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brilliant so we're just allowing the final people in from the waiting room and i'm sure others will join us as the evening unfolds we are live streaming as well on youtube so hello to our audience here on zoom or in zoom technically and
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then also with us on youtube and hopefully on twitter as well so i'll just start us off this evening my name is katie national and i'm a senior lecturer in gender studies at the institute of arab and islamic studies
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and just a little bit about the series this has been a creative collaborative and political engagement between the european center for palestine studies the institute of arab and islamic studies and the exeter decolonizing
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network and tonight we're very pleased to be welcoming dr gabor mate and i'm going to stop there and i'm going to actually hand over to our chairs for the evening rame ramile and natalie ohana
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thank you thank you so start by introducing myself my name is ramir meli and i'm a social and cultural psychologist i'm also doing my phd at the institute of arabic and islamic
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studies luckily lucky to be working with cathy and iran my project engages with collective trauma and explores an indigenous construct that help palestinians cope with hardship refer to
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a smoke i'll be co-chairing the event with my colleague natalie so i'll pass it to mentally to introduce yourself thank you ami and hello and good evening
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everyone um i am natalie ohana i am a lecturer at the law school in the university of exeter i am really excited to be here and it is my really absolute honor and to be co-chairing this event
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together with my colleague ramy um i would like to start by thanking our hosts and the people who made this event today possible so the institute of arab and islamic
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studies the european center for palestine studies and the exeter decolonizing network i want to thank the team behind the event asha ali
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malcolm richards katie natanel andrea wallace lara frick sarah wood sarah roberts nadia khalif safi darden joseph sweetman and sajad rizvi i would also
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like to thank our audience uh who joined us in different platforms and from all over the globe via zoom and youtube thank you to my colleague and the fantastic phd student ramirez
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who co-chairs the event with me and a huge thank you to our speakers to these incredible speakers this evening evening elon pape in gabo mate the format for today is 45 minutes of a
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conversation followed by 30 minutes of questions and answers rami over to you thank you so much natalie before we introduce our speakers i would like to share with you some guidelines in order
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to make this conversation as smooth and your participation as as smooth as possible so for those with us on zoom please keep your microphones muted during the event cameras may be on or off as you wish
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comments and questions are invited through the chat functions on zoom and youtube and via the hashtag matepaper2022 these will be collated and moderated by us
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please communicate with kindness and respect as you would in person this continues to be a difficult time marked by anxiety and loss how we speak matters please note that the event will be
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recorded so you are welcome to change your name if you wish to remain anonymous uh and we will use screen names to identify the speakers in the q a q a i would like to start first by introducing
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uh ilan ilan pape is a professor of history and director of the european center for palestine studies he's an expatriate israeli historian and
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socialist activist his research contextualizes the history of palestine into a larger global context of settler colonialism and has deeply informed movements for transformation
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he is the author of the best-selling book the ethnic cleansing of palestine history of modern palestine the israel and palestine questioned the forgotten palestinians history of the palestinian
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israel and the idea of israel his 2016 book the biggest prison on earth a city of the occupied territories receives the palestinian book award i've had the privilege of working with ilan
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for the past few months and my phd and i have witnessed how he has cultivated a politically motivated community of activists and academics
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both in exeter and across the world i pass it to natalie again thank you ami i would like to introduce now uh dr gabor mate dabo mata is a retired physician who
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after 20 years of family practice and palliative care experience worked for over a decade in vancouver's downtown east side with patients challenged by drug addiction and mental
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illness the best-selling author of four books published in 27 languages gabor is an internationally renowned speaker highly sought after for his exp for his expertise on addiction trauma
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childhood development and the relationship of stress and illness his book on addiction received the hubert evans prize for literary non-fiction for his groundbreaking medical work and writing he has been
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awarded the order of canada his country's highest civilian distinction and the civic merit award from his hometown vancouver his books include in the realm of hungry
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ghosts close encounters with addiction when the body says no the cost of hidden stress scattered minds the origins and healing of attention deficit disorder and with
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gordon newfield hold on to your kids why parents need to matter more than peers gabor's next book the myth of normal trauma illness and healing in a toxic culture is due to be published in autumn
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2022 on a personal note gabo mates has had a profound influence on my work analyzing the intersection between legal systems and trauma
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different from mainstream thought in medicine psychiatry psychology education and law mate understand trauma in relationship to forms of social oppression through his work it becomes apparent
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that keeping one's trauma or a group's trauma invisible is a forceful political act that serves power and sustains oppression this enabled me to use the concept
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trauma as a critical and subversive lens in the analysis of legal proceedings elon i will pass it to you for the beginning of the conversation elan i think you need to unmute sorry
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hard to teach uh an old dog new tricks i would rather sit with gabor in in a room than than online so i do apologize if every now and then there's a bit of hiccups
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this technology does not suit me uh in any case uh i want to thank everyone who made this event possible particularly thank you gabor for finding the time
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and the patients uh uh to be with us uh uh tonight or this morning wherever we are um when we start such a conversation in this particular moment in time we can probably
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not avoid mentioning the ukraine to begin with even if our conversation series focuses on decolonization and palestine and other issues it is clear that
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we feel compassion so with the victims of this brutal war wage on that country and anger those who have the ability to stop the war and do not and yet the western media and political
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coverage of that war exposed high hypocrisy or high levels of hypocrisy in particular if you are someone who is aware of the human made and nature made
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catastrophes in the arab world in africa in the inner cities in north america the pueblos of south america and in particular in palestine i would like to chat with you about this
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and other notions related to decolonization in palestine by attempting to associate your world of treating and healing and caring for the individual's mental and medical
