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In Part I and Part II of this series, I described how my patient, Gudrun, was able to find a partial resolution of her unconscious conflicts that arose out of her family secrets (especially her mother's family secrets) related to the Holocaust. The discussion in the comments which followed Part II was extremely thought-provoking and enlightening. Many questions were raised, especially about the applicability of this particular woman's dynamics to the current state of the European zeitgeist. If you haven't read the comments, I would suggest doing so now, because many of the points are pertinent and relate to this post.
My patient grew up in Germany, post-war, in an environment where the entire population conspired to bury all memory of their complicity, many by an active role but most by their passivity, in the Holocaust. Her mother's childhood best friend was the Jewish girl who lived next door; one day she and her family simply disappeared, never to be seen or mentioned again. Gudrun's mother kept this secret to herself for almost 40 years. Of interest, the mother never really "knew" explicitly that it was a secret; she had merely never thought to mention it to her daughter until Gudrun directly confronted her on a visit when Gudrun was in her late 20's.
The analogue, in an individual, of Europe's communal denial is repression, and therein lies the tale (if I may borrow from the Bard.)
One of Freud's great insights was that when traumatic memories were "forgotten" or repressed and kept out of awareness, they continually pressed to return to the surface of the mind. The forces that made "forgetting" necessary fought to keep the trauma out of conscious awareness and out of this struggle symptoms and character deformations resulted. A classical example of the type we no longer see in sophisticated populations would be hysterical conversion symptoms. A patient conflicted about his aggression (afraid of hurting others or himself) could develop an hysterical paralysis of his arm. With a paralyzed arm, he would not be at risk of harming anyone; unfortunately the resulting symptoms often caused more trouble than the impulses. Freud referred to such symptom formation as a "return of the repressed."
[Our understanding of such symptom formation is quite a bit more sophisticated and complex these days, but the basic framework for understanding has stood the test of time.]
In the same way, once Europe "repressed" the memory of their own involvement in the atrocity of the Holocaust, the elites imagined they could forget and pay no price. However, Europe is paying a very high price, and may in fact be setting the stage for a violent "return of the repressed."
The man with a paralyzed arm that I imagined above is Europe. Since World War II, when the full horror of the Holocaust became unmistakable, the Europeans have tried to deny their own aggressive impulses. They have become more peace loving than the blood thirsty Americans and disarmed themselves in the process, more moral than the cowboy from Crawford, much smarter and more sophisticated than the rubes from across the sea. Yet all the time the Europeans were maintaining the pretense of sophisticated urbanity, there was a sickness at their core.
My patient resolved her conflicts over aggression, shame, and guilt, by punishing herself, destroying her own future, and making the commitment that she would never be complicit in atrocities again. It is tempting to see, in the demographic failure of the sophisticates in Europe, a similar bargain. Yet I would submit that it is not so easy to keep the repressed safely locked away in the unconscious. Since the end of World War II, the Europeans have done nothing, beyond offering lip service, to prevent or stop genocides from recurring, now in Darfur, lately in Bosnia, Saddam Hussein in Kurdistan and Shia Iraq. Their fear of aggression and their inability to draw moral distinctions have disarmed them in the face of true brutality. They even have striven mightily to disarm those who they see as their evil mirror image, the Israelis. (This would be an example of the "narcissism of small differences" which deserves a post or two of its own; keep in mind the German Jews were the most successful and highly assimilated Jews in all of Europe before the rise of Nazism. The comment has been made that the Germans will never forgive the Jews for the Holocaust. Neither will the French.)
The entire culture of Political Correctness and Multi-Culturism rests on the Marxian dialectic of oppressors and villains. In the PC world, only white men and their agents can be evil oppressors. Saddam Hussein can kill millions of fellow Muslims and this is of no concern; Hafez al-Assad can destroy Hama and kill 20,000 with not a word of censure from the Europeans; the Saudi royals practice slavery and medieval punishment for apostasy without a word of censure (sadly, including from our own government); Iran murders rape victims and feverishly works to produce nuclear weapons to use on various enemies, including the Jews, and the Europeans moan and wring their hands, afraid of their own aggression to such a degree that the idea of using force to disarm the Iranians is unthinkable. This allows the Europeans to split the world into those who are able to freely express aggression and those who are to be prevented from expressing aggression. This explains why the Americans and Israelis are always wrong and the Muslims are never in the wrong. At the same time, it is always safe to verbally attack the Americans and Israelis, and not so safe to attack Muslims.
The conflict has increasingly been brought home to their own back yards and it is no coincidence that the Europeans find themselves paralyzed in the face of aggression from the Muslims in their mix. Their initial response had been denial of the aggression within, buttressed by their almost reflective PC-thought; however, this is not working very well.
Gateway Pundit has photographs from the French riots of last year (Wednesday, March 29, 2006); these are not "cartoon" riots but protests staged by French students and labor unions against government plans to shake up their moribund economy by creating more jobs with slightly higher risks. The protests became yet another opportunity for the Muslim youth, whose ethnicity and religion are never mentioned in the French press, to riot against the privileged French who they see as dhimmis. Yet the Muslims, in their foolish over-estimation of their own power, are once again in danger of over-reaching prematurely. By acting too soon, the Muslims in the heart of Europe may yet precipitate the clash of civilizations so many fear and so many want, before the Europeans have finished their demographic suicide.
I believe the "return of the repressed" is already in motion. On Monday, I plan to discuss how an unlikely source has confirmed some of my worst fears.
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