The Terrible Legacy of Mankind
How trauma prompts people to commit the atrocities we’ve seen throughout history and that are happening right now in Gaza. How can we end this vicious cycle?
by Dieter Duhm, March 31 2024
A man has fallen madly in love with a woman. The two have sworn eternal fidelity to each other. Then he finds out that his wife is having an “affair” with someone else. His despair quickly turns to hatred. He goes crazy and kills her. Last year, 240,000 cases of domestic violence were registered in Germany, not including the number of unreported cases. Jealousy is the pandemic of our time, killing more people than any other disease.
Half a million people in Germany suffer from cancer. What is behind all this despair, illness and violence? These are personal fates. But they are not alone, because a sedimented layer of fear and violence lies over the whole of humanity, on all continents. Otherwise they would have the courage to defy the orders of their despots and build autonomous regions where they no longer have to protect themselves from each other.
What the Israelis are doing today is the consequence of a cruel past of persecution and murder, which the Jews had to suffer for many centuries, not only in Nazi Germany, but already in the Jewish pogroms of the Christian crusaders in the 12th century and much earlier. If this history of suffering had not been so deeply engraved in their genetic memory, they would not have carried out the cruel revenge on Palestine. The whole of humanity comes from a traumatic past that can only be resolved at completely new levels of consciousness.
What did the Americans do to the Indians, what did they do to the African slaves, what did they do in Vietnam? What did the Germans do to the Jews? What did the former rulers do to the peasants? What did the Catholic Church do to women? What did the German colonialists do to the Africans? What did Stalin do to Ukraine? What did the Chinese do in Tibet? We could go on and on until today. Where do the goods in the supermarket come from, how much nature, how much wildlife and how many people have to die every day to satisfy the consumer needs of Western industrialised societies? The world in which we enjoy our prosperity and celebrate our festivals today has emerged from an unspeakable war history of genocide, racism, blood and cruelty against women. The world is a whole, what happens somewhere happens everywhere in a modified form. Science speaks here of “genetic resonance”.
This historical legacy is embedded in our collective humanity and is causing such horrific things everywhere as are currently happening in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine. We live in a powder keg that could explode at any time on every continent. And indeed, it explodes thousands of times a day on our planet.
I am not speaking on behalf of any party, religion or community. I have been involved in the Middle East issue for many years and have tried not to mention the worst things in my writings so as not to add fuel to the ideological flames. But now I have to speak plainly because what is happening in the Gaza Strip is so incredibly cruel that I can no longer remain silent. I say what everyone knows, if they want to know anything at all, instead of suppressing everything. For example, I see a 14-year-old boy in Gaza who has to have his leg amputated after an Israeli attack, without anesthetic, because the Israelis have blocked the delivery of medication. Without anesthetic! And this is just one example of an unspeakable number.
What Israel is doing in the Gaza Strip no longer has anything to do with the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, nor with the hostage rescue. The Hamas attack was well planned and the Israeli secret service Mossad knew about it long beforehand. Why didn’t Israel do anything about it? Did they perhaps need this attack to achieve their goal of destroying Palestine?
This of course leaves an embarrassing question for those responsible in Germany: Why did you support all this? You watched as Israel expelled the Bedouins and destroyed their villages and occupied Palestinian territory to build your own settlements there. Why did you support such attacks? It was clear that slowly but surely the Palestinian side could not develop the greatest love.
When I heard about what the Germans did under Hitler in my youth, I asked my parents and many others: Why did you take part? They always had two answers. The first: “We didn’t know anything about anything.” The second: “We couldn’t have done anything.” I sensed the immense cowardice of a nation of 70 million people who supposedly couldn’t do anything. Many of them had Jewish neighbours or friends who were suddenly no longer there.
