Ghosts of Empire: seeds of violence - part 1

i keep having this thought - it comes up between the latest horrors and updates from Gaza - about how we heal from legacies of violence. Beneath the drones and rubble is a story so old it feels ancestral. A story of people being erased by those who were once erased themselves. The trauma returns as prophecy; as if the past, unhealed, insists on repeating itself.

When i first visited Berlin, i walked through the Jewish Museum. It was summer and the heat radiated off the concrete and cement of the city, but inside the cold grey walls offered a relief from the scorching temperature. The architecture tells a story, the whole building aches - jagged walls, sudden silences, the feeling that the building is remembering something you cannot yet name. This is intentional of course, it was designed to take you viscerally on this journey. You follow a timeline not just of the Holocaust, but of centuries of exile and persecution.

When the Black Death arrived in the 14th century, Jewish communities across Europe were accused of causing the plague by poisoning wells to kill Christians. Many were tortured to extract confessions to these crimes. Massacres occurred in Jewish communities: in Strasbourg Jewish people were expelled or burned alive; in Basel Jewish people were forced into a wooden structure on an island and burned. The Pope at the time, Clement VI tried to stop this violence by issuing edicts stating that Jewish people were not to blame for the plague, pointing out that they too were dying from it, but his efforts had little impact. Fear, superstition and the pre-existing social isolation made Jewish communities easy to pass blame to.

The museum traces the history of Jewish communities expelled, criminalised, hunted across Europe long before the camps were built. In order for the Holocaust to have happened in the way that it did, there had to be centuries of prejudice - a culture made ready for such crimes. The narrative is not linear. It is a wound that keeps re-opening.

So when we look at what's happening now in Palestine, where now, some descendants of those who survived this brutality are enacting - or complicit in - a brutal occupation of Palestine - what do we do with that? How do we speak the unspeakable - that the traumatised, when unhealed, can become the architects of new traumas? That liberation without healing is a corridor that leads us back into the same room? There is another facet to this situation - the use of trauma as a weapon.

Naomi Klein describes this as 'weaponised trauma' - when a history of suffering is used, not to seek solidarity, but to assert entitlement to land, supremacy, immunity from critique. In the case of the Israeli settler ideology, the wound of the Holocaust becomes the shield and the sword, protecting violence whilst simultaneously justifying its expansion. This isn't unique to Israel. This is not just a geopolitical analysis. This is a human pattern. A mirror held up to all of us. What do we do when the generational trauma comes back on a national scale? If trauma becomes a fortress, it can block the very empathy it once demanded.

This got me thinking: what does it actually mean to move forward after violence. Ending conflict is crucial, but insufficient. The harder question is how we heal the roots, not just the symptoms.

On the origins of violence

Most conversations about colonialism focus on its impacts on indigenous peoples who were colonised. That work is essential. But i've been wondering about something different: what made colonisers capable of such violence in the first place? What if their capacity for violence also came from unprocessed historical trauma? It's not difficult to trace where Israel's violence originates, but what if we go back further.

Before Europe was "white," it was a vast constellation of cultures. Celtic, Slavic, Nordic, Basque, Etruscan. Peoples with their own songs, their own gods, their own ways of knowing. Then came empire. Then came the Church. Then came whiteness. To become "white," they had to forget who they were. And that forgetting was not gentle. It came with swords, with fire, with silence. The Roman Empire, the spread of Christianity, and later the formation of nation-states involved enormous violence against these diverse European peoples. Languages were banned, spiritual practices criminalised, and local autonomy crushed.

Think about the witch trials, where thousands of women (and some men) were tortured and killed - often for practising folk medicine or preserving pre-Christian traditions. Or how regional languages like Occitan, Breton, or Gaelic were systematically suppressed. What was lost was not just speech, but cosmology. Relationship. Root. These weren't gentle transitions; they involved real violence that severed people from their ancestral ways of being.

The same Church that burned women for preserving herbal knowledge would later bless conquistadors destroying indigenous medicine. The same legal frameworks that criminalised Celtic druids would be exported to criminalise African spiritual practices.

What if Europe exported its trauma before it ever exported its civilisation?

Of course, not all peoples who endure trauma go on to dominate others. The leap from pain to power requires something more: a system that weaponises grief into ideology. Empire is not just the result of historical trauma - but of trauma weaponised and organised by power. It takes institutions, theology, economic systems, and violence to turn haunted people into colonisers. Unprocessed pain may be the ember, but empire is the structure that fans it into wildfire. Not all colonised peoples became colonisers - many retained practices of reciprocity even under occupation. The difference lies in whether trauma meets existing systems of hierarchy and extraction, or communities with strong practices of collective care.

i'm not interested in excusing colonialism as a trauma response. It's more about understanding how pain, when left unhealed, becomes available to those in power as a tool for domination. Without this lens, we risk mistaking systemic oppression for personal wounding - or worse, allowing harm to continue unchallenged.

When you sever people from land, language, ritual - when you destroy their memory and call it progress - they do not become free. They become haunted. And the haunted build empires to forget their ghosts.

Inventing the White Identity

Whiteness is not a heritage, it's an invention. A political project designed to erase difference, consolidate power, justify colonial domination. It's not that white people are whiteness, but they have been conscripted into it, often unknowingly. And part of healing, perhaps, is recognising that conscription and stepping out of it. This means refusing the comfort of color-blind politics while actively learning suppressed histories - not to claim victimhood, but to understand how cultural severance creates the emptiness that supremacy fills.

i wonder if dismantling white supremacy requires something similar - a kind of collective healing process where descendants of Europeans investigate what was erased from their own histories. Not to centre that loss - but to stop unconsciously weaponising it. To trace the line between the burning of witches and the building of colonies. Between the loss of ancestral songs and the rise of white supremacy.When you don't know who you are, when you have no meaningful cultural identity beyond domination and consumption, you cling to myths of superiority.

