukrainian peasant population some 10 years prior was synonymous with being a Jew. This propaganda combined with the existing trauma and the Nazi ‘liberation’ of people who had been oppressed by the Stalin regime helped the Nazis expand their genocide into Ukraine and recruit many of those who carried it out.
This is an example of how the evil that countries and groups of people do combined with an added infusion of hate, whether through stereotypes or propaganda, can lead ordinary people to either participate in or consent to genocide.
We know the evil the Jews suffered in the Holocaust. Some in Israel believe that Israel must crush Gaza into the ground and kill every last man woman and child there because the Palestinians of Gaza are raised to hate Jews, they continue to ‘elect’ Hamas as their leadership, they are ‘Hamas in training’, they are human shields of Hamas, ‘Hamas is ISIS’, whatever the justification. This idea does not represent the Jewish people of Israel and it is not true of the Palestinians of Gaza. It is the position of the insane faction that Netanyahu and Co. represent. If they get their wish on this one, they kick the can while whoever is left in Gaza, Jihadist or not, remobilizes and hits harder.
We also know what evil the Palestinians have suffered in the last 75 years. Most people of Gaza do not believe in jihad. Many who support a holy war against all non-Muslims are responding to unlivable conditions and see no other way to fight for freedom against a power structure that has been suppressing, displacing and terrorizing them for generations.
The only way to make it stop is to stop and to make a genuine effort to humanize the other and to begin the path to collective de-traumatization.
