Abstract
The point of departure is in the past. Something terrible has happened: somebody was badly hurt-harmed, traumatized. There is a narrative of acts of direct violence; physical, verbal, both.
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Notes
- 1.
This text was first published in: Santa Barbara et al. (2012: 213). Permission to republish this text was granted by TRANSCEND University Press.
- 2.
A first version of this part of the book was published in Spanish (Galtung 1998a: 126).
- 3.
However, from all countries now reports are emerging about how veterans suffer not only reliving the fear of being killed but living the remorse at killing. Thus, Intervention: The International Journal of Mental Health, Psychosocial Work and Counselling in Areas of Armed Conflict, has much material.
- 4.
Empirically encountered in the author's practice, see Chap. 10; not an office desk exercise.
- 5.
In other words, focusing not only on Jewish vulnerability and suffering, and German prejudice, discrimination and extreme violence, but also on the relation between, say, a minority high on economic and cultural, and a majority high on political and military power.
- 6.
For a penetrating review of the Israeli case, see Baruch Kimmerling, “Israel’s Cult of Martyrdom”, The Nation, 10 and 17 January 2005. He points out that "the boundary between perpetrators and victims began to be blurred in disturbing ways, raising troubling questions about the role some Jews had played in the Nazi campaign of destruction. In the 1954 Kastner affair, the carefully policed boundary between victim and perpetrator all but evaporated, upsetting the stability of Israel's entire political system". The banking analogy would be to bad money, impure traumas, chasing out the good. Hence much has to be done to collect pure traumas, like collecting freshly minted, solid, coins.
- 7.
I am indebted to Fumiko Nishimura for this important point.
- 8.
The photo of Chancellor Willy Brandt on his knees in front of the memorial in Warsaw in 1970 is unforgettable—as a part of the reconciliation engaged in by Germany. Possibly the best apology any government has offered in recent times and from a non-believer. No Japanese prime minister has done anything similar for Nanjing; nor any US president for Hiroshima-Nagasaki. The Japanese Prime Minister Hashimoto issued an official "deep remorse and heartfelt apology" for his country's actions in WWII in 1998 (the same wording as Prime Minister Murayama has used in 1995--International Herald Tribune, 13 January 1998). British veterans' groups said the apology was not enough.
But unforgettable is also the bombing of German cities by the Anglo-Americans, very well documented in Friedrich (2003, 2004). Officially there has been no effort to “equalize”, meaning canceling the trauma accounts against each other. In the German public this is a frequent theme (the present author heard it for the first time in 1949, hitchhiking in war-ravaged and occupied Germany; then while visiting Dachau in 1955). Robert McNamara came close in the way he talked about the burning of 100,000 Japanese in the major raid on Tokyo in the documentary The Fog of War. For the German case see Buruma (2004).
Further Readings
Galtung J (1998a) After Violence: 3R, Reconstruction, Reconciliation, Resolution. Coping with Visible and Invisible Effects of War and Violence (Princeton, NJ: TRANSCEND): 115.
Galtung J (1998b) After the Violence: Truth and Reconciliation, L’Ateneo, Anno XIV, No 5, Novembre/Dicembre: 17–22.
Galtung J (2005a) On the Psychology of Reconciliation (in English, with a Japanese summary), in Prime, No. 21 (Tokyo: International Peace Research Institute, Meiji Gakuin University): 5–20.
Galtung J (2005b) “Twelve Creative Ways to Foster Reconciliation”, in: Intervention: International Journal of Mental Health, Psychosocial Work and Counselling in Areas of Armed Conflict, 2,3: 222–34 (Special issue: reconciliation in practice).
Santa Barbara J; Galtung J; Perlman D (2012) Reconciliation: Clearing the Past, Building a Future (TRANSCEND University Press) (www.transcend.org.tup).
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Galtung, J., Fischer, D. (2013). Conciliation as Liberation from Trauma. In: Johan Galtung. SpringerBriefs on Pioneers in Science and Practice, vol 5. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32481-9_18
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