The Packbats' Weblog

Content warnings for discussion of trauma, graphic descriptions of sexual assault, and suicide.

"Can Historians Be Traumatized by History?" from The New Republic.

This paragraph in particular jumped out:

It is bad advice to say that politics, sex, and religion ought to be kept out of polite conversation, but nobody wants you to bring up a genocide at a dinner party. “The extent to which my research is ‘dark’ and therefore not polite dinner conversation means I’m repeatedly isolated in piecing through the material,” Elena Gallina, a Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford and researcher of sexual violence in wartime, told me.

It makes me think of the equation from that old Tumblr thread about abuse, PTSD, and emotional neglect: "Overwhelming Experience + Isolation + Shame = PTSD".

If historians are expected not to be traumatized by traumatic history? This, we would expect, would make their trauma worse.

On the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen Square, the New York Times "Lens" blog made two memorial posts regarding the photographs of the Tank Man: first, the classic four photos with comments from the photographers, and second, the fifth photo, unreleased until now.

I am sure I can say nothing to add to these. But I am wondering: what of the driver and other crew of that lead Type 59 tank? It seems to me an incredible thing, that these four PLA soldiers, presumably with orders to drive away the protesters from the square, saw this single man (incongruously carrying plastic bags, as if he was just out shopping) walk out in front of them ... and they stopped. Their guns were silent. Ashamedly, the driver turns the tank to go around the man - like you might turn your car to avoid a pothole - but the man puts his body in the way, seventy or so kilos of meat and bone against thirty six thousand of metal, and ... I don't know. Were they confused? Or did they, somehow, in the midst of the machinegunning of hundreds of people, look out through their periscopes and see a person, a fellow human being, before them?

I have been thinking for a while that nonviolent protest is the strangest sort of moral judo - if war is an extension of diplomacy, seeking victory by the destruction of your enemies personhood, then this is likewise an extension, an anti-war, seeking victory by the construction of your own personhood. The acts of passive resistance bewilder because it is impossibly to justify as war. It can only be understood as human.

We don't know who the Tank Man is. As far as I am aware, we don't even know who was in the tanks.