Abstract
Introduction
The group analytic study of political violence is still in its infancy. But Robi Friedman’s concept of the soldier matrix opens up new possibilities (Friedman, 2015). By referring to a ‘group analytic study’ I mean an approach that is specifically group analytic as distinct from one that is psychoanalytic or based on group concepts rooted in individual psychoanalysis which are sometimes rather crudely transposed onto ‘groups' or social phenomena. A further problem in the latter case tends to be that the idea of a ‘group’ is itself reified and then homogenized as if all groups are essentially the same and prone to display the same characteristics and dynamics. A group analytic approach should, I suggest, enable us to enquire into the specific dynamics of any context of political violence without prejudging what we might discover.
Traditional Approaches to Psychoanalytic Studies of Political Violence
The psychoanalytic study of political violence has historically had a number of problems. For example, from the late 1980s to the late1990s an annual conference was held in London called ‘Psychoanalysis and the Public Sphere’. From such a title it might be expected to address the location and application of psychoanalysis within the public sphere as it sought to contemplate various social issues. Although there were various efforts to do this, the irresistible trend was to move from psychoanalysis and the public sphere to psychoanalysis of the public sphere. A social situation would be identified, then its dynamics explained in psychoanalytic terms, paving the way for a solution based on that analysis. Psychoanalysis thus became the meta-discourse to which all other discourses were subjected.
Attendant on this approach are several consequences:
First, it becomes virtually impossible to envisage the psychoanalytic discourse itself being subjected to any sort of meta-critique, either in its own terms, or in terms of the massive social forces to which it might be subject.
Second, the situation being analysed inevitably becomes viewed as the site of some sort of psychopathology that needs to be ‘cured’ or treated in order for the social world to function better.
Third, the analysis is often relatively simplistic and reductionistic and sometimes unrealistically optimistic.
Fourth, the context of the problem readily becomes unproblematic. For example, if the staff in a particular institution are having particular problems, these can be explained in terms authority problems within the staff, of lack of containment by the management, complex processes of projection and projective identification etc., but the nature and task of the organization itself which could be a school, a hospital or a factory tend to remain unproblematic. Thus its social value and social purpose along with the extent to which its workforce was unionised or not, exploited or not, could remain uncontested and uncritiqued. Many of these aspects of the context are then subsumed under the term ‘reality’ to which, within this sort of psychoanalytic discourse, mature individuals would adapt themselves.
Fifth, implied but seldom made explicit in this approach is an assumed state of healthy or mature functioning, the attainment of which is the goal of the analysis and intervention. It is further obscured and even denied that this state of assumed health and maturity might have ideological implications and might even be described as having a political agenda.
Sixth, following close on the heels of questions about this implied state of health and maturity is the position of the person analysing the situation. Maturana (1988) has argued that ‘reality’ is ‘brought forth’ by the act of observation which must be carried out from a particular position, which he calls the ‘observer position’. But in the psychoanalytic approach I am describing, the observer position seems mostly to be one of studied neutrality, if not omniscience. The observer is not a participant in the situation, (s)he is not included in the picture, and (s)he is presumed to have no interest in the outcome beyond that of the benign doctor or social healer wishing for the cure of the patient or the resolution of the problem.
Seventh, and perhaps most problematic of all, the psychoanalytic discourse through which the acts of observation, analysis or intervention are constructed is treated as a neutral scientific discourse with no political or ideological agenda. Society then becomes a ‘whole’ in which the benefit of all and the benefit of each are assumed to be more or less synonymous, and there is only one way for us all to live together in a state of harmony and adjustment to reality. Conflicts inherent in the social structure or in the international politico-economic system simply do not exist and the losers in those conflicts and their losses are simply negated. Which of course returns us to the first problem.
