Sylvie Shene - Articles - Wars and Dictators

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ARTICLES: WARS AND DICTATORS

CHILDREN WHO HAVE BEEN BEATEN, HUMILIATED, AND ABUSED, and who find no witness to come to their aid often develop a grave syndrome in later life: they have no knowledge of their true feelings, fear them like the plague, and are therefore incapable of recognizing vital connections. Without realizing it---and without taking responsibility for it---they work out the horrors that they once experienced on innocent people. Like their parents before them, they regard their actions as “redemption” for others. The result is action divested of all responsibility and invested with seeming legitimation by ideology working in conjunction with boundless hypocrisy. The direct consequences are destructive, cynically inhuman actions, actions inimical to life and, in the age of technological perfection, of the gravest threat to our planet.

“We do not want to beat you. But we must. We have to beat out of you the wickedness with which you were born.” This is, roughly, how parents spoke to their chidden in Luther’s time. Luther told them it was their duty to save their children from the devil and thereby turn them into good and God-fearing citizens. They believed it. What they didn’t know was that Martin Luther, whose mother raised him with pitiless strictness, was, by giving his sanction to this method of bringing up children, enabling himself to maintain the illusion of having had a good and loving mother. She was, if you like, invented the aid of repression. People believed Luther, and did not know that instead of driving the “devil” out of their innocent children, each blow they gave them was sowing the seeds of destruction in an innocent being. The more severely, the more blindly, the more often they beat them, the more wicked their children became, and, as the seed ruptured in later life, the more destructive.

Do today’s parents know better? Many do, but not all, not by a long shot. Many are confirmed in their ignorance by so-called “authorities,” just as they were four hundred years ago. The terms of the debate have simply changed. No one today speaks about the “devil” in connection with a child’s upbringing. Instead, we talk of “genes.” Some members of the media don’t shrink from totally ignoring the history of the last war and the lessons that can be learned from it; they inform their readers that criminality and mental illness can be traced to genes. If a person is born with the appropriate genes, they say, then he will ipso facto, turn into Hitler, Eichmann, or Himmler---come what psychologically may.

That old chestnut---that indulging children is damaging---seems to find as many advocates today as it ever did. That, we are asked to believe, is why there are so many antisocial teenagers. Discipline, say today’s so-called progressive pedagogists, is the right way to bring up polite, well-balanced adults.

Doesn’t reality contradict these views? Is it really true that Hitler, Eichmann, and Himmler didn’t have enough discipline? Should they have been beaten even more to ensure that they didn’t become mass murderers? When posed to discipline’s faithful admires, such question invariably go unanswered. But their ideology is not concerned with facts. Their own repressed experiences gives them all the sustenance they need. There, a completely different logic holds sway in any case: the logic of repression. Because their concern is not the truth, but the avoidance of old pains, contradictions do not bother them unduly.

Every human being is born into the world without bad intentions, and with the clear, strong, and unambivalent need to maintain life, to love and to be loved. But if a child encounters hatred and lies instead of love and truth; if, instead of being cared for and protected, it is abused, then it should be able to shout and rage to defend itself against ignorance and wickedness. That would be a healthy, natural reaction to the destructive assaults of the adult world. Such protest would save the child’s psychic healthy and dignity, its safety, integrity, its consciousness, its responsibility, and self-esteem. But a child that has been beaten, humiliated, and neglected has no such change. All the human creature’s naturally endowed ways of maintaining its integrity remain closed to it. Protest could be its death. Nor can the organism, which is still incomplete and growing, cope with these overwhelming feeling. In order to survive, therefore, the child has in most cases no choice but to repress the memory of what has happened to her. The inordinately any injury---murderous rage; a longing for revenge; feeling threatened by the whole world---must always be repressed. And for a child without a helping witness, her parents are the whole world. In the child’s unconscious a wish is likely to form with time consolidate itself: the wish to destroy this whole world so that she or he can at last live.

As all these feelings remain repressed, as they may never be experienced, as the need for respect, love, and truth may never be adequately articulated, many once-damaged children choose the path of symbolic satisfaction---for example, in socially accepted forms of criminality and perversion. Armaments production, arms dealing, and ultimately, war, are ideal domains for the acting out on innocent people, and with total denial of its origins, of the murderous, repressed rage that was never allowed to be experienced.

What was previously forbidden, war suddenly permits. A foe’s image suffices as a target for the hate that has remained pent up for years, for the child’s blind, boundless, murderous feelings---that were never consciously experienced and consequently could be neither corrected nor controlled---to be unloaded in acceptable forms. In the process, these feeling need not, for a moment, penetrate consciousness.

An American fighter pilot in the Gulf War, for instance, asked how he felt when he got back from his bombing mission, said: “Great. I did my job well.” Is that all? the journalist wanted to know, “What else?” The soldier responded with surprise. If this man had been able to feel, if his feelings had not been frozen in him for a long time, he would have shared the fear, powerlessness, and anger of the people he was bombing. Perhaps he would thereby have felt his own powerlessness, his defenselessness in the face of the incursions committed by adults seething with anger. Then he would have been able to see the connections between humiliations experienced early in life and the satisfaction he got from no longer being a helpless victim, but being able to threaten others with bombs. He would no longer be an ideal soldier, but a conscious person who could help others see through the mad machine whose moving parts they have unconsciously become. He could have played his part in preventing wars. Unfortunately, wars continue to be accepted, for there are so many people who have learned only to destroy life and be destroyed by others, people who were never able to develop their love of life because they were never given the chance.

