Freeing Ourselves from Oppressed and Oppressor Roles
I want to make a few points about oppressed and oppressor roles then share a personal experience.
1. In the RC women’s draft liberation policy statement, we say that all forms of oppression are harmful. Comparing and “grading” oppressions in different countries or societies is a mistaken activity and does not lead to effective work against oppression. We also should not grade or compare the wrongs committed by oppressor patterns or institutions. We can end up justifying or defending the “lesser” oppressor.
Genocides have happened and are happening throughout the world. Let us not compare the genocides of different countries—which was worse, which was “milder.” There is no such thing as a “mild” genocide. They are all wrong and evil.
Also, we need to continually fight for the full understanding that all humans are good, that there are no human enemies.
2. The patterns from the traumas of the past—from genocide, holocaust, slavery, and so on—are transmitted from generation to generation. Present cultures, societies, and nations carry these patterns until they are discharged and the institutional causes of them are eliminated.
In an oppressive society, all people in oppressor groups—regardless of when they were born in relation to collective institutionalized traumas—have oppressor patterns and play or potentially play oppressor roles. Repudiating those roles, and discharging, is required for individual and group liberation. People in oppressed groups also have patterns from the collective traumas. They need to take responsibility for their struggles in the present; discharge the distresses attached to those struggles, including the victim role; and free themselves (and society as a whole) from the effects of the oppressions.
3. No person, group, culture, or nation in the oppressor role should be targeted, demonized, or smeared for having that role.
It was suggested that people on this discussion list tell their stories of forming relationships with people they had seen as “the enemy.” Here is my story:
I’ve had about thirty-five Intensives on my early distress. [An Intensive is a number of hours of one-way Re-evaluation Counseling in a week, for a fee, from Re-evaluation Counseling Community Resources in Seattle, Washington, USA.] Much of it is related to the Holocaust in Europe during World War II. Much of my life has been defined by material related to the Holocaust.
I was born in the United States in 1943. My grandparents all came from Poland and were Orthodox Jews and Yiddish speakers. My mother’s body endured big hurts due to her parents’ patterns from living in a country experiencing pogroms. That led to a difficult pregnancy, which affected me prenatally.
I have no memory of any time before or surrounding my birth when I did not get some kind of information related to the Holocaust—including about deaths of family members, fears of being killed, gruesome concentration camps, and the destruction of Jewish women’s bodies, especially in regard to reproduction.
I lived for the first seven years of my life in a community with many European refugees, including many German Jews who were Holocaust survivors. It was a Holocaust culture. I listened to stories about, and watched television shows depicting, masses of people murdered in camps and met people with numbers on their arms.
We German, and Eastern European, Jews were teased and otherwise mistreated in school for our connection to what had happened in Europe. My school was dominated by white Protestants, and I often felt hated but could not name the feeling.
We were expected to assimilate into white Protestant culture. This included changing our names, never talking about our extended families, giving up our accents, being made ashamed of any religious affiliation (Jewish), and never feeling we could ask questions about what had happened to our people in Europe. We were silenced.
I was also raised around anti-German feelings, which were often considered “bad feelings” by non-Jews now that everything was “fine.” In my synagogue we wrestled with issues of “good and evil” when we should have been discharging.
When The Diary of Anne Frank came out, I was a young teenager and had nightmares about being killed by Nazis. I would go to bed and read over and over the line in the book that said, “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
As the International Liberation Reference Person for Women, I went to Germany in the 1980s to lead a women’s workshop. I had never been to Germany before, and I did feel scared. It turned out [happened] that there were many wonderful parts to the trip. For example, some German RCers took me to a lovely Passover Seder held in a synagogue that had been destroyed by the Nazis and rebuilt in the 1960s.
At the workshop I was the only visible (white Ashkenazi) Jew and the only USer. (A couple of women came up to me and whispered that they were “hidden” Jews and were using RC to reclaim their Jewish identity.) I was asked to take time in front of the workshop to discharge on being a Jew who was visiting Germany. I was reluctant, as I did not know what the women at the workshop had worked on and did not have confidence in being counseled.
I decided to take charge of the session. I asked if there were any women at the workshop who were my age. A woman raised her hand who had been born in Berlin (Germany) in 1943. I was born in New York City (USA) in 1943. I can’t remember exactly how the session went, but both of us told each other our life stories, including as they related to World War II. I remember that the woman seemed very sad to me. I believe we both discharged.
I am a USer, and thus the session was complicated. As a German Gentile, the woman had been and still was the agent of my oppression. However, the United States had unnecessarily bombed big parts of Germany when the war had already been won. Also, parts of the U.S. ruling class had collaborated with Nazi Germany before and perhaps into the war. U.S. immigration policy had been unfavorable to Jews, and the United States had sent a boat of German Jews away from the country. All those Jews had later been killed in Germany.
I remember clearly that the woman talked about her father. He had been a member of the Nazi Party (as had many rank-and-file Germans) and had fought in the German army. She said that at the end of the war, when he’d returned to his family, “he was gone” and “never came back” into human contact again. She had lost her father. It looked different in my family, and my immediate family’s experience was in the United States, but some of my relatives had a grief-stricken quality that they never got free of.
The two of us did not try to say that our experiences were equivalent. (It seemed that this woman had done some work, probably in RC, on taking some rational responsibility for the Holocaust.) We may have hugged briefly at the end of the session but did no more. What I liked best was that we did not pretend anything—for example, that we were now “best friends.” It was clear, however, that we liked each other and had made an honorable connection.
A couple of years later, I went to Nairobi, Kenya, for the Third World Women’s Conference as part of the first big No Limits for Women project. One afternoon I encountered a group of RCers sitting on the lawn and saw my German friend from the workshop. We smiled, hugged, and talked briefly, with great affection, but did not arrange to have a Co-Counseling session or to see each other again. Neither of us could do more. Neither of us wanted to pretend anything.
If I were to see her again, now that I’ve done a lot of discharging, I would be able to do more. My sense is that she is no longer in RC, but I would guess that we both have a “soft spot” for each other and that it is forever.
Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, USA
Reprinted from the e-mail discussion list for RC Community members
(Present Time 202, January 2021)