The Psychology of a culture is revealed and perpetuated in how they relate to and treat their children and in how they relate to and treat the most vulnerable people within their society. Heal that and we can heal everything.
47% of the known fatalities caused by Israeli War against Palestinian Civilians are children.
There are many more buried under the rubble.
Continuous Traumatic Distress is a condition Palestinians live in, it is not a disorder. The violence of apartheid occupation is the disorder.
Dear Representative,
I recently wrote to you urging you to support the South African application for an adjudication at the International Courts of Justice.
I present the following 25 minute interview with two psychologists working in the area of children and trauma in war zones, with particular reference to conditions in Gaza and The West Bank, and a representative of Save The Children.
In this interview, a new condition is described - Continuous Traumatic Distress, without the adjective 'disorder'. Imagine being deliberately and intentionally traumatised every day, 247, year after year. Where is the true 'disorder'
I respectfully suggest you view this important interview, so that you understand clearly the condition Palestinian Children are in, and have been in for decades.
Can you think about a child who grows up in a war zone who cannot even imagine peace or at the very least the cessation of violence because that is all they have ever known, because the child has internalised that state so deeply, he or she has no concept of anything else?
Millions of children are now utterly dependent upon the International Community to now take action to stop the violence of the Israeli State in Gaza, The West Bank, the occupation, the illegal settlements. As these interviewees state, as things stand, there is nothing the Humanitarian community can do to help those children right now, until the violence is stopped.
These children need safety from violence as the first step towards improved condition, as the only way to ensure all appropriate aid is provided to them, to meet their unmet needs.
I urge you once again, having viewed this interview, having understood the realities of life for these children, to at the very least demand our Governments take the action required to force Israel to cease this atrocious violence or be held accountable at the ICJ and the ICC.
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Kindest regards
Corneilius
Thank you for reading this blog.
"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."
This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.
The South African Government has made an application to the International Court of Justice, which rules on serious criminal offences between States, to initiate an indictment of the State of Israel for its current violent assault upon the people of Gaza, and the West Bank. They are asking that the courts rule on the situation, to charge it as an act of Genocide, to demand that all states party to the Genocide Convention take action to prevent this genocide from continuing, as International Law requires.
Ireland has ratified the Genocide Convention, as has South Africa and Israel, and most States around the world that form up the United Nations General Assembly.
It follows then, that the Irish Government, as a member of the UN, and in recognition of the long oppression of Irish people carried out by the English State and our in depth understanding of the history and adverse impacts of colonial conquest and genocidal actions designed to destroy the culture of the Irish, our language, our customs, culture, land tenure and polity by the English State, and later the British Empire, should support this application to the International Courts of Justice.
Can you please confirm that you will be taking the appropriate action to require the Irish State to uphold the Convention on Genocide, and other International Laws of War and the Humanitarian Law and join the South African application, to support it in full, without reservation?
Kindest regards
Corneilius Crowley (Irish Citizen)
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I think that Offensive Militarism is psychopathy institutionalised. It MUST be dismantled.
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Here follows a brief interview with International Human Rights Lawyer Francis Boyle, who has taken and won a number of adjudications at the International Court Of Justice, regarding Herzogovinia/Bosnia and Yugoslavia.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
Thank you for reading this blog.
"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."
This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.
It is not a matter of looking around to see where those lives were misplaced, forgotten, left behind, dropped behind the sofa, dropped by accident as we got out of the car, left behind in the supermarket.
Their lives were stolen and not by stealth.
Their lives were taken, openly, in full view, not in a secret act or by mistake - their bodies were ruined, destroyed, violently, cruelly, intentionally. Block by block. AI AI oh.
Limbs were ripped from bodies. Hands that will never caress a grandchild's forehead, legs that will never dance again, fingers that will never again play music or prepare food and share it lovingly.
Throats that will never laugh again, or sing lullabies, or pray, eyes that will not tear up in bliss or sadness.
Their internal organs were crushed by pressure waves from hi-tech explosive munitions designed to do exactly that, delivered from the most advanced jets that industry can build, by shells sent by tanks and howitzers, carefully aimed to cause the most destruction possible.
AI AI Oh!
Their hearts will not flutter in new love, their lungs will not fill nor will their throats and hearts sing at weddings, their eyes will not see the years of growth and maturation of their children, or their parents, they will not take selfies at sunset to share to their friends and family.
Their guts were spilled, splattered and spread across the walls that no longer stand to protect these families that they might sleep soundly and in love. Body bags of parts of bodies, the remains, what is left is unrecognisable as a person, as a human being.
They were blinded, they were broken in pieces, they were battered and brutalised and their surviving relatives had to bury them under an AI rain of hellfire, rockets and white phosphorus.
AI AI oh.
The survivors sleepless with trauma can see the stars, they can see the moon and they can see the flares through the spaces where ceilings once kept them safe from the rain and the sun.
