Ghosts of Empire: inheriting healing - part 2
Last post i discussed how violence and colonial projects erased identities and rituals of healing, leading to cycles of trauma and domination that we have inherited globally. i also discussed how thinkers like Frantz Fanon believed that violence was necessary for overthrowing oppressive regimes and for liberation movements but this violence had its own impact and consequences for both parties.
There's this joke on the clock app that goes 'the only thing i inherited from my parents is trauma'. Part internet humour, part lived reality. There used to be a time where it mattered immensely what you left onward, if not as legacy then at least as meaningful material sustenance for the next generation. i wonder if we could not also consider the work we do on ourselves, and collectively, as steps towards the healing inheritance we should be creating for our children and future generations. But first we need to examine our empathy gaps.
If trauma becomes the foundation for new oppression, then understanding how we've been trained not to feel becomes crucial to any liberation strategy.
Eyes Wide Shut
Of course now we are facing something Fanon could not have imagined: a level of violence so extreme and relentless, but equally streamed across our screens in real time. For years now we have been watching children pulled from rubble, parents carrying children's bodies in plastic bags because there are no more burial cloths. We've watched aid workers killed, journalists reporting their own family member's deaths and doctors operating under phone lights without anaesthesia.
This is unprecedented in human history. Not the violence itself, but our collective witnessing of it. Previous genocides could hide in the dark, only brought to light by the stories of survivors. This one streams in 4K. What will it mean for us, to process this much death, cruelty, and trauma. We carry Gaza in our pockets. We watch the social media feeds of people we have come to know as they stop posting, their accounts go silent, their last words archived in a digital tomb. We watch IDF soldiers commit heinous acts of cruelty - from sexual violence to shooting off limbs - while telling us they are fighting against terrorists. As if hungry civilians carry some unmatched threat against armed soldiers.
This is a new kind of wound - not the direct bombardment of people, but the secondary scarring of helplessly witnessing it. We develop what psychologists might call moral injury: the deep soul damage that comes from participating in or witnessing acts that violate moral beliefs. Except we're not just witnessing - we're complicit. Our tax money funds it. Our workplaces that print Pride paraphernalia one month, spend the rest of the time asking us not to solicit political material in the workplace. Our politicians enable it. Our media manufactures consent for it. It's the topic that makes power shuffle in its seat hoping to look away until it's over. And for years now we watched people begging for help we cannot give, except to amplify their voices into a void that swallows screams.
Some of us cope by scrolling faster, numbing ourselves to stay functional. Others become hypervigilant, unable to look away, checking for updates obsessively as if our witnessing alone could keep someone alive. We fragment - part of us at work, at dinner, laughing with friends, while another part remains in Gaza, counting the dead. This splitting is its own trauma - the guilt of normal life continuing while people are buried alive.
But for some, there isn't any guilt. They've avoided the topic successfully so as to think of it as distant and unrelated to their lives. They’ve cultivated an online and offline presence of not seeing, of choosing not to see, of being able to ignore. And that is something i want to address.
The casual ease with which Israel attacked Iran, and the way the media reported on it - reveals the severity of our brainwashing - they didn't even bother to write new copy, borrowing phrases directly lifted from the devastation of Iraq. Every millennial grew up with these mantras about that part of the world: "WMDs," "45-minute warning," "axis of evil," "regime change," "they only understand force," "surgical strikes," "human shields," "terror tunnels," "ticking time bomb."
Netanyahu has literally been warning that Iran is "3-5 years from nuclear weapons" since 1992. In 1995, he told the US Congress Iran would have the bomb by 1999. In 2002, he testified to Congress that "there is no question whatsoever" that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons - then pivoted seamlessly to warning about Iran. In 2009: "Iran is 1-2 years away." In 2012, the cartoon bomb at the UN. In 2015, 2018, 2023 - the same warnings, same timelines, same existential dread.
They simply dusted off old press releases, swapped country names, and pressed play on the same manufactured hysteria about existential threats and ticking clocks. In some cases the exact same lines about Iran have been recycled from Netanyahu for decades, it's as lazy as it is diabolical.
