Genocide Awareness
Oct 31st, 2007 by Michael Justice
Genocide Awareness Blog?
Typically we think of lectures as events where invited speakers make their comments, field a few questions, then depart, leaving perhaps a few ripples in the pond to remind folks that they’ve been present. With the aid of technology, however, we can change that scenario. Lectures can become substantive prompts that transform the public square into an extended town meeting where the conversation begun with the lecture extends beyond the initial presentation and expands to include a growing network of dialogue partners.
Oct. 22, Peter Galbraith launched the Cohen Center’s first annual Genocide Awareness Lecture his lecture entitled, “Preventing Genocide in the 21st Century: Lessons From Iraq, Bosnia, and East Timor.” Galbraith’s remarks drew together numerous observations from his years in diplomatic service in Central Europe and East Asia. And his comments in reply to the many questions that were posed brought wisdom and insight to current tensions in Iraq, especially. Many of those comments are summarized in his Op.Ed. piece that appeared in the next day’s New York Times (link). With access to that article and questions posed by students and others who attended the lecture, we have an opportunity to extend that conversation further.
What are the lessons we can draw from Iraq most particularly as think about our obligation to prevent genocide from occurring yet again?
Review of lecture by Prof Donald Bloxham: “Genocide in Comparative perspective: Does the Holocaust Fit?”
by steinphd@gmail.com.
Thank you Professor Bloxham for your very informative and important lecture.
I am an Analytical Psychologist by profession with a specific focus on the archetypal psychology of psyche in men and woman and the gendered interpretation and application of that fact over time to the polarized cultural politics of race, sex, class, age and creed.
If I understood you correctly I would surely agree that the “act of genocide” or its “definition” cannot be reduced to Hitler’s Germany. To do so is a grand distortion of gendered ethno-psychological, mytho-poetic cultural and political development of consciousness over time.
I especially appreciated your comparative view of “patterns” responsible for “genocidal development” and more recent “never to be discussed” unlawful occupation of Iraq that has specific relevance to the word and image of “genocide,” the “pogroms” or “psyops” of political deception and disinformation of those who plan and implement it, those who are complicit, and those who are its victims.
I also appreciated your well-taken point of trying to talk about an irrational emotional state of archetypal possession rationally. Killing is not a rational act and nothing will ever make it so, which does not suspend the rule of law or a little psychological experiential understanding about its archetypal etiology. That paradoxical point is the basis of my profession and dialogue with survivors of the holocaust and other gendered wars of relational religious ethnic violence. The bridge between the rational formative intellect of words like “genocide” and the unformed irrational emotion of the “unconscious” is “psyche.”
What I would like to introduce into the dialogue about “genocide” is the archetypal psychology of “psyche’s” polarized gendered projections stripped of historic symbolic context or “body” of understanding. That dialogue would begin by reposing the “problem of genocide” as an imaginal archetypally patterned projection of ego’s polarized ignorance about “psyches” symbolic soulful opposite in a man and a woman. A little amplification of that imaginal fact could be explored in terms of Western, white, Judeo-Christian monotheistic cultures polarized rejection of a more polytheistic feminine principle as co-equal and distinct in the mythos of creation and the transliteration of that fact into social policy and law over time. Case in point is the “burning times” of seven million women as witches, the colonizing genocide of indigenous cultures, and blatant violations of constitutional and international law that are always justified in the name of “God,” “Country,” and “Democracy.”
From my psychological perspective I would like to bring into the discussion of “genocide” the archetypal patterns of its enthralling active and receptive numinous emotional energies responsible for the creation and imaginal experience of the word itself. To that discussion I would like to further suggest that that the gendered archetypal patterns of “genocides” political manifestation cannot be reduced to one man, one culture, one race or one religion. This psychological suggestion supports the well taken point of Prof Bloxham’s comparative cultural political amplification of genocide as it does the need to give more “contextual body” to Hitler the man and Germany the culture. This could be done through a brief specific identification of polarized social, political, economic, religious, familial influences on the development of Hitler’s split off emotional psychic life and the concomitant hubris of its polarized archetypally patterned projections in turn responsible for the creation of social policies and laws of “genocide.” Identification of those variables would give a little more “body” to badly needed contextual understanding of inchoate emotion surrounding those imaginally gendered cultural facts. It would also support Prof Bloxham’s embodied self-critical comparatively gendered cultural analysis of “the problem” by building a relationship through dialogue between culturally polarized intellectual and or emotional views and experience of genocide without an individual or collective psyche.
I would like to further posit the imaginal fact that “Genocide” reflects a polarized development of consciousness over time that has “forgotten,” if ever it knew,” the paradoxical co-equality and distinction of “psyche’s” projected symbolic innate desire for “transcendent wholeness.” “Genocide” archetypally reflects a projected politicized polarization of “psyche’s” wholeness that just loves to make a “You” into a “me.” Psychologically understood that “wholeness” embodies a consciously differentiated and re-embodied realization of “psyche’s” archetypally inherited soulful opposite in a man and a woman as an original source of cross-cultural relatedness and gendered cultural individuality at once.
In keeping with your comparative analysis of “genocide,” in terms of a current “two-party” presidential election that “excludes” “third party” debate or candidates I would like to pose one final question: How is “unlawful occupation” a “choice.”