Formation of Post-Traumatic Narratives (Case: Georgian and Russian Narratives after the August 2008)
Nino Tabeshadze PhD in Culture, Professor of Georgian
Insttitute of Public Affairs (GIPA), Invited Professor at Ivane Javakhishvili
Tbilisi State University.
ABSTRACT
A friend is one who has the same enemies as
you have’ – these words of Abraham Lincoln can easily be applied to the
position of Georgian Policy-makers of such post-soviet country as Georgia.
Georgian policymakers actively started to search for friends by creating the
image of ‘shared enemy’, especially in 2009- 2012. This shared enemy was the
Soviet Union. States united in Soviet Union should have higher solidarity
towards each other than the others. This became clearly seen during the August
War 2008 when Georgian politicians underlined the influence of Soviet Union
stating that opposing country could not overcome the memory of past glory. It
is not the secret, that the policy-makers have big impact on society.
Especially on the society which was traumatized by the war. For Georgian
community political myths became the main source of belief. Policy-makers
became the main storytellers. And society became the target audience. We can
easily imagine the condition of society, which was in depression thanks to the
war. Then, new tendency took the lead: policy-makers stared to tell the ‘truth’
which people wanted to hear. Deeds of heroes, Violence of enemies, Struggle for
freedom – all those stories can be found in speeches made by Georgian
politicians after the war of 2008. Our aim is to investigate those speeches and
to see how the icons of ‘heroes’/’enemies’ were created.
KEY WORDS
Collective
Trauma, post-traumatic, stress, recovery, monument, hero.
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