They have no toilets, no fresh running water, they have no food. They have no medicines, they have no counselling. They comfort each other by being still in it together, sharing what is left, which is closer to nothing with each and every bombing raid. They have no cookers, they have no fridges and they live under plastic sheeting, they live crowded into the remaining homes, a family in each room, shivering in fear, in despair, in unbearable condition waiting for the bomb earmarked for that dwelling. They know the meaning of Genocide. The lived experience, short as it is, unbearable as it is is still far too long.
AI AI oh.
The Israeli State War diet is to the death of all the innocents, their sordid claim that peace is the aim of this growing pile of bones of Palestinian families is vulgar psychopathy institutionalised.
The USUK ruling class cheer them on. The USUK media dumb down their reporting. The USUK ruling class urge restraint in public, citing self defence, while they allow the Israeli State to continue. ‘Tone it down a bit’ they say, in public.
They send more weapons to Ukraine, they send more weapons to Israel, they send more weapons everywhere war is active, as their shares in warfare industries increase in value.
These are our Ruling Class. We vote for them and we pay them. And this is what we get. We are the lucky ones. They will not bomb us, will they?
We see this on our screens. We see this on our phones.
I have long known that every war does this. This is what war is. No war has ever been fought without harming the innocents, men, women, children and elders and their villages and towns, their cities. Horror movies are scary, war is disgusting, revolting, degrading.
There are no heroes, the myth of honour is a veil.
It takes real human courage, it takes immense effort, it tales great heart and kindness to make Peace the task. It will take all of us to make peace a reality.
Today the USUK population correctly protest, pointing to the innocence of these Palestinian families. We hate marching, the weathers is not great, and we fervently wish we had nothing to protest, that we could instead demonstrate love and make empathy our polity’s core - our marches are not hatred, even though the ruling class hate them. Striking nurses do not hate, they care.
We did not hold our War criminals to account in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 and six and seven and eight and beyond, even as we had the evidence.
They all walk free, enriched, pensioned, protected and they have more than they need, whilst poverty is intentionally maintained in order to ensure the wealth extraction faction remains dominant.
We - you and I and our neighbours, we who live on every street - we cannot undo the harm done, and we must ask ourselves now - 'What can we do to prevent more harm?'
How do we live on with integrity, without relying on hope, faith or comfort to get us through and where will we find the shared determination to end the warfare that we are all paying for, so that peace has a chance?
The cost of murder crisis has many layers.
They did not lose their lives, they will not get them back, we know where they went, we still have ours.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
Thank you for reading this blog.
"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."
This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.
Everything the Israeli State is doing, it learned from The British Empire and the English Ruling Class.
I am reposting parts of this important Irish Times article, because it reveals an aspect of the Israeli colonial project that is frequently and conveniently ignored. An inconvenient truth, that predates WWII.
The Israeli colonial project has very little to do with Religion, It is an economic and political project. Zionism is a manipulation, a veil, a distraction and an excuse - the excuse emerged after WWII.
The project the British Empire pursued and still pursues is preventing any Arab solidarity that might unite with the vast wealth of Oil and emerge as a competitor to the British Empire or more correctly the Oligarchy of the old Empire, the Wealth Cabal that continued in spite of public theatre of 'loss of Empire'.
I urge readers to go to the Irish Times article and read it in full. It's a very useful stepping stone towards a more honest study of the roots of the Israeli project.
Winston Churchill sent the Black and Tans to Palestine
1937: Arab civilians being searched by British Military personnel in Palestine. Photograph: Getty Images
British politicians who waged war in Ireland used the same tactics and forces in Palestine - and a Dubliner was in charge during the Naqb.
"Douglas Duff had been stationed with the Black and Tans in Galway before moving to Palestine. His memoirs make clear that he brought a great deal of bigotry with him. Referring to the Palestinians of Haifa, he wrote: “Most of us were so infected by the sense of our own superiority over these ‘lesser breeds’ that we scarcely regarded these people as human.”
Officers who had served in Ireland played a prominent role in quelling protests by Palestinians against the expropriation of land where they lived and farmed. Raymond Cafferata, for example, had been part of the Auxiliaries during the Irish War of Independence. In 1933, he headed a contingent of foot police at a Jaffa demonstration which had been banned. A baton charge that he ordered was commended by British administration in Jerusalem for being “magnificently executed” despite how numerous Palestinians were shot dead during the protest.
Later in the 1930s, a full-scale Palestinian revolt erupted. Grattan Bushe, a legal adviser to the Colonial Office, warned that “repression by force is repeating the mistake which was made in Ireland”.
His warning was ignored; military commanders were assured that they could take “whatever measures are necessary”.
The measures were to include demolishing much of Jaffa’s old city, imposing collective punishment on villages with rebels in their midst and mass detention in labour camps.
The Balfour Declaration’s purpose was to form a “little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”, according to Ronald Storrs, “the first military governor of Palestine since Pontius Pilate” (his words).