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health with my world of recording the chronicles of groups of people nations and minorities who individually and collectively are under daily uh
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oppression and whose only crime is their perceived identity and locations so before asking more focused questions on such specific topics whether the ukraine on palestine i would like to
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preface this conversation with the following question how far can we go in projecting or applying your inputs on trauma fear depression and bubble addiction which
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are all interconnected to the treatment of the individual to an analysis of collectives be there nations movements minorities or groups bound by a collective identity can we talk about a
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collective trauma can we talk about addictions to ideologies to fanaticism to war mongering to self-victimization to victimizations of others
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by using the same methodology in order to find out why traumas are invisible how can we make them visible and what impact do they have on our lives when they are denied
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just unpacking it with a small a examples before we uh i i asked you to respond gabor uh let's let's unpack one example ideology can ideology be defined
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as an addiction can a certain harmful ideology be sustained either because of denial of its harm or because it seems to be pursued as a passion but in fact it is both self-harmful and
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harmful to others intuitively i feel as a historian that this could have been an extremely helpful dimension which i haven't used i'm sorry to say or a new entry point to my unfortunate choice of chronicling
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inhumanity as a major topic especially in palestine but not only there while moving to tears when discovering rays of humanity in it a personal inclination but i'm also not sure when that's in
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breakfast whether this has not become an addiction in a way preparing for this talk i remember that edward said fondly i should say called me a nakba janki i still believe it's a possible it's truthful it is possible to
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know or to want to know what happened in the in 1948 in the catastrophe in the nakba to do it because of a pursuit for justice and not because you are addicted
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to inhumanities and massacres but i'm much more ambiguous after reading you in any case can we relate to racism fanaticism and their harmful dehumanization of others which in my
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work are at the heart of the chronicles of inhumanity that i narrate with the realm of your compassionate approach to people who are addicted in the broadest possible meaning
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of the term well thank you elon fischel it's a pleasure to be speaking with you you're certainly one of the people um i have most admiration for in this world [Music]
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it's a multi-layered question that you're asking me and i'm not sure that i am adequate to respond to it but let me begin first of all just you touched upon the ukraine um
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it's quite both astonishing and dismaying to see what's going on right now you and i both agree on the unjustifiability of the war the cruelty of it i imagine you know
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but it's the hypocrisy that strikes me the most so in new york times columnist three weeks ago shortly after the war began as an article with the headline
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my generation thought that the age of barbarism is over we've just woken up again i want to write that guy have you ever heard about iraq have you heard about yemen
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have you read about guatemala have you read about gaza have you heard about the occupied territories you're just waking up to the reality that there's barbarism in the world so
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what kind of selective mindset would ignore all that in vancouver here there's a concert organization a musical concert organization the young russian pianist
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that was going to play here he's not he banned and uh now the tennis association is talking about banning the russian players like medvedev and rubler from tournaments okay i think that's great
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let's sanction the russians let's also exclude any canadian athletes because canada sells weapons to the saudis with which to murder yemenis let's also sanction the americans for
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any number of internationally known and compared with ukraine much larger killings and massacres and invasions you know that's just you know there's of course sanctioned the uk the uk has no
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right to be in any sports tournaments given its history and its current uh engagements i mean what will go on and on and on so the hypocrisy christ to the heavens
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and uh it's not a matter of justifying i'm not even going to go into the history of the ukraine and all that that's just not relevant here but but just just the hypocrisy the hypocrisy comes out of ideology
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and an ideology by its very nature includes and it excludes and it's got hidden blind spots which will exclude it from
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allowing any material that would challenge it to penetrate so my own particular history with well let me talk about my serial
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disillusionment first of all so i grew up in communist hungary a jewish survivor infant survivor of the genocide and to me the soviet army were my heroes they saved my life i also believed in the system
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and then there was the 56 revolution against this brutal oppression stillness depression that i wasn't aware of as a child because my parents weren't telling me about it so i got disillusioned and then you come to the
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west and now it's america which is the shining city on the hill and then four years later they're massacring millions of vietnamese and pub on television supported by the press
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so i get this illusion there and then i'm a zionist and uh and my disillusionment with that being and i'm talking about the value of the disillusionment by the way what i'm
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talking about is good to be disillusioned i always ask people would you rather be illusioned or disillusioned you rather know the truth or would you rather hang on to fancy ideas
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so as a young zionist leader i was given the task one year of giving a talk on how to counter air propaganda on the campuses so i thought well
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if i'm gonna counter air propaganda camp passages maybe i should find out whatever propaganda actually says so that's when i started looking into the other side when i see the other side i didn't read their propaganda by the
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way i read jewish sources about zionism and that's long before elaine and his fellow new historians came on the scene but there was already enough evidence in 67
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to lead me to conclude that what happened here was the exclusion of one people to establish a land for another that what happened in 67 was a very deliberately
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concocted war which ilan has eloquently documented since then so anyway i then present my point of view not yet believing in it but just here's their propaganda
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and here's what they're saying and all my fellow zionists were angry with me how can you be saying these things and i said i'm just pretending to be an heir i'm speaking my side and they were upset for me for even i
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fulfilled the assignment but they were upset with me for doing two videos of it so one more disillusionment you know so an ideology is addictive in a certain sense because let me define addiction
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for you so an addiction um is any um manifested in any behavior that a person finds relief or pleasure in and therefore craves and holds on to
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despite negative consequences and does not give it up despite those negative consequences so i don't want to call ideology exactly an addiction but it's got features in common
