Terra Incognia 99 Chosen Trauma, Why they hate us and Israeli universities

Terra Incognita
Issue 99

“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”

A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel

Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/

October 22, 2009

1) There is no such thing as ‘chosen trauma’: The idea of a “chosen trauma” is a recent development. It is to psychiatry what the “other” is to philosophy and is part and parcel of the post-humanist undermining of history and truth. People do not “choose” to have trauma, they actually have trauma when people commit genocide against them or deport them from their land. Caring about the trauma of the group is not “racist” because it “excludes” others. It is a natural human emotion.

2) Why they hate us?: The West is hated by two groups: Islam and Western women. Not all Muslims hate the West and neither do all Western women. However one can find, in the western female coddling of Islam and the belief that Islam is “exotic” or the feeling sorry for Muslim minorities and the conversion of western women to Islam that western women, freed by the west, desire nothing more than the slavery of Islam. The West fails in its granting of freedom to people and educating them because it educates contempt and its freedom fails when those who benefit the most have the most contempt for it.

2) A Story about Justice and the University in Israel: The University in Israel speaks often of justice. But is it justice when that university protects its academics but those academics, who receive pay from the state, encourage terrorists to murder the students and destroy the state?



There is no such thing as a “chosen trauma”
Seth J. Frantzman
October 22, 2009

In order to punish victims and attempt to destroy identity, post-humanism has created something called “chosen trauma”. Describing what ‘Chosen trauma’ is Vamik Volkan in the publication Group Analysis (2001 University of Virginia) describes it thus “subjective experience of thousands or millions of people who are linked by a persistent sense of sameness.” It is the “mental representation of a massive trauma that the group’s ancestors suffered.” But we also learn that this is inherently negative; “when a group regresses, its chosen trauma is reactivated in order to support the group’s threatened identity. This reactivation may have dramatic and destructive consequences.” Thus any sort of rememberance of suffering is negative in the eyes of post-humanism because it inevitably leads to group identification and causes the group to potentially mistreat others. At the very least it means that the group may identify with itself and thus be “racist”.

Another description of the idea of “chosen trauma” can be found in an article by Ayse Karabat in The Daily Zaman in Istanbul. He describes it as “the mental representation of an event that causes a group to feel victimized. The group mythologizes an event and draws it into its identity, passing the mental representation, along with associated feelings and defenses, from generation to generation.” In writing about the “chosen trauma” he was speaking about Armenians in Turkey and their preservation of their community and attempts by youth to free themselves from the cautious behavior of the “elders” who view themselves, according to the article, too often as victims.
H.D.S. Greenway of the New York Times uses the term to describe the Turkish and Greek Cypriots. He creates yet another definition; “to described the way nations, as well as individuals, can seize upon a wrong done to them to the exclusion of any wrongs committed by themselves.”

The invention of the term “chosen trauma” is deeply connected to the Turks and Cyprus.
Greenway didn’t bother to do the background research and missed the fact that Vamik Volkan, who invented the term, is a Turkis-Cypriot. Born in 1932 he moved the United States at some point. He has done much of his work on the psychology of conflict. Had he been involved in Philosophy he would have preached to us about the idea of the “other” but he has transferred this idea to his own work. In 1988 he spoke of the “need to have enemies and allies”. He has written on “killing in the name of identity” and “from ethnic pride to ethnic terrorism”. He has also written on homosexuality, cross breeding plan species, as well the “animal” and “primitive” instincts and psychological problems that exist within us. For Mr. Volkan it is obvious the experience of being a Turkish Cypriot (a Muslim group that complains of its own victimhood and at the same time has used that as an excuse to cleanse its portion of the island of minorities) lodged deeply in his mind and he has connected all human instincts that involve group identity, pride and dislike of others with being “primitive” and “animal.” It reminds this author of a college textbook on anthropology that spoke of how “primitive people once identified themselves first with their group and were suspicious of outsiders.”