Not everything went to plan: the Zionist movement fell out with and, in the case of two groups, waged a campaign of guerrilla warfare against Britain in the 1940s. Storrs’ comment nonetheless encapsulates how the British elite viewed their nearest colony and the Middle East through the same lens."
Everything the Israeli State is doing, it learned from The British Empire and the English Ruling Class.
Divide, by disabling civility, to maintain position.
There are, we are told, a lot of Israeli citizens caught up in the violence, waging mob war upon each other on the streets and it is being exacerbated by online grooming and religious demagoguery as a deliberate ploy by the Netanyahu power base to counter the emergence of a unified opposition.
Generating lateral violence within Israel itself, in order to dissuade fragile alliances is a tactic well within the scope of the Netanyahu power base.An ideologically diverse group of parties opposing Netanyahu, who is known to be corrupt, looked to be progressing slowly but surely towards a government supported by Ra’am (United Arab List), a conservative Islamist Arab party.
In a moment of crisis it is possible for any well funded actor to produce and disseminate material in a grass roots amygdala hacking campaign. But last-minute election hackings and strategically timed document leaks are more than just a media game. They are many textbook examples of how psychological operations can be applied to serve not only warfare, but whatever we call those illegal, malicious and democracy-threatening information influence activities. This includes not just hacking and leaks, but how this information is used in addition to fake news and other forms of illegitimate manipulation.
Political grooming operations generally have two purposes: to change people’s behaviour, alter their perception and make them react, or to have them not react. These reactions are largely based on emotions, which have always been at the core of all information-psychological influence.
How many British citizens understand the current Military involvement of the British Government in violence across the Middle East?
"As violence escalates in Israel and Palestine, we take readers through the expanding military relationship between the UK and Israel, which has been erased by the British media. The deepening alliance involves UK military training of Israel for combat, joint exercises, arms deals, as well as intelligence cooperation.
The UK’s new military strategy, released in March, states clearly that “Israel remains a key strategic partner”.
Months before the importance of the relationship was spelled out, the military chiefs of the two states signed a cooperation agreement “to formalise and enhance our defence relationship, and support the growing Israel-UK partnership”, according to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).
Following the agreement, Britain’s ambassador to Israel, Neil Wigan, tweeted he was “delighted”, saying it would “further deepen our military cooperation”.
What is in that agreement is secret and has not even been formally acknowledged by the UK government. But Israel lobby group Bicom (the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre) has written that the two militaries are “integrating their multi-domain capabilities in maritime, land, air, space, and cyber and electromagnetic”.
Nobody knew.
Just as in Brexit Britain, political grooming gangsters worked feverishly to exacerbate fear and insecurity, to nurture dislike into petty hatred, all of which feeds into internal extremism and lateral violence. If one's primary source of knowledge of the people of Palestine and Israel is what one reads in the News Press and consume via broadcast TV News or your online bubble, then it is all too easy to fall for the caricature, the poll that pretends to describe what all those other people one has never met really think, the meme that triggers a fear or bias.
There are many Israeli's who oppose the oppression, and a majority of Jews globally oppose the violence, even if they support the concept of a Jewish haven, a Jewish homeland state as part of an imagined two state solution. A significant part of the global Secular Jewish community do not support the concept of a singular Jewish State - they oppose a Religious State on principle. It is a mixed bag, and the danger of caricature and stereotype is that it blurs all of that.
The Israeli project is always precarious because it does not stand on reason, evidence or rational governance. This is true of all Empire, conquest and colonisation projects, and is a constant of the history of civilisation. Bully cults are inherently unstable.
Intergenerational Trauma
The cycles of intergenerational trauma persist in large part because the occupants of the institutions of power, a class of people who are powerful because they actively dominate within the institutional political and economic power framework, work diligently to pass the positions of power onto the next generation of carefully groomed mentees and heirs, to assure that the historically powerful class, as a class, continues to dominate.
They behave as they do with callous disregard to the welfare of whole populations: be it Modi, Bolsonaro, Johnson or Netanyahu or Koch, Rinehart, Mercer or any member of the global gang of kleptocrats their primary concern is their obsession with the power to rule, at the expense of the socially critical task of healthy governance. Their obsession with the maintenance of their power at all costs, as a personal and institutional dynamic, corrupts everything they touch.
Johnson is fond of telling us he wanted to be Prime Minister as a child hood projection into his future. It's personal with him. Pathology always is. When leaders leave office in tears - Nixon and Thatcher for example - it is because they have internalised the Power of the institution as if it was their own personality, part of their psyche.
Why do I write about all this stuff?
I write (in spite of knowing that I am a tiny, impotent citizen, powerless to make any material change to the prevailing situation) because I feel so strongly that we, the decent people, the innocent majority caught in the cross fire of hierarchies of violence by accident of birth that places us on one side or the other, until we reject those attributions out of awareness, will always, once we are aware, resist oppression because we want to live well, to live peacefully. We realise that we are not designed by evolution to be bullied, nor are we designed to be bullies. We want to live well, to love and be loved, to nurture our communities children, to watch them grow into graceful adults in healthy environment, to see them love and be loved, to take pleasure in their joy and creativity. That is the deepest human urge.
