Dr. Gabor Maté, a renowned expert in trauma, discusses the psychology of Israeli soldiers, Palestinian resistance fighters, WWII survivors, Nazis and even himself.
By Chris Hedges, December 18, 2024
While the trauma that Palestinians continue to face in Gaza is sustained, brutal and seemingly never-ending, the universal susceptibility to trauma unites humanity as much as it divides the self.
Dr. Gabor Maté, renowned physician and expert in trauma and childhood development, illustrates this point articulately on the latest episode of The Chris Hedges Report through attempting to make sense of the psychology, trauma and reason behind the actions of Palestinians, IDF soldiers, WWII survivors, Nazis and even himself.
Hedges begins the show by asking Maté to describe the trauma that Palestinians currently face, as they struggle to survive the constant shelling and murder delivered by Israel for over a year now. But even Maté struggles to make sense of it all:
“This weekend, 40 members of a single family were killed. So when that child is orphaned, it means that their whole support system is gone. So you know what? I can’t tell you. I can only extrapolate from what I’ve seen and imagine something unfathomable.”
Hedges and Maté do not only reckon with the psychology of the victims of genocide, but also grapple with how “ordinary men” become willing, ruthless, executioners under the rule of totalitarian regimes.
Hedges, not sure if these seemingly normal people commit atrocities as a result of trauma or because they are not “morally sentient,” is asked by Maté, “Well, why would somebody become morally insentient?”
The doctor goes on to describe how humans achieve a healthy moral compass. Rather than be taught morality or indoctrinated into it, people gain moral sentience “because [caretakers] treat you well, because they see you, they understand you, they love you, they embrace you. They promote the development of moral faculties, which is a natural human process given the right conditions. So the lack of moral sentience is actually a sign of trauma.”
Maté’s analysis connects back to the Palestinian resistance itself, and the atrocities they often commit in pursuit of liberation from their occupiers. Hedges, who knew the co-founder of Hamas, Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, tells Maté that when he pressed al-Rantisi on the act of suicide bombing, the Hamas leader justified his stance with statistics as a way to “morally evade” the subject.
Maté simply, yet wisely, explains that Rantisi, who witnessed the Israelis execute his uncle at the age of 10, did not receive the aforementioned “right conditions” that would have equipped him to recognize these moral contradictions.
“I think what happens is that one of the impacts of trauma is it can close your heart, and when your heart is closed, you don’t see the humanity of the other. And this has happened in a big way in Israel now.”
Host: Chris Hedges
Producer: Max Jones
Intro: Max Jones
Crew: Diego Ramos and Thomas Hedges
Transcript: Diego Ramos
Chris Hedges: There are numerous layers of trauma arising from the genocide in Gaza. Of course, the worst trauma is being inflicted on the Palestinians in Gaza, traumatized long before the genocide began, but thrust in a relentless nightmare that month after month sees them reduced to dire poverty and deprivation amid carnage and mass slaughter.
But what of us, who watch this live-streamed genocide? What is this doing not only to the rule of law, but to our own psyche? How are we being changed as genocide becomes normalized, not only by Israel but its chief armed supplier the United States? What of the Israeli soldiers who commit these atrocities? And how will this trauma play itself out in the future?
Dr. Gabor Mate in his book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture, which he wrote with his son Daniel, argues that our culture’s standards of normalcy are in fact destructive to the physical and psychological health of human beings.
In a distorted society, one that feeds on perpetuating trauma, one where profit and personal attainment are the highest values, one where everyday people are left to endure their pain and shame in silence, one where Palestinians are dehumanized and murdered indiscriminately, how are we to nurture our emotional health and avoid heading down the path of individual and collective annihilation?
Trauma, Dr. Maté illustrates, plays out not only on our bodies, but in the kinds of relationships and the world we create.
Joining me to discuss these issues is Dr. Gabor Maté , a physician and childhood development specialist who has written several best-selling books, including In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection, and Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder.
Gabor, let’s begin by talking about what trauma does to us, and then I want you to address what sustained or repeated trauma does to us, because the Palestinians have no capacity in Gaza. There’s no capacity for them to recover. It’s now over a year of endless trauma.
