16 ms·

Inheriting the Trauma of Genocide

67 points by niyikiza 8y ago

miramardesign 8y ago
is this hacker news or sjw news? oh sjwism is infecting tech.
fmajid 8y ago
Even something less traumatic like being drafted for the Vietnam War has a measurable impact on descendants: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/01/being-drafted-during-the-vietnam-war-also-hurt-your-descendents.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/01/be...
- danielvf 8y ago
  A previous paper by the same author said that those drafted in Vietnam earned less throughout the rest of their careers, and proposed that the difference was due to a loss of work experience. http://economics.mit.edu/files/14352 http://economics.mit.edu/files/14352 "This paper also proposes a simple explanation for the loss of earnings to white veterans: they earn less because their military experience is only a partial substitute for the civilian labor market experience lost while in the armed forces. Goodness-of-fit tests suggest that for whites, the time-series of veteran status coefficients is consistent with this hypothesis. Experience-earnings profiles estimated using Social Security data imply that white veterans suffered an earnings reduction equivalent to the loss of two years civilian labor market experience." The more recent paper you linked to an article about, proposes that the decline in sons earnings are due to an increase in their likelihood of joining the military, less parental time during their formative years, and reduced starting economic positions. The paper's author seems to see it as essentially being the opposite of genetic.
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    There's another obvious theory that will explain that difference. It was easy to dodge the draft. You could say that those who didn't ended up earning less because failing to get out of going was a signal of incompetence. Or, if you were aware that the problems they had in supplying raw manpower to Vietnam led the army to emphasize drafting people who should legally have been unable to serve based on their very low IQs, you could observe that it would be pretty shocking if veterans as a class showed equal earning power to society in general. > They were, to put it bluntly, mentally deficient. Illiterate. Mostly black and redneck whites, hailing from the mean big city ghettos and the remote Appalachian valleys. > By drafting them the Pentagon would not have to draft an equal number of middle class and elite college boys whose mothers could and would raise Hell with their representatives in Washington. > The young men of Project 100,000 couldn't read, so training manual comic books were created for them. They had to be taught to tie their boots. They often failed in boot camp, and were recycled over and over until they finally reached some low standard and were declared trained and ready. https://www.mcclatchydc.com/opinion/article24544984.html https://www.mcclatchydc.com/opinion/article24544984.html https://www.amazon.com/McNamaras-Folly-Hamilton-Gregory/dp/1495805484/ https://www.amazon.com/McNamaras-Folly-Hamilton-Gregory/dp/1...
    - iguy 8y ago
      I believe these papers made some attempts to avoid seeing the effects of draft-dodging. For example one of them goes only by draft numbers, without looking at who actually fought, and finds worse outcomes among the children of the group with bad numbers (fighters and dodgers) compared to good numbers. But I don't know enough details to say whether some biases remain. Indeed "McNamara's Morons" is a pretty crazy story. Turns out the army had rules for who to recruit for a good reason.
UI_at_80x24 8y ago
And this is a fantastic argument why 'The West' owes reparations to the descendants of the West African Slave trade. The genocide in Rwanda, the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (to name but two recent atrocities); these were over within a handful of years. Every single second of it was worse-then-horrible and equally shows the worst of humanity. They nonetheless ended. The West African Slave trade lasted for HUNDREDS of years. "Chattle Slavery" only ended in name and one needs only look at the Prison system in the United States to see the still evident policies and procedures that continue to this very day to continually harm the descendants of slavery. This is an ongoing crisis, that must be resolved. What tortured damage lingers in the DNA of these descendants? We have proof that Rwandans, and Jews have suffered damage and harm; is it too hard to imagine that we owe a debt and an obligation to healing these injuries? And for healing to begin, the damage must stop.
- jchrisa 8y ago
  Here is a good article that runs the numbers on what reparations could look like: https://qz.com/1012692/this-is-what-reparations-could-actually-look-like-in-america/ https://qz.com/1012692/this-is-what-reparations-could-actual...
  - steve76 8y ago