It is an urge I will never cede. What should I? I see that urge in the Palestinians, in the Aboriginals, and in the Ashaninka, the Awa, the Yanomami, in the San and the Sami, I see that urge in the Uyghur and the Han, in the Japanese, the Korean and the Russian peoples, I meet it in the Irish, Welsh, Scottish and English people. I see that urge everywhere. It is a global movement. A human universal that is older that civilisation.
The urge to live well, to love, to nurture - Humankind.
In the long run, the project of the Hierarchy of Violence Culture is a dead end. It is culturally, emotionally, psychologically and in evolutionary terms a dead end for dead beats.
Mars as a hoped for escape bolt hole? Is that the best Bezos and Musk can come up with? Really? How very sad, how utterly unimaginative. How bleak!
We ordinary, healthy folk will never cede the will to be free from oppression. We will recover and make our home safe again. We feel the call of healing and recovery deep in our bones. The Palestinian and the Aboriginal alike want to live in peace, as neighbours rather than as victors. Most of us human beings want to live well, as neighbours, in cared for communities.
The past 12,000 years of cultures of hierarchic violence do not compare well to the millions of years of evolutionary mutual aid. Why aren't mainstream Jews supporting Palestinian Human Rights?"There are no doubt both similarities and differences between the systemic racism in the U.S. and that in Palestine/Israel. Nevertheless, while the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a white American policeman produced a huge reaction from white Americans, there has been little empathy in Israel or among American Jews for the plight of Palestinians and the violence they face at the hands of Israeli soldiers and security forces.
The insistence of the Zionist movement on a Jewish state and their denial of the equality of Israel’s own Arab citizens and the inalienable rights of Palestinians in the occupied territories make it nearly impossible for there to be a reaction like that which followed the killing of George Floyd.
While most Israelis are totally opposed to a one-state solution (which would dilute their idea of a majority Jewish state), perhaps only when it becomes clear that this is the path they are pushing Palestinians toward will it be possible to find a historic compromise.
For Palestinian citizens in Israel to experience equality and those in the occupied territories to acquired statehood will require a dramatic change. A historic compromise is unlikely until Israelis and their supporters experience a major change in attitude — one akin to what white Americans seem to be going through right now.
In the same way that white Americans are finally beginning to acknowledge the systemic racism in American society and discuss ways of addressing it, Israelis need to acknowledge the humanity and rights of Palestinians."
Prince Harry, the Hierarchy Cult and you and I.
My two previous blog pieces refer to a) Prince Harry and his comments on intergenerational trauma, and how important that subject is for all of us and to b) the psychology of hierarchy of violence culture and how that afflicts us all.
The Israeli colonial conquest story is very much all of that.
Intergenerational Trauma and the psychology of hierarchy of violence culture.
The Israeli 'problem' stems from historical trauma that remains unresolved, flowing from one generation to another and intensifying hatreds making matters worse. Political and economic violence perpetrated by hierarchy systems.
Jewish communities have been violently oppressed and harmed by Christian Hierarchies for centuries - always as political scapegoats, an unjust scapegoating - and the adults and children of those communities have always been innocent: they just happened to be living where they were. They were picked on, victimised by the prevailing localised hierarchies of power as part of political machinations in this or that territory. The Jewish Diaspora is a cloth woven of the thread of refugee communities seeking shelter from violent abuse. That history is real.
Institutional Christianity and Islam, and other religions have so often sat side by side, walked hand in hand with Organised Hierarchies of Violence, as political power institutions, that they are almost impossible to separate. Every reform movement within Christianity bar the Quakers, the Amish and a few others has become embroiled in the Political Hierarchy of Violence Cult.
Institutional Islam has had it's wars with Judaism too, and even more so with Christianity as a competing Empire system. And yet in Palestine, in the 1920s, Jews, Christians, Muslim and Secular Arabs all lived as ordinary citizens, cheek by jowl, in communities without hardened edges, as they had done for centuries. Friends, neighbours, lovers and colleagues.
It is a deliberate behaviour of Hierarchies of Violence that them must groom as much of the population as they can at the earliest stages to enrol the people who live there by accident of birth into the habituation to the hierarchy as their natural background - this is a big part of this problem.
Who teaches children to follow this or that leader, and why?
Right now, the Israeli Institutional Hierarchy of Violence system, supported by the US and UK Institutional Hierarchy of Violence Systems are operating a genocidal policy against the Palestinian people, their land tenure, their polity.
It cannot be justified because it is so deeply rooted in injustice : "I have a gun, get off your land or I will kill you."
This pattern of colonialism is common across the Earth in these times.
That cult of Hierarchy, of entitlement to violence and domination, is the problem.