I outline this whole approach and its limitations because it illustrates the inherent problems of most psychoanalytic approach to war and political violence. Indeed the approach to war and political violence is sometimes more problematic because it often begins with a set of assumptions about humans or human nature based on a concept of the human individual who is primarily shaped and determined by primary object and part object relations and their internal phantasy world. Thus the social world becomes a product of projective processes and all social problems become the result of phantasy, paranoid schizoid splitting and failure to reach the depressive position or some object relations elaboration of it. War and political violence become the result of these individually based dynamics.
Approaches to War and Political Violence
Ernest Woolfe in an earlier issue of this journal (Woolfe 2009a) exemplifies this approach, focussing as he does on the susceptibility of certain personality types to narcissistic rage as a response to helplessness, and the potential offered by the political arena for such individuals to act out this rage as members of a group. This he seems to argue, is the at the root of political violence in the Middle East. It is a view that seems to overlook centuries of violence, colonialism and political oppression. Such a view, as I argued more extensively in my commentary on Woolfe’s article (Blackwell, 2009) leaves some confusion as to how widespread such narcissistic disorders might be. If they apply only to a relative minority of people with developmental disorders, then it is hard to see how they explain so much violence involving so many people. If on the other hand a very high number of people have this sort of psychopathology then it appears to be a strange and puzzling reflection of standard child rearing practices in a variety of cultures.
Woolfe’s theory does not really show how large numbers of apparently ‘ordinary’ people can become violent or, at least, advocates of violence. He also has to split healthy from unhealthy aggression: The former is ‘aggression employed in pursuit of maturely experienced causes . . . to defeat an enemy who blocks the way to a cherished goal,’ (Woolfe, 2009b) as if this can readily be distinguished from the response to narcissistic injury. The ideological question—What sort of violence is labelled as ‘healthy’? —is not hard to notice. The cliché that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter is increasingly well recognized at least in theory if not in practice—see for example contemporary representations of Al Qaida and Islamic State. Woolfe is also clearly theorizing group behaviour, not in terms of ‘group’ dynamics but in terms of the individual psychopathology of those who constitute the group.
A major collection of psychoanalytic articles on ‘Terrorism and War’ (Covington et al, 2000) evinces more of these problems of trying to address complex social processes of political conflict through a primarily psychoanalytic lens. Even those contributors who identify specific group processes, notably Hannah Segal and Bob Hinshelwood, fail to generate group specific conceptual frameworks and revert ultimately and perhaps inevitably to descriptions of group dynamics which are a product of individual psychodynamics enacted within and between groups.
Group Dynamic Approaches — Volkan, Alderdice, Adorno and Fromm
The approach seemingly most popular with group analysts has been the one developed by Volkan with his theory of chosen trauma, large group regression and the large group tent, which has been further advanced by Lord Alderdice. Yet what is conspicuous about both these approaches is again the way they define whose wars and whose group dynamics are a problem and whose are not, whose aggression is healthy and whose is pathological.
In his introduction to the aforementioned collection, ‘Terrorism and War’ (2000), Alderdice writes, There is no doubt that liberal democracy must be defended against attacks from without and within, just as a therapist must strive thoughtfully to protect the therapy from the attacks of the resistance. (Alderdice: 2000, 9)
Thus ‘liberal democracy’ which, effectively means the ‘West’, is characterized as the benign and thoughtful therapist defending therapy against ‘the resistance’. Considering the use of the term, ‘the resistance’, in France, Greece, Yugoslavia and other occupied European countries during the early 1940s, this has an eerie ring. When one thinks that such defence of liberal democracy has involved, in the last six decades—to take just a few random examples, the slaughter of more than two million people in Vietnam, the sponsoring of violent coup d’etats and military dictatorships around the world, and more recently the use of extra-ordinary rendition and torture—sometimes of innocent civilians—on black sites around the world, and the continuing drone attacks with their own collateral damage of dead and injured civilians, and the description of the Geneva convention as ‘quaint’—one is led to wonder what sort of ‘therapy’ is being protected from ‘the resistance’. Is it perhaps the ‘shock therapy’ described by Naomi Klein (2007) as the means of establishing the global hegemony of the neo-liberal economic model through the sustained barrage of overt and institutional violence and concomitant propaganda to which we have been subjected for the last 35 years? It is also not hard to see how, in this approach, the ideological loyalty of the author/observer is obscured, and the psychoanalytic discourse is immune even to criticism in its own terms: What exactly is being projected into ‘terrorists’ and other ‘enemies’ of ‘liberal democracy’?