Gabor Maté: Well, first of all, Chris, thanks for having me. Nice to see you again. Well, let’s start with the Palestinians, where there was a study 20 years ago now looking at Palestinian children. And something like 95 percent of them 20 years ago showed some symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder, a large percentage — lest anybody think that history started on Oct. the seventh — a large percentage of kids wet their beds.
They were hostile towards their parents. They had nightmares, anxiety, depression and so on. This was 20 years ago, and when you think of the young militants who streamed into Israel on Oct. the seventh, guess who those kids were, guess who those young people were. And of course, that’s been going on for decades upon decades upon decades.
There was a study that just came out a few days ago that showed that war trauma actually affects the genetic functioning of kids, that it actually affects how their physiology functions long time later. So we can just imagine what’s happening there now and what’s going to be the impact in the long term, it’s almost unfathomable.
Especially since the support services that ordinarily would embrace these kids and give them some kind of succor and some ease and some support to the parents — all that’s been destroyed. And the adults that are meant to keep them safe and to protect them are completely incapable of doing so.
So it’s unimaginable. And it’s been going on for well over a year now. This is [coming] upon decades, upon decades of trauma, such as yourself witnessed when you were a correspondent there. So from that point of view, it’s hard to even to predict. Now here in the West, of course, it depends on how plugged in or keyed in we are to the situation.
A lot of people deal with it because they’ve been insensitized and inured. They don’t even care. If you get a conversation on an American TV network debating on which quarterback is the best in the National Football League now, you’re going to get millions of views, but when you get discussions of what’s happening in the world to real human beings, relatively speaking, not that many people are interested.
So one of the things that this culture does is it actually desensitizes people. It inures people. From the point of view of people that care, and of course, there’s many millions who do care, a number of things happen.
I’ll tell you what happened to me after Oct. the seventh. It triggered all my childhood trauma. I really went into a state. I was reactive, irritable, despondent, and that took me a couple of months to climb out of. It just took me over. It’s like my mind and heart were occupied territory, because I’m so aware of what’s going on there.
As a former Zionist, I don’t need to know anything more about what Zionism has done to these Palestinians, and I’ve been watching this for decades. And then to see this horror, I didn’t know what to do with it. I’ve come out of that, but it took me some time.
A lot of people have been similarly affected, and their emotions and their hearts are broken. There’s a sense of helplessness that, despite all the news that we get and despite all the evidence in front of our eyes, we feel so helpless. We feel so inert in the face of what’s going on.
There’s something called moral injury. Moral injury is when you watch something terrible happen, you feel helpless in the face of it. And that, I’m sure, has affected a lot of people and on the part of activists I’ve seen this. I mean, there’s been some beautiful activism, and people have really extended themselves, but the persecution of people who have been active has been relentless, and has been merciless.
So people lose their jobs. I know doctors who’ve lost their positions because they’ve spoken out. Academics are under threat. The student movement, of course, they’ve done it, they tried to crush it with so many ways. So people have paid a heavy price.
And I think above all, and I don’t know how you feel about this, but you’ve been speaking about this issue for a long time. You’ve been there. You’ve witnessed it, you reported on it. You’ve paid a price within your own profession for your truth speaking about this, you and I have both spoken on this issue extensively, but none of that has saved the life of a single Palestinian child.
Where does that leave us? You know, it’s hard to hold all that outrage and that despair, that desire and commitment to do something and the short term ineffectiveness of anything that we do. These are difficult states to negotiate.
Chris Hedges: Well, despair is the right word. And like you, the first few months, although it’s not great now, of course, came to me at night having spent so much time in Gaza, but also having spent time in Sarajevo, because I know what it feels like to be shelled continuously, 24 hours a day, was a bad combination.
Although the saturation bombing of Gaza does not compare to Sarajevo. Sarajevo was no fun — 300 to 400 shells a day, constant sniper fire. But that’s nothing compared to Gaza. They’ve dropped the equivalent of two nuclear weapons, in terms of explosive powers on Gaza, an area 20 miles [long] and five miles wide.
I want to talk about the differentiation of trauma. Trauma you endured as an infant or a small child during the Holocaust. You, I believe, separated from your parents, your grandparents perished in Auschwitz. And the trauma that I experienced as a war correspondent, but it must be different to be, at this point, somebody who has lived for over a year — I mean, there’s no clean water, there’s no housing.