Israeli State violence is part of that cult. The British Empire was part of that cult, and still is. That is why the English Parliament supports Israel and legislates the permits to supply Israel with weaponry, it is why they sabotaged Corbyn from within the Labour Party as they savaged him in the News Mefia.
Hierarchy Culture has to operate vast indoctrination systems, effectively grooming entire populations, aware that some few see through the conditioning. They have to find ways to dismay, demean, exhaust and otherwise suppress those who see through the cultural grooming. The people who are groomed and conditioned are not sheeple - they are mostly decent people who are innocent victims, and whose best interests are served by understanding how the grooming functions and helping each other see it and then move through it.
The Israeli state learned it's trade at the feet of the British Empire.
Of course, this lead to me writing a song.
A song about home, about good decent people returning home, having been evicted by gun and blade.
The chorus is the Israeli and British Violence singing their song of the taking of land by force, the verses are the voices of the Palestinians - Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Secular - who were evicted, those who remained, those being evicted today, by violence.
They are also the voices of every colonised people, every pre-conquest culture. Their voices continue, and at the end of this song they outlast the voices of the colonial violence - this is my way of pointing out the futility of the Israeli project of extinction of a people, my support of the people, my hope in their eventual return and justice and peace restored.
Every where an indigenous people are being intruded upon by conquest the invaders must be stopped, as soon as possible.
Lyric: get off your land, we've got the guns
get off your land, we've got the jets
get off your land, we've got the bombs
run! run! run! run!
They came here, reached out their hands,
they WANTED TO BE NEIGHBOURS
they bought our lands,
They said they were friends,
Friendship never ends,
they started to sing a DIFFERENT SONG
This land is our land, promised by God
we will improve it, turning the sod
That's when it all went wrong
they started to sing a DIFFERENT SONG
it Was planned that way from the very start
to disarm us, charm us, infiltrate our hearts,
set us at ease, built a secret army
to do as they please
they started to sing a DIFFERENT SONG
This land is our land, promised by God
we will improve it, turning the sod
they started to sing the invaders SONG
The day came, they declared their state
army SWARMED our village, WE HAD NO hate
ordered TO LEAVE, we took WHAT we could CARRY
they chased us from our homes, who heard our voice
then we started to sing another song
this land is our land, we've lived here forever,
we were wiling to share it, they said never,
that's when we knew we'd have to be strong.
we'll return to our land, we have great heart
we'll return to our homes, we will restart
we will live in peace, we will live in love
we will beat back your conquest, when push comes to shove
we are good people, no matter what you say,
we are Palestinian, we are here to stay
Apartheid is a war crime, we all know
the world is awakening, and time will show
conquest and empire will always fall
the original people always walk tall
pride in our humanity, strong in our heart
we will not be erased, the return must start
the Naqba was a turning point, that plan that must fail
our resistance is eternal, the wind in our sail..
we are good people, no matter what you say,
we are Palestinian, we are here to stay
we are good people, no matter what you say,
we are Palestinian, we are here to stay
we are good people, no matter what you say,
we are Palestinian, we are here to stay.
A short note on Prince Harry and his comments about intergenerational trauma, his family, the Royal Family as an Institution and the media response to his comments.
"I don't think we should be pointing the finger or blaming anybody, but certainly when it comes to parenting, if I've experienced some form of pain or suffering because of the pain or suffering that perhaps my father or my parents had suffered, I'm going to make sure I break that cycle so that I don't pass it on, basically.
It's a lot of genetic pain and suffering that gets passed on.
I started to piece it together and go 'okay, so this is where he went to school, this is what happened, I know this about his life, I also know that is connected to his parents so that means he's treated me the way he was treated, so how can I change that for my own kids?"
I think Harry is doing us all a service. I think as a parent he is being honest. I think he is taking his responsibility to his children's future seriously, thoughtfully, compassionately. I think he is taking his responsibility as a public voice seriously too. I think his compassion is real.
And it's not just about Harry, nor is it about his family (which he did not choose). It is about all of us. Do not let media narratives distract you.
Harry, Meghan and Archie : photo credit, Press Association.
Imagine the changes in social policy that might emerge if trauma informed approaches percolated into the deliberations within Parliament and our NHS, our schools, our Police Forces and our Prison systems, into how we resolve homelessness and much else besides.
There is so much work to be done.
Harry is using his voice, his public presence and status to give some public space to the awareness that intergenerational trauma is a social and material dynamic that is very real, has profound effects on all of us as people and it has an effect on our culture.
Whilst he discusses this in very personal terms, and whilst his discussion relates to and involves members of his own family there is another element which is much more important - the element of this that is for the whole population to consider.
What does intergenerational trauma mean for us, in our lives, in our family lines, our communities?
Would we or could we do things differently if we were trauma informed?
