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Our Bearing Witness to Genocide work is grounded in our Peacemaker Community Three Tenets:
- Not Knowing – letting go of fixed ideas about ourselves, others and the world
- Bearing Witness – the practice of bearing witness to things as they are, all the joy and suffering in our world
- Loving Action – effective, compassionate and sustainable action, bringing healing and transformation to a troubled world
Based on our experience of working in prisons and jails, juvenile facilities and on the streets, our experience in facilitating transformational trainings and deep shadow* work, and our experience of bearing witness to genocide at Auschwitz-Birkenau and other concentration camps and genocide sites, we have developed a working hypothesis that the roots of most all the violence plaguing our world, from domestic violence, to urban crime, to religious and sectarian strife, to war and genocide, are the same -- internalized trauma and shame resulting from child neglect, child abuse, poverty, systemic oppression, racism, structural violence and all the ways in which people, whether as children or adults, experience a lack of love, nurturing, inclusion, and empowerment.
Of course there are many more apparently direct causes of conflict like social and economic injustice, religious sectarianism, over-population, scarcity of resources and so on. However, we would would hypothesize that it is the trauma and shame induced toxicity swirling in our human culture that cause us to meet these challenges with violence. We do not believe that such violence is innate to human nature. To the contrary, we believe in the basic goodness and innate dignity and value of all human beings and all of life. Rather we are suggesting that the global pandemic of violence in our world is caused by a virus that is circulating within our global human culture, a virus of internalized trauma and shame. We are also suggesting that this viral pandemic of violence needs to be addressed with the same level of common purpose and global cooperation that has been successful in eradicating or at least controlling other maladies like small pox, polio and typhus.
Marshall Rosenberg, the international peacemaker and founder of Nonviolent Communication (NVC), asserts that we live in a perpetuate a shame based culture and that our very language is embedded with shaming constructs. Our conventional and dominant means for acculturating our children into whatever societal values, mores and belief systems we buy into is shaming. We reward the desired behaviors and shame the undesired behaviors. And as we know from cultural anthropology, sociology and other disciplines many of the social constructs reinforced in this way are purely arbitrary within a particular cultural and to not have cross-cultural agreement or validity. Nonetheless, violating the social construct is a sure fire invitation to shaming, ostracizing and even death. We have to become more enlightened in raising our children and find non-shaming ways of inviting them into a desired set of societal values and cultural mores.
In addressing the terrible history and present reality of genocide in our human culture and its underlying roots described above, we feel the first step is to bear witness to the awful reality of this most egregious and abhorrent form of mass violence. By creating a safe and powerful vehicle and container for participants to take a deep plunge into not knowing and bearing witness at Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Rwanda and other genocide sites, we are facilitating the beginnings of a deep process of transformation that allows us to move beyond seeing this violence as "other" and to directly dealing with the victim and perpetrator archetypes and energies operating in the unconscious (shadow) structures of our own personalities and conditioning. We believe that the path of transformation that will address this virus of shame-based violence in our human culture goes directly through the human shadow, and requires each of us to do our own shadow work so that we can come together as intentional communities of practice and witnessing and loving action to address our cultural and societal shadows. As has been said, "The only way out is through."
*shadow: In Jungian psychology , the shadow or "shadow aspect" is a part of the unconscious mind consisting of repressed weaknesses, shortcomings, and instincts. It is one of the three most recognizable archetypes , the others being the anima and animus . "Everyone carries a shadow," Jung wrote, "and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is." (Wikipedia)
It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses- and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible that he should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster's body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost. Having a dark suspicion of these grim possibilities, man turns a blind eye to the shadow-side of human nature.
- Carl Jung, "On the Psychology of the Unconscious" (1912). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. P.35
If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts. He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do this or that, they are wrong, and they must be fought against. He lives in the "House of the Gathering." Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.
- Carl Jung, "Psychology and Religion" (1938). In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. P.140
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