The stench of the rotting bodies, of course, thousands, I mean, some people are estimating that it’s 200,000 dead. We don’t know. I certainly know — Palestinians who I was in contact with a few months ago, we no longer have any contact. They’re not listed as dead, they’ve just disappeared.
Differentiate for us that kind of trauma that you endured, or maybe I endured, and the trauma that is now being visited on the Palestinians on Gaza over this length of time. I mean, I would have a hard time drawing a corollary. I mean, maybe Sarajevo, maybe the Warsaw Ghetto, but it must manifest itself in different ways.
Gabor Maté: Well, not being there and not being in direct contact and not dealing with the situation doesn’t leave me in a position to say anything definitive, but again, I can only extrapolate and imagine, you know?
So I can tell you something, I’m 80 years old now. I’m sitting here in my room working on the computer or reading a book. My wife walks into the room where I am, and I don’t hear her, and all of a sudden I go like this. Now this is the startle reflex of a 3-month-old. And if you take a 3-month-old baby and you slap your hand, make a loud noise, they’re going to [makes motion], you know?
It’s still ingrained in my nervous system, because, apart from the genocide that was happening around us and threatened to engulf my family, as you say, did take my grandparents, there was a war going on, and I was in Budapest as an infant, and the allies were bombing Budapest so that these loud noises and the air raid sirens, and it was nothing like what’s happening in Gaza. Nothing compared to it in terms of numbers of people dead.
At least we stayed in the same apartment, but Gazans are having to move all the time. They set up tents, the tents are burnt down. There’s a deliberate destruction of the civilian population. Healthcare workers are targeted by drones. Food workers are targeted by drones. So I can’t think of a single situation that’s comparable.
And you and I both witnessed the Vietnam War, where there was a lot of carpet bombing, deliberate destruction, assaults on civilians, napalming of children, but at least those people had the capacity to fight back, so there was a sense of possibility and ultimately, victory.
These people are like utter helpless, exposed victims of a military force that they have no capacity to resist in any meaningful sense. I don’t know what that sense of hopelessness and this constant bombardment and this insecurity and starvation, I mean, I can only extrapolate to say that — now unless, of course, there’s one saving grace here, you and I have both witnessed it, the incredible resilience of the Palestinians.
Their spirit, their communal sense. But you know, I find myself rambling when I try and answer your question only because I can’t find the words for it. I think it’s beyond words, this one, Chris, this is beyond words.
And I know that, I think it was you that interviewed one of the founders of Hamas, who watched his uncle being killed in a civilian massacre in 1956 and you can see what happened to those people. What will happen to these kids? And the orphans, when a Palestinian kid is orphaned, it’s not like they lose their father and their mother.
They lose their uncles and grandmothers and grandfathers, whole families. This weekend, 40 members of a single family were killed. So when that child is orphaned, it means that their whole support system is gone. So you know what? I can’t tell you. I can only extrapolate from what I’ve seen and imagine something unfathomable.
Chris Hedges: When we began the discussion — this was Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, by the way, one of the co-founders of Hamas, who I knew, who was assassinated in 2004, with his son, by the Israelis. And he was in Khan Younis in 1956, he was a 10-year-old boy, and he watched the Israelis line up hundreds of people against the wall, including his uncle, and execute them.
And that set him on a life of armed militant resistance against the Zionists. I used to argue with him about suicide bombings. This was when suicide bombings were happening in Jerusalem and other places which I covered. I was there when the horrific bombings would take place, and watch the bodies being laid out on the sidewalk.
And he would always answer me with statistics, which seemed to me a way to morally evade the subject. And he would say, well, they’ve killed more of our children than we’ve killed, and when they stop killing our children, we’ll stop killing their children.
He was very bright, he was a doctor, graduated first in his class from the University of Alexandria. I mean, he was extremely intelligent and well spoken. I just want to ask you about that.
I mean, he seemed —and I pressed him on that point more than once — he seemed incapable of grappling with the moral dimensions of suicide bombing, which I found frustrating, and my argument to him was that he was surrendering the essential, the moral superiority of the Palestinian cause by engaging in indiscriminate killing of civilians.
And you brought up Oct. 7 and linked it to trauma. But can you talk a little bit about that violent response? We have to acknowledge that on Oct. 7, there were atrocities that were clearly committed by armed Palestinian factions.