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it does provide psychological comfort to people you know when you're a zionist you've got a reason to live you have meaning you have a collective you have a history that makes sense to you
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you get to be both a victim but also a victor which is deeply satisfying both of those are deeply satisfying in other words you don't have to deal with your vulnerability and all addiction is about not dealing
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with vulnerability addiction is about because you are so hurt that vulnerability threatens you so much you basically try to numb yourself to your vulnerability and zionism as an ideology in any ideology really is a big
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antidote to vulnerability because now we have an answer to everything and uh now we're we can justify whatever we do we don't have to be vulnerable we don't to look at the truth
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so the ideologies are very seductive and and and they work like like the addict is in denial of the problem that he's creating for himself let alone for other people
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that a person who is connected or addicted to an ideology will be in denial of the harm being done to themselves and particularly to others so yes i think it's useful to talk about
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[Music] ideology as addictive and of course just as addiction in my view is an answer to pain addiction is people's attempt not to feel their pain it's understandable
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in in the same way you know um when i think of my grandparents who are killed in auschwitz that's very painful now if i can believe that there's redemption
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and there's a response and there's revenge redemption response and revenge through a particular state and its activities well then i can then deal with or not
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feel so much the pain of what happened so yeah the ideologies and addictions have a lot in common and what most of they have in common is the rigid
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incapacity and unwillingness to look at the truth of it thank you so maybe we'll talk a little bit more about you know disillusionment and denial and how we confront it in
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situations as we are facing both in canada and in israel in a way uh towards past evils and and and current evils we both come from a european jewish
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background you and i with different trajectories different fields of professional interest and yet in in many ways our concern about palestine and the palestinians is
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our main and first meeting point so palestine uh would be very much present i hope in our conversation as much as we can in the limited span of time we have but i noticed in an interview you gave
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to our it's very typical to israeli journalists they ask you the very end of the interview about your take on israel and palestine as if this was a passing issue not entirely related to the conversation
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on crime addiction and trauma i would like to take a different approach or rather have as we already started a general discussion on these issues and related to palestine and other concerns preoccupying the network
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and good in people who made this event possible so in order to to fuse what you did in canada and what we are both watching with horror is unfolding in palestine let us talk about our two maybe our two
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settler colonial societies so to speak two political projects established in the past with the help of what the late patrick wolf called the logic of the elimination of the
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native these settler colonial society the canadian one and the israeli one still by large deny their past a denial that enables them to continue so to speak the project of the
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elimination of the native but we both approach it i think with some caution you express every now and then your sense of gratitude for a canada that received you and your family which
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is probably akin to what i should have felt towards zionism in palestine that gave refuge to my parents escaping from nazi germany in the 1930s we both were i think tell
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me unless i'm wrong were unaware of the settler colonial setting genocide and ethnic cleansing that accompanied these two safe havens for our families and probably our life
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changed when we became aware of these atrocities you dealt with it in a very positive i think approach when you told the toronto star for canadians to be truly uh strong and free
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uh we must be uh we must come to terms with our grim past a quote which led me to assert that these are not just personal journeys we have taken we were and are guided by
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indigenous victims of these colonization projects who helped us to decolonize our knowledge and without the struggle for liberation we have no way of changing the ideological system that have power
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both to continue narrating their version as well as continuing the colonization that is meant to just justify uh this narrative is meant to justify so we can
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treat the canadian and israeli denial as a political situation but it seems from what you're saying that it's also a mental situation can we also treat that denial in the way you would treat denial when you confront
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it when you meet patients or clients who deny their trauma depression and addiction or all of them together and i just want to add my frustration when applying this process to israel as
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i do believe is as an activist that some measure of acknowledgement and even co-resistance has to come from the setter or colonialist community for the healing process namely the
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decolonization to succeed but to even begin this you need at least to be able to elicit some compassion from the israeli jews to the palestinian plight and this hardly exists do you feel a
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similar problem prevents such a process in canada and again as you are leading the way in showing compassion to to addicts in a society that tends to review them as criminals rather than
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victims maybe your interaction with the state anti-drug policy and the overall cultural and social denial and criminalization of these people by the society at large can also be
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help us to deal with our societies their lack of compassion that i think is is the main hurdle to start a conversation about the denial and because as long as
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israel would be a state of denial in the double meaning of a state of denial i can see no way of ending uh the the violence that israel imposes on
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the palestinians wherever they are well yeah so [Music] canada did receive our family with open arms um and we appreciated it and i didn't know
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what was happening here the same year in my new book i talk about this the same year that we arrived in canada in 1957 as hungarian refugees
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and by the way speaking of refugees [Music] europe is now welcoming with open arms the ukrainian refugees as they should but in the new york times just last
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weekend there was a front page article in the new york times magazine about the same europe had closed its eyes and its arms and its hearts to the middle eastern refugees that european
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policy had created so there's a hypocrisy even in the generosity so yes we were received as refugees in canada anti-communist refugees you know which
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didn't wasn't wasn't entirely irrelevant and but in the same year that i arrived here in british columbia in 57 there was a woman who was then four years old i've met her since then a
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native woman her name is carlene and she was taken to the residential school and the residential schools were places were run by the churches
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where the government mandated that native children be abducted from their families they were not permitted to see their parents their parents were threatened with jail if they even tried to see their kids