What we are today witnessing is the consequences of the repression of the suffering inflicted on us in our early life, the splitting off of our feelings and the resultant blindness to vital connection. That can be clearly seen in the example of the production of chemical war-fare agents. Who wanted war? German firms who produced and marketed poison gas just wanted to make a fast buck. That’s legitimate, isn’t it? It is also legitimate to feel nothing in the process and to ignore the consequences of our actions. That’s how computers can help us. Eichmann, in fact, even managed it without one. He only had to deal with dots and dashes, not human eyes, hands, and hearts. Did the government wish poison gas to be produced? After all, the government wasn’t earning anything from such a venture, though it did tolerate the good tax-payers. But that’s legitimate enough. What? No one knew that one day the poison gas could be used to kill people? No. No one was responsible for such thoughts. Each person had his or her own department, and there was no “Department of Unnecessary Thoughts.” But hadn’t the Belgian professor Aubin Heyndric informed the United Nations and various governments about the lethal danger of poison gas production? Why did those warnings fall on deaf ears?

Today, many people are posing such questions. They invariably meet with the same answers: I didn’t know. It wasn’t my job. I wasn’t responsible. I was just carrying out instructions. With unnerving similarity, one is reminded of the answers given after World War Two. Fifty years ago, entire peoples were slaughtered with poison gas, dubbed “a clean solution” at the time because no blood was spilled in the process. Today, children who never dared take a hard look at their fathers’ deeds are involved in a possible repetition of those deeds, because in principle, they never really questioned them. Had they done so, the hideous nature of those deeds would have been immediately apparent to them and they would never have been able to continue them.

That is the logic of repression: I refuse to know what my parents did to me and to others, I want to forgive them and not to condemn them. I don’t want to question them. They are my parents, and therefore they are beyond blame. Because my system (my body) knows what happened, even though my consciousness has no memory of it as long as my feelings remain blocked, I am compelled to repeat the crimes carried out against me (the destruction of life) without realizing it. The mistreatment of my own children, horrific wars against supposed enemies, the destruction of life wherever I see it growing, allow me to raise a monument to my parents and retain my blindness.

Millions of once-humiliated, injured children, who were never allowed to defend themselves against the invasion of their integrity committed by their parents, will be reminded by the recent war of the history of their own private vulnerability. Until now they have managed to keep it more or less at bay. Now, they feel stirred up and confused. But as they lack their early memories and the feelings appropriate to them, they also lack a perspective in which to view these events. In their flight from their own painful personal history, they resort to the one means they learned as children: Destroy and/or let yourself be destroyed or mistreated, but remain blind at all costs.

To keep secret from themselves their own history of painful humiliation, sold to them as a sign of love, men go to prostitutes and pay for beating that they then tell themselves---as their parents once convinced them---they enjoy. In order to at last forget the sexual abuse of their fathers, women become prostitutes and allow themselves to be further humiliated, clinging to the old illusion that men’s malleability might somehow give them power. The sex industry, with its numerous flagellant clubs, sadomasochism, and well-developed network of advertising, lives solely from this need, the need of men and women, to at last consign the story of their own childhood to oblivion with the help of a new, but very similar, scenario in the present.

Wars, through destruction and self-destruction, afford the ultimate opportunity to finally rid ourselves of the emotional pressure built up in us since childhood. On television recently, members of an American elite corp could be seen being instructed in the different kinds of torture they might face if captured. These “toughening-up” routines were reminiscent of the sadistic practices of Dr. Schreber,* who by all accounts also did such things “for the good of” his children, recommending them to others throughout the world. There were also women in this elite corp. All of them were volunteers. When one realizes that all those who volunteered for the Vietnam War, as studies on the Green Berets have shown, came from brutalizing backgrounds, then it is hardly surprising that men and women will let themselves be tortured of their own free will so that later, faced with possible torture, they will be able to remain hard and insensitive, Were these sons and daughters able to have access to their own, real story, they would, instead of toughening themselves, seek and find productive ways of defending the world from war.

Even the most sophisticated weapons will not put an end to the production of new weapons. Nor will they free us of hatred as long as this hatred is projected onto others and not allowed to be felt and experienced in its original context. If we wish to protect life on this planet, we can do so by questioning the present dangerous and ubiquitous blindness---above all, as it exists within ourselves. Human beings who know their histories will not want to sacrifice their lives so that other people can settle old scores, and they will have no difficulty finding other ways of existing and resolving conflicts than war. If our planet is indeed to have a better chance of survival, there is no alternative to the truth---by which I mean confronting ourselves with our individual and collective history.

*I quoted extensively from the writing of this famous pedagogist of the nineteenth century in my book For Your Own Good.

From the book: "Breaking Dowm the Wall of Silence: The Liberating Experience of Facing Painful Truth." By Alice Miller

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