Download Power-Under As A

Power-Under TRAUMA AND NONVIOLENT SOCIAL CHANGE steven wineman foreword by aurora levins morales Power-Under Trauma and Nonviolent Social Change Steven Wineman Foreword by Aurora Levins Morales 1 TO ELISABETH For Eric and the world he is growing up into ©2003 by Steven Wineman Permission is expressly granted for any part or all of this book to be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, as long as the material is properly attributed to the author. Cover design by Eric Sluyter 2 Contents Acknowledgements 4 Foreword by Aurora Levins Morales 5 One The Politics of Trauma 12 Two The Power-Under Paradigm 47 Three Trauma and Gender 119 Four Trauma and Oppression: Identifying as the Victim 171 Five Trauma and Nonviolent Social Change 203 Notes 274 How to Help Distribute Power-Under 301 3 Acknowledgements I am grateful to Elisabeth Morrison for her steadfast support and encouragement throughout the writing of this book, for her thoughtful comments on successive drafts, for all that I have learned from her about the tenacity of life force and human spirit, for teaching me about turning poison into medicine, and for challenging me to balance my inclination toward pessimism with a more hopeful voice and a more positive vision. My thanks to Dennis Balcom, Louise Dunlap, Vicky Steinitz, Mary Jo Hetzel, and Pat Cane for reading the manuscript at various stages of completion and for their helpful feedback. Aurora Levins Morales has enthusiastically validated my approach to trauma as a political issue, and I am particularly grateful to her for writing the foreword. I am also thankful to Loie Hayes for her interest in and support for this project. Kathleen Spivack encouraged me to start writing about trauma, and also encouraged me to make writing a priority in my life. I am grateful to Eric Sluyter for his wonderful designs of the cover and my promotional flyer, for helping to build my website, and for encouraging me to write shorter sentences (with mixed results which are entirely my responsibility). Thanks to Shimon Ben-Shir for finishing the construction of my website. Dorie Krauss helped me to think about how to distribute this book, offered technical assistance with how to get onto the web, and supported me all the way through. Naomi Almeleh has likewise offered me steady encouragement. David Marshak introduced me to the work of Alice Miller, which set me on a path that led eventually to the writing of this book. I was a member of Movement for a New Society for 4 years in the mid-80s, and I learned an enormous amount about “revolutionary nonviolence” which has been invaluable as I have tried to figure out strategies for breaking cycles of violence in which trauma plays a pivotal role. I’m grateful to everyone I knew in MNS who contributed to my understanding of nonviolence. 4 FOREWORD by Aurora Levins Morales 1 It is Passover, and as a Jew I recite the words, never forget that we were slaves in Egypt, hearing all the ambiguity in the instructions. What does it mean to promise the remembrance of pain? Is it so we never take anyone else's pain lightly? Is it a promise to become so fierce that no-one will ever enslave us again? Exactly how are we to carry a trauma thousands of years old? It is Passover, and the sixtieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when a small group of young Polish Jews fought back against stormtroopers whose mission was to deport and kill the remaining Jews in Warsaw and bulldoze the Ghetto. Sixty years later, soldiers who might have been their grandchildren are using the same strategies that the SS used in Warsaw: starvation, isolation, denial of medical care, assassination of those who resist and indiscriminate shootings of anyone caught in the streets, the demolition of building after building, sometimes burying the residents in the rubble. It is not difficult to find a nearly endless supply of such historical repetitions: emancipated slaves turned slaveholders; persecuted religious minorities from England who burned, hanged and crushed heretics and witches; newly independent colonies creating their own internally colonized, their own categories of the economically and culturally suppressed second class. But what do we do with this information? I watch my relatives reenact the horrors of holocaust, insist they are fighting for their survival against ruthless conspirators, live increasingly militarized lives, believe 5 they have no choices, become more and more like their wounds. What are we to do? It is not enough to feel shame. It is not enough to point out the "ironies" and use them to condemn the atrocities of a new generation of perpetrators. 