What would it mean for those socialised into whiteness to begin the work of remembrance? Not to escape responsibility - but to meet it with humility and clarity. To say: we were made to forget, and in that forgetting, some of us became vulnerable to ideologies that made us dangerous to others.

This is not about romanticising some ancient past. It is about reclaiming the capacity to be human outside of domination - to build identity on what we create together rather than what we destroy in others.

Cycles of Domination

These cycles of domination and disconnection didn't just occur in Europe. They echoed - and continue to echo - around the world: in the transatlantic slave trade, where entire cultures were uprooted, commodified; in the genocide and forced assimilation of indigenous peoples in the Americas and Australia; in caste oppression in South Asia; in apartheid regimes that encoded segregation into law. Each time, systems of violence were built atop stories of superiority - stories that required someone else to be seen as less human. They're not identical stories but they share a pattern: trauma, turned into myth, used to justify control.

A global understanding of liberation must therefore include a global understanding of grief.

When we look at imperialism, we see strategy, greed, ambition. But underneath - what if we also saw unprocessed pain? A people dislocated from themselves, dislocating others in turn?

Rather than excusing, it reveals.

It's important to clarify here: understanding trauma is not the same as excusing violence. There's a risk, especially in white majority contexts, of using trauma as a shield for accountability. But blame without understanding rarely leads to transformation. Healing, in this frame, is not a soft alternative to justice - it's the foundation of it. If we truly want to end domination we must go deeper than punishment or reversal. We must ask: what conditions allow this to take root in the first place?

What happens after liberation?

This makes me think about the future for Palestinians. As i write this, Tony Blair's name crops up yet again in his lifelong dedication to evil, this time as his institute is linked to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza so wealthy businessmen can redevelop the strip once they finally eliminate the indigenous population. Or 'relocate' them as the paper suggests. It's the same old story, colonialism repackaged.

In an earlier draft of this piece i wrote that i truly believed Palestinians will gain their freedom. As the weeks have gone on, it's unclear if the Palestinians will survive the current crop of world leaders, whose contributions range from criminal negligence to active complicity in genocide. But a cease to the killing, an agreement of peace, that would be just the first step. Because occupation does not leave quietly. It leaves residue. It leaves grief buried so deep it grows roots in your children. The violence may end on paper, but it echoes in the body. And unless it is named, mourned, metabolised - it re-emerges, sometimes inwards, sometimes outwards.

We've seen this before. Revolutions that overthrew tyrants only to become tyrants in new uniforms. Movements that did not make space for the wounded child inside the warrior. The psychological wounds don't automatically heal when the political situation changes. Liberation isn't just about removing the oppressor. It's about what comes after: how do you ensure that your children and their children can recover without reproducing the same violence within their communities or against others? How do you break the cycle?

Because occupation does not leave quietly. It leaves residue. It leaves grief buried so deep it grows roots in your children.

Frantz Fanon understood this complexity intimately. In The Wretched of the Earth, he argued that violence against the coloniser could serve as a form of collective catharsis for the colonised - a necessary reclaiming of agency and humanity. "At the level of individuals," Fanon wrote, "violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect."

Earlier this year, i listened to the audiobook of A Dying Colonialism where Fanon discusses violence as an essential liberation tool in the Algerian revolution. The revolution was violent, and when it became violent, it offered the Algerian people a real chance of liberation from the French. But he wasn't naive about violence. He recognised its double-edged nature - how it could liberate but also deform. He witnessed firsthand as a psychiatrist in Algeria how colonial violence created profound psychological wounds in both the colonised and the colonisers. His clinical notes describe the nightmares, the paranoia, the way violence seeps into the most intimate spaces of human life.

This is where Fanon's work becomes essential for our moment. He understood that decolonisation wasn't just about removing the coloniser - it was about the colonised discovering "the man behind the settler" and equally important, rediscovering themselves beyond the colonial relationship. The violence he spoke of was not an end but a means of breaking the psychological hold of colonialism. Yet he also warned that this rupture must be followed by the careful work of building new forms of life, new ways of being human together.

What Fanon perhaps didn't fully explore - what we must now - is how this healing happens in practice. How do we hold both truths: that oppressed peoples have the right to resist by any means necessary, and that the means we choose shape who we become? How do we honour the necessity of revolutionary violence while creating structures that can metabolise its aftermath?

Healing as Political Necessity

i ask this and it also feels premature, we must acknowledge a crucial tension: for those under active bombardment, survival comes first. Healing is for those with the privilege of safety. We cannot speak of processing trauma to people dodging missiles. Yet even under siege, Palestinians create practices of care - sharing food, protecting children, maintaining dignity. These acts of preservation become the foundation for future healing work.

We can still prepare - we can build the frameworks now for the healing that must come later. We can learn from movements that have walked this path before. Healing is not a luxury. It is a political necessity. Without it, liberation is incomplete. When it's unhealed, trauma becomes the logic of the next regime. This is why trauma must be metabolised, not mobilised into ideology.

Fanon himself was working toward this understanding near the end of his life. In his psychiatric practice, he saw how violence - both colonial and anti-colonial - lodged itself in the body, in dreams, in the capacity for intimacy. He knew that political liberation without psychological liberation would leave the architecture of domination intact, ready to be inhabited by new masters.

This speaks to something i will discuss in Part 2. In the next post i will explore the systematic attack on our empathy regarding violence in the Middle East and movements that heal.

Stay tuned!