Facing and Discharging on Oppressor Roles
I am a white fifty-one-year-old Protestant woman, raised owning class in the northeast United States by parents who were born and raised in Europe. I have been in RC for thirty years and have been doing owning-class work since I started RC.
I recently attended a War and Genocide Workshop for owning-class people, near Boston, Massachusetts, USA—the first RC War and Genocide Workshop for the owning class. It was profound for me personally and I think may have given us a road map to where our work as owning-class RCers needs to go.
Jo Saunders, the International Liberation Reference Person for Owning-Class People, led the white Jewish and Gentile owning-class Co-Counselors in looking at their connections to war and genocide. Azi Khalili, the International Liberation Reference Person for South, Central, and West Asian-Heritage People, led a concurrent War and Genocide Workshop for owning-class people targeted by racism. Azi’s and Jo’s workshops met together at the start and the end of the weekend but mostly met completely separately, even at meals. Jo’s workshop broke into Jews and Gentiles, with Eileen Hoffman leading the Jews, and these groups also spent much of the time separate from each other.
The entire workshop was small compared to our typical owning-class workshops in the eastern United States—only about forty people attended. The topic is just that difficult to work on.
THE WHITE WORKSHOP
Our white workshop was a wonderful group. We were close, funny, warm, thoughtful, aware, and super-scared but also super-ready to work together. Many of us had decades of being in close, connected relationships with each other. In many ways owning-class workshops have been where I feel most at home in RC, and this one was no exception.
We got lots of discharge in sessions and small support groups. We also had long chunks of time in which to play, rest, and get our attention out. We needed a good balance of attention and sufficient contradiction [to distress] to be able to look at the heavy workshop topics from the perspective of being in the oppressor role.
Jo challenged us to find and face the early material [distress] that had set us up as owning-class people to participate in and benefit from war and genocide. I had already done some work on my family’s connections to wealth and power accrued from war and genocide, and I had led some owning-class groups on the topic in my Community. However, it turned out [was revealed] that I had barely scratched the surface of the work I needed to do.
There was much to learn, and we were eager to share with each other. I knew something about the money made from wars—members of my family had been involved in that business for a long time—but I didn’t realize the extent to which wartime decisions had been connected to and driven by business interests—even in those “good” wars I’d learned about as a young person. (Azi reminded us at the start of the workshop that there is no such thing as a good war.) We shared stories about historical moments that had been framed as fights for justice but in fact had nothing to do with justice or freedom and instead were about benefiting the ruling classes.
For example, the U.S. government had prior knowledge of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and used it to manipulate the U.S. public into supporting the decision to enter World War II. Slavery was abolished as a tactic for winning the Civil War and ensuring the economic dominance of the North, not because abolishing it was the right thing to do. Hitler’s original plan to expel Jews from Germany morphed into an extermination program in part because other countries refused to take in the exiled Jews.
We faced and worked on racism, anti-Jewish oppression, North-South issues in the U.S. Civil War and their continuing impact, the impact of World War II and the Vietnam War, and more.
I initially found it difficult to face that I and my U.S. people are benefiting from the wars our government is currently waging around the globe. The United States is an owning-class country with respect to the rest of the world, and we benefit from the wars it wages to keep our oil cheap and other resources readily accessible. That the United States is an owning-class country with respect to the role it plays in the world is not news to most people who live outside the United States, but it can be difficult for us as USers to comprehend.
By Saturday night of the workshop I felt like my mind was swimming in oatmeal. I struggled to face my family’s participation in genocide and war, and the wealth they’d made from them, and how I, as a USer, am benefiting from living in an owning-class country that is currently waging war (largely covert and unannounced) in at least seven places around the globe. I simply could not get a grip on the early distress I needed to discharge to keep my attention out.
That night Jo worked with people on their early lives, and after a few demonstrations things began to clear a little for me. Seeing people work on their early vulnerabilities made it easier for me to understand my own early distress.
On Sunday morning Jo talked about soldiers coming back to their families after being at war and the personal, intimate impact of war, particularly on women and children. She asked me to share my story of being the child of adults whose early lives had been deeply affected by World War II. The story is hard to tell in public. I had experienced extreme neglect, violence, and sexual abuse, all of which had been followed by a thorough cover-up campaign to protect the family name, money, and status. The connections between my parents’ experiences growing up in war and what they had played out at me became crystal clear [extremely clear] to the rest of the workshop.
Both my parents experienced severe hardship. They were born in London, England, and Oslo, Noway, in the late 1930s and were raised in the middle of World War II. Both of them were heavily targeted—physically, sexually, and emotionally—in their own families and by the invading military, in environments marked by violence and fear. By framing my parents’ lives as having been wrecked by their early war experiences, I was able, for the first time, to see the wreck of my own owning-class childhood as a casualty of war. In some ways, it was a relief to frame my personal story like that. In other ways, it was very painful.
My mother’s family’s wealth, power, and prestige were intricately and directly connected to both war and genocide. Her side of the family included high-ranking eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century English military and political leaders as well as prominent fascists who accrued power and wealth as war profiteers between the two World Wars. Some in my family made fortunes in textile and alcohol businesses—industries based on exploiting slave labor. My family also includes a great-great-great-great-grandfather who, some twelve generations back, was guilty of war crimes, religious persecution, ethnic cleansing, and the forced expulsion of the Irish out of Ireland on a mass scale. His name was Oliver Cromwell.
It is one thing to know that my family benefitted from, and were active leaders in, perpetuating war and genocide throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. There is hardly any money left, so for some time the work has seemed to be about simply learning and facing the history. It is another thing to see and understand that my owning-class country is currently waging war in a number of places around the globe and that I am benefiting from it. And finally, it is yet another thing to face that the very wars my family historically benefited from and helped to make happen set the stage for what is happening now and were the source of the neglect, violence, and sexual abuse that defined my childhood.
In the days after the workshop, I felt like I was “going crazy” trying to piece this all together in my mind. I had to fight to stay in present time and found it hard to reach for connection to people I know and love. I picked fights [started fights] with people I love, and cried a lot. I assume this is how it must have been for me as a young person trying to grapple with what I saw on my parents’ faces and experienced at their hands but could not in any way comprehend.
LOOKING FORWARD
I suspect that my story is not unique. War and genocide destroy everything in their path. All of us have connections to them, especially those of us from owning-class families. It will be interesting to see where this work leads us.
As owning-class people (and maybe as USers), perhaps—in order to reclaim our minds and our real selves—we must face the devastation played out at us in our families in the name of amassing wealth and resources, and also the devastation, the war and genocide, that we and our people are responsible for and still play out and benefit from. And then we must take action to set it to right.
Starting with the topic of war and genocide, then learning more about the current situation, and then identifying how my earliest hurts are tied to war and genocide, I now have a place to work that I did not have before. I look forward to seeing what happens as I continue my sessions, free up my mind, and increase my ability to act.
USA
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