    The real evil of fascism is not racism as evil as that is. It's the nihilism and amorality, the weaponizing of the absurd and turning everything grotesque for selfish petty celebrity and sadism. We really are fools to think hundreds of millions of fascist and marxists went away overnight. America taught the world one lesson, and we taught it well. Leave Americans alone. The world's evil is still there, as it always has been, and seeps into the marginalized parts onto truly poor victims who are degraded and brought to their destruction. Think of that next time you do drugs or watch porn or gamble. People who despise all human rights prey on others there. To those, know we are created in self-evidence. You will never win over us. We've touched the Sun. We've left our star. We soon will cure cancer and all diseases of the human mind. We bring matter out of nothing and scatter mass as if it was nothing. It's not our part to defeat you. It's ours to completely embarrass you and your pathetic schemes.
iguy 8y ago
Un-paywalled: https://outline.com/ZPBe47 https://outline.com/ZPBe47
baumgarn 8y ago
I can trace my personal issues as a result of my parents experience to their parents experience in WW2 (Germany). My grandfather for example as a teenager had to clear landmines as a prisoner of war. The damage from these experiences lasts for generations, like a ripple effect.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- btilly 8y ago
  Anyone with a passing acquaintance of history knows that pretty much every family, from anywhere, will have a long history of trauma starting not very many generations ago. Looking around my office at people whose stories I know, I see sexually abused people, war refugees, children of war refugees, people who grew up under communism, someone who is coping with a degenerative illness (multiple sclerosis), and on and on and on. Yet these are all functional people, holding down professional jobs. The interesting part isn't that you can trace your problems back to trauma, but rather how you might some day manage to not have to. Because the more that people successfully do that, the better the world we can build for our mutual future.
  - soganess 8y ago
    "Anyone with a passing acquaintance of history knows that pretty much every family, from anywhere, will have a long history of trauma starting not very many generations ago." This sidesteps the issue of scale and omnipresence. It's not limited to someone you hold kinship with, or you, or your direct parents, it's the very idea of you. There are few things that personal... and it happened to millions; it's that long "history of trauma" extended from kin to kind. I'm ethnically Armenian and I've seen children who've never been exposed to any of the gruesome photos, or even set foot in the country, burst out into tears on Red Sunday. The concentration of generational transference is on a different order of magnitude. From there, if you add the wrinkle of knowing what gruesomely and specifically happen to the people closest to you, experiencing trauma like it happened first hand becomes a much more understandable occurrence. TLDR: Large scale communal lose shift the starting point, personal trauma pushes things over the edge.
aaron695 8y ago
This meme has to die. These things were normal in our history. The difference is now many of our near ancestors didn't have these things happen to them.
johnnycake12 8y ago
In the former Yugoslavia we have a concept of "inat", which (among other things, it's a complicated and multifaceted term) is kind of a genetic hatred, passed down from generation to generation. The attempts at genocide in the region are sure to have strengthened those hatreds in future generations, as did all of the other regional conflicts in the past.
chx 8y ago
What can I say? One of my grandmothers came back from Auschwitz, the other from Lichtenwörth. Most of their generation didn't survive. And then I went to Yad Vashem when I was 16. That was a grave mistake. Don't go to Yad Vashem at 16 especially not when you have relatives affected by the Holocaust. I haven't seen a World War II movie since, I can't.
didibus 8y ago
As I can't read the full article. Do they indicate any kind of leads into an hypothesis that the trauma is transferred through the genes themselves? Or is this more an effect of culture and education?
- jshevek 8y ago
  Un-paywalled: https://outline.com/ZPBe47 https://outline.com/ZPBe47
rainworld 8y ago
One must put in contrast the eagerness to push epigenetics, inheritable trauma with the unwillingness to accept the heritability of IQ and its consequences.
- tomhoward 8y ago
  It seems to me that each are eagerly embraced by opposing quarters. Maybe if each side could drop their defenses and consider the other position, we could come up with a more integrated theory and actually get somewhere.
jakobov 8y ago
I have seen this first hand amongst my friends who are grandchildren of holocaust survivors. For many of them their grandparents anxiety is very visible and part of their lives. One grandparent would always steal the free bread from restaurants, another could not be left at home alone, another bought an Uzi and gold and kept it hidden in the house in case the Nazi's come back... the list keeps on going. I grew up in Skokie which has(or had) the largest concentration of holocaust survivors in the world. Even more than cities in Israel.
magen_dovid 8y ago
a lot of post that require pay register or some commercial action for evaluation

67 points by niyikiza 8y ago

is this hacker news or sjw news? oh sjwism is infecting tech.

