Gaza has become a prophetic image of the apocalyptic future: the senseless destruction, the rubble, the rampaging gangs – including a nation’s army; the sadism, the cynicism, the suffering of families, world leaders who are ga-ga or fascist… it becomes a site of trauma (overwhelming stress) having to be processed (or otherwise) by the global community.

Appropriate then, that I should happen to come upon a book about trauma (Creating Sanctuary, toward the evolution of sane societies, by Sandra L. Bloom), and find the following highly political statements:

‘It is a fundamental and absolute moral responsibility that we bear witness to the pain and suffering that is all around us and that we join together to liberate the human body, mind and soul from the wrack of trauma re-enactment that is stretching our social body to the limit of endurance.’

 ‘We are basically compassionate and social creatures but abandonment and suffering can twist us up. People who have lost their way can make terrible decisions, whether they live on the streets shooting up, whether they run corporations or whether they run for Congress. It is up to the rest of us to hold them accountable and stop the madness.’

‘… do we rise above primitive biological drives and instead come together, bonded by reason and a desire to seek greater meaning in what has happened and seize this opportunity to transform this tragedy into a heightened state of social consciousness, finding the courage to blaze new trails on the road to social harmony?’

‘Our existing structures no longer adequately hold us. We lack methods to solve problems that are global, interconnected, ecological and biopsychosocial. We lack an alternative vision for the future. It is impossible for an old paradigm to be overturned until a new paradigm is born.’

‘What does it mean to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Basically, civilisation needs a new operating system and new programmers and we need it within a few decades.’

‘How do we create environments now that are truly supportive to life? With slow and laborious efforts, fitful starts and many stumbles, there are people out there in every discipline who are struggling to find and define a new way of being, of learning, of acting, of working, of playing, of healing in the world. Now we need to reach out and find each other in order to create a community of care, of concern, of commitment.’

Of course the psychiatrist is absolutely right, but how does the revolution occur? How is the madness stopped? How are they held accountable? There are people and groups defining something new but they are small and the task of them reaching out and finding one another and then reaching out to the rest of society is a big one given the tight time frame. At this stage the IDF would appear stronger than the psychiatric sanctuary or the protest march or the sit in or the flotilla or the national strike. The flotilla was resonant for it brought those kidnapped into closer proximity to the Palestinian experience. National strikes ring alarum bells, but … there is a further issue. As Naomi Klein has pointed out, the elite have no positive vision, they are envisioning the death of civilisation as we know it. That is their programme and woe to anyone who attempts to establish a more benign operating system.

Within the trauma model the task of healing involves the functional self and the traumatised self, gathering and embracing the traumatised fragments with compassion and understanding in order for integration to take place.

I don’t know yet how whether that translates into a model of political action. At Kōtuku we have been on a humble political journey. It began with a some elderly activists constructing a timeline of campaigns we had been involved in and realising that since 2000 things had become incoherent, with theory breaking down. We then tried updating the Communist Manifesto, that most potent of 19th century political tracts which led us to similar conclusions to those of the trauma author. Different spaces, same conclusion: the need for revolution, for a reprogramming of the species.