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Autobiography Beethoven Christian art Martin Luther Music

Wagner vs. Bach, 2

I invite visitors who like classical music to watch an hour-and-a-half documentary: ‘Bach: A Passionate Life’. The host of the documentary informs us that, when Luther took refuge in a castle, he believed that the devil was stalking him from the ceiling. Compare such dark paranoia with the return to the artistic spirit that then reigned in Renaissance Rome!

In that room the dark monk, Luther, translated the New Testament using many German dialects, thus creating a unified language for that nation. In one of my previous posts I said that all western nations since Constantine, except for the brief reigns of Julian the Apostate and Hitler, should be considered quackery from the new point of view. The reason why the Germans allowed themselves to be brainwashed so easily since the US-imposed Diktat is explained if we see that the inertia of their culture was infinitely more Christian than the occult paganism of the Third Reich. In other words, what succeeded again in WW2 was, as happened after the assassination of Julian, the grip that the Christian archetype holds over the white man’s psyche.

Compare my point of view with what even a racist revolutionary, a non-Christian, wrote in one of his novels. Harold Covington envisioned a dispute between Christians and pagans, both freedom fighters for the 14 words, during the racial revolution: a dispute that was only resolved when the pagans allowed that the hymn of the new Aryan republic was… a hymn that Luther had composed! Naturally, neither the late Covington nor his secular followers that can still be heard once a month on Radio Free Northwest knew that Christianity and the JQ are one and the same.

These Luther hymns went perfectly in line with the central goal of Bach’s life, as we are informed after minute 29 of the documentary linked above: ‘A well-regulated church music to the glory of (((God)))’. Those were Johann Sebastian Bach’s words: the words of the grandfather of all the composers! But without putting triple parentheses now, after the 45th minute of the documentary a writer confesses to us, when we hear Partita for Violin No. 2 in the background, that this sort of musical soliloquy ‘would convince me that there is a God’.

This is most interesting because that Partita is the music solo I have heard the most from Bach, and although it is secular (i.e., non-sacred music) it perfectly portrays the feeling of the child of my dream in my previous post: that what for my father (or Christians) seemed sublime to me it seems hellish. Infernal not in the sense of today’s degenerate music, but in another sense. Just as Gothic cathedrals represent magnificent art, much of Bach’s music (and even Beethoven’s quartets) transports me to that gargoyle-filled nightmare world of which I want nothing more than a return to a musically enlightened world.

Please understand me well. Unlike those Neanderthals who don’t understand the music of Bach, Beethoven or Wagner, since my parents were musicians by profession I did understand them. But it is the dark Zeitgeist that, as in my dark cathedrals series of dreams, bothers me even though I recognise that the Partita is a masterpiece. Curiously, when after getting used to listening to it on violin I once heard the same Partita by Bach, but this time versioned for classical guitar, the gargoyles disappeared and I was finally able to enjoy it. Something similar happens to me with the church organ and the harpsichord: I cannot hear them except when the pieces are versioned for other classical instruments, although more modern. It is the Christian Era Zeitgeist that irritates me, and to understand my subjectivity I must translate another page of El Grial:
 

______ 卐 ______

 

What impresses me about this historical revisionism is the clairvoyance of the teenager I was, whom my parents and a psychoanalyst destroyed at the time. He saw things as they were, and compared the loss of his beautiful life with the loss of the ancient Hellas. For the adolescent Caesar, the best of his Palenque had been his ‘Greek’ stage, and the stage after November 1974 was like the fourth century and subsequent European centuries. How I remember the way in which I then projected that drama on the image of an LP that my father liked, that we called the Hercules Mass.

I was deeply hurt by the transition from the world of the Greeks and the Romans to Christendom; and the face of the lad on the cover of the album, together with the Kyrie of Josquin des Prés, represented the fateful transit: sculpture and music that, in my adolescent mentality, I thought dated from the times after Constantine. Still something of the Hellenic beauty was seen in the profile of the young man—I felt inside—and it hurt me that, unlike the jovial times of the ancient world, he was now praying with his face up (note that the female above the lad is no longer Aryan). Later I remember very vividly that, already living with my grandmother in the darkest stage of my life, I blamed my father’s Christianity for the annihilation of the beautiful youth of Athens. What I was unaware of at my seventeen is that the grandiose temples, statues, and libraries of Greco-Roman culture had been ripped apart, and adepts of the old culture marginalised and even genocided by Christians…

Now I know that the tragedy of the West in general, and the tragedy of my life in particular, are two sides of the same coin. The soul that the adolescent Caesar so projected on the downgraded ‘Greek’ of the album was killed by the same regressive forces by which the Greco-Roman world was killed: the incredible evil, stupidity, massive psychosis and envy of humans. From this angle, writing about my life has also been, in some way, writing about the western tragedy.