But what about the revenge of the primitive? Post-humanism has tried to convince us that trauma can be “chosen” and that trauma is a “myth” and that its consequence is violence against the “other.” The group “excludes” the things it does in order to remember what was done to it. This discussion therefore concludes that any rememberance of a trauma is not only wrong but that it is primarily mythological and therefore not based on truth. This is part and parcel of modernity’s assault on history.
There are real traumas. When a community is partially destroyed, its women raped and its land stolen it is indeed a trauma. Modernity would tell us that there is no truth behind such events as the Armenians genocide, the Rwandan genocide, the Trail of Tears, the Great Trek, the Holocaust or any other event. It is merely a “chosen trauma”. When the Jews describe the Holocaust as something that “happened to Jews” they are “excluding” the Gypsies and gays and Russians murdered by the Nazis. Thus in remembering their ‘chosen trauma’ they are racist. And, to take the argument one step further, the Jews then use the Holocaust as an excuse to abuse Palestinians, in the words of Avraham Burg they “manipulate the Holocaust.”

This is why people speak of a chosen trauma. The brainwashing of individuals to have no attachment to the group is quite successful. At the Israeli university, which is one of the more liberal and self-hating in the world, the three or four Ethiopian Jewish students who are enrolled there are raised to believe that it is racist for them to take any special interest in their Ethiopian community. Instead they are convinced that the Arabs are the group, the “other”, that they should work to help. Thus poor Ethiopians who live in tenements find themselves graduating with bachelors degrees in sociology and going out to give their free time and energy protesting “Ethiopian jewish racism against Arabs” and defending Muslim cemetaries in Israel. Such is the degree of communal destruction that the leftist post-human university can take people who are penniless and who suffered a terrible trauma coming to Israel (in which tens of thousands died of starvations and thousands were raped) and turn them into people who believe that loving their own community is “racist” and one must work tirelessly for the “other.”

By describing history as “myth” the post-human ideology of “chosen trauma” deconstructs that history. Thus the murder of millions in the Holocaust becomes part of a “Jewish myth of suffering.” Who speaks that way? No liberal would dare say that. But they say it about the Armenians. The Armenians have a “chosen trauma” and they should get over it.

The use of the word “chosen” in “chosen trauma” also degrades the existence of the trauma. The idea is that the individual should choose not to have a trauma. He should mature and become modern and throw off the shackles of the past, a past which involved memory and identity and exclusion. Modern man is just man, by himself, with no group. There is but one race: human.

The question that should be posed about “chosen trauma” is two-fold. Why do certain groups get to have their chosen trauma. African-Americans can never seem to forget the trauma of slavery and they are aided and abeted in this by the same liberal who tells the Armenians or others to forget their trauma. Black blame all their problems on slavery. Whether it is the fact that 80% of black American children are born out of wedlock (what people now glorify as “my baby daddy”) or the fact that black women “relax” their hair, it is all due to slavery, even though it isn’t. But no one tells the blacks to abandon their “chosen trauma” or that in having pride in being black that they are ‘excluding’ others. The same should be said of the Muslims, especially Palestinians. No one asks them to get rid of their chosen trauma of the “nakba” or for Muslims to forget the “crusades”. Instead the west blames all of the problems in the Middle East on colonialism and “western oppression” and the “humiliation of the Crusades and the Israeli Occupation.” So where is the complaints about the Palestinians “excluding” others or the consequences that their obsession with their trauma has on the peace process?

The other question that should be posed is whether or not the murder of leftists can be also described as a “chosen trauma”. We often hear leftists whining when a few of them get suppressed. Whether it is the attempted bombing of Prof. Sternhell or the tyranny of Pinochet, one must always hear about the assault on a few leftists and “dissidents” here and there. But is that not also a “chosen trauma”? Is it not also part of a “myth”?
The last problem with the concept of the “chosen trauma” is that it implies there is no truth. Greenway tells us that in Cyprus the Turks and Greeks each have a “narrative” which excludes the suffering of the other. The Turks don’t mention the expulsion of the Greeks and the importation of settlers. The Greeks don’t mention the assaults on Turks the preceeded the Turkish invasion. Greenway and the promulgators of “chosen trauma” tell us that because the two communities disagree that therefore there is no truth, there is just a “chosen trauma.” But this is an assault on fact and history.

