All is about valor and honesty

The article “The Jews and White Nationalism” republished on October 4, 2009 at The Occidental Quarterly Online when it was under the watch of Greg Johnson opens with the sentence:

Surfing the blogosphere, I stumbled upon The West’s Darkest Hour, a blog written by a TOQ Online reader and Lawrence Auster fan who has some concerns about the presence of anti-Semitism in the White Nationalist movement. Like Tanstaafl, it appears that Chechar learned of us through his involvement in the anti-Jihad movement. In his previous post about White Nationalism, Chechar described his odyssey from liberalism to spectator of the racialist underworld as being like awakening from “The Matrix.” Each revelation is the tip of a much larger iceberg.

The next year after the article was published I deleted the two above-linked articles because they spoke of a stage when I still held politically correct views about the Jews and Judaism. In this article I will briefly recount how after a series of revelations I finally woke up.

In an unpublished work that consumed a decade of my life, Hojas Susurrantes (Whispering Leaves), I recount how I grew up in a traditional family and how I was relatively well treated in my childhood. Alas, both of my parents started to abuse me and my sisters when we reached adolescence.

Since in those times nobody talked about child abuse or was willing to listen, my sisters and I grew up carrying over ourselves massive doses of unprocessed pain. In fact, my Hojas is a sort of mourning to deal with the pain caused by our parents’ betrayal and the society’s deafness toward the calls for help coming from the minor that I was. The mourning I endured since my late teens and throughout my twenties allowed me to see through the society’s denials. And it was precisely the long mourning and the consequent soul-building what allowed me, a year ago, to see the stark realities of the Jewish question.

Perhaps only those whose souls have been ploughed through pain could understand what do I mean. In the chapter “The Soul and the Barbed Wire” of The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn wrote insightful passages about how the human soul rotting in solitary confinement finds salvation through a metamorphosis that allowed him to turn the abyssal pain into wisdom. Like so many abused children and teenagers, the barbed wires of the Gulag islands drove many Russians mad. Solzhenitsyn managed to escape psychosis through soul-building as his defense mechanism. This is not easy. Not easy at all. But every time I read those Gulag pages I see myself through all those years in the self-imposed confinement of my study to find out how on Earth could such tragedy befell upon my beloved family. However, what Solzhenitsyn calls the ascent of the soul is such an enormous subject—wasn’t it Voltaire who said that man could know the universe but that it would need eternity to learn something about his soul?—that I will leave it like that.

* * *

Fleeing from Zapatero’s degenerate Spain, on September 11, 2009 I printed and ring-bind twenty-five articles of The Occidental Quarterly. One of the first articles that I started to read crossing over the Atlantic, “The Seven Pillars of White Nationalism,” fascinated me, especially the author’s stance about how “National Socialism might save us.” I had never read anything like that in a serious journal. The author’s views seemed extreme to me; I stopped reading the article, and tried to get some sleep in the plane.

The following days, weeks and months the whole business of White Nationalism struck me as extremely engrossing. Despite of what I then perceived as a flaw in the movement, anti-Semitism, I found myself discovering that the matrix in which I was previously sleeping was far deeper and alienating than what I previously thought. So alienated from reality I was that it may be said that in the last fifteen years I have been awakening from a series of different though inter-chained matrixes, with “each revelation as the tip of a much larger iceberg,” until reaching the real awaking point.

In 1995, after a long process of digesting the literature of the skeptics of the paranormal, I gave up my old belief in psycho-kinesis: the subject of the first entry of my blog. (Since my late teens and twenties I had gone astray in New Age magical thinking precisely because it was my flawed defense mechanism during my dark night of the soul—a night in which I quixotically strove to heal the family wounds through paranormality.) Alongside with my awakening from para-psychological beliefs, in my thirties Octavio Paz’s essays debunked in my mind much, though not all, of the ideologies of the Spanish-speaking Left. His many critiques in Vuelta represented a fresh waking up from the dogmas I had been taught in High School.

But those awakenings were transformations allowed within the matrix system in which I still mentally inhabited, as was my next awakening.

Closely related to child abuse are the mental health professions that during intergenerational conflicts always side the parents, and therefore, the perpetrators of the abuse at home. For example, on the parents’ behalf some psychiatrists prescribe psychiatric drugs to rebellious, albeit sane, children, especially males. It was not until a 1998-1999 mental health course at the Open University of Manchester that I discovered the most important books of the main critics of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. I awoke to the fact that such professions function like a political pseudoscience to enforce the will of abusive parents, which moved me to write down those findings in my native language.

What precipitated that awakening was the footnoted information that I collected still within the fringes of the university system. Then in 2002 I discovered the work of Swiss psychologist Alice Miller, who unlike the previous critics of the mental health professions is a real taboo in the academia. Only thanks to her I discovered that the psychic toll of parental abuse on children is a forbidden issue in all societies (I write about this in the third book of my Hojas).

But that was not all. In 2006 another non-academic author surprised me. Lloyd deMause answered my email questions about child abuse in the Ancient World and advised me to read a couple of chapters of one his major works.

I was impressed. The discovery of deMause’s psychohistory widened the vision I had previously learnt in Miller’s works. After assimilating psychohistory I found myself with a meta-perspective that comprised child abuse studies from early civilizations to modern man. The “unified field” provided by my inward soul-searching process thanks to Miller, and the outward historical research provided by deMause, made me feel I had an unrivalled point of view to see the tragedy of my family in particular and of Homo sapiens in general.