"I argued then that the study of psychological trauma is an inherently political enterprise because it calls attention to the experience of oppressed people. I predicted that our field would continue to be beset by controversy, no matter how solid its empirical foundation, because the same historical forces that in the past have consigned major discoveries to oblivion continue to operate in the world. I argued, finally, that only an ongoing connection with a global political movement for human rights could ultimately sustain our ability to speak about unspeakable things." ~ Judith Herman in Trauma and Recovery
I think that as a society, as a culture and as individuals and families, we all could benefit to some degree to look at whether or not intergenerational trauma has played a role in our lives, in the lives of our families and perhaps become more aware of the possibility that it has, and that as such, more compassion and understanding can grow that leads to less trauma effects as we grow into the future.
I would say too that in my opinion, those in the media who took Harry's words on this to be an attack on his family or an attack on a much loved institution are wrong to assume that position - they are not doing either any service by castigating Harry so.
I have written a bit about intergenerational trauma previously, and it is a subject I have spent some time looking into from a personal perspective and as a societal dynamic.
Unresolved trauma has a way of playing out in our lives, families and communities, and in the history of nations and ethnic histories. What remains unresolved continues to create distortion in behaviour.
Topically as I write, this weekend the Israeli State's 75 year mistreatment of Palestinian people comes to mind. The impact of the invention of Institutional legalised Racism as a tool to divide European and African indentured workers in the British Colonies of the Americas which was the precursor to legalised slavery of Africans comes to mind. The trauma associated with Misogyny is ever present.
The political violence perpetrated by violent governments against citizens seeking accountable democratic governance, in Colombia and Myanmar, and in so many other places comes to mind.
Libya, Syria and Yemen. Northern Ireland. We see the effects of intergenerational trauma writ large.
The football hooliganism last night, of some Rangers and Celtic 'fans' in Glasgow's centre contrasts with the peaceful protest that blocked a hostile environment deportation of asylum seekers, refugees from a traumatised land.
These are all societal level dynamics that afflict so many lives, and because the dynamics of intergenerational trauma remain unresolved, they persist.
It doesn't have to be that way. Cycles of adverse behaviour can be ended.
We can do this.
Thank you, Harry, for lending your voice to this story.
A God that can send you to Hell is a violent God. A God that says he, she or it loves you and can still send you to Hell, is a gaslighting God. Such Gods are always, always projections of violent people.
Hierarchies of Wealth, Power and Violence are cults, they are mafia cults.
I know this much, I am not the problem. Me not fitting into this society is a healthy response.
Would we or could we do things differently if we were trauma informed?
"I argued then that the study of psychological trauma is an inherently political enterprise because it calls attention to the experience of oppressed people. I predicted that our field would continue to be beset by controversy, no matter how solid its empirical foundation, because the same historical forces that in the past have consigned major discoveries to oblivion continue to operate in the world. I argued, finally, that only an ongoing connection with a global political movement for human rights could ultimately sustain our ability to speak about unspeakable things." ~ Judith Herman in Trauma and Recovery
The News is not helping, is it?
The news media is full of a myriad of stories, images and narratives - more commonly biased and less so objective - and we see that violence erupts once more as Israeli State Mechanised Warplanes bomb the prison of Gaza, where people have nowhere to run to, for safety; we see the outcome of reckless policy on COVID19 in UK, USA, Brazil and India as wave after wave of infection surges; we are all aware of the intrusion into and colonisation of 'undeveloped lands inhabited by older indigenous cultures; Myanmar's youth resist the Military oppression of their new-born democracy... there's a lot going on.
The truth is not being told.
Meanwhile, for 1.8 billion people, across East Asia, Oceania and elsewhere zero community transmission strategy is protecting their lives and livelihoods in large measure.
What is the climate within which all this is happening, and can we change that?
Music helps me ground myself when facing all of this. Here's two songs in particular, that emerge from the Irish experience, that I find particularly resonant. They humanity of both songs, and of their writers is a beauty to me.
Won't you settle down, stop fighting for your gods...
Oh, settle down, stop fighting for your gods.
They can't hear you now, not with the noise of your guns.
Once were towering steeples
Now there's a soaring eagle
A crescent moon and a rising sun
Our prayers ascending, but what good will they bring?
If all that's willin' is more and more killin'
Won't you settle down, stop fighting for your gods...
Oh, settle down, stop fighting for your gods.
They can't hear you now, not with the noise of your guns.
The mountains of Mourne
The county Cork I was born in
This dirty old town
Where the rain's always fallin'..
Our prayers ascending, but what good will they bring?
When all that's willin' is more and more killin' ~
What a beautiful song, so movingly performed. Fergus O'Farrell died young, aged 48. His career was blighted by his health, he suffered from Muscular Dystrophy - his body of work is immense, intense, beautiful and worthy of all praise in and of itself.
For me this song speaks to the inhumane cruelty and ultimate futility of Religion, when Religion is used as a reason to wage wars of colonisation. It also speaks of a deeply felt empathy and a humane view. It is an historical song.
It sits comfortably with Damien Dempsey's song Colony, a fierce rebuttal of the colonial mindset and a resounding song of defiance. This song makes the hair stand on end, and is as strong a heart beat of the humane as any. Here's the writer, on why he wrote the song, for whom he wrote it.