If a hundred people are killed and one group says it was “revenge” and the other group says it was “spontaneous rioting” and another group says it was “freedom fighting” it doesn’t mean that the 100 people did not die. It may be true that the Germans in Poland that were expelled in 1945 were expelled because they were “settlers” or to ‘ensure peace’ or because “it was war” but none of it means that there were millions of Germans living in Poland and the Czech Republic before 1945. People mistake the fact that different people interpret right and wrong differently in order to pretend there are no facts. Did the killers of Gandhi do it out of patriotism or evil, was the deed wrong or did it save a nation from the appeasement of Gandhi. Surely some say that the killing of Gandhi was a great and honorable deed. Most disagree and view it as abhorrent. But that doesn’t mean Gandhi wasn’t killed. In fact we even know why he was killed. Whether that killing was right or wrong cannot be determined, perhaps, but the motives of the killer can, in fact, be explored. When terrorists strike liberals like to say that the terrorist has his own motives and that because he uses the “weapon of the poor” or because he perceived himself as “humiliated” that his actions are justified. Those who disagree that people should blow themselves up and kill children do not define terrorism as “resistance”. They condemn it as wrong. The fact that people disagree on interpreting an event doesn’t mean it is part of a “myth”. It is not a “chosen trauma” that the victims of terror want to commemorate being victims. They are actually victims. Liberalism murders the victim by saying he can “choose” to not have trauma. In fact some liberals do choose to not have humanity. Some victims of terror have sympathy for the terrorists. But that is not an example of the flexibility of victimhood, it is merely another example of the inhumanity of modernity. Modernity murders the soul of man. One more example of the murder of that soul is the idea of “chosen trauma”. The real trauma we face is suffering through modernity until it can finally be destroyed so that we can all return to our “primitive” and “animal” past when we “mistakenly identified with the group and were suspicious of outsiders.”





Why they hate us?
Seth J. Frantzman
There are two groups of people who hate Western Civilization, one is Islam and the other is Western Woman.

Consider the recent events in Israel. The riots in Nazareth in 2001 and at Yom Kippur in Acre in 2008 were both partially caused by pent up anger at Arabs harassing Jewish women. An attempted lynching of two Arabs in Pisgat Zeev in 2008 was for the same reason. The murderer of Dana Bennet and the murderers of Leonard Karp were both aided by Jewish women, in one case a Jewish soldier woman. There are now groups in Pisgat Zeev and Petah Tikva aimed at discouraging Jewish women from dating Arab men. The Ethiopian community is hosting a seminar on the issue. In Kiryat Gat a Jewish 15 year old dated Beoduin men, went to night clubs with them and was then taken by them, handcuffed to a pole and burned to death with gasoline. In the Galilee an Arab gang operated for three years raping Jewish women.

When all these incidents take place one must ask why. The usual explanation by women in Israel is that the Arab men give vulnerable young Jewish women presents and flatter them and that the women come from troubled homes with either absent fathers or abusive strict fathers. This always seems to be the “answer” and no one seems to ask more questions.