Truthfully, there has been a long history of desensitising the West towards the humanity and suffering of brown bodies, particularly in the Middle East. The same forces that severed Europeans from their ancestral cultures have continued that work - training entire societies to disconnect from empathy toward certain populations. The 20+ year 'War on Terror' was also a war on our collective capacity to feel - a deliberate continuation of the trauma conditioning that makes domination possible.
We were taught to view death through the abstraction of drone footage, where human beings became "heat signatures" and wedding parties became "terrorist gatherings." The media perfected a grammar of distancing: "collateral damage," "surgical strikes," "enhanced interrogation."
Every euphemism a small training in numbness.
Every pixelated video of a building exploding, scrubbed clean of the screams inside.
This is the deeper war - not just for territory or resources, but for our attention and empathy. They need us numb. They need us scrolling past death between coffee orders. They need us to accept that this is simply how the world works, that brown bodies in the Middle East exist in a permanent state of being about-to-be-bombed, that their children matter less than our comfort in not thinking too hard about where our taxes go.
Hollywood conscripted our imaginations, flooding screens with Arab villains who were never fathers, never lovers, never children themselves - just bodies to be eliminated for the hero's journey. That ridiculous yellow filter on any story taking place east of Europe as if they exist in some other world. News segments reduced entire civilisations to statistics scrolling beneath commercials. We learned to hear "14 killed in Baghdad" the way we hear traffic reports - background noise to our morning coffee.
The coloniser had to be trained not to see.
This desensitisation was deliberate architecture. It took think tanks and focus groups, embedded journalists and curated imagery. It required the constant dehumanisation not just of combatants but of entire populations. We were taught that their tears meant less, their deaths counted differently, their futures mattered only as potential dangers to our own. This desensitisation is itself a form of collective trauma - the systematic severing of our natural human responses to suffering. Just as colonising powers once had to train settlers not to see indigenous humanity, modern empire requires training entire populations not to feel. The machinery that once made Europeans forget their own cultures now makes us forget our shared humanity.
Fanon wrote about the "North African Syndrome" - how French society refused to see Arab suffering as real, how pain in brown bodies was dismissed as exaggeration or performance. He documented how colonialism required this psychic numbing, this learned inability to recognise the colonised as fully human. The coloniser had to be trained not to see.
That training clearly worked. It still works.
Today, it lives on in the deafening silence around the genocide in Congo - a conflict that has killed over six million people, displaced millions more, and continues in slow motion beneath the radar of global outrage. Why the silence? Because the violence feeds the machine. Congo’s coltan, cobalt, and rare earth minerals power the smartphones we scroll with, the electric cars we greenwash with, the servers that train the AI we call ‘neutral.’ Companies like Apple, Tesla, Samsung, Glencore, and Huawei rely on this extraction. So does the entire green tech industry. Western governments, NGOs, and media institutions look away, not because they don’t know - but because acknowledgment would implicate them. This genocide is taking place out of sight.
But something’s shifting. Palestine is a different story.
Here we are presented with this opportunity to break the cycle. What we're witnessing with Gaza could become the collapse of this carefully constructed numbness. Despite every effort by power to make us look away - the banned words, the skewed coverage, the social media suppression - we cannot unsee. The very technologies meant to distract us have become windows into Gaza. Here we have a moment between the brainrot and siloed algorithmic feeds, to consider why we keep accepting and paying for this violence.
Gaza is a crack in the machinery. Perhaps it was the phones - every Palestinian a witness, a journalist, a recorder of their own humanity. Perhaps it was the children, speaking perfect English, pleading directly to us. Perhaps it was simply too much, too fast, too undeniable.
The same platforms designed to scatter our attention instead are now amplifying one undeniable truth: a genocide in real time.
The apparatus that spent decades teaching us not to care suddenly couldn't keep pace with the speed of bearing witness. We've seen fathers holding their babies' bodies and recognise our own worst nightmares. We heard doctors refusing to abandon patients and understood heroism. We watched children comforting each other in hospitals and remembered what we're supposed to protect.
Or at least, that is what i encourage you to see, because the spectrum of desires, pain and want, that you experience in your life, is not any different from the people in Palestine, Congo, or anywhere else on earth. They deserve to have that recognised by the world looking in.