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and in his residential schools these kids were abused emotionally sexually physically culturally spiritually and starved as well thousands of them died
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this last summer this day june of 2021 they discovered a group of bodies of young children now this wasn't used to the indigenous
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population they had been talking about these missing children for decades but here was proof and thousands of these bodies were discovered now two weeks before these bodies were discovered there was a poll
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in canada a public opinion poll which found that 70 of canadians said they knew nothing or little about the residential schools which in a certain sense is astonishing
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in another sense it's an artifact to polonanism and denialism now in that same year that arrived in canada there was a four-year-old indigenous woman carlene
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who was taken to residential school she made the mistake of speaking her own language her tribal language the punishment that she had a pin stuck in her tongue and so for a whole hour this
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little girl couldn't put her tongue back in her mouth because she would cut her lips and that's before the sexual abuse began so she was an alcoholic by the time she was nine years old can you imagine
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and of course your grandchildren are now drug addicted now two weeks after these bodies were discovered a prominent canadian
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pseudo-journalist named conrad black who was knighted by the queen lord black lord black writes an article saying that what is what's the big deal about his
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two dead bodies now it's illegal in canada it's illegal to deny the holocaust but it's perfectly legal
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to deny the cultural and and physical genocide of native people that's denial and the denial comes has two basis to it
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first of all if you're the perpetrator and you want to continue to perpetrate then you just have to deny that you're perpetrating that's not where most people come from
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in their denial most people come from the denial um in from sources i think that where there's a confluence of personal history
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and large-scale history societal history so denial happens when to admit the facts is just too painful a lot of people are traumatized in this
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culture a lot more people are traumatized than we realize and for them to be to be aware of how they were hurt by people that love them or mental of
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them is too painful to admit so they're in denial so that what i'm saying is in this culture quite regardless of the history or perpetration of
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genocide people are individually on a large scale psychologically programmed to be in denial about reality of the world
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now when people are psychologically minded to deny that will then support the large-scale historical denial and furthermore there's a kind of passivity that this society engenders in people
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i mean who really wants the earth to be destroyed but what are most people doing about it nothing that's a kind of ingrained eric from the psychologist talked about
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the social character and the social character is implicated to the family of origin but it serves the social purpose of making people fit into the society as the society is structured
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so apart from the personal denial that feeds the social denial there's also this passivity so that you know you ask the average israeli
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or the average canadian or average british person put together three intelligent sentences about the history of palestine they couldn't do it you can ask the irish british person
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who's participated whose country participated in the invasion of iraq with the death of millions you know half a million people at least put together three intelligence sentences on the history of iraq or of
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afghanistan or right now tell me three intelligent sentences about the history of the ukraine in the last 10 years they couldn't do it because there's this
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ingrained passivity that's built into the social character and that then serves the interests of the social political structure that
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is designed to perpetrate because people are in denial and people are passive so here's where the personal psychological feeds into the social and historical
00:33:07
definitely i can recognize it so easily when uh thinking about israel as you know just recently uh an affair i was involved with about uh a horrific massacre that happened in
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1948 and and was denied for many years and naive in a way a naive israeli filmmaker uh was able to to expose the masquerades
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of this massacre which really was the the most important solid evidence for what we have claimed for many many years that this this has happened and he told me now the whole discussion in israel about
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uh the atrocities committed in 1948 would change and i said to him it won't change because even the people he did the documentary film i said to him even the people that you are interviewing who admit uh of
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perpetrating uh the massacre say hey why do you want to talk about it there's no need and secondly uh they lived for many years denying that
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that massacre and it reflects the society's denial of that event so definitely the the kind of connection between the individual
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denial of one owns part uh and accountability on the one hand and the overall i call it orchestrated denial but by the state go hand in hand
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but i think when you talk about the indigenous uh the first nations in canada and the indigenous i also noticed that you're not only uh of course tell us the the horrific
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uh experiences that they had and so on but you also feel as i do when i talk to palestinians that we have a lot to learn from them both in your medical treatment but also in
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your uh uh overall uh uh kind of comprehension of reality and and obviously in canada in particular we can see how decolonization in this respect is uh connected with indigenous rights
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but also because of that with ecology so you you had a dialogue with a group called the indigenous climate action that works on the assumption that ecological disasters and disruptions are
00:35:31
an ongoing uh traumatic event or or even a structure that spends generation and there is a good qual fantastic quote from what i think he's
00:35:43
the founder of ica who says that uh this whole issue of ecology in canada but not only in canada is interwoven she says into colonization in
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the form of modern extraction practices by which i think she means of course uh the way we extract minerals and so on so namely colonization is based on denying the intricate maybe
00:36:08
even the organic relations between identity and our natural surroundings and you told this group and i quote i find it yeah i find it it's here if someone learned how to drop our
00:36:20
arrogance i mean the arrogance of western slash northern culture and opened ourselves to learning what could we learn from you you meaning this particular group and bring us back to
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ourselves and stop this madness is this unlearning and learning help us to decolonize our ecological world so where are we in this dialogue in canada in
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not only telling you know the chronicles of what has been done but respecting this group of people as a group that can teach us how to deal with ecology
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nature and reality well um let me leap up for a moment i'll be right back okay don't leave okay i'm back okay [Music]
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[Laughter] so this is a cedar hat given to me by one of the first nations groups that i've spoken with in canada and and i and i do that a lot and uh