Categories
Autobiography Friedrich Nietzsche Martin Luther Music Richard Wagner

Wagner vs. Bach, 1

The fourth part of El Grial begins with a dream that I now translate into English:

I was walking on a street by day next to Dad, who pointed out to me, enthusiastic and joyful as his character, the great church—or wall of a great church, rather like a Gothic cathedral—while I felt real horror for the (not glimpsed, only felt) kind of gargoyles, low relief sculptures or external figures of a very dark-stone cathedral. The contrast between the spirited Dad in pointing out to me that Christian bastion as something so positive that he even smiled at me and the horrified son—although I corresponded to Dad’s smile from my height as a child with another smile to be nice with him—couldn’t be greater.

Then I commented that over the years I had several dreams with that theme. I interpreted that my father lacked enough empathy to realise that traditional Catholic doctrine, which seemed so positive to him, horrified his little firstborn.

I recently said that Parsifal’s music has been one of my favourites, despite the fact that the opera characters are quasi-Christian knights that Wagner devised. Wagner’s last opus is not a hundred percent Christian insofar the script never names Christ or Christianity. Rather, it resembles the spirit of the Germanic sagas in times of Christian conversion, when something of the ancient pagan spirit was still breathed. In this first entry about how I contrast Wagner with Bach I confess that, unlike Parsifal, traditional Christian music has horrified me as much as that series of dreams with which I opened this post.

Iconoclasm, even in music, is a thorny topic. If we proclaim the transvaluation of all values the question immediately arises: What to do with the so-called sacred music after the anti-Christian revolution conquers the world? We have already seen that Nietzsche loved Parsifal’s music but abhorred its message, especially the chastity of the quasi-Christian knights. In my opinion, Wagner, Hitler’s favourite composer, is salvageable but how should we treat sacred music from his predecessors?

Unlike Richard Wagner (1813-1883) who flourished a century after the death of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) Bach had no passion for the Germanic sagas of the pagan past. On the contrary: Bach composed his music for the main Lutheran churches in Leipzig, and adopted Lutheran hymns in his vocal works. The hundreds of sacred works that Bach created are generally seen as a manifestation not only of his craft, but of his great devotion to the god of Christians: the very god of the Jews. Bach even taught Luther’s catechism as Thomaskantor in Leipzig, and some of his pieces represent it. For example, his very famous St Matthew Passion, like other works of this type, illustrates the Passion of (((Christ))) directly with biblical texts.

Compare all this with Wagner’s relatively paganised work who didn’t quote the gospel: a musician who, by introducing pre-Christian elements in his operas, was already starting to shake off the Judeo-Christian monkey from his back. But before continuing my talk about Bach I would like to quote, once again, the words of Nietzsche that appear in The Fair Race:
 

§ 61

Here it becomes necessary to call up a memory that must be a hundred times more painful to Germans. The Germans have destroyed for Europe the last great harvest of civilisation that Europe was ever to reap—the Renaissance. Is it understood at last, will it ever be understood what the Renaissance was?

The transvaluation of Christian values: an attempt with all available means, all instincts and all the resources of genius to bring about a triumph of the opposite values, the more noble values… To attack at the critical place, at the very seat of Christianity, and there enthrone the more noble values—that is to say, to insinuate them into the instincts, into the most fundamental needs and appetites of those sitting there…

I see before me the possibility of a heavenly enchantment and spectacle: it seems to me to scintillate with all the vibrations of a fine and delicate beauty, and within it there is an art so divine, so infernally divine, that one might search in vain for thousands of years for another such possibility; I see a spectacle so rich in significance and at the same time so wonderfully full of paradox that it should arouse all the gods on Olympus to immortal laughter: Cæsar Borgia as pope!… Am I understood? Well then, that would have been the sort of triumph that I alone am longing for today: by it Christianity would have been swept away!

What happened? A German monk, Luther, came to Rome. This monk, with all the vengeful instincts of an unsuccessful priest in him, raised a rebellion against the Renaissance in Rome…

Instead of grasping, with profound thanksgiving, the miracle that had taken place: the conquest of Christianity at its capital—instead of this, his hatred was stimulated by the spectacle. A religious man thinks only of himself. Luther saw only the depravity of the papacy at the very moment when the opposite was becoming apparent: the old corruption, the peccatum originale, Christianity itself, no longer occupied the papal chair! Instead there was life! Instead there was the triumph of life! Instead there was a great yea to all lofty, beautiful and daring things!

And Luther restored the church.

Categories
Autobiography Currency crash

Busy again

I am reviewing the books I wrote in my native language and so I am not paying much attention to this site. In any case, I think I’ve already said the elementary, summarised in the first book that appears on the sidebar. (New visitors who haven’t read it would do well to download the free PDF or get a hard copy.)

