Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Moral injury is the social, psychological, and spiritual harm that arises from a betrayal of one’s core values, such as justice, fairness, and loyalty.

“Moral Injury” – Psychology Today, emphasis added.

I became interested in the term “moral injury” when I read of the suicides of IDF soldiers who have served in Gaza. One reservist who committed suicide by self-immolation is quoted as saying, “I smell and see burning bodies all the time.“

It’s the concept that violence and injustice have more victims than the directly victimized. And it can affect how we function and are able to fight back when we participate in, witness, or fail to prevent something of intolerable evil.

Part of the horror is doubting that the values ever existed. Certainly, the inmates of the most incarcerated nation on earth – the USA – might have different attitudes to the claims of minimal justice, fairness.

We are in a season of injustice and cruelty. Do fascist periods occur like seasons? Is there a periodicity?

The quote that is attributed to Voltaire – that belief in absurdities leads to atrocities – is being acted out, stupidly.

We’re now exposed – often in real-time – to video of abducted mothers torn from their children, workers taken at their jobs, green card holders handcuffed when reporting to ICE appointments, in the USA – and to videos of people in Gaza shot, burned, or bombed, or herded, starving, from blasted place to blasted place by pitiless IDF operations in a not so hidden logic of extermination.

The displaced and bereaved in Gaza, and the disappeared in America, are not the only ones experiencing injury. We who witness and cannot stop it also lose confidence in our ability to effectively support decency and justice, or be confident that we live in a world of such things.

Unlike trauma from an accident or natural disaster, this........

© CounterPunch