Bear60's Blog

THE WOMEN’S HOLOCAUST

By Christopher Bear Beam, M.A.

There are many holocausts that many in the West – and all over the planet – have not much heard about. The article “War Rape” in Wikipedia cites that 500,000 women were raped in the Rwanda Genocide of 1994. War Rape was first recognized as a crime against humanity when the International Criminal Tribunal tried the Former Yugoslavia. It was evidenced that Muslim women in Foca (southeast Bosnia and Herzegovina) were subjected to the systematic and widespread gang rape, torture and sexual enslavement by Bosnian Serb soldiers, policemen, and members in paramilitary groups. Crimes against women are also recognized as integral to the strategy of war in some cultures.

We must never forget that rape is a crime of violence. As far at its effects, a recent study (cited by Wikipedia) lists STDs or VDs, (including HIV) and pregnancy. Another two physical effects are incontinence and vaginal fistulas. The short-term or long-term psychological wounds may include depression, anxiety disorders (including PTSD), multiple somatic symptoms, flashbacks, difficulty re-establishing intimate relationships, shame and persistent fears.

We have forgotten about the African holocaust that took place in colonial, slave-trading days. The millions of Africans, who were stolen from their homes, put on floating coffins in absolutely deplorable conditions, where men, women, and children, in the millions, died in the Middle Passage. All people need to learn this history, and remember it.

I say this in the spirit of “identificational sorrow,” a concept that means that we do have a link to our European ancestors who were culpable in this African Holocaust. It doesn’t matter if our defense is “Well, my family were never slave-owners,” because we were the ones who benefited from this genocide, and we still, even today, are reaping the benefits. The largest slave-traders in America lived up north of the Mason-Dixon line: the duplicity of the DeWolf family, who amassed a fortune from the bestial treatment of African slaves, made us all culpable, so that we can no longer turn away our eyes to escape our shame. This was another one of our own white-driven holocausts.

Then there are the indigenous peoples of the land in North and South America who have been the targets of genocide and holocaust. Native Americans had their land taken by theft, were dispossessed to places other than their homeland, slaughtered, tortured—men, women, and children. Eventually, their children were taken from their families by ‘good Christian folk,’ housed in boarding schools, stripped of their language, their names, their native clothing, sometimes of their womanhood by forced sterilization, their spirituality (you can only really strip a person or group of their religion, but their spirituality may become more impervious through resistance), and made into the image of the white man. The saying, as a rationalization for their abuse, was, ‘Kill the Indian, save the man.’ This was both a physical and a psycho-spiritual holocaust, since the psychological trauma, poverty, lack of access to resources, internalized oppression, and intimidation of beatings, lynching, and rapes were seen as its consequences by future generations.

When the early immigrants came to America, they created a political moment (a moment for European American history) by inviting the leaders of the American Indian Nations to come and meet with them to see if any kind of strategy might be engineered for peaceful co-existence in order that they might take more of the land and resources of America. The white men noticed that Native Americans brought women with them to these assemblies; in Native culture, women were viewed as equals to men, so they were in leadership responsibilities. The white leaders were horrified because of their sexist views of women, so they counseled the male Native American leaders to leave them at home. After all, Europeans reasoned, they weren’t intelligent enough for the business of ruling, controlling, and stealing what wasn’t theirs to steal, and this was, in the end, what leadership was all about, right? I doubt if the Native Americans took their advice.

We never have to look too far away for historical examples, once we wipe the historical denial from our eyes, and can use our special vision called ‘remembering the past and our part in it.’ The examples are there. I suppose one could even dispute the term genocide or holocaust (there are various interpretations and definitions); in my mind, we don’t need to limit it to the extermination of targeted people. The forced and coercive transfers of any group of people from the land of their ancestor’s kills their spirit… Dislocation leads to the decimation of people’s identities.