Even something less traumatic like being drafted for the Vietnam War has a measurable impact on descendants: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/01/being-drafted-during-the-vietnam-war-also-hurt-your-descendents.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/01/be...

danielvf 8y ago
A previous paper by the same author said that those drafted in Vietnam earned less throughout the rest of their careers, and proposed that the difference was due to a loss of work experience. http://economics.mit.edu/files/14352 http://economics.mit.edu/files/14352 "This paper also proposes a simple explanation for the loss of earnings to white veterans: they earn less because their military experience is only a partial substitute for the civilian labor market experience lost while in the armed forces. Goodness-of-fit tests suggest that for whites, the time-series of veteran status coefficients is consistent with this hypothesis. Experience-earnings profiles estimated using Social Security data imply that white veterans suffered an earnings reduction equivalent to the loss of two years civilian labor market experience." The more recent paper you linked to an article about, proposes that the decline in sons earnings are due to an increase in their likelihood of joining the military, less parental time during their formative years, and reduced starting economic positions. The paper's author seems to see it as essentially being the opposite of genetic.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  There's another obvious theory that will explain that difference. It was easy to dodge the draft. You could say that those who didn't ended up earning less because failing to get out of going was a signal of incompetence. Or, if you were aware that the problems they had in supplying raw manpower to Vietnam led the army to emphasize drafting people who should legally have been unable to serve based on their very low IQs, you could observe that it would be pretty shocking if veterans as a class showed equal earning power to society in general. > They were, to put it bluntly, mentally deficient. Illiterate. Mostly black and redneck whites, hailing from the mean big city ghettos and the remote Appalachian valleys. > By drafting them the Pentagon would not have to draft an equal number of middle class and elite college boys whose mothers could and would raise Hell with their representatives in Washington. > The young men of Project 100,000 couldn't read, so training manual comic books were created for them. They had to be taught to tie their boots. They often failed in boot camp, and were recycled over and over until they finally reached some low standard and were declared trained and ready. https://www.mcclatchydc.com/opinion/article24544984.html https://www.mcclatchydc.com/opinion/article24544984.html https://www.amazon.com/McNamaras-Folly-Hamilton-Gregory/dp/1495805484/ https://www.amazon.com/McNamaras-Folly-Hamilton-Gregory/dp/1...
  - iguy 8y ago
    I believe these papers made some attempts to avoid seeing the effects of draft-dodging. For example one of them goes only by draft numbers, without looking at who actually fought, and finds worse outcomes among the children of the group with bad numbers (fighters and dodgers) compared to good numbers. But I don't know enough details to say whether some biases remain. Indeed "McNamara's Morons" is a pretty crazy story. Turns out the army had rules for who to recruit for a good reason.

UI_at_80x24 8y ago

And this is a fantastic argument why 'The West' owes reparations to the descendants of the West African Slave trade. The genocide in Rwanda, the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (to name but two recent atrocities); these were over within a handful of years. Every single second of it was worse-then-horrible and equally shows the worst of humanity. They nonetheless ended. The West African Slave trade lasted for HUNDREDS of years. "Chattle Slavery" only ended in name and one needs only look at the Prison system in the United States to see the still evident policies and procedures that continue to this very day to continually harm the descendants of slavery. This is an ongoing crisis, that must be resolved. What tortured damage lingers in the DNA of these descendants? We have proof that Rwandans, and Jews have suffered damage and harm; is it too hard to imagine that we owe a debt and an obligation to healing these injuries? And for healing to begin, the damage must stop.

jchrisa 8y ago
Here is a good article that runs the numbers on what reparations could look like: https://qz.com/1012692/this-is-what-reparations-could-actually-look-like-in-america/ https://qz.com/1012692/this-is-what-reparations-could-actual...
- steve76 8y ago
  The real evil of fascism is not racism as evil as that is. It's the nihilism and amorality, the weaponizing of the absurd and turning everything grotesque for selfish petty celebrity and sadism. We really are fools to think hundreds of millions of fascist and marxists went away overnight. America taught the world one lesson, and we taught it well. Leave Americans alone. The world's evil is still there, as it always has been, and seeps into the marginalized parts onto truly poor victims who are degraded and brought to their destruction. Think of that next time you do drugs or watch porn or gamble. People who despise all human rights prey on others there. To those, know we are created in self-evidence. You will never win over us. We've touched the Sun. We've left our star. We soon will cure cancer and all diseases of the human mind. We bring matter out of nothing and scatter mass as if it was nothing. It's not our part to defeat you. It's ours to completely embarrass you and your pathetic schemes.