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there's a lot to be learned so um in fact i just spoke to the group yesterday here and uh let me let me tell you a story so in my field medicine um
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[Music] western medicine terrific achievements obviously but it's also hopelessly narrow in its perspective it separates entities that
00:37:50
in real life are inseparable so it separates the mind from the body so when you go to the average physician with a chronic medical problem then they're never going to ask you about your childhood your traumas your
00:38:02
personal relationships how you feel about yourself as a human being your stress is on the job and yet these have everything to do why most people get sick chronically they separate the mind from the body they separate the individual from the environment
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so so that disease is seen as a biological event in an organ that's it now that's not works in reality give me i'll
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give you a couple of examples the more experience of racism a black american woman experiences the greater her risk for asthma indigenous women in canada
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who never used to have any rheumatoid arthritis any autoimmune disease prior to colonization now have six times the rate of rheumatoid arthritis of any other person in canada indigenous
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women do now i'm not going to go into the reasons to that for that but it all has to do with um suppression self-repression um which is imposed by
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um a colonialist [Music] male dominated society the you know the patriarchy so
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now but western medicine doesn't make those connections despite all kinds of evidence so it's not that we don't have the science we have the science we just choose not to look at the science talk about an
00:39:34
ideological blinder now by contrast i was talking to a colleague of mine who's a lakota sioux part liquid sewerage and american physician and psychiatrist and
00:39:48
he said in the lakota tradition when somebody gets sick the whole community gathers and says thank you your illness is manifesting the pathology of the whole community and
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so your healing is our healing now let me tell you from perspective of hard science that's much more scientifically accurate than the split western view
00:40:13
and that's not the only area in which we could learn a lot we could learn a lot learning about resilience i mean dire and and and horrific
00:40:26
as the situation in some of canadian in canada's first nations communities is with the impacts of multi-generational abuse and dire and horrific as the situation
00:40:39
often is in the in palestine i'm sure ilan that you have been as impressed as i have been here in canada but the sheer resilience of these people
00:40:52
with their capacity to survive endure and continue to create and continue to have positive responses even in the face of unbearable oppression
00:41:03
you know i know a woman in jericho who works with well her neck was broken by the israeli army an israeli surgeon operated on her
00:41:17
and helped to save her life but what she does is she does sufi dancing you know the whirling the sufi dervish whirling with palestinian kids who spent months
00:41:31
in these jails not being allowed to see their parents well how the heck do you have that kind of positive energy after your neck is broken i mean you're so perhaps
00:41:43
i mean and she's one of the most lively people that i know and it's the same with a lot of the indigenous people i meet here in canada so we can learn a lot from brazilian about resilience we can learn about the unity of all beings
00:41:55
and and when when an indigenous person think of a river the river is part of them they're part of the river that's a totally different way of relating it you know looking at some object out there
00:42:08
they're actually looking at some entity that is a part of them it's hard to even put it into words but it's a point of view that certainly if we learned from it could save us so
00:42:20
yes we have so much to learn and again if we didn't have these blind spots we would uh open ourselves to wisdom that could really help save the planet
00:42:39
just um do you if if i take it a bit further and thinking about uh the way especially in western societies we dealt we still are dealing
00:42:52
with the kobe 19 crisis and then taking into account uh you you the way you you want you warn us against uh about the risk of uh
00:43:06
uh of basing medicine on biology and chemistry alone and against the conventional rejection of a more holistic approach to illness and the treatment
00:43:19
was as you've just put it that the norm is treating disease as an independent entity an approach that decontextualizes the illnesses from the social cultural
00:43:30
maybe even political environments do you think this is something also that was at the basis the way the western societies and governments dealt with the covet 19 or still are dealing with the
00:43:43
covet 19 or even the world health organization and if it is something that is based on that particular approach that you are challenging can there be another approach
00:43:56
to deal with this uh pandemic that as in the case of ukraine also has these so much hypocrisy and cynicism and manipulation around it as well as of
00:44:09
course a genuine objective a reality of of uh pandemic well it i think it'll take some time for us to really absorb the lessons of the
00:44:21
covet experience but some things are apparent already so um who gets covered who is who's more prone to get caught in britain for one thing it was people
00:44:34
black asian people of color they were more likely to get coveted or to die of it than caucasians well that's not a [Music]
00:44:46
isolated biological fact that's a social fact of who's oppressed and who is far and who's stressed boris johnson the formerly somewhat corcoland
00:45:06
prime minister of yours um was hospitalized as you know he spent time in an icu and he came out he became a weight loss evangelist he says you know because obesity is a
00:45:19
risk factor for kovid but what causes obesity there's been an epidemic of obesity in the western world in fact throughout the world shockingly so
00:45:31
in the last few decades with the spread of neoliberalism so the obesity epidemic is not separate from the oppression and stress that people experience
00:45:43
when economic and social conditions become more challenging but he would never he never he'll never talk about that in his anti-obesity campaign
00:45:55
furthermore if we understood each other not each other if we understood the world from a genuinely global sense then and and knowing that viruses know
00:46:09
no geographical or political boundaries when it came to rolling out the vaccine what we would have done and i've heard i didn't think of this myself i've heard this pointed out though by people opened
00:46:22
my eyes we wouldn't have given vaccine to all the healthy people in all the rich countries we would have inoculated all the vulnerable people all over the world that would have been a far more
00:46:35
effective public health measure but of course it's we have the money we have the power not to mention the fact that governments gave all kinds of money to
00:46:48
the private companies to develop the vaccine but they share none of the profits of it so some of these companies are making a thousand dollars a second with the product that was developed with government money
00:47:02
so that not covered not anything can be separated from the global colonial situation if we didn't have a colonial mentality if we saw somebody in south africa or
00:47:14
india or papua new guinea or latin america as important as we are and as valid members of the community that we're a part of
00:47:26
then we will not make decisions based on privilege we will make decisions based on inclusion and that certainly hasn't happened in this forward such a crisis
00:47:40
not to mention the outrageous amounts of money that the pharmaceutical companies want to charge these poorer countries why don't they just make the pattern available you know everybody i mean are we are we
00:47:52
humanitarians or are we profiteers well yeah we're profiteers which is itself the essence of colonialism and not to mention in israel specifically
00:48:04
they inoculated all the israelis but palestinians that's not our responsibility let them do it themselves yes and i think one of the problems is because because there is a
00:48:20
uh an intricate um explanation here uh above every other problem we have in challenging the narrative that is given to people to
00:48:33
justify these unjust policies is that we don't always have the time span uh and and we don't have the ability to elicit the patience of people to to her to hear
00:48:47
and listen to a more intricate uh explanation and you cannot do these things by sound bites you really need a space for this but this probably is good for another
00:48:59
conversation and i'm aware of our time that is running out and i wanted to to just maybe as a final question if if not i may be able to squeeze another one
00:49:11
