AFTER VIOLENCE: 3R, RECONSTRUCTION, RECONCILIATION ...

positive civil society on concrete ground.
In chapter 3 above not only escalation of direct violence but
also the structural damage known as polarization of society, even
the world, in two camps was mentioned. Depolarization will not
take care of itself. It does not come automatically, nor is it
obvious that the best restructuration is "normalization" to the
situation before violence: that situation produced violence.
Take occupied Norway 1940-45, typical of Western European
countries occupied by Germany. There was the Norwegian-German
polarity. But then there were social (including sexual),
military, political, economic and cultural collaborators, under
German protection. When the object of the primary polarization
demobilized and were repatriated to Germany, the Norwegian pole
polarized, and the trauma inflicted by the German occupiers was
passed on to "bad" Norwegians instead./59/ Continuation of the war
inside Norway took precedence over restructuration, leave alone
reconciliation. Restructuration took 20 years. Reconciliation?
These processes of depolarization, and then repolarization
along other lines, are strong. They come on top of us unless our
insight in them places us on top of them. The obvious point, that
Quisling and his people had been 10-20 years ahead of the rest of
Norway, siding with Germany against the Soviet Union, could have
served as an opener for a more Buddhist approach. We are all in
the same boat of world politics, tossed around by the waves; do
not reify that we once were on opposite sides as something
eternal. But this has not happened and probably never will before
the last quisling is dead and buried so that there is no chance of
59