Here gain the reality of political-economic history is largely avoided. Alderdice in a later article (2010) talks about the process of ‘radicalization’ (with reference to political Islam and other apparently alien discourses) being based on ‘perceived injustices’, but he avoids engagement with the nature or substance of these injustices. As I have argued in a response to that article, (Blackwell, 2009) the deployment of such terms as ‘fundamentalism’, ‘radicalization’ and ‘terrorism’, whilst appearing to be rooted in scientific study of social phenomena, actually contributes to the construction and maintenance of an Orwellian discourse that obfuscates the way in which the ‘West’ maintains a system of global domination, exploitation and oppression.
Perhaps the most politically sophisticated psychoanalytic approach has come from the Frankfurt School. Yet their post war study of authoritarianism—the sort of authoritarianism that, in Germany had put Hitler in power and supported his leadership—became focussed on the individual personality and was indeed titled, ‘The Authoritarian Personality’. This echoed Eric Fromm’s earlier attempt to define something called ‘social character’ which could be applied to those sympathetic to or supportive of Hitler in 1930s Germany. One might regard the authoritarian personality as a manifestation of social character yet that is not how it appears in the actual study where it seems clearly to describe a type of individual personality.
But Fromm’s effort was a more elaborate attempt to locate a psychoanalytic understanding of individuals within an evolving historical process with specific reference to the changing class relations and the predicament and alienation of the lower middle-class. It is noteworthy that Fromm went on to develop his idea of a ‘social unconscious’ in parallel with Foulkes although they seem to have been unaware of each other’s work and conceived the SU in different ways. I suggest in passing that we need Fromm’s SU in GA in order to extend and develop our own understanding and use of the concept.
Developing a Group Analytic Approach
As Earl Hopper has often observed, even in a small therapy group, the internal worlds of the participants are only part of the context of the group, and therefore only part of a group analytic perspective; and a society is considerably more complex than a small group.
In the group analytic symposium in Lisbon in 2014 I proposed what I regard as the beginning of a specifically group analytic approach to understanding political violence, focussing history and the social unconscious in the relevant matrixes (Blackwell, 2014). The paper has not yet been published but here below is, I hope, a sufficient outline to provide a meaningful link with Robi Friedman’s concept of the soldier matrix.
As part of my critique of the Volkan–Alderdice theorization referred to above (Blackwell, 2012) I proposed a framework for a group analytic approach to understanding political violence and the contexts in which it occurs. This was based on an earlier framework I had developed for working psychotherapeutically with refugees (Blackwell, 2005) which addressed four levels of experience for both therapists and clients so that the therapeutic encounter could be understood as a meeting of different people with different experiences at different levels. The four levels were the political, cultural, interpersonal and intrapsychic. It subsequently became clear that two more levels needed to be added: religious and economic (Blackwell, 2009). All six levels are intertwined and constantly resonate with each other. They can, as I subsequently realized, be seen not only as levels of experience but as contexts or levels of context in which individual experience occurs and by which it is shaped. It is now apparent to me that these levels can also be seen as dimensions of a matrix. While they were originally intended to understand the therapeutic matrix of clients and therapists, it is equally possible to apply them to situations of conflict and political violence. That is to say, we can view a conflict as an encounter between the separate matrixes of the parties involved, and we can further perceive, at a meta level, a matrix created by the encounter of the two matrixes, that is a matrix of the conflict itself. The final level of the framework to be included is the matrix of the observer who is studying and theorizing the conflict. Thus we follow the group analytic principle that the group ‘conductor’ must be included in the analysis of the group. In the same way, the observer must be included in the picture painted by the observation. In the context of war and political violence, it must be recognized that there is no politically neutral position, not any scientific neutrality, but only a discourse that will necessarily embody an ideology; albeit an ideology that, like aspects of the different levels of all the matrixes involved, will be significantly socially unconscious.