Not systematic rape, not beheading the babies. This was of all hasbara, you know, Israeli propaganda, but there were real atrocities. Talk about or link for me, the trauma these people have endured and the atrocities that take place.
Gabor Maté: Yeah, well, a couple of things come to mind. One is there was a very famous leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. I wish— the name escapes me. Mark was his first name, but he was a cardiologist.
Chris Hedges: You’re talking about Marek Edelman.
Gabor Maté: Marek, yeah, that’s right.
Chris Hedges: Gabor, his wife was one of the founders of Médecins du Monde, and she was also in the ghetto, and she lived with me in my apartment in Salvador, when she worked in Salvador.
Gabor Maté: Isn’t that something. And Marek Edelman was the second in command and became the first in command of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. And needless to say, nobody talks about him in Israel because he was a supporter of Palestinian freedom.
But he would criticize the Palestinian resistance for their bombings, the suicide bombings and their attacks on civilians. So he could make a distinction between the justness of their cause and the inhumanity of some of their methods.
And the other doctor that comes into mind is a Palestinian psychiatrist, I think maybe surname was [Eyad al-] Sarraj, but I’m not sure, he was a famous psychiatrist in Gaza who talked about these children who watched their parents being incapable of protecting them, and their parents being humiliated by the Israeli soldiers, which the Israeli armies — I mean, they just humiliate parents in front of their kids and the helplessness of their parents, so that these kids then gravitate towards a movement that says we’re going to fight back.
So you can understand the appeal to these kids, whose parents are powerless, to support a force that at least says we’re going to fight back no matter what. So that’s, on a human level, it doesn’t justify anything, but it’s totally understandable, number one.
Number two, I think the man you mentioned, something happens in their heart. Their hearts get shut down. I think what happens is that one of the impacts of trauma is it can close your heart, and when your heart is closed, you don’t see the humanity of the other. And this has happened in a big way in Israel now.
I mean, yeah, the Palestinian resistance is engaged in some unjustifiable actions, including some of what happened on Oct. 7. Mind you, as both you and I know, the real history of Oct. 7 has yet to be told and all the details have yet to be uncovered, but no matter how we look at it, there are some horrible things that were done by the Palestinians on October the seventh, because they were full of hate, because they were so traumatized.
But if you look at The Washington Post yesterday had an article showing the videos shared by Israeli soldiers, and you’ve seen some of this, the viciousness, the vindictiveness, the hatred, the inhumanity. And these are people who had not been traumatized in the same way as that the Palestinians had been, and they’re quite capable of celebrating.
You know, the event in Amsterdam a few weeks ago, what the Western press did not report is one of these soccer hooligans from the Maccabi football team, soccer team, would who have been notoriously racist for ever, the night before the so-called program, what they were chanting, you know what they were chanting in Amsterdam?
“There are no schools in Palestine because we’ve killed all the kids.” And they were chanting this with glee.
So not justifying anything, but if the Israelis who haven’t suffered anything compared to what the Palestinians have suffered, in fact, they’ve perpetrated it, if their hearts can be so embittered and closed and shut, can we understand why some of the Palestinians might have responded the same way?
I’m not favoring it. I’m not justifying it. I’m saying is the doctor you were talking to who could not get your logic on the inhumanity of suicide bombings, his heart was closed, and that’s a trauma response.
Chris Hedges: Yeah. What did Dostoevsky say? Hell is the inability to love. In war, I would meet people who had become completely numb through trauma, but I found, having spent years in war zones and being around them, that they didn’t live very long.
That complete emotional shutting down led them to carry out acts that either were intentionally or unintentionally suicidal. They began to engage in all sorts of activities. And this was also true with war correspondents who spent too long in war zones.
They would usually drink themselves to death or they wouldn’t — but it becomes, I’m going to ask you because you know far more about it than I do, but what I saw anecdotally is it became a route to self annihilation.
Gabor Maté: Well, when you look at, when you talk to Israelis, a lot of the soldiers come out of these adventures with post traumatic stress disorder. And not just because of what happened to their comrades, but because of what they themselves perpetrated or witnessed, and the results are self destructive.
