https://x.com/alon_mizrahi/status/1790304674542735375?s=61&t=nilGqPeurpC5xVqZAZdZog
An interesting piece by Alon Mizrahi, Jewish Arab Israeli writer, on his view of collective trauma:
“Collective trauma is always fake and manufactured. Let me explain why and how. It's going to be a little provocative, but not uninteresting (and, as Twitter virtually stopped showing my posts to new people, make sure you follow if this happens to bounce into your feed).
Not only is collective trauma fake and manufactured, I say, it is also one of the most destructive and psychologically effective forms of perpetuating white colonial privilege and white supremacy.
To demonstrate my point, let's look back on 9/11, the last grand big trauma the American collective endured, or, as I believe and can easily show you, was brainwashed into experiencing as a collective trauma.
You remember that day, right? You also remember how it was covered. Never a more dramatic and apocalyptic live coverage of anything was ever seen. For hours on end, mentally broken, teary-eyed and breathless news broadcasts showed every millisecond of it again and again and again, and it went on for days and months, or maybe years.
Now imagine 9/11 happening a century earlier (for purposes of this exercise, we'll hypothesize the existence of huge, jet-powers airplanes in the early 20th century).
How would 9/11 be experienced in an era before live video coverage? By the time it reached Wyoming or California, it would naturally be surpassed by local and more urgent stories (a train wrack; a new goldmine discovered; a baby born to a couple in their 50', and so on).
I could elaborate a lot more on this point, but I think it is rather clear and intuitive. And what it means is the public trauma and urgency of 9/11 were not the result of the events themselves, but of the means by which they were mediated to the wider public.
A consciousness generated by artificial means is never authentic.
Naturally, 9/11 would only be a trauma for people who were involved in it firsthand. But it would be such a political waste to let it be that, right? For maximum effect (both the generation of manufactured collective trauma and the augmentation of politically motivated mass media as the source of consciousness), 9/11 had to be given a meaning so sweeping it would immediately negate any coolheadedness and human context, thus allowing the powerful establishments to operate free from criticism.
The same thing happened in Israel on October 7.
To bring this understanding even closer to home, I'll tell you about a conversation I had with Ruhama Marton, an Israeli psychiatrist, veteran radical left-winger, and founder of Israel's Physicians for Human Rights.
Ruhama, an 88-year-old woman with memories of life in Palestine before the Nakba (she once told me, in an interview I did with her, about the Palestinian boy and girl who were her childhood friends in Tel Aviv, and who suddenly, and heartbreakingly, disappeared one day in 1948), is one of the brightest political thinkers I ever knew, and I consider her a teacher. A true and actual radical.
Some weeks after October 7 I called Ruhama to talk about things, as I had very few people I could actually do that with. I told her I was feeling it was getting insane, and I remember telling her what I saw as a neverending loop of 'look what they have done, look what they have done, just look what they have done', and then I added 'to us'.
'You have to stress the 'to us' part', Ruhama told me. It is crucial.
This is indeed crucial, and if you look at the way 9/11 was covered, you can break down the different psychological mechanisms at play, of which this was a strategic one.
It was, indeed, a neverending loop of 'look what they have done to us'.
By repeating and repeating this endlessly, a clear divide is created: we are just heroic first responders, victims, and shocked witnesses. They, on the other hand,oh those human animals.
One side is defined by pure human and pure emotions and feelings misleadingly contextualized in language, culture, and geography, the other by nefarious actions from which you are to deduce their inhuman, bloodthirsty barbarism.
So the generated collective trauma was used in real-time to make them appear alien both in terms of political relationships (this could not be a response to something we did), but also morally: look what they have done to us, who have always been so moral, communal and pure.
You can tell collective trauma is fake also by simply looking at who is entitled to this free pass on everything. The US went into collective trauma after Pearl Harbor and was justified in nuking Japan, and also on 9/11, and further justified in killing millions in the Middle East.
Jews were traumatized by their history and so should be forgiven the Nakba, and further traumatized by October 7 and justified in genocide.
But have you ever heard anyone else being described in terms of acting out of collective trauma? Has it even been used for black people in the US or anywhere else? For Muslims, who have no right to be traumatized as a collective, no matter what is done to them?
No one who isn't a white colonizer is afforded the privilege of this card. Not even Russia, a definitely white culture, after being almost totally annihilated in ww2, and losing tens of millions of soldiers and citizens. You never hear 'leave them alone, they are traumatized'.
Finally, and especially about Zionism. the very mention of trauma is a joke. Zionism had all its plans for Palestinians finalized years before the holocaust. It dehumanized them and had a deep disdain for their way of life and who they were even before the first Zionist settlers landed in Palestine.
This was never about collective trauma. It was always about a sense of supremacy and entitlement that every now and then finds new excuses and justifications for its psychopathy: sometimes it's 'scientifically-proven' racial superiority, sometimes it's a religious mission, and sometimes it's 'collective trauma'. But it is always fake, deceitful, manufactured, and murderous.”