Do You See?

The relationship of oppressed people to their oppressors can be understood in terms of the prohibition to see or be seen.

 

Take the American example. Under Jim Crow in the South, Blacks understood that they were to be invisible—not seen and not seeing. No Black person could look at a white person in a way that reflected her humanity or the realities of her existence. Even the imagined gaze of a Black man at a white woman was grounds for lynching. After almost one hundred years of this invisibility, the nonviolent demonstrations of the civil rights movement forced the nation to see what was being done to Black people. It turned out that by then, the early 1960s, once it was forced to see, the nation discovered in itself the capacity to act on what it had seen. Historic civil rights legislation was passed and significant changes occurred.

 

Take the German example. Once Hitler had consolidated total power in Germany, the regime set about, first, placing in concentration camps all those whom it was felt people did not want to see due to their difference: homosexuals, people with disabilities, Roma people. Then the Nazis began their campaign against the Jews, which can be viewed (as Freud all but foresaw) as the elimination of those who because of their difference were able to see things differently from the majority. Stupendous crimes were committed in part to eliminate people who looked different or saw things differently.  

 

Take the Russian example. The Soviet Union went from conditions of joint leadership in the late 1920s, in which people generally had the freedom to see what was happening in their country and say what they thought about it, to conditions of a totalitarian Stalinist state in the early 1930s, in which people were not permitted to see what was plainly in front of them. They were not permitted to see all around them the hideous suffering of millions of people caused by the first Five-Year Plan. They were only permitted to see a heroic act of self-determination by unified and optimistic people led by a farsighted and benevolent Soviet state. Later, during the Great Terror, 1937 to 1938, everyone was killed—Old Bolsheviks, independent writers, and most of the military leadership—who might (in the future) see things differently from the way Stalin needed things seen. Anyone who had made or might make Stalin uncomfortable by what they might be able to see was killed. 

 

Now we have the Israeli example. We know the history: 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes in 1948, and since 1967 they have lived under a settler-colonial regime that denies them political and human rights, treats them as less than human, and, as I write, is in the process of murdering tens of thousands of them in Gaza and now also on the West Bank. Their status brings to mind Black Americans under Jim Crow, German Jews under the Nuremberg  Laws, and any Soviet citizens under Stalin who Stalin considered had seen or might see something that made him uncomfortable. 

 

Black Americans under Jim Crow, like Soviet citizens under Stalin, had to practice invisibility in order to survive: they had to appear to be what the majority demanded that they appear to be. The situation of the German Jews was different, in some ways the opposite. Many German Jews under the Nazi regime began with the thought that they and their forebears were as German as anyone, but the Nuremberg Laws, passed in 1935, made sure that Jews were seen to be different and were systematically excluded in incremental steps from society. This culminated in their having to wear yellow stars and, soon after that, in the Holocaust itself. Unlike the other two examples, Jews were kept from disappearing, and then they were killed. 

 

These brief forays into the history of authoritarian regimes from the viewpoint of being seen or not seen point up very different national experiences. In Germany, the oppression could only cease with total military defeat, which came too late for most Jews. In the famous postwar moment, German citizens were forced to walk through concentration camps to see what their government had done to human beings, to see what they had assiduously determined not to see before. They had to be forced by the military leader of one of the conquering armies to literally open their eyes to the unspeakable crimes that their countrymen had inflicted on innocent people.

 

In the US, the body politic was healthy enough so that being shown the reality of the Black American experience was sufficient, in the 1960s, for it to make changes significant enough to  bring national life more in line with the stated national value of justice for all, which in the process were shown to have real force. In Russia, the oppressive requirement to see only what was approved to be seen gradually lost its power after Stalin died, until under Gorbachev it lapsed completely. Then citizens were allowed to see everything, including what was contained in formerly secret files about the crimes of the Stalinist regime. The Soviet Union collapsed soon after that. In Russia, the freedom to see began before the collapse of the Soviet Union, had its apogee in the decade after that collapse, and then slowly waned under Putin until a Stalinist-like prohibition on seeing what the regime doesn’t want seen was reproduced during the war in Ukraine. In this respect, Russia was healthy enough to acquire the freedom to see but not healthy enough to maintain that freedom, at least now.

 

The Israeli case is being played out dramatically as I write. Can Israelis see the suffering of the Palestinians that has been caused by the actions of the state of Israel from the days of its founding? Or can they only see their own suffering in our time and before? We know that the current Israeli government has been trying to destroy the independence of the Israeli judicial system. An independent judiciary does for a nation what a healthy superego does for an individual: it allows things to be seen and then responded to as justice requires. Can the Israelis maintain an independent judicial system? Can the Israelis see what they are doing, see what continuing down that path will lead to, and act so as to change course, thus affirming values of justice and humanity that their culture contains? 

 

Can a nation allow itself to see? The Germans could not; they had to be defeated. The Russians could, briefly, in the context of the failure of the Soviet Union. The Americans could—then. In November 2024, we will see if Americans are still animated by the values that prevailed in the 1960s. One meaning of an electoral victory of Donald Trump in November would be a national decision to return to the years when Black Americans and their historic suffering in America were not seen. Indeed, Trump’s victory would mean placing the resources of the federal government in the service of making what is unpleasant for people to see (for example, climate change) invisible. 

 

Seeing and being seen are also obviously essential to individuals. They form a part of the psychopathologies addressed in psychoanalytic treatments, ranging from a need to be invisible to a need always to be seen. Pointing out the similarities between national and individual realities puts us in mind of the tragedy of large groups. An individual can find a psychoanalyst to work on a psychopathology about seeing or being seen. A nation cannot. We saw the very different fates of nations in struggling with these issues. In our historical moment, we ask: Can Israel avoid the fate of Germany? Can the US? Turning away from seeing is to turn away from the possibility of justice.¹

 

 

¹  For a dramatic experience of this issue from the point of view of the Palestinians, I recommend I Witness Silwan: Public Art, Tourism, and International Solidarity in Occupied East Jerusalem, a photo essay by Susan Greene.