Excerpt: The Matrix of Violence

(Excerpt of the book: The Sacred Matrix by Dieter Duhm)

This morning, August 11, 2000,
10,000 Indonesian soldiers
marched into Western Papua.
Thus begins the genocide
of one of the last indigenous cultures on earth.

The history of the patriarchal era was and is a history of violence: Kosovo and the history of the Balkans – Chechnya and the history of the Caucasus – the fate of the Kurds and the history of Turkey – the history of Greece – Roman history – the history of the Jews - the history of Christianity – the history of Islam – the history of the slave trade – the history of colonization – the history of capitalism – the history of the United States – the history of Africa – the history of Asia. If we take a normal encyclopedia of history, we mainly find the years and the names that are associated with the great conquests, wars, subjugations, expulsions, and annihilations. It is the same everywhere, whether in Troy or Carthage, in Samarkand or Nineveh, Jerusalem or Dresden, Hiroshima or Grosny.
Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in the year 70 A.D. Do we know what lies behind such a succinct statement? Do we know what unspeakable misery, what horror, what absolute hell such a destruction of a city meant for its citizens? Those who do will soon close the history books again, for they find the same thing on every page, everywhere on earth. This history has been shaped by violence – and that obviously seems quite normal to the historians and to those describing it.  (...)

In order to fully understand what is meant by the matrix of violence, we must observe our own lives more closely. We will discover to what extent the way we lead our everyday lives in the West is coupled with real worldwide violence. The continuum of violence, which is ruling the planet today, is caused mainly by ourselves, our everyday consumer habits, and our silence. We are living in a state of acute complicity. Violence has been perpetrated to produce everything that we need for our daily lives, such as food, clothing, cosmetics, medicine, technology, automobiles, gasoline, culture, and entertainment. Violence against living beings - against the inhabitants of the forests, meadows, streams and oceans. Violence in animal laboratories, in animal husbandry, and in the slaughter-houses. Violence in the haciendas of the Third World, where we get our coffee, our sugar, our bananas, and much more. Violence against the indigenous farmers whose properties were stolen by the corporations, violence against the workers in countries with low wages who carry out the work of slaves for the profit of our economy. Merciless violence against all those who resist the global injustices and therefore end up in torture chambers. Never has so much torture and never have so many murders been carried out by western and other intelligence agencies as is the case today. Never before did consumerism flourish to the extent that it does today. Millions of people and billions of animals die for our prosperity every year. One glance into a filled refrigerator shows us the results of the world-wide imperialism that we are living within.
Nobody could stand to look closely and see what we are actually doing to the animals. Instead of observing the creatures and their suffering, the terminology of profits is used. Hardly anybody has the courage to resist it. The soul’s infrastructure hardens when softness can no longer bear to see things the way they are. A kind of collective scar tissue of the soul has enveloped our hearts and minds. The mechanization of life and the focus on the need for consumption and turnover require people to sacrifice their elementary need for contact, trust, love, and community. Elementary longings and life energies can no longer be translated into meaningful action. They break through violently, for example in hooliganism. Or else they eat their way inward resulting in the growing number of people whose lives have become unbearable due to loneliness, despair, and depression. Every 20 minutes a person commits suicide in Germany.
We, ourselves, are participating in this continuum of violence as long as we silently partake in a way of life whose hidden side is so soiled with blood. The fact that we still engage with each other as innocent people, that we try to counter all atrocities only by trying to create an intact private sphere, and that we watch and do nothing while a world goes to pieces is the result of a unique collective repression. The feats of repression of the highly armed consumer societies of our times greatly exceed the feats of repression of the Nazi era. Back then, one could still emigrate or resist. But where should one emigrate to today, and who should one resist? It is difficult to resist something that one is part of oneself. It is also difficult to fight an injustice that is no longer rooted in a single group or in single actions, but in the system as a whole – an injustice that is ultimately a prerequisite for its existence.
I am not describing all this in order to elicit moral nausea, but to show why the creation of a global power of peace is impossible while retaining our current ideas about life. We need a new matrix, a new concept for human culture and society. It will arise in any case, for the current system cannot hold up much longer. The question is only at what level we will then continue. Will a global holocaust throw us back to the level of cave dwellers? Or will we succeed in developing a new, realistic model of non-violent cooperation with all living beings? This concept must become visible at a few places on earth for it to become a field-creating global force. This is the purpose of the Federation of Healing Biotopes. The globalization of violence must be countered by a different type of globalization of peace. We need a new development on earth that helps us to fill the words “human being” with a positive content.