To give a brief example, by way of illustration: I made the point some time ago (Blackwell, 2005), that the Israel–Palestine situation could not be understood without at the very least, an extensive understanding of the history of anti-Semitism in Europe and the history of colonialism in the Arab world. I now believe those histories need to include specifically the dimensions of politics, economics, culture, religion, interpersonal and intrapsychic dynamics, and we need to understand the matrix of the conflict dating back to the beginning of what the early Zionists called the Colonization of Palestine (Goldberg, 1996) in the late 19th-century. In the symposium in Lisbon I tried to elaborate this example while also applying the same framework to understanding the rise of Nazism in Germany (Blackwell, 2014). So it is interesting to see that Robi Friedman has focussed specifically on these two areas.
The Soldier Matrix as a Development of a Group Analytic Approach
Friedman’s article makes a number of significant contributions to developing a distinctly group analytic approach to understanding political violence.
First he locates himself within the analysis providing us with a conceptualization rooted in personal experience and rooted in a participant role in the context under discussion. He writes as an Israeli within a specific historical context with a specific historical dynamic, which clearly determines his experience and his perspective. And he writes as a soldier himself with personal experience of the battlefield, and as someone who grew up in a family where there were both perpetrators and victims of political violence.
Second, he gives us a framework rather than a theory. He does not say, this is what goes on between soldiers and civilians, but instead offers a framework in which to locate and explore the relationships between soldiers and civilians and the impact of war on civil society. That framework is the soldier matrix.
Central to my proposed application of the concept of ‘matrix’ to large collectivities of people is the supposition that the matrix can be understood in terms of various dimensions. Moreover, I think we can see sub-divisions of a matrix. So the idea of a ‘Soldier Matrix’ allows us to consider the specific impact on a wider matrix of war and political violence. I think that Friedman is arguing that there is not just a Soldier Matrix alongside other matrixes, but that the Soldier Matrix permeates the whole matrix of a particular society or collectivity.
Although his primary references are Israel and Germany he also makes a passing reference to suicide bombers, which invokes a different discourse of war, violence and soldiering. Yet it invokes it in way that allows serious comparisons and the possibility of shared dimensions and not entirely dissimilar experiences. In bypassing the usual splitting between good soldiers and bad soldiers, defenders of civilization and ‘terrorists’, he significantly humanizes those often regarded as the enemy and, virtually by definition, sub-human. It should be noted here that a recent contribution to the group analytic approach has come from Gabrielle Rifkind who, in her role as head of Middle-East Department of the Oxford Research Group has visited, talked with and most importantly listened to Hamas and has sought to make intelligible as distinct from diagnosing the position of the other popularly demonized groups such as the Taliban, Hezbollah, and the Iranian government (Rifkind and Picco, 2014)
The idea of an ‘anti-soldier matrix’ introduces a dialectical movement in which the activities of the soldiers and the soldier matrix generates from within the same society and within the same matrix, an oppositional movement—anti-thesis. Although he locates this anti-soldier matrix primarily in post Second World War Germany, it could be equally applied to the United States during the Vietnam War where the ‘anti-war’ movement gained such momentum that it effectively divided the country, its communities and many of its families. Veterans (former soldiers who had fought in the war) became significant participants in that movement.
In Israel an organization called New Profile was set up to oppose the conscription of young Israelis into the army and to provide support and strategic advice to those seeking to reject the call-up. It describes its mission as the ‘civilizing’ (i.e. de-militarizing) of Israeli society.
The anti-soldier matrix also brings into focus those Serbs who campaigned vigorously against Milosovic and his wars within the former Yugoslavia. This moves beyond more simplistic theories that focussed on the supposed ‘large group regression’ and fixation on the ‘chosen trauma’ (of the battle of Kosova) that appeared to make the whole Serbian population complicit in the crimes of their government. The anti-soldier matrix thereby contributes to the humanization of societies caught up in wars and political violence.