However the truth is much more complicated. Arab women also come from broken homes with abusive fathers and strict traditional cultures. Yet they don’t rebel by going out with Jewish men. The excuse of the westerner to this observation is to say “well that’s because their society would kill them.” But this excuse isn’t good enough. I’ve known Arab women, mostly from secular backgrounds, not so different backgrounds than the Sephardie and Ethiopian girls in ‘vulnerable” neighbourhoods who are enticed so often by Arab men. These women don’t mind hanging out with Jewish men and from time to time they are taken with the “exotic” idea of what it would be like to go out with them. But they generally hold themselves back from such behavior. Not because of the men in their society but because they believe they would be betraying their culture. No matter how liberal and open minded they are repelled by the idea. Now why is that? Why is it that the Arab Muslim culture, which beats women, which maligns them, which allows men to go out with all sorts of women, which gives men four wives, which puts women in headscarves and expects them to stay at home and beat children, why does that society, even at its most liberal, produce women who like it, honour it and are patriots for it. Even the women who hate the Hamas brand of the Muslim religion, even the women who find Arab men obnoxious in their behavior, even those women honour their culture and faith. Why? In short, why does the western culture fail when it comes to women?
What does the west not provide the women that she would make her stay part of her own culture and not love the “other” and find the “other” exotic? Is it because the western man is metro-sexy and gay and in touch with his feminine side? Is it because the Western man no longer provides? Or is it the western education system and feminism in general that produce women who hate themselves and their culture? Is it freedom, does freedom ensure that humans, women in this case, will beg for a return to slavery, their natural state? Is the western education system, the idea of freedom, and secularism, a failure?

We in the West condemn those religious groups among us that seem to produce women who actually like being part of the group. Consider the religious Jews. Their women don’t find others “exotic”. They don’t want to learn the language, religion and culture of the “other”. Yet we are told by secular society that they are prisoners, suppressed and beaten. But the secular man who would liberate them would liberate them only to find that they don’t desire him but desire another repressive religious culture, such as that found among the Muslims. Isn’t this a puzzle? The West liberates the woman, only to find that the woman hates the West and prefers other religions and cultures that reminds her of the way it used to be in the “bad old days” of the 1950s or the Victorian period. The same women that will condemn the “conservative, chauvinist” style of the 1950s is the same women that yearns to learn Arabic, to know the difference between the Eids and the various ins and outs of Islamic law. She is the same woman who takes the belly-dancing lessons and travels abroad alone to meet and marry foreign men, never returning home. In fact she yearns precisely for the 1950s culture, because is there any culture that is more like the 1950s in terms of its view of women than Arab culture, is there any culture that is more like Victorian England and its mores and dress codes than that of the Muslims?

This is the brutal truth about the Western world and its system and its promise and its future that few want to admit. The West can be summed up with one word: failure. It is a failure. It may appear a success from certain points of view such as economics or democracy. That is all well and good. We have rights to a free trial and such things like that. But the future of society depends on women and children. The long term future depends on these essential ingredients. In nations such as China and India they murder women in the womb (such is the benefit of that western science called abortion). The brilliant Chinese allow Muslims to have as many children as they want but restrict Han Chinese to one child. Most families abort female babies and have males as their one child. There is now a gender gap in China, with millions of missing women. Muslim countries by contrast happily give birth to women and marry them in the fours to men so as to increase their population. But in Russia and Japan and other highly secular country the birth rate is less than one child for every two people. They simply don’t want children, lest the little brats ruin their pursuit of the secular life. Failure. Failure. Failure. Failure. Yes, those societies are all failures.

Europe is a failure. Its women, and I see them from time to time, are butch, mannish, small breasted, unhappy, self-hating, short-haired, and if they are not, if they are pretty and friendly, then they are only interested in African or Muslim men. Such is the European male and his uselessness as a man that he spends his days pursuing things other than women, dressing like a homosexual and generally expressing no interest in personal responsibility, work or women. The European male is gay and the European women acts like a man. Both are objectionable.

