TheOldGuy @TheOldGuy@qoto.org
I am a Democrat who supports Ukraine in their battle against The Russian Z fascist invaders.
I am a 73 year old Covid hermit who
lives on 10 acres in a sparsely populated area of the Ozarks. I heat with wood that is leftover by the lumber industry. When cutting oak for lumber only the trunk is used.
The largest town is population 2992. The county is 13k people scattered over 713 square miles.
Joined Dec 2022
Rick Wison Friday Brief
Good Morning Resisters. Still in the 20s outside First morning Sammie was reluctant to get out of bed for Friskies Salmon.
The trauma turns memory itself into a restricted area. It is also next to impossible to access it and extract information from it. And this will continue until time and healing gradually begin to free these souls.
Under occupation, people cannot speak freely about what has happened. Trauma also takes away the ability to speak, in its own way.
Many months ago, the Kyiv Independent's War Crimes Investigation Unit talked to a woman about her experiences under Russian occupation — how she was abducted, how she was tortured, how she was abused and what Russians tried to force her to do.
Ukrainians from all the territories that have been under occupation tell such stories: the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Kyiv, and Chernihiv oblasts. Over the course of our Unit's work, we have become very familiar with this Russian modus operandi.
At the same time, each never-before-heard story is valuable because it gives an additional chance to identify those involved in the crimes and also because it’s a distinctive human experience of pain in need of being relieved.
We documented everything this woman told us and stayed in touch with her.
About six months after our conversation, this woman sent us a message saying: "I have not told you everything. I want to tell you more. I was not ready at that time."
We got on the phone, and she started talking. She said that when the Russians kidnapped her, they not only tortured her. They also repeatedly raped her.
“I have never told anyone about this before. Not even law enforcement. Not even my family. I felt shame,” she explained.
It took a long time for this woman to decide to talk about this other crime. When she first talked to us about the abduction and torture, she definitely remembered the rape. But the trauma occupied that memory, and this woman was not ready to give us or anyone else access to it. Like the occupation, the trauma took away her ability to speak.
Only gradually, over time, was she able to free herself from the trauma enough to let us into her memory’s territory. And so the hope for justice was born.
When we talk about crimes committed in the occupied territories, we often repeat: To know about them and to investigate them, we need to liberate those territories. Justice is not possible without the liberation of land.
The same applies to crimes that cannot be learned about because of trauma. Only when a victim of a war crime has healed from the trauma and can talk about it, a chance to investigate it and achieve justice appears.
Unless the trauma of individual Ukrainians and Ukrainian society as a whole is addressed, much of the truth about Russian war crimes will remain unknown. Liberating Ukrainians from their trauma, as much as liberating the territories, is essential in the quest for truth.
I am a Democrat who supports Ukraine in their battle against The Russian Z fascist invaders.
I am a 73 year old Covid hermit who
lives on 10 acres in a sparsely populated area of the Ozarks. I heat with wood that is leftover by the lumber industry. When cutting oak for lumber only the trunk is used.
The largest town is population 2992. The county is 13k people scattered over 713 square miles.
Joined Dec 2022
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