At the same time, it emphasizes the way in which wars and political violence permeate the wider social matrix so that everyone is affected and everyone forced to position themselves in relation to it. But the complexity implied by the term ‘matrix’ invites us beyond the traditional division of victims, perpetrators and bystanders, creating a space in which more varied and complex motivations and actions might be discerned.
This area of understanding is furthered by the idea of a matrix containing figurations. This means we can look at how systems of belief and the shared operation of unconscious defences are generated through the day-to-day interpersonal interactions in family, extended family, organizations and community. What might additionally be added is the place of mass media in the matrix of communication.
Friedman’s challenge to the idea of large group regression takes us another step towards a level of greater complexity and closer engagement with the problematic reality that so often refuses to conform to theoretical formulations. Dissociation, I would suggest, plays an important part, but cannot be the sole determinant in a complex matrix.
International and Intercultural Resonances and Comparisons
Soldier Matrix
Like Robi Friedman, I was born into a soldier matrix. My father, a former combatant in the First World War and mother, a war baby born during that time, were married during the Second World War and had their honeymoon venue partially determined by the fortification of English beaches which kept holiday makers away from the coast. I was born in the aftermath of the Second World War with rationing still in operation, and imbibed as a child in the 1950s a deluge of comic book stories about the war featuring heroic British soldiers and airmen defeating the Germans. Other comic book heroes were to be found defending the empire or shooting their way through the ‘Wild West’, as if the warrior motif were being displaced or extended from the recently fought war to other arenas of successful and desirable conflict.
I also grew up with my father’s war stories usually told in the dry, wry tone in which Robi Friedman describes leading the advance into a hail of bullets, wondering whether any of his comrades are going to follow him or whether they might decide to shoot him instead of the enemy. It invites me to consider the possibility that soldiers of different armies cope with the anxieties of battle and the threat of death with a similar sense of humour. Admittedly these are both armies developed within a European and primarily western cultural tradition, yet they are still two generations apart in historical time.
It is interesting to pursue the connection between European militarism and that of Israel through the idea of the soldier matrix. Boyarin (2000) proposes a view of a Zionism whose impetus was provided by the image of masculinity prominent in Europe in the 19th-century. Within the discourse of anti-Semitism, the Jew was depicted as weak and unmanly; a characterization in which his reluctance to fight was central. Jews were the victims of an anti-Semitism shaped by the militaristic and colonizing culture of European nations by whom they were regarded as not entirely dissimilar to colonial subjects—they were after all originally from the Middle East. Boyarin argues that Hertzl accepted the anti-Semitic stereotype and, in identification with the aggressor, developed an aggressive and colonising Zionism. We can consider this in terms of the part played in anti-Semitism by a European soldier matrix that was then identified with, and internalized in, the development of Zionism.
It would also be relevant to trace the history of the Israeli ‘soldier’ from the early conflicts in Palestine and the developments of different armed groups, both Jewish and Arab, before and after the War of Independence/Naqbah and the involvement of the British army in that development. The Jewish groups were eventually unified into the Israeli Defence Force based on the Haganah, while Palestinian armed opposition appeared to cease, only to emerge years later in the PLO, Islamic Jihad and Hamas. The latter two were offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The involvement of religion in the soldier matrix is also an important area to consider, as are the interrelationships between the soldier matrixes in different countries.
It has been reported that there has not been a single day, since the end of the Second World War when the British army has not been in action somewhere in the world. Britain is one of the most militarized of all nations, in which the readiness to fight, for whatever reason, is still a highly valued character trait in many parts of the foundation matrix. We could describe British culture as permeated by the soldier matrix. We have an official national anthem calling for military victories and an unofficial national anthem, Land of Hope and Glory calling for an extension of the Empire.
The glamorization of military conflict and mass media promotion of patriotic fervour related to wars and military conquests, as in 1950s children’s and especially boys comics already referred to, has been significant at various points in Britain’s 20th-century history.
