If we all agree that a people can experience trauma on a large scale and that trauma can then pass onto the descendants, then the reverse must also be true – a people who have inflicted trauma on a large scale pass that experience onto the descendants.

People who are descended from people from slave-owning and imperialist nations carry with them the scars of slave ownership, genocide, oppression. It shows in the way they act, speak, think. Their worldview is informed by their history as masters of “lesser people”.

  • multitotal@lemmygrad.mlOP
    1·
    11 days ago

    Thanks for the response

    are we talking about wounded nervous systems and their consequences

    Definitely this. It’s one of the reasons why Nazis invented gas chambers, because they saw the psychological damage murder inflicted on their soldiers. They didn’t want there to be tens of thousands of mentally damaged maniacs in their new Reich. So they had Jews from the camp lead other Jews into the gas chambers and they had Jews pull them out and stuff them into crematoria. This way the German soldiers would not witness/experience all of the horrors they were inflicting. But gas chambers are unique in history, all other times humans committed genocide or atrocities they did it “by hand”.

    Though these surely have some overlap, I don’t think they are quite the same

    I don’t think they’re the same. But for example a slave owner, regardless of how they treat their slaves are still a slave owner. Their way of thinking, speaking, viewing the world will be passed onto their children, then that will probably get passed onto their children.

    I can’t think of examples in the West when people were forced to confront their past. It’s always “oh, that was my dad/grandad, it has nothing to do with me”.

    You get a situation where people’s thinking and worldview hasn’t changed significantly, yet they believe they are somehow changed just because some time has passed.