but one of the the things that really are impressive in your own biography is uh to not put it in any fine words is your willingness to to
00:49:23
how shall i call it risk lawlessness maybe even prison when you refuse to adhere to policies or instructions not to regulate the administration of drugs to addicts so that they will not resort
00:49:37
to a lethal overdose in case of an abrupt withdrawal or detoxification process and when you were told not to use a certain traditional medicine and
00:49:49
an indigenous one in your clinic most of our students who are part of this network are also activists and and they keep asking themselves how far can they take
00:50:02
their action and activism vis-a-vis the law of the land if you want the regulation or or is there is there a kind of a sense of when you
00:50:15
think it's time to break the law in seemingly democratic society and how far we can go with this because you must have consciously known that you are uh
00:50:29
disobeying if you want a policy or regulation or maybe even even a law in some of the things that you have done uh in vancouver uh so is this something
00:50:41
that you you feel is part of of social activism and uh and our role in in our struggle against all the things we were talking about
00:50:53
denial uh oppression and and learning from the resilience of those who are at the receiving end of these uh colonialist and racist practices it would be
00:51:06
um an over valorization of my own history to say that i've ever really faced any serious threat to my my liberty i was never in that kind of situation uh i don't know what i would have done if i
00:51:20
had been i'd like to think i would have acted on principle but who really knows you know you don't know until you're up against it um i think um what i faced personally is i mean when i
00:51:32
when in 1967 i wrote an article that israel actually started this war to take over the territories i was kicked out of my father's house you know now
00:51:47
to give him credit towards later in his life he came around and he started to see reality you know but so what you face first of all is you have the decision to make
00:51:59
do you want to speak your truth or do you want to maintain your emotional relationships if the truth threatens those relationships
00:52:12
so i think that's an important question for all of us and i i can't tell anybody else what to do but personally i've never been able to shut up about things that i felt were important to speak about including
00:52:25
israel-palestine and that's cost me some relationships and i say well that's that's the price to pay i'm in no position to advise anybody about breaking the law or not there are many inspiring examples
00:52:38
here in canada right now young people are protesting against the further takeover and destruction of native resources forests and so on they're being treated brutally by the police by the
00:52:52
way brutally and the press doesn't report it's not news police brutality is not used in this country the police is valorized and heroized but i i haven't done that myself
00:53:11
a friend of mine who's 76 year old and is what stands up to my eyebrows she's a grandmother and she was arrested for threatening the peace
00:53:25
because she stood on a bridge blocking traffic as a protest against the destruction of native lands so i can't advise any otherwise anybody else because i don't know what i would do if i was confronted with that kind of a
00:53:39
a choice um i think the question we have to keep asking ourselves is uh what is the truth worth to us and uh what are we willing to give up
00:53:51
um in order to serve the truth as we understand it and that's a highly individual question and some people throughout history of course have have given and continue to give
00:54:05
some extraordinary brave answers to that question but i've not been an association myself okay great so we started with the individual and we finished with the individual i can see
00:54:17
that not only question i think the whole books that are addressed to you so we might as well uh start uh getting the audience into our conversation and see what interests them
00:54:30
and not only only us and thank you gabor i really learned so much from it and thank you so much for your patience and attention it's my great pleasure thank you thank you
00:54:43
okay so i'm passing it to the moderators thank you very very much both we will start now the question and answer session
00:54:54
i will start with my own question to gabo in your understanding of trauma you connect trauma to healing agency and action
00:55:07
however the dominant western understanding of trauma medicalizes it associates the victim identity to it and makes it the center around which
00:55:19
disciplines and expertise are built and developed these lead to the weakening of agency of the people who have the most important knowledge that could lead to change
00:55:31
and eventually to the reinforcement of colonization and depression what can we do to intervene in this discourse and dismantle those layers
00:55:43
that limit the force embedded in trauma well so first of all western medicine specifically western psychology more broadly speaking
00:55:57
and western culture even more broadly if it understands trauma at all which mostly doesn't has got a very new review of it [Music] now that narrow view of course
00:56:11
can't be separated from the needs of the society see basically any any any ideology will any any any society
00:56:26
will will adopt a set of assumptions that reflect the interests of the dominant groups now nobody with their their eyes open can deny that
00:56:39
what we call democracy is nothing democratic about it that it's actually controlled very tightly and uh very efficiently really by a propaganda system that's a whole lot more
00:56:51
efficient than the crude propaganda system in communist eastern europe that i grew up with the propaganda system is far more subtle and effective um but at the top there's a group
00:57:03
his interest the system serves now the main institutions of that society whether an education law or medicine will reflect the ideological needs of that of that structure
00:57:20
so it's not just an intellectual debate when you talk about the blindness the blind spots of western medicine it's not just a question of facts versus other facts or
00:57:32
knowledge versus other knowledge it's also [Music] a reflection of an ideology of a top-down ideology so the ideology of trauma is pure victimhood
00:57:45
where the victim has no agency fits in with a society of social control or with a culture of social control so when you say how to dismantle it you're never going to do it on an intellectual level if it was only a
00:57:59
question of intellectual argumentation the debate would have been over decades ago because the facts about trauma are undeniable the reason why a deeper awareness for
00:58:11
trauma doesn't penetrate the medical schools is not just because the facts are not there but because those institutions themselves are traumatizing institutions and many of the
00:58:24
practitioners who come out of them are traumatized people and furthermore the pharmaceutical companies who who profit off the system and whose
00:58:40
funding fuels a lot of the research have no interest in hearing trauma they have an interest in mitigating the effects of trauma
00:58:51
through either psychiatric medications or medicating chronic illnesses that have a traumatic basis so they're not interested in healing they're interested in symptom control
00:59:03
now healing as you imply involves agency on the part of the individual but you can see an activism even you know now heaven forbid that people should
00:59:16
become actually active agents in their own lives i mean never mind in medicine what would that do to the whole social structure so that you're actually talking about challenging not just the
00:59:29
narrow ideological perspectives but the whole social structure that fuels that narrowness so that's a much larger question and my answer is i have no idea how to do it all i do
00:59:42
i mean it's like asking ilan how do you do undo communism in israel pasta and you probably tell you if he knew how to do it he would have done it by now you know all he all he keeps doing is he he keeps
00:59:56
speaking the truth and trusting that with some people that truth will have some traction and that eventually it'll prevail that's all i can do with my view of trauma
01:00:09
so i have no idea how to mentally dismantle anything all i know is how to keep seeing the truth saying the truth is i see it and that's what i'm advising you to do as well without any hope of immediate
01:00:21
results by the way because you might be gray uh like elaine and i before you before you see too much result but you know what at the same time
01:00:35
it's having an impact you know and and more and more people are waking up so that's the positive side thank you very much rami would you like to ask this second question
01:00:49
yes thank you so much as someone who studied psychology i always see a tendency to universalize whatever has been studied in western society and trauma as a construct as a
01:01:01
concept came from the us after the vietnamese war and as a word when we try to translate it for arabic for example it doesn't sting we still have like the literal translation would be
01:01:14
shock so in my work i try to contextualize and focus on the context so i'm curious to see do you think that there is a universal response to trauma that is