iguy 8y ago

Un-paywalled: https://outline.com/ZPBe47 https://outline.com/ZPBe47

baumgarn 8y ago

I can trace my personal issues as a result of my parents experience to their parents experience in WW2 (Germany). My grandfather for example as a teenager had to clear landmines as a prisoner of war. The damage from these experiences lasts for generations, like a ripple effect.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
btilly 8y ago
Anyone with a passing acquaintance of history knows that pretty much every family, from anywhere, will have a long history of trauma starting not very many generations ago. Looking around my office at people whose stories I know, I see sexually abused people, war refugees, children of war refugees, people who grew up under communism, someone who is coping with a degenerative illness (multiple sclerosis), and on and on and on. Yet these are all functional people, holding down professional jobs. The interesting part isn't that you can trace your problems back to trauma, but rather how you might some day manage to not have to. Because the more that people successfully do that, the better the world we can build for our mutual future.
- soganess 8y ago
  "Anyone with a passing acquaintance of history knows that pretty much every family, from anywhere, will have a long history of trauma starting not very many generations ago." This sidesteps the issue of scale and omnipresence. It's not limited to someone you hold kinship with, or you, or your direct parents, it's the very idea of you. There are few things that personal... and it happened to millions; it's that long "history of trauma" extended from kin to kind. I'm ethnically Armenian and I've seen children who've never been exposed to any of the gruesome photos, or even set foot in the country, burst out into tears on Red Sunday. The concentration of generational transference is on a different order of magnitude. From there, if you add the wrinkle of knowing what gruesomely and specifically happen to the people closest to you, experiencing trauma like it happened first hand becomes a much more understandable occurrence. TLDR: Large scale communal lose shift the starting point, personal trauma pushes things over the edge.

aaron695 8y ago

This meme has to die. These things were normal in our history. The difference is now many of our near ancestors didn't have these things happen to them.

johnnycake12 8y ago

In the former Yugoslavia we have a concept of "inat", which (among other things, it's a complicated and multifaceted term) is kind of a genetic hatred, passed down from generation to generation. The attempts at genocide in the region are sure to have strengthened those hatreds in future generations, as did all of the other regional conflicts in the past.

chx 8y ago

What can I say? One of my grandmothers came back from Auschwitz, the other from Lichtenwörth. Most of their generation didn't survive. And then I went to Yad Vashem when I was 16. That was a grave mistake. Don't go to Yad Vashem at 16 especially not when you have relatives affected by the Holocaust. I haven't seen a World War II movie since, I can't.

didibus 8y ago

As I can't read the full article. Do they indicate any kind of leads into an hypothesis that the trauma is transferred through the genes themselves? Or is this more an effect of culture and education?

jshevek 8y ago
Un-paywalled: https://outline.com/ZPBe47 https://outline.com/ZPBe47

rainworld 8y ago

One must put in contrast the eagerness to push epigenetics, inheritable trauma with the unwillingness to accept the heritability of IQ and its consequences.

tomhoward 8y ago
It seems to me that each are eagerly embraced by opposing quarters. Maybe if each side could drop their defenses and consider the other position, we could come up with a more integrated theory and actually get somewhere.

jakobov 8y ago

I have seen this first hand amongst my friends who are grandchildren of holocaust survivors. For many of them their grandparents anxiety is very visible and part of their lives. One grandparent would always steal the free bread from restaurants, another could not be left at home alone, another bought an Uzi and gold and kept it hidden in the house in case the Nazi's come back... the list keeps on going. I grew up in Skokie which has(or had) the largest concentration of holocaust survivors in the world. Even more than cities in Israel.

magen_dovid 8y ago

a lot of post that require pay register or some commercial action for evaluation