I was deluded, if we take into account that psychology is not unrelated to sociology and that an authentic free press only started with the advent of the Internet.

By the end of September of 2008 I discovered the blogosphere; watched some online documentaries about the Islamization of Europe, and learnt how the prolific Muslims may overrun Western civilization by the end of the century. Originally skeptical about these apparently preposterous claims, in Madrid I purchased a translated copy of Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept. By the end of 2008 I was still a liberal and could only read fairly liberal stuff. Since the family that destroyed my life are very traditional Catholics, conservatives had been anathema thoroughout my intellectual life. Only after Bawer convinced me that there was indeed a demographic problem in Europe I dared to purchase English-Spanish translated copies of both Oriana Fallaci’s trilogy on Islamization and Robert Spencer’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam. Spencer is only a scholar on Islam. But it took me a Sabbatical year to digest the material from the more intellectually-inclined counter-jihad blogsites in English.

The extensive reading on these broader sociopolitical issues not only shattered my former liberal worldview and turned me into, God forbid, a conservative: it convinced me that those concerned about the Islamization of the West were right, and their Lefty detractors in gross denial. Now I surely was mature psycho-historically and politically, I thought.

Nope! I was a chick still struggling to break free from his eggshell to glimpse the real world. By the time I started to read The Occidental Quarterly at the international airport I knew that there was a group of people who in the previous decade had coined a new term, White Nationalism. It is true that by the end of 2009 I still disagreed with the nationalists about the Jewish question. This difference aside, after discovering the existence of such an important group of intellectuals that the system had screened off from my vision for half a century of my life, I felt I had finally broken the last of the Russian dolls-like eggshells and that I could finally hear the voice, “Welcome to the real world!”

Alas, I was still sleeping!

But the last Morphean dream could not last long. Thanks in part to the efforts of Tanstaafl, in February of 2010 I was “struck by a lightening bolt” that cracked the last shell. I realized that I had gotten the Jewish question all wrong and that the Jewish problem was not hallucinatory as I believed. It was all too real after all!

Before that most crucial day of February 24, 2010 I used to interchange emails with two of the best Jewish minds in the blogosphere active in counter-jihad. Paradoxically, these pair helped me to wrap my head around the question of their tribe. Of course: both got mad after I flipped sides. But what convinced me of the essential truth of anti-Semitism is that neither of these two intellectuals could say anything rational about my February challenge:

If by March I don’t get a convincing rebuttal of Avery Bullard’s statement [that Jews are never overrepresented in movements that represent our interests, only in those that weaken us] from those who have advised me in e-mails to shun those who criticize the Jews, I will have no option but to remove the “non anti-Semitic” clause before “White Nationalism” in my blog’s masthead.

After this provocative challenge the pair did not engage in civil discussion. They simply ignored the new world I was starting not only to glimpse beyond the outer, now ripped membrane, but ignored too the clarity of my vision once I finally passed through the shell and stepped outside this last prison for the white mind.

One of them said in his webpage that he would never talk to me again unless I reverted my paradigm back to my previous views on the Jewish question. The other intellectual behaved even more irrationally. Infuriated, he told Tanstaafl, “I see you as my direct and mortal enemy” and threatened in my blog that he would “have nothing to do with Chechar as long as he has anything to do with you.”

The Jekyll-Hyde transformation of a famed author for the readers of The Brussels Journal took me by surprise. But the reaction of the non-Jews—the Christian, agnostic and pagan commenters at the blogsite Gates of Vienna where I had originally met them all—taught me a lesson. Ned May, the GoV admin emailed me telling that he would stop publishing the rest of my psycho-historical book. Obviously, neither he nor other of these deracinated whites dared to discuss the issues. For we gentiles, criticism of Jews is considered beyond the pale. Nationalist readers will find comical that the Norwegian Fjordman, one of the most notable gentile bloggers in counter-jihad, has stated: “It appears that the only people who can denounce genuine anti-Semitism yet at the same time criticize liberal Jews are people who are part-Jewish themselves, such as Larry Auster or Takuan Seiyo.” In other words, only the Jews can criticize Jews. [Note of August 2011: It now looks that Fjordman is Jewish on his father’s side]

These gentiles are beyond our reach however we approach them. The sad truth is that due to their unwillingness to see the elephant in the room these whites, who fancy themselves as defenders of the West, are, inadvertently, undermining their civilization.

Granted: like them I was a philo-Semite most of my adult life. I blame Hollywood and the general culture for this nasty and incredibly hard to crack outer shell that walled-off my mind from the real world for so long. But the main difference between me and these Jews and non-Jews who cling to neo-conservatism is honesty or the lack thereof.

* * *

If there is a moral that can be deduced from my spiritual odyssey is that the dishonesty of the family, psychology friends and counter-jihad conservatives I left behind is a byproduct of deep, ingrained cowardice.

In my teens, when I was abused at home, I believed that compassion was the main virtue of humankind. In my twenties and thirties, when I struggled with the religious demons of my parental introjects, I believed that reason in the sense of the Enlightenment philosophers was the main virtue. In my forties, when my haughty family refused to read the heartbreaking autobiography I had written, I believed that humility was the main virtue.

In my middle age I have come to realize that all is about valor and honesty.