01:01:25
common across all all individuals and the second question which you tapped on briefly is when you talked about the indigenous communities in canada and how they
01:01:37
respond to their trauma and they have resilience practices what can we learn from those practices that can be adapted by the psychiatry discourse or
01:01:49
the healing practice without being co-opted those are my questions thank you well as to the first one um what i can tell you is just last week
01:02:02
my already published books were bought for translation to arabic an arabic publisher wants to bring them out this is an addiction this is on chronic health chronic illness mind body unity it's on attention
01:02:16
deficit disorder it's on child raising and all four of them will not be published in arabic my new book the myth of normal has already been bought for arabic translation and not to be too personal about it but i
01:02:29
have to take some heart from the fact that my books have not been published in 30 languages in 30 countries you know 30 languages actually what does that say uh it says something with the
01:02:42
universality of trauma and the nature of human experience now that universality is refracted through certain cultures there'll be different cultural
01:02:54
manifestations but the fundamental underlying humanity in a human experience it's universal and i get that response from all over the world so they know that it's universal which
01:03:08
what else do we expect we're the same you know i mean you can it's like asking if you take uh a german shepherd and treated badly how is that different from treating a poodle badly well it's not that
01:03:21
different even though the pool and the german shepherd look very different you know so um there's a universality to trauma underneath the cultural differences
01:03:33
as to what we can learn uh from indigenous cultures well the biggest learning is a greeting that is used in canada i think in the u.s as well but indigenous people
01:03:45
they say all my relations and all my relations means all my relations that means not just all my relatives it means all my ancestors the earth the rocks the sun the stars
01:04:01
everything like we're all connected they're saying the greeting is we're all connected but that little lesson alone little it's a huge lesson that would transform healing if we saw all the connections
01:04:12
when in a when you go to a sweat lodge a sweat lodge is a tent um in which there's a pit and there's the they drag in hot rocks and you sit there
01:04:26
you know and and in a close circle and they're bringing there's a pit and they bring in these fiery hot rocks red hot rocks and they pour water over them and then
01:04:38
steam and you really sweat it's called the sweat lodge it's a transformative healing experience but when they drag in the the rocks they say here come the grandmothers and the grandfathers
01:04:51
so the rocks are the grandmothers and the grandfathers aren't they don't become from the earth you know but what if we understood that
01:05:01
that's the teaching all my relations thank you so much natalie would you like to take the next question from yeah thanks amy so the next question is for both ilan and gabor
01:05:18
um it is from antalya eastman who's asking so i must i'm i'm a psychotherapist from london and have found that there's a distinct lack of
01:05:29
compassion from white people from the uk in and outside of the therapy room towards the experiences of racialized people save often for european jews if we can understand this from a
01:05:43
perspective of trauma and denial how do you think this can be changed on both an individual and social level well i've been speaking for a while so how about letting you know i'll let you rest for a second
01:05:58
um that's what i i'm sure that this is a very uh accurate description uh not only uh in the therapy room but also in the way
01:06:10
people are represented in the media in academia in the public discourse in the public domain uh this is why i think and this is what we are doing in the
01:06:23
decolonization network in exeter we definitely do not exempt britain from discussion of colonizers uh colonizes society or societies of
01:06:35
colonizers namely we don't think that the political decolonization of the empire back in the mid 1950s or 1960 meant that britain was
01:06:48
decolonized as a society the treatment of minorities or former subject of the empire uh all indicate that this this is a racialized
01:07:01
uh society uh that uh is still practicing old colonialist attitudes uh when dealing with uh let's call it non-white people although
01:07:14
this is not the best way of of of defining it and i think that there is a denial in britain uh about this kind of
01:07:25
racism that is still institutional uh is uh sometimes visible sometimes less visible we we see it in every walk of life and and
01:07:38
sometimes the way that we are dealing with britain as a post-colonial uh society uh absolves us as as people who live in
01:07:50
britain from realizing uh how much of the racial and colonialist attitudes are still uh with us it's it's like i remember i think doubler even said it to me that
01:08:03
if he would be invited in palestine to talk about post-trauma he would say wait a minute there's no post traumas yet there is so many people still experiencing the trauma itself or or
01:08:16
when some scholars talk about uh use post-colonialism to describe certain areas including palestine and britain and you say wait a minute we're not yet in a post-colonial a reality in
01:08:31
many so many parts of of of our society so as gabo said i think our role first of all is to expose it to show it because it is covered with certain narratives even with academic
01:08:45
scaffolding and definitely media coverage so we need to to expose it to show it and and then uh go back to questions of resilience and
01:08:57
challenge of how to change it of course not as individuals but as social movements who believe that they have both the agency and the power at least to
01:09:08
to begin changing this uh racial reality that i'm sure you are experiencing both in your therapy treatment and we experience it in the academia and the media and other walks
01:09:22
of life there is an american black psychologist named dr kenneth hardy who talks about what he calls the assaulted sense itself and this is where the
01:09:36
racialized person takes on the view of the racializer now i have it in this interesting so that you know people start to see themselves as disempowered and inferior i've i've had an interesting experience
01:09:50
with that because in hungary i was i was a jew and in eastern europe if you're a jew you know that you're a jew there's kind of a visceral historical otherness
01:10:03
that that is bestowed upon jews in eastern europe certainly was when i was growing up i was bullied for being a true i remember a friend of mine coming to my defense once saying leave him alone it's not his fault that
01:10:16
he's jewish you know it's a fault but it's not his fault he can't help it then i come to canada and all of a sudden i'm a white man because
01:10:29
for all the complaining about anderson is in canada it's trivial compared to what it is in eastern europe and certainly trivial when it comes to the anti-indigenous prejudice in this
01:10:40
country so really i become part of the the dominant group and what's interesting for me is how quickly when one becomes
01:10:52
when one joins the privileged stratus strata stratum how quickly one forgets what it's like to be on the other side so that's i start taking on the attitudes to some degree of the
01:11:05
dominant uh patriarchal figure that this society allows me to be i just wanted to share that i have nothing to add to ilan's words i i think
01:11:22
it is the case of um personal refusal to accept that assaulted sense of self to to accept that uttered view of yourself
01:11:36
and and to stand up for yourself whenever you need to and then on a larger level it's a question of social activism and truth-telling and
01:11:47
organizing and it's going to be a long struggle yet because uh it's not a post-colonial society it's iran says you know the forms of fellowism have changed but the essence of it has not
01:12:04
thank you so much we have another question uh from astra ali as she asked as we are viewing in ukraine as we have throughout history uh the uk has been rewriting history to
01:12:18
uphold a many a manufactured noble tradition to hide its brutality how do you think we can find fight against this rewriting that's a question for both of
01:12:28
you uh whoever would like to start first well i think from my point of view you've already answered it um yeah i don't i don't have anything else to add to it it's a good question but i think we've been talking about it really throughout
01:12:44
yeah yeah i just said asha one thing that you know there are genealogies that are being taught and constructed and this is the big question we are
01:12:55
pointing to the academia is the academia mission statement is to challenge these genealogies which are by themselves are act of violence
01:13:07
uh and and justify violence in the past and in the present or are we as academics uh continue to to rehash the same genealogies and narratives because we care about our careers
01:13:21
and the relationship we have with the powers that be and i think as gabriel said it's it's an individual decision how far you're going to challenge it how far what price are you willing to