And from that point of view, that society, in perpetrating what it’s doing now, is also destroying itself. But that’s in the long term. You know, in the short term, they’re going to impose a lot more suffering and a lot more devastation on a completely captive population.
But yeah, it’s self destructive and again, like these correspondents that you talk about, it’s probably, to some degree a question of that moral injury that I mentioned, where they’re watching this stuff, they’re reporting on it but they’re totally helpless in the face of it. And what does that do to a human being — of watching something as horrible as all this, and being totally inert or inept or incapable of stopping any of it, you know?
And I think the only way to get through this is to allow ourselves to feel our despair, to allow ourselves to feel our — like generally, we try to run away from…what you’re describing — people drinking themselves to death, why are they doing that? Well, what do you say about somebody who’s drunk too much? There’s an old expression, oh, he’s feeling no pain. So that alcoholism is an attempt to run away from pain.
All addictions are an attempt to run away from pain, and the only way to get through this is to allow ourselves to feel the pain, to feel the despair, to feel the outrage, to feel the heart brokenness, not to run away from it. And we have to accept that this is how it is right now.
And that word acceptance can be misunderstood as meaning that we accept the situation, that we don’t do anything about it. I don’t mean that, but I mean we have to accept what is and the limitations of our capacity to change it.
You know, I strode out of a family Passover dinner nine months ago, screaming at everybody. This is a holiday that’s supposed to celebrate freedom and escape from slavery. Meanwhile, this is going on in Gaza, you know? Well, that was a trauma response on my part because I had difficulty just being with — but this is how it is.
So can we be accepting of our own emotions or despair or outrage or daily heartbreak and not be overwhelmed by it, and still remain active in the face of it, but not be filled with bitterness and hatred at the same time, because I’m telling you, I felt so much bitterness over the last year and hatred, and I kept it under reasonable control.
I’m talking about my internal experience. And the people, good people that don’t get it, that don’t want to get it, that don’t want to look at what’s actually going on. A lot of families have broken up over this. So, how can we be with this horror and survive as human beings?
You know, fullness of our humanity. Can we stay loving and compassionate and rational at the same time? It’s very difficult, which is, I think, why a lot of people just distance themselves from it.
Chris Hedges: I want to ask about how people reconcile the atrocities that they committed, having been in war and around atrocities I had to report about them. I myself was shut down. I was clinical, became overly clinical.
Even though I was standing over bodies often that had been mutilated and killed, of course, I would have my notebook, and I would count numbers and describe the particular ways their eyes have been gouged out, or the throats have been slit or whatever.
Not in the moment, I wouldn’t feel anything, but sometimes, then, maybe sometimes weeks later, it would hit me like a tsunami, and I wondered about the Israeli soldiers coming back from Gaza and at least from your experience, I’m assuming that in Gaza, they also, as I was, were shut down.
And yet, if they don’t engage in this self destructive behavior, it does come back. There is a reckoning. Again, I don’t presume to know you know even a fraction of what you know, but I wondered if you could address that point.
Gabor Maté: Well, there are some Israeli soldiers, and I’m sure you’ve talked to them, who have epiphany at some point of understanding of what they’ve done, or what their comrades have done, or what they witnessed. And then they have a difficult reckoning, and then they become active to try and stop it from happening again. That’s a small minority of the Israeli population.
The same thing, of course, happened in Vietnam to a number of American soldiers. The difference was that in American society, there was a fair bit of support or soldiers who came to rue and oppose what their armies were doing because there was a significant anti-war movement.
In Israel, they come back to a society that, for the most part, ignores what they did. As we know from all kinds of Israeli reports, they don’t get to see what they’re doing in Gaza. And the soldiers who come back come back as heroes. And they are lionized, and they are supported in their unconsciousness. And in order to reckon with what they’ve done or what they’ve witnessed, they have to actually go against their whole society.
Soldiers coming back from Vietnam, who were willing to talk about it, who were open about it, the veterans against the war, they were embraced by a lot of people. In Israel, they faced ostracization, the small minority. It’s going to be much more difficult for them. Now, it’s going to have a terrible impact on Israeli society. In the long term, it’s going to further entrench the traumatizing nature of that culture.
But it’s going to take a long time. That’s as best as I can foresee it. And all the more so since Israel is like an addict, where the uncle is supporting them with giving them heroin, all the heroin they want.