It has been argued that the Falklands/Malvinas war in 1982 effectively got Conservative PM Margaret Thatcher re-elected in the UK in 1983.
Nicoletta Gullace (Gullace, 2015) describes the recruiting campaign for the First World War directed at young women, urging them to reject men who were not volunteering to go to fight for their country. We see in this project the interweaving of themes of male sexual potency, physical courage, personal worth, sacrifice and female sexual power. These themes are mediated through a soldier matrix that extends from the internal world of sexual and violent fantasy, through the intimate interpersonal sexual relationship, the wider interpersonal network, the culture and the political system. In fact the impetus or moment begins with the political, which seeks to shape a culture through invading the bedroom and the inner world activated and enacted therein.
This dynamic has always been significant in the management of class conflict. Working class men have traditionally been offered a national identity with patriotism as an alternative to class identity, class consciousness and class struggle. Military triumph and global domination through empire with its resonance of sexual potency, power and sadism are powerful seductions for otherwise disenfranchised, relatively powerless and exploited people. Indeed this substitution is a significant element of the rise of the attraction of fascism to the working classes, as well as to the alienated lower middle classes described by Fromm.
Fanon (1963) has argued that violence is the essence of colonialism. Behind the alleged spreading of Christianity and ‘civilization’, underpinning the economic exploitation on which the industrial revolution was built and developed and on which European economic prosperity has continued to rest, was violence. It is a connection I have made in discussing colonialism and globalization, linking the slaughter between European armies in the trenches of the First World War with the violence deployed by those same European powers in the colonization of large sections of the world. A project whose essence was summed up in the aphorism, ‘When all is said and done, we have got, the maxim gun and they have not’.
The concept of soldier matrix allows us to look again at the number of wars on the African continent since official decolonization. If Fanon is right, that the very essence of colonialism is violence, and therefore it can only be opposed by violence, then we can consider the way in which an anti-colonial soldier matrix, opposed to military occupation and domination, became a soldier matrix in itself, incorporating the belief in the necessity and validity of violence as a form of problem solving if not survival. Thus the anti-thesis becomes the synthesis and thence the new thesis. This of course needs to be related to the continuance of economic and cultural colonization, which is interwoven with the continuing violence. We see this in the recent shootings of workers in the course of an industrial dispute at the Marikana mine in South Africa and in the continuing carnage of the war in Congo, to take just two more or less random examples. This perspective also enables us to take a different view of Islamic State. Their repeated use of orange jump suits for their prisoners may be read as a communication in the language of the US government, about that government’s own contempt for the Geneva Convention and for the lives of third world people, with its ‘extraordinary rendition’, black sites and continuing drone attacks. A dimension of the US/western soldier matrix played back to that matrix through the soldier matrix that has arisen from it. Much the same can of course be said of Al Qaida and 9/11.
The Anti-Soldier Matrix
Having grown up in a soldier matrix through the 1950s I became part of a powerful anti-soldier matrix in early adulthood. I went to university in the late 1960s, when the threat of nuclear war, exemplified in what was known as the ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’, had cast a shadow over a generation. The shadow was extended and intensified by the US invasion of Vietnam. British prime minister, Harold Wilson came under considerable pressure from the US government to support the invasion with British troops. That could conceivably have meant conscription for me and my peers, and the various choices between prison, flight or participation in a near genocidal war.
At the same time, following the student and workers uprising in May 1968 a global movement of protest developed, identified with third world liberation struggles, the civil rights struggle in the US, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, and the class struggles in the US and western Europe. There were widespread demonstrations, sit-ins and other forms of peaceful protest and civil disobedience. Subsequently armed resistance groups developed within the US and western Europe. In the US the Black Panthers utilized the right to bear arms enshrined in the US constitution to develop a policy of armed self-defence for black communities. The ‘Weathermen’, emerging out of the ‘Students for a Democratic Society’, reasoned that to fail to take up arms in defence and support of the Vietnamese was to effectively collude in their oppression and slaughter. In Europe, the Angry Brigade in the UK, the Red Army Faction in Germany, Action Direct in France, and the Red Brigades in Italy all decided that the appropriate response to the violence inherent in their socio-political systems was to take up arms against the state. In Northern Ireland, the intervention of the British Army in the context of the Civil Rights struggle led to the rejuvenation of the Irish Republican Army that had previously become virtually defunct.
