Trauma
Trauma, horrible as it seems, can and is being leveraged in order to influence. The Civil Rights movement appealed to the terrible suffering engendered by lynch mobs and the daily barrage of economic hardship and microaggressions faced by Black Americans. Brexit drew from the perception of older, poorer, less educated Brits outside of wealthy urban centres that their way of life had been erased by globalist forces. Left-wing protest group Antifa drew support from trans and LGBTQ people who saw the Western establishment as creating an unsafe environment for them to live their lives.
If cultures are defined by their history, the hardships inflicted by others shape them more ferociously than any other factor. Levers are emotive, and nothing is more emotive than trauma. The experience of pain coupled with the feeling of helplessness sears into our memory so we can stay alert and ensure it never happens again.
Trauma is currently a buzzword in psychology as applied to our individual experience. People use it to make sense of their life story, and of how this impacts how they feel and behave in the here and now. An interesting feature of trauma is its subjectivity: out of a cohort of people that experience an adverse event, only a small portion will remember it as traumatic. If you ask someone who sees themselves as traumatised, they will inevitably pin it on a specific precipitating event, but others that also experienced the same event will not be traumatised. Trauma isn’t just an artefact of hardship – it’s formed by memory, and the stories that our memories tell. Cultural trauma works in exactly this way too.
According to our own cultural background and politics, we may find some traumas more personally compelling and emotive than others. If my family is Jewish, the Holocaust will loom over our history. If my family is Palestinian, it will be the Nakba, or recent events in Gaza. If we feel hostile towards a culture – if we, for example, dislike Serbs and blame them for committing genocide in the 1990s – we may not take their traumas seriously. A battle with the Ottomans in 1389 will seem like a weird and alien cultural hangup.
It doesn’t matter that trauma is subjective, though, or whether you agree about the way in which the event is being described, because the lived experience is what shapes a culture. The feeling of having been oppressed, harmed, violated, weakened is what counts. Trauma can, therefore, seem epistemically solid or shaky to an outsider, and be in the distant or recent past, but it will be valid so long as there is cultural experience of it.
Understanding core traumas can make sense of elements of a culture’s political identity today. The Mongol invasion decimated cities like Kiev and Ryazan, killed swathes of the population, and imposed an oppressive system of financial extortion that stunted Russian political and economic development for over two centuries. Stories from the Russian Primary Chronicle portrayed the devastation as a divine punishment or a test of faith. Later accounts of Russian history looking back on the time described Kievan Rus culture as fundamentally disrupted, so that what came after the Mongols was profoundly different to what came before. Aside from the suffering and loss of life, the Mongol domination humiliated the Russian people. They learned that they needed strong leaders to ensure it never happened again – and the salience of this traumatic learning was only increased in the face of a later invasion by Poland. They also learned that they could be resilient in the face of extreme hardship. Russians were tough survivors, for whom pain was to be expected and endured. Among them were strong, cunning leaders. Nevsky, a prince who cooperated with the Mongols to maintain relative autonomy and focused on resisting Western incursions, became a symbolic figure of pragmatic leadership: when life is hard, we have to pick our battles, and a leader who understands that will do well.
When trying to win Russian hearts and minds, we need to understand how past hardship has created a preference for symbols of strength. The high walls and towers of the Kremlin were built and rebuilt multiple times throughout history to serve as a symbol of Russia’s strength and resilience against invasions. Icons from the Russian Orthodox Church, which helped maintain Russian cultural identity during Mongol rule, became symbols of endurance and continuity in the face of outside domination.
The Nakba, meaning “catastrophe” in Arabic, is the name Palestinians give to the mass displacement of their people during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and is central to Palestinian identity. Palestinians were forced out of their homes and off their land, creating a rupture that transformed their identity from people who lived off their land into a stateless population. The memory of the event unifies the Palestinian diaspora across the world. Pro-Israeli histories might tell a different version of events, in which a similar number of Jews were expelled from Arab lands at the time, and Israel was invaded the day after its founding and hence fought back – but this doesn’t matter. We are trying to understand the Palestinian perspective, not to fact-check it.
Today, Palestinian cultural figures and political leaders, as well as numerous high-profile supporters in the Arab and Western worlds, act as “carriers” of the trauma, ensuring that it stays at the centre of Palestinian national consciousness and framing it as a foundational moment in the Palestinian identity. The Nakba is not just seen as a historical event but as an ongoing process. Every act of aggression from Israel, as viewed by Palestinians, ties back into it, feeding a narrative of continuing victimhood and resistance: the levelling of Gaza after October 7th, the exploding pagers in Lebanon, whatever comes next.
This is harnessed by external actors like Iran, who use the Palestinian cause to symbolise the cruelty and aggression of Israel and the West. It is also harnessed by other anti-Western forces, such as Russia and China, who can boost Western social media content that views the West as complicit in a genocide of Palestinian people, sowing discord and distrust. Hamas’s strategy of locating military facilities under critical civilian infrastructure like schools and hospitals meant that any Israeli attacks would maximise Palestinian civilian suffering and feed the trauma for a home and foreign audience. This has been an enormously powerful influence operation in its own right.
Russia and Palestine are two very distinctive geopolitical situations, but cultural trauma can exist as a set of ongoing grievances from the perception of other forms of oppression. Ethnic minorities who have experienced racism, class or caste groups who feel economically marginalised, women or gender minorities whose voices have been shut out by patriarchy – all of these experiences can translate into trauma narratives.
When we get stuck in culture war topics, we can rush to check the facts without entering the experience of parties who feel very differently about them. Mapping out their grievances as cultural traumas can help us understand them better, and understand the levers those traumas offer to external actors seeking to disrupt our body politic.
