This account of course raises many questions which we have still to deal with, notably about the origin of the projected feelings in the first place. But it has one great asset which, as it seems to me, makes some form of it a necessary move. This is that it resolves the difficulty about finding an adequate motive. The joint repressed aggression of a whole populace makes up a very powerful motive for communal crimes, such as pogroms, witch-hunts or gratuitous wars. It is a cause suitable to such effects. By invoking it, we can avoid a very odd and unconvincing feature of those explanations which ignore it, namely, that they divide populations sharply into a few guilty instigators and a majority of amazingly passive dupes or fools. Unless we think that a particular population is weak and foolish on all subjects, we must surely find it odd that they become so as soon as some particular feared or persecuted group comes in question. The picture of innocent passivity is not convincing because it is too selective. We know very well that not every kind of political leader, and not every kind of cause, finds this kind of uncritical passive obedience. And if the picture of the passive herd is suspect, that of the wholly active, creative instigator, stamping his personality at will upon this wax, is still more so. Mass leaders must use the causes they can find. Konrad Heiden, in his life of Hitler, stresses
There is therefore a sense, and not a trivial one, in which such demagogues are themselves the tools of their supporters.
When we consider the strategies by which people who do not officially choose to be wicked still manage to do so while quieting their consciences and denying their shadows, a diagnosis which focuses on what they fail to do may seem plausible enough, or at least not surprising. And we have seen that it is possible for people in this situation to commit an immense proportion of the evil which is actually done in the world. The harm that can be done by not thinking is literally immeasurable.
This dividing Cypriots into a 'few guilty instigators' and a 'majority passive dupes' is something that posters like mikkie2 constantly do. Like (the world renowned and respect) author, I too find this explaination utterly 'uncovining'. It is exactly this kind of thought process that allows these horrors to happen.
and here are some sections on the 'shadow self' - about our ability to deny our own 'wicked' tendencies and natures and to think and describe these things as merely somthing that 'others' posses, but not ourselves.
I am suggesting that self-deception arises because we see motives which are in fact our own as alien to us and refuse to acknowledge them.
We have therefore to look for diffused human motives, not clearly recognized, which blind people to their own interests as well as to other people's, and incline them to see as their duty actions which, if they viewed them impartially, they would consider wrong.
What makes these motives hard to see is the very same fact which gives them their force-namely, their immense diffusion. The habitual, half-conscious, apparently mild hostility of one people towards another is as little noticed, consciously, as the air they breathe. It also resembles that air in being a vital factor in their lives, and in the fact that a slight shift in its quality can make enormous changes. Yet it differs from it in being something for which they are, at root, responsible. To take the crudest case at once, it is what makes war possible.
This is connected with another striking feature, the ease with which improbable charges are believed against anyone designated as an enemy, the invention of further charges when real data fail, and the general unreality with which enemy thought-processes are imagined. We need to notice again how contrary this habit of mind is to rational prudence. If one has enemies, it is surely of the first importance to discover their real intentions, to study them carefully, and assess realistically the dangers which they actually pose. No real enemy is unlimitedly hostile. All have particular aims, and between such aims compromise is nearly always possible. Certainly some enemies are more threatening, some conflicts of interest harder to reconcile than others. But this only makes it all the more important to discover realistically which sort one is facing at the moment.
When we consider people's frequent failure to do this, and the extraordinary flourishing of violent hostility where no real threat is posed at all, we are (as far as I can see) forced to look for an explanation within. People who seriously believe that they are being attacked when they are not, and who attribute hostile planning groundlessly to their supposed attackers, have to be projecting their own unrecognized bad motives onto the world around them.
When we turn to disputes between nations things are, of course, often more complicated, since real conflicts of interests, and real threats, may be involved as well as irrational hostility. But when we look at these apparently more solid causes, complications appear. How rational is resentment? When one country has previously attacked another-for instance in the case of France and Germany after the war of 1870-what follows? It is natural for the invaded party to fear that it will happen again, to want its provinces back, and in fact want revenge. But intense concentration of these aims is certainly not the best way to secure, in the end, harmonious relations with the neighbour. And those harmonious relations provide the only possible hope of arbitrating the conflict of interest effectively.
Even in the most reasonable kinds of dispute, uncontrolled, chronic hostility is a liability, not an asset, and this, again, gives us further grounds to suppose that it takes its rise in irrelevant, projected motives, not just in the specific, apparent causes of the outward dispute. Specific grievances wear out; the unchangingness of group hostilities marks them as fraudulent. They are not responses to real external dangers, but fantasies. We erect a glass at the border of our own group, and see our own anger reflected against the darkness behind it. Where we know a good deal about neighbouring groups, the darkness is not complete and the projection is imperfect. If we want to maintain it, we may then have to do quite a lot of arguing. But the more unfamiliar that group is, the deeper the darkness becomes. The illusion can then grow wholly convincing.
What we see out there is indeed real enough; it is our own viciousness, and it strikes us with quite appropriate terror. And by an unlucky chance, while it remains projected, there is no way to weaken or destroy it. Persecution and punishment of those to whom it is attributed do not soften it at all; indeed, to the persecutors' alarm, they often seem to intensify it. Hence the strange insatiability of persecution, the way in which suspicion seems to grow by being fed, and security never comes nearer.
This has been a long post and the ideas in are challenging. However I believe that we urgently need this kind of undestanding and investigation into why Cyprus is the way it is today.
Denial of responsibilty of 'ordinary' Cypriots for the horrors that occured in Cyprus brings us no closer to understanding (so we can avoid it in the future) what occured. Blaming 'the motherlands' or the 'UK' or a 'few evil instigators' only makes that understanding harder. It is simply a mechanism whereby we 'salve our consciences' and 'deny our responsibilites'. It does ot help us create a united Cyprus - it stops us from doing so.
The green line is not so much a border but a mirror into which we project all the aspects of ourselves that we do not want to admit and place them on a group deemed as 'other'. The continued and uncritial continuance of this (from both sides) only cements our division by the day.