Huge demonstrations are currently taking place in Germany against the AFD and right-wing extremism. At the same time, Germany is supporting the total right-wing extremism of the Israeli government. Anyone who criticises Israel for its war crimes in Gaza on purely humane grounds is called an “anti-Semite” by the established German public. With such methods, Germany has become an advocate of mass murder for which there is no moral justification whatsoever. How can this be? Do the eager demonstrators and our petty politicians no longer know what they are doing? While they shout their democratic slogans to the world, they have been supporting one of the cruellest governments on earth for decades. If just one per cent of the 300,000 demonstrators saw with their own eyes what is happening in Gaza today, they would wake up from a sleep that they could only sleep because they were far enough away from the scene of the tragedy and simply believed what they were told. – All of a sudden, their hearts come into contact with the pain of a mother who has found her two dead children under the rubble of her bombed-out home. And some of them think that it could have been their own children. And then they learn that starving and mutilated children have become the daily norm in Gaza. Because they cannot bear this unimaginable pain, they do everything they can to return to their usual way of life and forget what they have seen. But some of them can no longer forget. The more they have experienced inside themselves what is really happening there, the greater their will to help with all available means. New city groups, new networks and new ideas for help are created of their own accord. Church communities would also be involved, because they would be reminded of the basic commandments of humanity in a whole new way.
This is a case of moral neglect on both sides – Germany and Israel – that will soon spread worldwide unless very courageous peace groups take the helm now and are no longer discouraged by police or water cannons. They could ensure that the gates are opened in the Gaza Strip so that the perishing population can once again receive the most basic necessities of life, such as clean water, food and medicine. In Rafah, where 1.4 million refugees have sought their last refuge, their last hospitals and refugee camps are now being bombed because a few Hamas terrorists might be hiding there. You know that this is all a monstrous lie, because for every Hamas fighter killed, 20 children are killed. And has anyone ever counted how many hostages were actually killed by Israeli bombs?
It’s always the same fear of jeopardizing your own life and career if you speak the truth too loudly. Why did the German people under Hitler allow the Holocaust to happen? Why do you allow all this to happen, why don’t you stand up against racism and genocide? Who do you actually obey? Why do you support this global dehumanization of human beings? What guilt, what pain, what tragedies that you once experienced yourselves do you now have to compensate for together?
I don’t expect any realistic answers, I just want to use this text to call on people to step out of the general hypnosis and hypocrisy and think seriously about how we can help the victims of international politics and its media propaganda. Every woman and every man who still has an open heart inside and experiences what is happening in Gaza or Rafah and now also in the West Bank will think for themselves about whether we can continue to lead our usual lives under these circumstances. I believe that the only thing that allows us to live with a pure soul today is the ultimate determination to help those who otherwise have no help. To become capable of helping, we need a high strength of compassion, courage and ethics. We need to reconnect with the spiritual center that we have called “conscience”. A true conscience is a spiritual force within us that can be stronger than any fear in an emergency. I have experienced it often enough.
What would it be like if tomorrow a few thousand women dressed in white stood in front of the Gaza Strip with the absolute determination to help the people and not allow any more violence? What would it be like in Germany if 100 such women suddenly stood with the same courage in front of the Holocaust Museum in Berlin, in front of the Brandenburg Gate and in front of the German Reichstag? Perhaps they would distribute leaflets. I am thinking of uncorruptible people who obey no political doctrine, but only a human ethic of truth, compassion and help. They don’t hate Jews or Palestinians. They don’t burn cars or throw stones at the police. They are breaking through everything that the German people have been taught in recent years and thereby creating a new field of truth and humanity. I suspect that even the most reactionary news channels would rethink under these conditions.
There are people and groups on all continents who have recognized the deception of our time because they – such as Ruth Pfau, Anita Moorjani, Sabine Lichtenfels or Peter Caddy – have come into contact with a greater love. Gurdijeff called such people the “inner ring of humanity”. I myself followed the inner command early on to no longer tolerate violence. When I was 28 and writing my dissertation at night, I heard a woman screaming for help downstairs in the courtyard. I ran down the stairs and met a man who had gone crazy and was beating his wife like a madman. I immediately intervened to calm the man down. He stopped immediately. Afterwards, they both thanked me and invited me to a birthday party in the neighborhood. I am not writing this to prove my courage, but to show what unexpected things almost always happen when we follow our conscience completely – because the “conscience”: that is God in us.