2 There are people who believe this is human nature, that all it proves is that we are all equally capable of viciousness. But as people committed to social change, to creating just and peaceful societies, we have a responsibility to understand how the unjust and violent societies we live in sustain and recreate themselves, how brutality reproduces, how the son of a Polish Jewish refugee can become the key strategist of world conquest for the grandson of Prescott Bush, who laundered money for Thysen, Nazi Germany's most prominent steel manufacturer, who used Jewish slave labor in his operations. How the granddaughter of a sharecropper, growing up in segregated Birmingham, hearing the church bomb explosion that killed her schoolmate, could utterly embrace the strategy of being better at white men's power games than they are, and advise the descendant of Virginia landlords on how to recolonize the Middle East. How the Harlem born son of Jamaican immigrants, raised in a city that devoured young Black men, became the man who helped to cover up the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians, the peddler of forged evidence and plagiarized misinformation trying to win support for genocide in Iraq. For that matter, how did English women and men become Massachusetts colonists and give rise to Richard Cheney? How did Prussian immigrants to 1860s Chicago produce Donald Rumsfeld, a man whom Kissinger allegedly described as the most ruthless person he knew? 6 We have learned about the cycles of abuse within families, about the way a child who is beaten and abused can grow up believing there are only two choices, victim and perpetrator, and can become an adult who feels like a victim while acting like a perpetrator. But, somehow, as activists, we have failed to see the immense implications of that knowledge for the work of social change. Over and over I see movements of liberation get stuck at the same place, the moment when we "other" the agents of our oppression, without trying to understand why they are as they are and how we can prevent more people being that way in the future. If we even begin to ask those questions, we are rapidly drawn to the places where we ourselves have been most deeply wounded. In the exact place where it is most difficult to understand how anyone could do as our enemies have done, and still be human, in the exact moment when they cease to be our kin in our imaginations, is the place of greatest potential illumination. 3 "If we view the oppressor as an inhuman Other – no matter how understandable this view is from the perspective of the victim and the oppressed – we rule out all possibilities for the kinds of dialogues that can win hearts and minds. If we view the oppressor as invariably acting from a place of subjective dominance, I believe that we will completely miss the deep and typically hidden suffering, the complex histories of violation and trauma, and the subjective experience of profound powerlessness that often go hand in hand with the cruelty and malevolence enacted by oppressors." -from Power-Under I first encountered Steve Wineman when he contacted me for support in trying to persuade a 7 progressive small press that the politics of trauma really was a cutting edge issue. He had read my work, and knew that we shared this belief. That both of us saw the ways in which the experience of victimization, and the traumatic rage that accompanies it, were being mobilized toward escalating violence in the world. That both of us saw a gap in the political practices of the left that seemed of the utmost importance. When Steve wrote to me, I was in the thick of questions of my own: How do we reframe our experiences of oppression so that we don't act from a sense of victimhood, and end up recreating what we abhor? Why do oppressors oppress, and how can we win them away from doing it? How do we interrupt the cycles of reenacted pain at the level of nations? How do we stop the self-defeating expressions of traumatic rage between oppressed constituencies that shatter our coalitions? These are not abstract questions for me. I wrestle daily with the impacts of colonialism, of sexism, of racism and anti-Semitism, of poverty and disability in an economy in which people are dispensable. I am also a survivor of severe and sustained sexual and psychological abuse during my childhood, carried out by a group of adult men that has left me with an intimate knowledge of the dynamics of torture, of the systematic attempts to shatter the spirits of the victimized. These are core issues in my life: How is it that I did not become a torturer? How is it that others do? What is it that allows some of us to choose outside the circle of reenactment? A few years ago, as part of a study conducted by Staci Haines to develop better policies around child sexual assault, I participated in one of a series of focus groups, organized by constituency.

Load more