Thus there was both peaceful and violent opposition to state violence. I suggest we can regard both these tendencies as forms of anti-soldier matrix. One is a complete rejection of war and the idea of being a soldier. The other is a subverting and redirecting of the violence into what we might call an anti-state soldier matrix. Interestingly, Friedman refers to suicide bombers as part of a soldier matrix. But I think they might also be regarded as part of an anti-soldier matrix in so far as they emerge as a dialectical anti-thesis to military occupations.
We may also consider the emergence at this time of the ‘New Left’ as a serious political and intellectual movement, bringing together different armed struggles, peace campaigns, workplace struggles and campaigns for human rights and democracy into a unified force. The ‘student power’ movement sought to democratize the traditional education system and to critique its role in the maintenance of an oppressive social order. It is interesting to consider how far to view this whole movement as a manifestation or development of an anti-soldier matrix, and how far to see the anti-soldier matrix as playing a specific part or being a specific theme within it.
This brings us to situations where a nation’s military has attacked its own citizens, notably in Greece, Chile Argentina and Salvador. Do we view this in terms of a civil war with two opposed soldier matrixes operating on each side? Or is it evidence, in some cases at least, of the military working primarily for the ruling class and ready, if necessary to attack any effective opposition to its rule? This perhaps indicates that the state and its structure, including the mass media need to be seen as a specific dimension of the soldier matrix. The position of police may also be considered in situations of attack against a country’s own citizens. Police may combine with the army in terrorizing a whole population or any opposition to the ruling elite. In the US police were involved in attacking the civil rights movement in the 1960s and in assassinating black leaders around that time. There was also the National Guard, which opened fire on protesting students at Kent State University in 1970. In societies where para-military ‘death squads’, operate it is often unclear whether they are extensions of the military or the police or both. In Northern Ireland there were indications of collaboration between army, secret service, police, and para-military groups in political assassinations. In England the police effectively became a paramilitary force in attacking striking miners. We might think of these phenomena as parts of the soldier matrix, or as perversions of it.
What I think is troubling for group analysts and psychoanalysts is the difficulty finding any significant response or engagement with this anti soldier matrix from either discourse. We can see the therapeutic work on what has been variously called ‘shell shock’, ‘battle fatigue’, ‘war neurosis’, or more recently, ‘post traumatic stress’, stretching from the First World War to Northfield, as part of a soldier matrix. But the confrontation with state power and state violence involved in the anti-soldier matrix seems largely to have left GA and PA in problematic bystander positions.
Culture and the Anti-Soldier Matrix
During the 1960s, the anti-soldier matrix manifested itself in popular music, which became increasingly part of the ‘peace movement’. Country Joe McDonald sang, ‘One, two, three, what are we fighting for?’ Bob Dylan sang, ‘You masters of war, you who build all the guns’; Donovan sang ‘The universal soldier, he really is to blame!’, various singers chimed in with Pete Seeger’s famous, ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ —about flowers going to young girls, the girls going to soldiers, soldiers going to graveyards and graveyards going to flowers. John Lennon sang, ‘All we are saying is give peace a chance’, while Barry McGuire sang, ‘You’re old enough to kill but not for voting . . . and even the Jordan River has bodies floating’. The Rolling Stones, in Sympathy for the Devil, seemed problematically to implicate us all in various soldier matrixes along with other scenarios of political violence. Catch 22 became a seminal anti-war novel and subsequently a movie while director Lindsay Anderson’s ‘If’ linked the English Public School system with authoritarianism and militarism.
