Collective trauma: Narrative with Visual images Recent blog posts

Collective trauma: Narrative with Visual images

Collective trauma: Narrative with Visual images

In an earlier post in this blog on  the 14 of July

 at

 http://connect.nmmu.ac.za/Blogs/Developing,-Problematizing-and-Testing-An-Applied/July-2014/Middle-East-problems

 

 

on the Middle East Problems I wrote

The Palestinians are being denied their most basic freedom of movement and freewill, because of the fear and traumas of the Israeli Jews who are living the traumas of their collective history. The Palestinians are forced to pay a collective price for the terrorism of the few.

 

The Jews are seeking their own piece of haven and their own self-determination in their biblical homeland. They do so after two thousand years of exile and diaspora, which entailed a complete and utter dependency on other nations and people, and suffering horrific persecution and systematic killing and butchery, the latest of which being the Shoah (holocaust). In their biblical homeland, they are met by the Palestinians who do not think they should pay the price for this ill justice that happened far away. 

--

Two main events dominate international news at the moment:

1. Israel-Gaza and

2. http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/jul/22/ukraine-train-carrying-mh17-bodies-arrives-kharkiv-video

 

 

And the two interrelate in a grotesque manner and it connects with my writing the above words in my posts.  You show this image of the train, death, train of death and death to any Jew and any Israeli and the immediate association and image below is what comes to mind and dominate the entire psyche, individually and collectively  http://www.theholocaustexplained.org/ks3/the-camps/daily-life/journeys/#.U89SUE3lq1s

 Jewish prisoners were treated like cattle; packed tightly into cattle trucks and locked inside for days as the trains travelled to camps across Europe.

 

Finally: The refrigerated train carrying the bodies of MH17 crash victims has finally set off from rebel-held Torez in eastern Ukraine four days after the disaster

 

Guaranteed!

 

The image is so powerful and so embedded and embodied - I am shaken, terrified and shivering upon these images - in the Jewish and Israeli psychology, education and ontology that just turns any Israeli and Jew into a different person, a terrified person, a persecuted animal fighting for its life and  seeking and fighting for protection and life and the protection, safety and security of its offspring. 

 

This is the life and world we live in - passengers' planes being shot down, most likely and probably by mistake, not that it matters for the passengers and their loved ones, trains coming to collect the remains of the passengers, similar trains to those sent by the Nazis and their collaborators to bring passengers from all over Europe, travelling often for days without air, food or water, and ending up also as a train full of bodies of people who died a most gruesome death abroad, with their last belonging robbed by the Nazis and their collaborators. 

Those who saw Schindler's List https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwfIf1WMhgc - know what I am talking about

Then, the sons and daughters of those few survivors, who grew on the stories of the Shoah and the remarkable surviving stories, against all odds, and whilst having to do awful things to survive, are sent to protect the Jewish people in its homeland from the (any) attempts to kill Jews by the rockets and terrorism.  The 18-21 years old soldiers, conscripted for three years, with almost no pay, vow and swear to protect the lives of the Jewish people in its land.  And as we can see, they do pay the ultimate price.

 

I know I am elaborating into the Israeli narrative - My psychology, history and narrative.  I know there was a Nakba

http://www.al-nakba-history.com/

 

 

 

https://www.google.co.za/search?q=palestinian+nakba&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=LV7PU62NMu_b7Abo_YCYAg&ved=0CEAQsAQ&biw=1024&bih=618

 

I want to embrace the Palestinians, as a second generation Shoa survivor - my family survived the holocaust. Let us exchange collective stories of pain.  Let us just listen and cry together for the injustices that history and life did to us.

 

The 1948 war took place three years after the holocaust, when the British mandate on Palestine ended.  It was a horrific ethnic conflict wherein both ethnicities in this land fought a dirty total war of kill or be killed, terrorrize or be terrorized  and that the Jews were flamed by what happened in the Shoah (not just in Europe but in Tunisia and North Africa, and Iraq as well) managed to win by the skin of their teeth: thanks to the sympathy of the shocked post-WWII and holocaust world, the only thing that managed to interrelate the USSR and US, Stalin and Truman then. And to grow and prosper into a most advanced and powerful economic miracle

 

 

 

I just want to show you with images how everything is connected.  History is grotesque and repeats itself.  And events are values laden and values and emotions charges.

 

In The End of History And the Last Man Francis Fukuyama discusses irrational tendencies that led events and competed with reason and rationalization. 

The fear of the Jews and Israelis of those trains going again is so great that the kindest and most humane person is so terrified that he or she is willing to go or send his/her children so that this will not happen, to eradicate any, the tiniest , possibility of this happening again. 

 

Let us sit together, talk, or cry or just be in silence.  And end this carnage. Enough is enough

 

Francis Fukuyama (1992). The End of History And the Last Man. New York The Free Press

--

Everything human, that is everything as it is perceived by a conscious and self-conscious human, is discursive, emotional, irrational, rhetoric, active, reflective, value-laden, narrative-laden, charged, evocative and painful

Let us not hide behind clichés and mantras and objectifications.

 

 
Posted by Alon Serper on 23 July 2014 08:02:10


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