And that’s Israel getting all that support from the Western world and from Canada and U.S., and you know, all the colonial and former colonial countries that justify it, that valorize it, that support it. So there’s not the context for them to come to their senses.
Now, I know Israelis. I counseled an Israeli woman who lives in Europe, I won’t say where, an academic. A few days ago, because she’s full of guilt for being an Israeli. She’s so ashamed of herself just for being an Israeli.
So my work with her was to help her understand that she’s got nothing to be ashamed of. But those are very few. I know some. There are very few I know. In Canada, I know Israelis who have given up the Israeli citizenship out of disgust, out of sheer disgust over what it means to be an Israeli these days.
But that’s a small minority. So for these soldiers coming back, I think there’s got a whole society that still supports their madness and valorizes their cruelty, so it’ll be harder for them to come to terms with it. The reckoning will come, but it’s much harder for them.
Chris Hedges: Does it come? I mean, so Robert Jay Lifton’s book, The Nazi Doctors, where he interviews doctors who worked in the SS, and I can’t remember if it’s Lifton’s term or it might be [inaudible], but he talks about moral fragmentation, where they take relatively trivial activities, you know, they’re good to their wife, or they go to church or something, and they use these trivial or marginal activities — because, of course, they’re engaged in a project of evil — to define themselves.
And then they are able, psychologically, to ignore the vast evil that they perpetrated. Can one survive like that? Is that an effective coping mechanism to deny responsibility?
Gabor Maté: Well as you and I know, Henry Kissinger died at the age of — was he 100? He died in bed, lauded and adulated by much of society. So, yeah, it’s possible, and how many millions of deaths was irresponsible for? Can I stop for a second and get something for myself? I want to read you something.
This is Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, responsible for the concentration camps. In a note to his wife, Margaret, “I’m off to Auschwitz. Kisses, your Heine, there’s a can of caviar.” His wife writes to him, “there’s a can of caviar in the ice box. Take it.”
Yes, it’s possible that people are so fragmented that they can actually live with themselves. In fact, that fragmentation is necessary for them to live at themselves. Did you see the film, The Zone of Interest, about Auschwitz? (Okay, whose Jewish director was so heavily criticized in Hollywood because he dared to mention the Palestinians.)
Well, it’s about Rudolf Hess, who was the commander of Auschwitz, whose family home was right outside the gates, and he had a dog that he was nice to, and he had children that he cared about. And then you go in every day and perpetrate these murders.
But you know what’s interesting is that he was captured after the war and sent to Poland to be tried. And the Poles tried him for murder, and, of course, mass murder and war crimes and sentenced him to death.
And a few weeks before he died, he wrote a letter to his son, saying, Whatever you do, let your heart be the guide. Listen to your heart. Don’t just let your mind decide, and don’t accept what authority tells you. Question everything. Let your humanity shine.
I’m paraphrasing him, but you know what? He meant it. He had a real transformation, and he wasn’t looking for clemency. He wasn’t gonna get any. He just came to terms with his conscience. And he says the reason I was able to do this, he says, is because the Poles showed me compassion like nobody in my whole life had ever showed me compassion, despite what I’d done, they showed me compassion, which put me in touch with my God again. So he’s somebody who, a few days before he died, overcame his fragmentation.
And there were a few Nazis like that, a minority. Many of them never came to that point, and they went to their deaths convinced that they were victims of injustice or defiant. I’m just saying that wholeness is possible, but it’s not guaranteed. And, yeah, it’s possible for people.
Now, the reckoning — I wish I believed in future lives like some Buddhist do or Hindus do, you know? Then I could at least tell myself these guys will pay for it next time. But I don’t, my mind doesn’t go there. I have no idea what the consciousness of a Kissinger was.
I have no idea what it’s like to be inside his head. I have no idea what it’s like to be inside the head of a murderer like that. But I also don’t want to find out, you know?
Chris Hedges: I want to draw a distinction between Himmler and Kissinger, because they didn’t actually carry out the killing. In fact, though, the one time that Himmler had to witness the mass murder of Jews, [inaudible] I believe he threw up, he was sick.