Here's the full song, off the album. When Damien sings this, the crowds no sing with him, and the atmosphere is electric, everyone in the room is on point, fully alive to the meaning of the song, and our place in history with it. Bearing in mind that the Palestinian people, the Aboriginals of Australia, the Ashaninka of Peru and Brazil, and many, many others all live with the oppression upon them, and resist and defend their lands and rights as best they can with little in the way of support from the rest of the world. Justice is still a long way off.
Colony Lyrics:
I sing the song of the colony
How many years and you're still not free
And your mother cries and you ask god why
Greed is the knife and the scars run deep
How many races with much reason to weep
And your children cry
And you ask god whyAnnie, she came from Dunlavin Town
The TB came and killed her family all around
Population booms
Eleven in two rooms
Katie she came from down Townsend street
Ten in a bed and no shoes on their feet
1916 came
They played the patriots game
Freddy, he came from the Iveagh flats
Tenement slums and infested with rats
Sleeping on damp straw
Trying not to break the law
Thomas, he came from Kilmaine in Mayo
Semi starvation was the only life you'd know
In a two room shack
Then jailed in Letterfrack
I look to the east, I look to the west
To the north and the south, and I'm not too impressed
Time after time
After crime after crime
They raped, robbed, pillaged, enslaved and murdered
Jesus Christ was their god and they done it in his name
So he could take the blame if it's not all a game
With bible in one hand and a sword in the other
They came to purify my land of my Gaelic Irish mothers
And fathers, and sisters and brothers
With our own ancient customs, laws, music, art
Way of life and culture
Tribal in structure
We had a civilisation
When they were still neanderthal nations
We suffer with the Native American, the Indian in Asia
Aboriginal Australia
The African people with their history so deep
And our children still weep and our lives are still cheap
You came from Germany, from France, from England
And from Spain
From Belgium and from Portugal
You all done much the same
You took what was not yours
Went against your own bible
You broke your own laws
Just to out do the rival
But did you ever apologize
For the hundreds and millions of lives
You destroyed and terrorised
Or have you never realized
Did you never feel shame
For what was done in your country's name
And find out who's to blame and why they were so inhumane
And still they teach you in your school
About those glorious days of rule
And how it's your destiny to be
Superior to me
But if you've any kind of mind
You'll see that all human kind
Are the children of this earth
And your hate for them will chew you up and spit you out
You'll never kill our will to be free, to be free
You'll never kill our will to be free, to be free
You'll never kill our will to be free, to be free
Inside our minds we hold, hold the key.
These two songs hold for me the sense of resistance that is deeply humane, that reaches for peace, knowing that although we are vulnerable, we are decent, we are lovers and builders of healthy community at heart and the bullies are bullies. They are not healthy people. Rulers are not healthy people. Colonisers are not healthy people.
Hierarchy of Violence Culture
From the many stories of the Bible, and before, going back 12,000 years or so, through the many Empires as they fought for territory and dominance, through to the invasion of Ireland in 1159 (I am of Irish ethnicity) and onwards as the Crusades and Islam swung back and forth, to the destruction of the Taino of the Caribbean, and the people's of South America, in 1492 onwards, to the British Colonies on what we call North America built by and for religious refugees, that stole land from Native people, and then destroyed them, utterly to the various Colonial excursions across Asia and elsewhere, pastors and merchants, armed to the teeth, through to the scramble for Africa, to the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe where Jews and others were slaughtered in their millions 'to make room' for the German Reich, and on through to today, where yet again the Palestinian people face the brutality of colonial warfare designed to extirpate them from their native homes.
Ireland cannot adopt a zero community transmission strategy to protect it's people in large part because of the partition, (and because it's own ruling class are as venal as rulers anywhere else).
The dominant neighbour, the English government rejects zero community transmission strategy, even as ZCT is proven to protect the lives and economies of 1.8 billion people across East Asia and Oceania and elsewhere, and prevent new variants from emerging, and this places of the British Isles at risk. It could so easily have been avoided.
These are the ill effects of a thousand years of overlordism.
Who rules the English people?
Ireland is still partitioned - those old wounds are still painful, and the political interference still blatant.
What the Israeli state has done and is continuing to do the Palestinian people for the past 75 years, the Normans did to Ireland for 800.
Do the Palestinians have to go through the same?
PROMISED LAND a poem by Michael Rosen
A family arrived and said they had papers
to prove that his house was theirs.
No, no, said the man, my people have always lived here, my father, grandfather .... and look, the garden, my great-grandfather planted that.
No, no, said the family, look at the documents.
There was a stack of them.
Where do I start? said the man.
No need to read the beginning, they said,
turn to the page marked ‘Promised Land’.
Are they legal? he said, who wrote them?
God, they said, God wrote them, look -
Here come His tanks.
