Trauma and suicide among aboriginal people: stories from the Arctic and Australia (with particular reference to the situation in Lithuania)
ENThe indigenous people were then, and even now, treated as primitive, passive and dependent people, a race with no contribution to the world. This view was paradoxical bacause the world was not only sacred to them, but their ancestor. The invaders saw the "natives" as needing to be assimilated into their superior race. The occupiers' real intent was for these people not to exist because they wanted to take the land and wealth. But such policies are not rare in the worls, as, for example, the atrocities in Lithuania that occurred after 23 August 1939, when the Soviet Union and Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Lithuania was occupied from 15 June 1940 and later taken - or annexed - and Sovietised, no different than colonialists. The Soviets attempted to assimilate the Lithuanians, just like all other nations dominated by the communist empire, and to turn them into the so-called "Soviet people". One paradoxical, but also revealing, piece of Soviet propaganda reads: "The equal among the equal and free." Heavy traumatisation occurred in the Arctic, Australia and Lithuania, but let me return to the stories of the people in the Arctic and Australia. They will shed some new light on the psyhology of heavy traumatisation: the long-lasting effects of political repression. [p. 170-171].