And then the actual people who they direct, of course, they’re ultimately responsible, but I think there probably is a difference for people who actually carry out their orders, carry out their murders, there are consequences that they feel, although they are tools of these power systems, that those who direct them do not feel.
Gabor Maté: Well, I think that’s probably true, and when you look at who actually perpetrates the murders, they’re usually the lowest, the least educated and the most unconscious people. If you look at Lieutenant [William] Calley, for example, who was the one person who was actually punished for My Lai, where hundreds of people were massacred, women, children, elderly. Who was he?
And if you look at the people that perpetrated Abu Ghraib, usually looking at very low level, poorly educated, very traumatized people, and they’re the ones who are thrust into these positions. And my guess is, not my guess, my very educated opinion on this one is that the people who perpetrated those things directly were actually themselves already traumatized even before they did these things.
It’s their disconnection and their fragmentation that even allowed them to behave that way in the first place.
There was an interesting documentary in Hungary, under the communist regime, there was a concentration camp called Recsk, that’s the name of the place where they took the enemies of the system to be tormented, sometimes killed, certainly mistreated, often tortured.
And the guards that served the communist system had actually been the same ones that belonged to the Cross Arrows Nazi party during the war — low level, poor class, traumatized people, and the economic system took these same people and made them protectors of the People’s Republic.
And the documentary showed the prisoners and then the guards decades later. Obviously, this film was made much later. The emotional health and demeanor of the former prisoners was so much more solitary and composed and grounded, whereas these guards were just broken.
You can tell by their facial expressions how tormented they were, even though it was the prisoners who suffered the torture and the guard who had perpetrated it, it’s the latter who, in old age, were totally broken.
Chris Hedges: I want to ask about Christopher Browning’s book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101. These were middle aged police. They were not members of the Nazi Party, recruited to carry out mass executions of Jews. They had the commander, I think the colonel of the unit actually said that those who did not want to carry out these mass executions would not be punished.
A handful of people refused, most of them, of course, through heavy drinking. But were they traumatized? I mean, or were they just not morally sentient?
Gabor Maté: Well, why would somebody become morally insentient? I mean, we’re born a certain way, you know? And human morality, if you look at the actual studies, develops not because people teach you morality, not because people indoctrinate you in good ways of being, but because they treat you well, because they see you, they understand you, they love you, they embrace you.
They promote the development of moral faculties, which is a natural human process given the right conditions. So the lack of moral sentience is actually a sign of trauma. It means that these people were hurt very early, very early, so that they shut down, and that shut down from feeling that what we’re really talking about here is an escape from vulnerability.
Now, vulnerability from the Latin word “vulnerare,” to wound. So our vulnerability is our capacity to be wounded, which we have from moment of conception until we die. But the mind can handle only so much vulnerability, and only if there’s protection, so that we escape not from true vulnerability, but from our capacity to feel and acknowledge our vulnerability.
We escape from it when the initial conditions are so painful and so hurtful, so that flight from vulnerability that results in moral lack of sentience is itself a trauma response. And if you look at the mass murderers, you know the mass killers who are in jails, it doesn’t matter who you look at, they were all severely traumatized as children, according to all the research. So that’s what we’re looking at here.
Chris Hedges: Well, when [Klaus] Theweleit writes his two volume set, Male Fantasies, he talks about the coldness, the severity, use of corporal punishment within traditional German society is, I think, to buttress your point, as essentially a kind of breeding ground for people who will who, through childhood trauma, will carry out atrocity.
Gabor Maté: Oh, and when you look at the actual lives of the Nazi leaders, they were all very traumatized children. From Himmler to Hitler to Goring, you know? And their hearts had completely shut down. It completely shut down. So lack of moral sense is itself a trauma response.
I’ve experienced my heart being cold sometimes. I know what that feels like. I don’t like it and it’s a trauma response, and it takes some work and some awareness and some support to move out of it. I think most people, if they’re honest with themselves there’s a Holocaust survivor, Edith Eger.
She’s in her 90s now, a wonderful woman. She was probably on the same train that my grandparents were on, on the way to Auschwitz. Her family died there. My grandparents did. They lived in the same city in southern Slovakia.
She survived, and she wrote a book called The Choice, and she says in that book that we all have a Nazi in us, so that capacity for closing down and being cold hearted that’s certainly in me, probably in you, I don’t know you personally. It’s in all of us. The question is, what circumstances help us melt that heart? And what circumstances frees it even more.