Both groups of colonisers cited religion and culture as their justifications for their behaviour. There's always a justification rooted in entitlement and supremacy. It is always a logical fallacy.
Conquest, Occupation and resistance.
Palestine - where the act of self defence and resistance, a legal right agreed upon by the all Earths nation states, is punished by full on ethnic cleansing, social, cultural and military war fare, and where that constant punishment of an entire population has been and is still supported by the USUK political ruling classes and is enabled by the EU and UN who play the role of bystanders, even as millions of ordinary citizens in all these countries oppose the violence of the Israeli State, and are also saddened by the violence of the resistance. The Palestinian people should never have been put into that position that they needed to resist war, occupation and colonisation.
What use is there in all of this killing?
What futures are nurtured by so much blood and gore?
I understand Faith, the way people grow up with the Faith of their parents and grandparents, never consciously chosen, always internalised through habit and thus integrated into sense of self - I understand the psychic trap that otherwise decent people fall into, when the Institutional and Political Power of the religion is harnessed in warfare. That is an abuse of Faith.
Unicorns against masks is yet another similar faith dynamic that pollutes responsible behaviour in the midst of a pandemic.
I detest those who build that trap, who ensnare the decent, the innocent, the children, generation after generation, just to maintain an institutional power base. They are to me the most abusive of people, bullies without pause, they liars and charlatans.
And I have no easy, simplistic answer on how to free the innocents from the trap. I was entrapped myself a number of times. It was honesty that finally freed me.
But this I know - these traps must be unset, be they religious, ideological, nationalist or genderist, and the innocent must be allowed to grow free. We have to find ways to ceasing indoctrination of defenceless children that lead to the kinds of extremism we are seeing in Israel and Saudi Arabia, in USA and elsewhere.
The Psychological Climate Issue.
Climate change is one thing, the global Pandemic is another as is the conquest and colonisation of lands already long inhabited by people who nurtured that land - be it Palestine or the Amazon Rainforest - and the psychological climate of hierarchies of violence culture is part of the problem and the puzzle to be resolved that all of these present.
What is happening in Israel, what is being done to the Palestinian people is emblematic of what this hierarchy of violence cult is doing to all of us, to humanity, and we the humane must find ways to stop it in it's track.
The train of hierarchy of violence must be halted, and we must disembark.
What is happening in England and India, and elsewhere, what is being done to the people by the reckless policies of the ruling factions in regards to COVDI19 is emblematic of what this hierarchy of violence cult is doing to all of us, to humanity, and we the humane must find ways to stop it in it's track.
The train of hierarchy of violence must be halted, and we must disembark.
We must do this, we must commit to doing, even if we do not know how that is going to work out. It is not merely the success of the project that drives this - it is integrity.
Ani Di Franco has a song, Inside Out, in which she sings "We are all citizens of the womb." This is true.
This line inspired me to write this poem.
A SONG FOR THE CHILDREN OF PALESTINE AND ISRAEL
The push, the release the squeeze, the belief in letting go - we both surrender to the next life as in the new world
I arrive to the softness of the strange dry air, something unknown to me, the pulse of my mothers heart the thumping with which I have for nine months lived - all of my life thus far - oh the relief of hearing that sound again having been briefly, yet intensely separated from that fundamental pulse.
I gaze with all my body, all my soul and we catch each other, before I reach to feed. and oxytocin mediates the adrenaline I am born, and we are clean, together...
My fathers deep voice rumbling in peace and joy, amazement and bliss.
Being born is the art of the eternal welcome.
Mind and body one ingenuous zone of love, head to toe I know that my love of life, this desire to nurture, the qualities we see and feel in each other,
and we are recognised, for these are the echoes, these are the dreams that are essential above all else.
Nurture love, tend the garden
Blessings are these tears of love, these peals of laughter like a silken glove held and yet unrestricted.
And then the flags, the tanks, and the shelling?
This tragedy is pathology, the loving is all gone, the culture says no breast-feeding in public, it's more important that you learn your Nations song!
Booooom!
~
What to do?
The first things that must be done is that states that organise violence on the scale that USUK and Israel and Russia and others do must be inhibited from doing so by their own populations - and in that populations across the Earth must find ways to build solidarity and generate material support for each other in achieving this. We are in this together.
It is for the British population to control their State and Oligarchy who interfere in other countries.
It is for the American population to control their State and Oligarchy who interfere win other countries.
It is for each countries population to assert our right to self govern - it is not the exclusive right of any ruling class, no such right exists. The ruling class rules by might and leveraged power and that is, in this 21st Century, wholly illegitimate.
This means we must as people in humane, informed intelligent solidarity take control of the democratic legislatures and write the laws that will control these powers and forces, and thus make them safe for people everywhere.
We need to do this just to get to the position where we can deal with Climate Change, Environmental Pollution, Air Particulate Pollution and poverty.
Climate change demands a psychological change among all democratic electorates.
We need peace to be able to work on Climate Change in meaningful ways.