I have many German, Israeli and Palestinian friends who have been engaged in Israel and Palestine as committed peace workers. During pilgrimages, public events and theater performances (“We refuse to be enemies“), the concept of a special peace village (“Peace Research Village”) was developed. The plan could not yet be realized at that time (2007) for human, political and financial reasons, but it is still valid.
One evening, a Jewish family in En Gedi (above the Dead Sea) invited me and my travel companion Monika to a Sabbath celebration. It was a wonderful evening and I was moved by the faith and kindness of these people. Afterwards, I reflected alot about the development of Judaism and the idea of the “Holy Land”. It made sense to take up the idea again on a new level, but without the dogmatic laws of the old religions. I have described the concept of a “Holy Land” in detail as a concrete utopia of “Healing Biotopes” in various books (for example in: “The Sacred Matrix“). I suspect that in the coming years such a project will manifest itself in several places on earth, simply because there is no way around it. The reasons why ideas, which resonate with the rules of life in the divine world, can have a global impact are related to the spiritual information processes in a holographic world. In this context, I would also like to draw your attention to the book “Grace. Pilgrimage For a Future Without War” by Sabine Lichtenfels.
Those who know of the indescribable cruelties in human history and still want to believe in something good in the universe often ask the question: “God, why do you allow all of this?” And God would answer: “I don’t allow it, you humans allow it.” I would go on to ask: “Why do humans allow it?” And the answer comes straight away: “Because you humans have experienced so many terrible things in your past as perpetrators or victims and have had to lie so much that your conscience no longer functions properly. Moreover, in love you often make a premature promise of fidelity that you can hardly keep under the current conditions. There is a deep connection between the war in love and the fight against external enemies.”
I have no doubt about the existence of a divine world, because I have experienced it often enough. Above all, I have learnt that the so-called God lies in the power of a functioning conscience. There is a universal humanity that is built into the conscience of all people. But as a result of the global derailment, the conscience became dysfunctional. People no longer obeyed their conscience, but the laws imposed on them by the various religions and empires. They obeyed out of fear of punishment, and the punishments were merciless in all religions. Those who did not obey the laws but followed their own conscience were killed. In this way, millennium after millennium, humanity moved away from the ethics that were originally instilled in all of us. It was replaced by a collective fear. Without this fear, there would not be the obedience with which people still submit to their despots today. And without this fear, people would know that real peace is not brought about by the most sophisticated weapons, but by spiritual forces. (This also applies to Ukraine and Russia.). The world is a subtle fabric that is not controlled by weapons, but by people’s thoughts and beliefs.
Fortunately, children born today know nothing of the horrors of their ancestors. Only when they grow older and enter into their first love relationships, after initial enthusiasm, are they touched by the genetic heritage of mankind. They will experience a similar fate as their parents and grandparents if they do not come into contact with a better world of love and sensitive education in time. This applies above all to the sexual sphere, which since the patriarchal mass murder of women carries in itsself an undercurrent of mistrust and fear of separation in almost every love relationship between a man and a woman. Here, in the destroyed relationship between the sexes, lies one of the causes that underlies most human catastrophes to this day. All humans and all animals have emerged from a female body. The earth is female, and all, even the strongest men, carry in their cellular bodies a primal longing for the mother ground of all life. If it is at all possible to save humanity from the global holocaust, then this would could be done by the reconnection with this mother ground. For here lies the real home that everyone longs for. “The home that shines into everyone’s childhood” (Ernst Bloch). For this we need a new world, a turning point in time that is not created by new weapons, but by people who have rediscovered their original love and no longer have to deny their divine origins.