During this time, the Vietnam War became the first war to be fought on prime time television as newsreel footage appeared on TV screens across the western world, accompanied by the photography that made Don McCullin both famous and dangerous. (He was systematically kept away from the front line of the 1991 Gulf War.)
These brief examples show the interweaving and interpenetration of political and cultural dimensions of the anti-soldier matrix and the emergence of specific communications in musical, literary and cinematic form. Interestingly, while popular music and rock ‘n roll manifested much of the anti soldier matrix, the major celebration of classical music— ‘The Proms’ —continued to feature the anthem, ‘Rule Britannia’, at its climax. Thus soldier and anti soldier matrix can be seen following class and generational divisions, as well as pro-establishment conformity in opposition to counter-cultural rebellion within the wider matrix.
We could add to this picture the slogan, ‘Make love not war!’ Considering the use of images of masculinity and sexual potency in the propaganda of the soldier matrix, this slogan represents a subversion of that symbolism mobilizing sexuality and potency into the anti-soldier matrix.
Sport and the Soldier Matrix
Friedman makes references to sports teams. It has been argued that sport is a sublimated form of warfare. It is part of a civilizing process where the desires, drives, psychodynamics and group dynamics that have historically found their outlet and expression in war can be channelled into sporting rivalry and conflict. This indeed was allegedly the underlying principle of the Olympic Games in Ancient Greece. At least one event, the javelin, and possibly the discus, involve an actual weapon. Similarly the Highland Games in Scotland include events that both symbolize and utilize weapons of war.
The Maccabean Games were organized in Mandate Palestine by the Maccabi World Union as early as 1932, 14 years before the establishment of the state of Israel. The games were in commemoration of the 1800th anniversary of the Bar Kokhba revolt, a major rebellion by the Jews of Judaea Province against the Roman Empire.
David Winner 2006 in his book Those Feet (2006) describes how the development of sport in the English public school system in the 19th-century, was meant to channel libidinous energy away from sex in general and masturbation in particular, and promote the development of muscular Christianity—violent exercise and cold showers—which in its turn contributed to the advancement and government of the Empire. He details how this ethos continued into the late 20th-century in English football where muscularity, physicality and directness continued to be the dominant approach while too much skill and subtlety, associated with ‘continentals’, was regarded with deep distrust and associated with femininity and homosexuality.
We can see here how what we can describe as a soldier matrix extends through sport into a wider cultural activity, which influences definitions and constructions of gender and sexuality. We can speculate as to how far to regard sport as an extension of the soldier matrix and how much as an anti-soldier matrix since it provides an alternative to war.
Again, the concept of soldier matrix does not provide answers and explanations but creates a framework for exploration.
Further Thoughts on Political Violence
We are left with a version of what is often regarded as the Marx–Weber split. Are ideas and beliefs superstructural phenomena determined by economics? Or are economics determined by beliefs and values such as may be found for example, in religion? Consistent with this latter formulation is the idea that beliefs may arise from psychological processes such as the sublimation of libidinous energy and oedipal rivalry, paranoid splitting and projection etc. However, the concept of soldier matrix takes us away from psychological determinism towards a view of the social context as the decisive determinant in mobilising such psychological processes. The real threat of real violence mobilises paranoid feelings and paranoid schizoid splitting and the real political context gives them a focus as well as providing an outlet for libidinous desires.
Marx, as I quoted him in this journal, (Blackwell, 2014) last year attributed the violence of colonialism to the essence of capitalism: The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilisation lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies where it goes naked. (Marx, 1853)
Yet what emerged in the 20th-century was the nature of ‘power’ and its essential dependence of violence. Mao Tse Tung claimed that political power comes out of the barrel of a gun. Moreover, it is clear that political violence and soldier matrixes predate capitalism by some considerable amount of time. While we may argue that capitalism has its own specific form of violence, which shapes its soldier matrixes in a particular way, we need also to consider the ways in which power itself generates or depends on a soldier matrix of some sort. The concept of soldier matrix therefore gives us another way to approach the problem of power and what Milan Kundera referred to as ‘man’s struggle against’ it.