What we're experiencing now is a narrative breaking on a planetary scale. Millions who once accepted official narratives about "conflict" and "complexity" now see clearly: children are being killed. Aid workers are being killed. Civilians reaching for food are being killed. The ideological machinery that Fanon dissected - the one that makes colonial violence appear reasonable, even necessary - is malfunctioning.
This mass witnessing could become what Fanon called "the moment of consciousness" - when the mystifications of power dissolve and reality becomes undeniable. He understood that seeing - truly seeing - the humanity of the oppressed was the beginning of revolutionary consciousness. He wrote that the colonised must "discover the humanity of the coloniser" but equally, the world must discover the humanity of the colonised.
In other words, the same technologies meant to maintain our disconnection are now forcing us to reconnect - not just to Palestinian humanity, but to our own capacity for empathy that was systematically trained out of us. But he also warned that consciousness alone doesn't end systems. It must transform into what he called "praxis" - thought wedded to action, understanding that reshapes the world.
The question becomes: how do we transform this helpless watching into action?
How do we honour what we've witnessed without being paralysed by it?
How do we let it radicalise us toward life rather than numbing us toward death?
Some actionable ideas exist here.
There are also global boycotts in support of Palestine that are incredibly easy to participate in. And if you think boycotting doesn't work, then you need only look at how McDonalds scrambled to buy back their businesses in Israel when the global boycott hit their profit margins. It's the language of capitalism and it's not enough but it's not nothing.
Building Movements That Heal
So what does collective healing look like in practice? How do we build movements that resist and regenerate simultaneously?
Consider South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission - imperfect, criticised, yet attempting something profound: creating space for both truth-telling and the possibility of moving forward. Or indeed, the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Look to indigenous restorative justice practices that understand harm as a tear in the communal fabric that must be mended, not just punished. These aren't perfect models, but they point toward something essential: justice that heals rather than merely reverses the roles of harm.
These processes work when they create space for both accountability and grief - allowing perpetrators to face harm without drowning in shame, and survivors to speak truth without being responsible for their oppressors' healing
We can learn from the Zapatistas in Mexico, who understood that revolution meant not just fighting the state but creating new ways of living - building autonomous communities that practice different forms of democracy, education, and mutual care.
Or Strike Debt, which emerged from Occupy Wall Street - activists who recognised that debt is a form of social control that keeps people isolated and ashamed. They created the Rolling Jubilee, buying distressed medical and student debt for pennies on the dollar, then simply abolishing it. By 2014, they had erased over $31 million in debt while spending only $700,000, liberating thousands from financial burdens they never should have carried. But more than the numbers, they understood something profound: that mutual aid can break the spell of individualised suffering. They turned debt from a source of private shame into a site of collective resistance, showing how movements can create immediate material relief while building toward systemic transformation.
These movements understand that we must complicate the binary. Accountability must co-exist with a deep understanding of roots. The coloniser and the colonised are not just roles - they are entanglements. Cycles. Inheritances.
And cycles can be broken. But we rely on processing of grief, recognition of truth and new rituals to mark a new way forward.
Individual healing practices - therapy, meditation, somatic work - matter. But they must scale to collective processes. We need truth and reconciliation processes that actually reconcile. Reparations that repair. Education that reconnects people to severed histories. Cultural practices that create new forms of belonging beyond domination.
Breaking the inheritance
i believe liberation for everyone - Palestinians, indigenous peoples worldwide, and yes, even those who identify as white - depends on our capacity to heal from these legacies of violence.
i also believe in the next 20-30 years from now we will look back and dissect this moment in history with the same haunting and historical analysis we reserve for the 1940s in Europe - wondering who stood by, who spoke out, and what we chose to call progress while the world burned.
We inherited trauma. But we can choose what we pass down.
The work begins with recognising that healing and resistance are not separate projects. That the same forces teaching us not to feel Palestinian pain once taught Europeans to forget their own cultures. That breaking these patterns requires both dismantling systems and tending to the wounds they've left.
Gaza broke the spell. Now we have a choice: numb ourselves back to sleep, or stay awake to build something different. To create movements that resist without reproducing. To heal without forgetting. To fight without becoming what we fought.
This is how we can become ancestors worth claiming.