01:13:33
pay for challenging it and if you are in the comfort zone how much of it how much of the comfort are you willing to give up in order to uh to be able to uh to change to challenge uh this
01:13:47
particular both rewriting of history and the accentuation or perpetuation of a certain narrative that definitely is not based on facts or an objective
01:14:00
reality but is serving a certain uh status quo uh that uh uh one wants to should challenge because it is an unjust one
01:14:12
and and in our case we're talking about a race a racist one and a colonialism thank you both both the next question is so i just want to add something here that it's tobacco and and there's noam
01:14:33
chomsky who ilan and i are both i'm sure um admire uh he said once that the responsible intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies and he said
01:14:46
this at least may seem enough of a tourism to pass over without comment not so however for the modern intellectual it is not at all that obvious and and so that
01:14:58
you know intellectuals you think would expose lies and tell the truth but really for many of them it's the other way around and they don't even know it because they was ideologically blind it's not that it's even deliberate in
01:15:10
many cases it's just ideology driven they're addicted to it sorry to interrupt no thank you so the next question i think it's mainly for gabor and it's related
01:15:24
to the word uh resilience it is from joanna daggett who's asking so she's saying as a youth worker in minneapolis i have experienced the word resilience
01:15:36
as country as contributing to passivity among white folks who leverage that framework my young people are seen as admirally admirably resilience resilient
01:15:50
in the face of state-sanctioned racial violence and decades of historical violence and trauma but it seems to perpetuate a state of suspended or among white folks like myself
01:16:02
instead of creating an activated critique that my young folks have been forced to survive and even thrive in a set of conditions that us white folks would never accept for ourselves
01:16:15
how do we reframe and redefine a resilience framework for activism for not accepting these sets of conditions for anyone so
01:16:27
it's a very subtle question resilience like any other word depends on context and not just context but also intention so who's using it for what purpose so uh
01:16:40
i could for example um beat you over the head and exploit you and tell myself should be okay if she's very resilient which will allow me to keep you beating you over the head and keep exploiting you and i think that's what the question
01:16:54
remains is that sometimes we say the young people are resilient as an excuse for not doing anything about what's happening to them so that's the misuse and every word
01:17:08
i wrote like truth i took that god a word like god a word like love they cannot be co-opted and be used to exploit people or to
01:17:22
blind them so that's one use of the word resilience this is an excuse to ignore um racialized economized
01:17:36
socialized injustices on the other hand it's a good word you know it describes reality you know it describes the capacity of human beings to
01:17:48
bounce back from some very painful and near devastating experiences and and resilience speaks to their capacity with the human psyche
01:18:01
to heal almost after no matter what kind of disaster and and and and trauma so it's a good word but then the question becomes not just
01:18:13
oh yeah they're resilient but how do we support that resilience how do we prevent events from happening that hurt people in the first place if they are hurt what can we do socially or
01:18:25
psychologically or medically or personally or policy wise to support that resilience in that second case resilience is no longer an excuse but a call to action
01:18:38
so it all depends on how we're using it and for with what intention okay thank you so much i think we have time for one more question maybe two um
01:18:57
[Music] the next question is from uh denise monzani the russia i'm a graduate anthropology student from brazil during my field work in east jerusalem
01:19:12
even though it wasn't the object of my study i couldn't escape observing serious mental health issues for instance a woman who was paranoid she couldn't relax inside her own house
01:19:24
because she felt she was being surveilled all the time i kept wondering about the relationship between her individual health and her environment my question to gabor is what knowledge or insights regarding
01:19:37
healing in the mental health field could illuminate also social processes or bring about social healing well on the obvious level for a palestinian
01:19:51
if that's what we're talking about here to believe that she's under surveillance by hostile forces is not entirely paranoid um it's just a fact
01:20:02
but i understand what you're saying she's talking about it in an unreasonable overwrought way in which case it's uh outcome of childhood trauma so sometime in her life
01:20:15
she was small and and she was watched and controlled by people that did her harm that traumatic experience then translates it
01:20:27
to itself into a belief about the world right now even if there's some accuracy to that belief in which in the political sense of course there is that belief in her case leads here to
01:20:42
isolate herself and to feel fear all the time in a way that most palestinians despite the occupation do not feel so in that case it's not just an outcome of
01:20:56
political reality but it's an outcome of a childhood trauma projected onto a larger social level she's just so she needs somebody who can actually help her deal with her
01:21:09
trauma so that her understanding of who's surveying her becomes a realistic one rather than a projection of inner terror caused by childhood hurt
01:21:30
thank you um i think we might have a ques another time for one question but actually i wanted to ask if ilan maybe you have more thoughts on the question of resilience
01:21:43
that was asked before yes and and i'm glad that rami is one of our co-hosts because rami is writing a phd on the arabic term for resilience sumud
01:21:56
which became a kind of a concept and one of the things he shows in what i'm sure will become a very successful doctorate is that mood resilience even within the palestinian context has
01:22:10
more than one meaning there's a different way a resilient is understood in a refugee camp in lebanon and how resilience is understood by a palestinian citizen of the state of israel or how resilient is understood by
01:22:23
someone under siege uh in gaza and i think that um at least from a sociological point of view i'm not sure from psychological point of
01:22:35
view but from a sociological point of view we are beginning which i think is very good we are beginning to dim the difference between resistance and resilience
01:22:47
we are not regarding resilience as something totally different from resistance your very resilience in the face of what you know are the
01:22:58
objectives of the oppressor become a resistance namely if the oppressor in this case israel wants to dislocate you to dispossess you
01:23:10
it is both resilience and resistance to stay food to be able to stay food it doesn't so you are not resisting by you know raising arms or you are actively confronting
01:23:23
the military power of the oppressor you are dealing with resilience through that kind of daily existence but even more so which is really
01:23:36
encouraging and i hope we can finish on an encore an optimistic note this conversation i find it inspiring that the palestinian society at least in historical palestine
01:23:48
which is half i think more than 50 percent are under 18 of that society the younger palestinian society see resilience also by insisting on having normal life
01:24:01
of having pleasure of having joy of not uh excusing everything on the occupation and the oppression and by enabling to
01:24:14
have a certain sense of normality in the face of an adversity and uh oppression that wants to deny them the normality so i think it's it's a huge
01:24:26
project that would give new meanings to anti-colonialist resistance in palestine uh in the 21st century we could not rely anymore just about this romantic and
01:24:39
important phase of the kind of anti-colonialist struggles we saw in the 1970s and 1980s not only in palestine but everywhere so so i think this is a huge
01:24:52
uh a project for for having a very nuanced understanding of both resistance and resilience as part of the challenge to unfortunately i say it is an israeli
01:25:06
jew for a project that is still intent on destroying palestine and the palestinians thank you so much both i can see the time so we won't ask the last question that
01:25:23
we thought we might be able to ask but i just want to say again thank you so much for this incredibly important conversation i know that i will definitely listen to the recording um
01:25:36
again um i don't know um if you want to add something i have nothing to add thank you so much i really enjoyed the conversation and i learned a lot thank you for the audience
01:25:50
for the beautiful questions thank you all yeah thank you thank you so much yes thank you have a great day have a
01:26:05
good day wherever you are people thank you bye bye for the office bye everyone thank you hi everyone
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