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Groups of people, either nations or cultures, just like individuals have a consciousness. And like individuals, a civilization collective consciousness records and reacts to historical traumas. History leaves scars on people’s collective consciousness. If some individuals tend to bury personal traumatic experiences under the false assumption that ignoring the pain will heal it, some cultures tend to do the same.
Bringing up the collective crimes of Germans and Japanese during World War II is a taboo subject in both Germany and Japan, as if both cultures are suffering from a collective amnesia. If you bring up in a conversation the atrocities committed by Japanese troops in Manchuria, Korea, the Philippines or Vietnam between 1936 and 1945, the standard answer from amnesic contemporary Japanese will likely be either “We didn’t know” or “It was a long time ago”. This applies to Germany as well, even though it is a crime in this country to deny the existence of the holocaust. Regardless, both cultures, as a defense mechanism, suffer from historic amnesia.
From persecuted Jews to Zionists: Why do abused become abusers?
If Sigmund Freud was alive today, and could put Israel or more practically either PM Netanyahu or his sidekick Lieberman on his couch for a few psychoanalytical sessions, one wonders what he would find out. Most psychological studies of abusive personalities point in the same direction. It seems to be a paradox, but as individuals, most people who display abusive behaviors in relationships were abused as children.
On first thought, one would think that people who had been abused would be more sensitive, not less, to the pain inflicted on others. That they would, as individuals or a collective, show a greater sense of empathy. But more often than not, in the case of children who were abused, they grow up to be abusers. It is as if the psychological damage and trauma from early childhood turns our natural and normal sense of compassion and empathy towards each other into a vicious cycle of borderline sociopathic behaviors, where inflicting pain become a source of pleasure. For individuals, this cycle of pain get passed on endlessly from one generation to the next. What applies to individuals is a good analysis model to a culture collective’s psyche.
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