Chris Hedges: Well, Primo Levi makes, I think, the same point.
Gabor Maté: Absolutely, and that’s why Primo Levi is such a great writer on the Holocaust, is because he’s not a moralizer. He just describes the way it was. And by the way, he was also supporter of Palestinian freedom. Primo Levi was, for which, again, he was never forgiven.
Chris Hedges: He writes about Chaim Rumkowski in the Lódz Ghetto, ran the ghetto the Jewish figure, and talked about how we all have Chaim Rumkowski within us. But of course, it’s that knowledge when you externalize evil, the way many Zionists do towards Palestinians, you, in the name of cleansing evil, commit more evil.
But it’s when we recognize the evil within us that’s the most important element to preventing ourselves from committing evil, because we know it’s there. I want to talk a little bit about — this has been a very hard year for all of us who care about the human existence and the rule of law and the plight of the oppressed.
What, just to close, would you tell people is the most important thing to sustain our own mental health, our own equilibrium, and yet, of course not be not be silenced?
Gabor Maté: Well, the first thing is find others. Don’t be alone with it, because it’s almost impossible to suffer and to witness all this without sharing it with people that understand you and can support you. So I think we need to be in community about this, whatever community you can find, number one.
Number two, don’t get consumed by it. Don’t let it take over your life. Not in the sense of don’t be active, but take care of yourself, because — for two reasons. One is, if you don’t take care of yourself, whatever that means, and I can talk about that, but if you don’t take care of yourself, you’ll burn out.
People talk about compassion fatigue. People talk about burnout. What that is, is not taking care of ourselves, so we burn out. And then you’re no good to anybody. The second reason is, if you don’t take care of your own mental health in this then the quality and impact of your activity is going to be impaired.
So I’ve spoken many times on this issue over the years, certainly when I come from a place of rage or come from a place of bitterness, my speaking is not that effective. So you have to come from much of a place of groundedness and some understanding of even the people, especially of the people that are on the other side you know, which is understanding doesn’t mean condoning or supporting or agreeing with or putting up with, but it does mean you get where they’re coming from.
If you want to speak to people and have any hope of getting through, you got to speak in a way that doesn’t immediately threaten them. And I don’t mean that in any way to censor your words or to suppress your truth, I’m talking about the tone and how you talk to them. So both for practical and for self care reasons, you got to take care of yourself. Thirdly, you and I are rather fortunate. They can’t fire us.
Chris Hedges: They just demonetized me, that’s all right.
Gabor Maté: But you know, if I was still a practical, if it was still a practical, not practical, practicing physician, which I’m not. I’m retired, I know they’d be coming after me. Because they do. But to the extent of your anybody’s capacities and platform use it, don’t stay inactive, because the inactivity itself is demoralizing. So join with others.
Take care of your emotional health, whether that takes counseling, sometimes, if it takes yoga, meditation, walks in nature, physically taking care of your body, how you eat, journaling, listening to music, whatever inspires or feeds your soul.
Do it and and then be as active as you can be within the limitations of your or the relative limitations or relative possibilities of your situation, and don’t take it on personally. There was a rabbi who lived 100 years before Jesus. He said, he’s talking about the world the task of what they call in Hebrew, Tikkun Olam, you know, healing the world.
And he said, the task is not yours to finish, neither are you free not to take part in it, but it’s not yours to finish. You know what? People have been trying to stop suffering and cruelty, promote healing, promote peace. I mean, you’re a theologian, you know all these great avatars of spiritual truth. You know, I often talk about the spectacular failures in history.
Take the Buddha. How is universal love going? You know, Jesus, how is forgiving your brothers and your enemies and turning the other cheek? How’s that going? You know, Lao Tzu, or the Hebrew prophets and their cries for justice. How’s it going?
So you might say they’re failures. Are they, or did they not contribute massively to a human project that is a long term project in our own little ways, we can each do the same thing. It’s not us to finish, so we can’t take it personally.
Chris Hedges: Great. Thank you. That was Dr Gabor Maté. I want to thank Diego [Ramos], Thomas [Hedges] Sofia [Menemenlis] and Max [Jones]who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
(Sources: Consortium News)
