Trigger Warnings by Jeff Sparrow

Author:Jeff Sparrow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL000000, POL042020, PHI019000, POL046000, POL008000, SOC022000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2018-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Trauma and trigger warnings

The growing conviction on the left that ordinary people were the problem rather than the solution manifested itself in many forms. One significant expression of smug politics involved an emphasis on the need for psychological protection for the oppressed, something that made political struggle — and especially mass political struggle — innately dangerous. This understanding of trauma spurred a variety of phenomena — from trigger warnings to safe spaces — that became entwined with culture war more generally.

To understand these specific issues, it is useful to look at changing notions of trauma, a history itself profoundly shaped by politics.

In his book Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters argued that while terrible events invariably left psychic traces, the forms those took were very different across cultures and throughout history. He discussed, in particular, the after-effects of military combat.

‘There is no doubt that soldiers often come back from battle with psychological as well as physical injuries,’ Watters wrote, ‘[and that] the fear and horror of direct combat can clearly damage the psyche of men and women. But the medical records of war veterans show that the manifestation of the injury is always tied up with cultural beliefs contemporaneous to the time.’1

Considerable evidence exists that individuals from different cultures react to traumatic experiences in ways that deviate from the standard Western list of expected symptoms. Female Salvadoran refugees speak of a sensation they call calorias, a feeling of intense heat in their body, while Cambodian refugees, distressed by their inability to perform the correct rituals for the dead, describe visits by vengeful spirits. A study of war trauma in Afghanistan, by contrast, has recorded reactions described as asabi, a type of nervous anger, and fisha-e-bala, the sensation of internal pressure.

The current understandings of trauma, including those that shaped political strategies on the left, arose from developments in American society in the 1970s. In his history of military psychiatry, Ben Shephard identified, in particular, the Vietnam War as ‘help[ing] to create a new “consciousness of trauma” in Western society’.2

Ironically, the US went into Vietnam confident that it could protect its soldiers from the psychological symptoms experienced in previous conflicts. Unlike, say, the men of the Great War, American troops in Vietnam weren’t expected to endure prolonged bombardments in trenches, but were rotated through relatively short tours, with the so-called Salmon program placing a psychologist in every combat battalion.

For a while, psychological injuries remained very, very low — well below rates in Korea and World War II. As late as 1970, an American medical researcher argued that ‘psychiatric casualties need never again become a major cause of attrition in the United States military in a combat zone’. Yet a subsequent study revealed that by 1988, 479,000 veterans were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Though it was rarely acknowledged, the direct-politics campaign against the Vietnam War in America also resonated deeply within the military itself — including in Vietnam. In 1969, 1,300 active-duty GIs put their names to a huge anti-war message in

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.