If we research very far in the distant past, we can locate the almost invisible, yet primeval, string of yarn that stitched the ideology of Domionism–the design of the chain of the hierarchy of life. Dominionism (growing out of European philosophy and theology) espoused the ideology that men should control nature to make it habitable and productive. For this, they cleverly twisted the theological word stewardship. At the top of this ladder reign men, and at the bottom they placed the ecosphere. Next on the hierarchy, one step down from men came women, but they were viewed as pretty far down the ladder, closer to the earth, which is base, wild, and savage. Women were made invisible, seen as seducing men and leading them into moral depravity, the essence of physicality and sexuality; impudent, easily persuaded by evil spirits (the Devil), unintelligent, in need of control and guidance, etc., etc., etc. You can see the close connection the way Europeans viewed animals.

During the “Dark Ages” the majority of criminals brought to tribunals and village kangaroo courts were women. Is there any reason to wonder about the Women’s Holocaust and how it could happen? Author Rossell Hope Robbins writes about this era being a “shocking nightmare, the foulest crime and deepest shame of Western civilization, the blackest of everything that Homo sapiens, the reasoning man, has ever upheld” (cited by Jim Mason in An Unnatural Order: Uncovering the Roots of Our Domination of Nature and Each Other, p. 226). This emerged as a power struggle between women and institutional male power. Eighty-five percent of the victims during this time were women.

Mason reports that victims of this holocaust range between 200,000 to a high of two million women burned at the stake during this 300-year period. The sordid paradox of the Women’s Holocaust is that it happened during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. This is just another example of how male-dominated power and extermination is truly crazy making.

Women were already cast in the role as being complicit with the Devil, so it was no stretch to level accusations against them for behaviors the church claimed as heretical. But really the causal factor behind this holocaust was that of sustaining the power of men and the church. If the church had been holding high the truth of the dignity and sacredness of all people, things, and every created being, why would it be torturing and killing so many women who they ruled were guilty of spurious charges?

Women were accused of witchcraft; some were covered with burning oil, or burned at the stake. No doubt, there were many terroristic rapes as well. Women were butchered or drowned, with their children forced to watch these insane and demonic acts; imagine, children forced to see their mothers killed… What else could this have resulted in except PTSD thousands of years before it was labeled this by contemporary psychologies? Women were also killed at the hands of church and state for being herbalists or healers. They were seen as evil because of their love of the earth and its restorative powers.

The mistreatment of women as inferior to men was part of the Holocaust of Women, and its practices migrated into the New World. It resulted in the Salem Witch trials in the New England states. It has continued to migrate by way of many more covert and subtle ways of oppression: at one time the suppression of civil rights such as voting, abusiveness, murder, rape, domestic violence, sexual harassment, discriminatory treatment, and a culture that still lives in many places steeped with sexism as a normal part of its life. I use the words “its life” advisedly because now sexism and misogyny are a part of our overall system. Systemic sources are bigger and more powerful than individuals. But it’s still a holocaust, no matter how you look at it or try to defend it.

I was so moved by a homiletic of a woman in our community Betty Duff that I became physically ill when I listened to her remarks: like a dredged out well with nothing left inside. All of us men had a mother; we may have sisters, aunts, girl cousins, and grandmothers we knew, yet each of us as men has assisted the White Male System to continue to live and breathe. I think of my own social conditioning growing up as a boy, then a young adult, and now an older adult. I am now recovery from this sickness of the male-dominated, sexist, and superior system; I listen more closely to my inner conversations around female stereotypes, as I have become more conscious and aware. My brain registers thoughts and ideas that I picked up in the land of domination and power. Now I’m moving through the plane of acute awareness, deconstruction, and reconstruction, and the old thought processes and behaviors are often hardened like fossils in ancient burial places. Healing is a dirty and messy business, but the end results are cleansing and lifting.

© Christopher Bear Beam, M.A. August 2009

Many, many thanks to Betty Duff who researched this time period and shared it with our community, Marilyn Douglas-Jones who offered help in editing, and Deborah Levine who gave me helpful feedback prior to the publishing of this blog on the American Diversity Report.