The West failed its women completely and utterly. It’s not a matter of women “getting taken advantage of” or “poor women who are vulnerable”. We have been fed this for years. This was the excuse why half of all Ukrainian women have been trafficked as sex slaves abroad. Its not poverty that caused them to be trafficked. It was teaching them to read. Yes. Isn’t that a sad commentary. They could read the adds for “housekeepers in Turkey” or whatever and they gave away their passports and allowed themselves to become slaves. It wasn’t just teaching them to read but teaching them that they should hate their culture and spurn their men and that they were “independent”. That “independence” led them to servitude. What independence it was! Poverty doesn’t turn whole nations into brothels, like Moldova. No. Yemen is poor and the women are whores. Gaza is poor and the women aren’t whores. The difference between the poor western woman and her Muslim counterpart is that the Muslim women wears a visible prison (the burka) and works as a slave for her husband. The poor trafficked Western women lives in a prison (the sex slave brothel wherever she has sold herself) and works as a sex slave for a dozen men a day. Lets be honest, there is no substantial difference between the position of the Muslim women in Gaza or the western women working as a slave in the UAE. Its not poverty that caused this or “the lure of fast money”. It is independence, equal rights and freedom and the West. It is the western male and his useless impotent culture. It is the West and its culture.



A Story about Justice and the University in Israel
October 20, 2009
Seth J. Frantzman

The University and all its humanism likes to talk about “justice” a lot. It likes to educate students about a “just” society of “equals”. The University serves as a brainwashing tool to mint students who do not think. While the University claims to want people who “think critically” the actual affect of its program is to mint people who all think the same. It is no different in Israel. The Israeli university takes people from a variety of backgrounds and, at least in the social sciences and humanities, mints students who all hate the country they live in and desire to “challenge” its existence and support the Arabs.

The Israeli university system, in terms of the Humanities and Social Sciences, is primarily composed of group think and homogeneity. It is almost exclusively Ashkenazi and leftist and it is primarily male. It excels at signing petitions against the very country it exists in. In one such petition 358 university professors and lecturer signed a petition supporting Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the army.

But let us be honest about this. The University prides itself on justice. But let us discuss justice for a moment. Is it justice when a wealthy University professor who receives a huge salary from the government and drives a car home to his village every night supports those who refuse to serve in the army. Is it justice that a student from a poor background must go to the army or face jail time and that this student may die in his service? Is it justice that a student from a poor background ends up working security at the university and must ride the bus back and forth to his tiny apartment and because of riding the bus or working as a security guard that student may die at the hands of terrorism? Is it justice that the student from the poor background must die for the professor who receives his salary from the state and supports the very terrorist who murders the poor? What justice is it when the wealthy who receive the most and who work for the government are the ones who support the murder of the poor?

The wealthy in the states of old may have abused the poor but at least they didn’t encourage those who murdered them? The question at the Israeli university is whether the academics deserve security? Do they deserve that the army should defend their “right” to free speech? When the right to free speech encourages those who murder the students, when the state actually pays those who encourage breaking the laws of the state then what does it say about the “right” of free speech?

One Professor at an Israeli University even told the terrorists who to target and who not to. He said they should murder only “settlers” but not good justice seekers from wealthy neighbourhoods such as himself. The army and the security guards at the university should heed the professors. The Universities in Israel operate on occupied Palestinian land, all of them are, in some way or another, involved in occupying the lands of former Arab villages. So, yes, the security guards should refuse to go to work at the University and the army should refuse to serve in any area near the university.

It is time for the professors to live the life that the rest of the nation has been forced to live. It is time for their neighbourhoods to have no security and no protection. They want to encourage the terrorists to “concentrate their attacks on the settlements”. If the university wants justice the only real justice will be in stripping the professorial elite of their diamond protection plans, stripping them of their villages and their BMWs. Send the professors in Israel to the development towns, to Sderot, to Kiryat Gat, to Kiryat Malaki and Lod and Ramla. The intellectual elite in Israel dumped the immigrants to the country in these neighbhourood and now that same cultural elite encourages terrorists to murder those people who have so little. Those who have nothing and live in poor places are drafted into the army and go without question while the wealthy high school students, the children of the cultured elite, refuse to do their service and go abroad with their European passports. It is impossible to call it justice when the poor must die so that the rich can critique their country.

No, the country does not have justice. There is no justice when those paid salaries by the state encourage the murder of other members of the state. When those paid by the state are ensured security by a state they hate there is no justice.