How do we talk about the unspeakable, atrocities that are perpetrated in war and …other forms of abuse and violence perpetrated against vulnerable populations..?
31,000 known murders, many more buried under the rubble, 2 million people facing deliberately imposed starvation, a call for ceasefire repeatedly ignored, billions witness the disgusting violence and maiming on their mobile phones.
Judith Herman has written on this in her book ‘Trauma and Recovery - The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Lewis_Herman
"“In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure no one listens.”
“The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery:
“The ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.
Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.
The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom.
The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called "doublethink," and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call "dissociation." It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which Freud recognized a century ago as disguised communications about sexual abuse in childhood. . . .”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/542700
The only way to describe atrocity is to describe EXACTLY what happens, for example, when a missile strikes a house, followed by another.
What happens in the milliseconds of explosion, fireball, blast wave, air suction and what that did to the peoples bodies in those moments, and what happens when the building collapses, what that does to the bodies on the moments, what happens when the collapse completes, what happens to the bodies crushed, what happens to the survivors, and their thoughts and feelings and sensations before, during and afterwards...
We can then listen to the first responders, neighbours and others who rush into help in what ever way they can, in particular when all they have are their hands and bodies to move rubble, extract survivors and bodies, take them to hospitals etc, etc, etc....
And then describe the way the person issuing the targeting command, location and number of missiles, and his or her command chain, and what happens when they clock off, and go home to their comfortable homes, to cook meals, play with their children, watch a movie, go to sleep, wake up and do it again.
Multiplied by the number of people adversely affected and all the down stream harms that follow, listening carefully to the survivors because their lived experience is first hand evidence of what that was like...
We could also talk about the designers of the missiles, what research they did, how they tested the missiles, who they understood exactly what their designs do to people and buildings...
There are no adjectives to describe this. Just the raw honest data.
Justice and Repair
Judith Herman has recently published a follow up book looking at how Survivors think and feel about justice.
https://basicbooks.uk/titles/judith-herman/truth-and-repair/9781529395006/
“From one of America’s most influential psychiatrists, an “extraordinary” and “profound” ( New York Times ) manifesto for reimagining justice for survivors of sexual trauma
The #MeToo movement brought worldwide attention to sexual violence, but while the media focused on the fates of a few notorious predators who were put on trial, we heard far less about the outcomes of those trials for the survivors of their abuse.
The conventional retributive process fails to serve most survivors; it was never designed for them. Renowned trauma expert Judith L. Herman argues that the first step toward a better form of justice is simply to ask survivors what would make things as right as possible for them. In Truth and Repair , she commits the radical act of listening to survivors. Recounting their stories, she offers an alternative vision of justice as healing for survivors and their communities.
Deeply researched and compassionately told, Truth and Repair envisions a new path to justice for all.”
Survivors and Justice - a story of resilience, persistence, determination and humane spirit.
Here is a astonishing story of one person who was kidnapped as a child having already been sexually assaulted by neighbours, unbeknownst to his parents, because he was unable to speak.
"Although it happened more than 60 years ago, Antonio Salazar-Hobson remembers every detail of his kidnapping. He says that if he closes his eyes, he is instantly taken back to that hot Sunday afternoon in 1960 when he was a four-year-old boy standing with his brothers and sisters in the red dust of his back yard on the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona.
Nearby, at the bottom of a short passageway connecting the back yard to the road out of town, a car is idling.
A white man is leaning out of the window, calling Salazar-Hobson’s name. He is very afraid of this man and the woman sitting next to him in the passenger seat. His older brother and sister are also afraid. They have been told by their parents, who are out working in the fields, that they must not let Salazar-Hobson go anywhere with the couple in the car. He can hear the fear in their voices as they call out: “Thank you very much, but Antonio can’t come for ice-cream.”
Then, suddenly, the man is out of the car and moving at astonishing speed towards them. As the children stand frozen with terror, he swoops down on Salazar-Hobson, lifting him up and carrying him away. He throws him into the backseat and the car accelerates away, leaving his brothers and sisters screaming in the dust. In just a few hours, the car will have crossed over the border into California. It will be another 24 years before Salazar-Hobson sees his family again.
What happens to Salazar-Hobson in the time between his kidnapping and his return to his family is so horrifying that it is almost impossible to comprehend. After being snatched from his back yard, he is taken into a nightmarish landscape of sex trafficking, violence and exploitation, where the rest of his early life is spent in an endless loop of fear, pain and loneliness.
Yet Salazar-Hobson’s story is so much more than the evil that was done to him. Rather than being broken by what he experienced, he instead rose from the ashes of his stolen childhood to accomplish extraordinary academic feats and become one of the US’s most successful labour rights attorneys, representing vulnerable and powerless communities, and dedicating his life to justice and compassion. “I chose not to be obliterated by the abuse and trauma I was forced to endure,” he says. “Instead of being swallowed by the darkness, I survived by walking towards the light.”"
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