Keeping the Shadows Dark.

I mentioned in a recent post that I was concerned at signs that there is a process of suppressing dissent going on around the world. I referred to Google’s removal of all ‘Dislike’ numbers on YouTube, but let’s widen it a little.

I read today that the Russian Supreme Court has banned Memorial, a civil rights group established to remember the victims of oppression during the Soviet era. And the Chinese government has a policy of removing, and presumably destroying, all monuments to the massacre in Tiananmen Square.

One of the things I find interesting about this is that Carl Jung wrote about the ‘shadow side’ of both individuals and states. The shadow side is the dark side of a person’s or state’s psyche, the one we don’t like acknowledging, sometimes even to ourselves. He argued that it is necessary to bring this dark side to the fore, to integrate it and thus make the personality more complete. Only then can we work to eradicate it as much as possible. Well, you don’t integrate something by burying it, do you?

And we shouldn’t forget here that the Russians and Chinese are not the only states with a shadow side. We British have the British Empire with its forced labour camps and the Amritsar Massacre. The Americans have their history of slavery and the treatment of indigenous peoples. France has its colonial policies in North Africa. Germany gave the Nazis to the world. We admit them and apologise for them, but now there are movements afoot claiming that we shouldn’t remember them. We should bury them and let them rest in the vaults of history. Is that integrating them?

But what of the possibility that there is a force in the world bigger than individual governments, a force working to suppress integration so as to facilitate greater control of the people by, and for the benefit of, the rich and powerful? Is this notion the product of a paranoid imagination? I don’t know, but it is certainly in the area of conspiracy theory, so let’s leave it there for now.