I recently said that regarding covid-19 I am inclined to trust the research of Chris Martenson. But this scientist is limited to the facts. In my view, the current debate between those in favour of the lockdown and libertarians is almost irrelevant. What matters is that covid-19 punctured the economic bubble, which was going to burst sooner or later even without the virus.

I have insisted so many times that visitors should watch the YouTube crash courses of both Martenson and Maloney that I sometimes wonder if I should mention them again. Probably not, until the dollar finally collapses. ‘To the good listener, few words’ seemed to be the motto of the laconic Spartans (nothing more opposed to Jewish loquacity!).

In any case, now that I am busy with my books, if an important idea occurs to me—something that doesn’t usually appear on racialist sites—I will interrupt my work to post something here.

Categories
Autobiography Daybreak Publishing Hojas Susurrantes (book)

‘Whispering Leaves’

(first pages)

 
I opened the eyes in the morning and to my surprise I was on Korinna’s bed in the bedroom of my sisters. I felt uncomfortable to know I was there, but on turning over and see that Kori had slept with Genevieve I felt relieved.

Both were sleeping, but looked younger: Genevieve looked like a thirteen year old. How I remember the incredibly pure face of Genevieve!, like a little slept virgin. The beautiful matutinal light and the silence of the morning gave the bedroom a unique smoothness.

With a child’s spirit, in a leap I raised up to look at the street, I opened the window and…

What I saw produced indescribable amazement and rapture.

Everything was changed.

There was nothing of the street of Palenque, the Narvarte neighbourhood or even Mexico City, but a Cathedral of such beauty that I stayed ecstatic and dumb at contemplating it. It was of such beauty that the volatilisation of the known world absolutely made no dent on me: my rapture upon seeing the rosy Cathedral eradicated all negative feeling, it was like being in a pristine state of mind.

The Cathedral was in a Mexico certainly, but like a Mexico of another dimension, like a future, or as if history had taken another course, or like if we were in another age.

The landscape was so tranquil, so smooth, there were so few people in that settled and balmy city that my sensation to contemplate it was that of the purest halcyonism.

The landscape I had before my eyes was huge: I could see miles away. Barely there were houses. Just the Cathedral hypnotized me with its unknown majesty in this dimension.

Far away, very far away, I seemed to see a humble woman with a shawl, one of those who get up very early in the morning. She walked by an empty plaza or main square much more extended than the Zócalo of our city or any other.

Then I saw below the changed street of Palenque. By our garage, or a little to the left, in its place there was a grocery store and a few men that looked like villagers; one of them even had a peasant hat. They looked as tranquil as the landscape.

Then I saw a friend from the park that came in direction to the store and I shouted to him:

‘Rodolfo!’

I wanted that he explained to me what had happened with the world, what might have caused such incredible changes. He saw me and raising the hand he greeted me but he continued ahead to the store and I felt disappointed because I expected an explanation on the state of affairs.

But the setback disappeared when I fixed my eyes again on the imposing Cathedral: I didn’t want to miss a second that image that had me bewitched, in an ecstatic state.

It was paradise and without a thought I went out of the bedroom in order to run down home’s stairs and get outside. But when I came out of the bedroom…

Everything grew dark.

Among the blackness, I found myself in the hall. I wanted to go down the stairs but…

There you were.

I wanted to get outside but your presence seemed to impede my way.

You had the typical face of upset mother segregating bile. I was under the impression you scolded at me, but since my visual rapture had been so, so high nothing of your scolding did I hear, I only saw your vertiginous lip moving. Aunt Blanquita was behind you, also irritated, she seemed a confidante that backed up your scolding. (Very nebulously I remember my little brother near the darkened stairs, but I’m not sure.)

Despite the tenebrous place and the gloomy and jabbering consorts—that I didn’t hear at all—:

From the hall, level with your bedroom there was a window, from which enthralled I continued to observe my Cathedral, this time from a side…

I stayed speechless before its magnificence… marvelled at such a beauty.

But you continued with your deaf scolding, choleric and making faces.

For an instant, your grimacing distracted me from my ecstatic vision.

For an instant I felt pinked by your senseless scolding.

And in that instant I turned over to talk you back.

 

Then I waked up.

It was night. About three in the morning, the most profound and silent hour of the night.

The ecstasy of my dream’s psychic dimension had been such that once immediately awoke, realising all was but a dream, I craved with all my might to go back to that parallel world and stay there.

It was a sharp drop, the drop from a very high universe to a degraded one. Once you reach the Himalayas of spirit, you don’t want to let them go.

Never my unconscious had reproduced with such an unlikely exactitude the world: it was indistinguishable from the real one. Impossible to believe all was a dream. The bedroom for instance was a trustworthy replica of the white bedroom of my sisters.

It should’ve been about March 1977 when I had the dream of the Cathedral, the moment I reached the peak ecstasy in life. The impression produced in my mind, and the consequences for my real life, are let felt even now.

It’s the most important dream of my entire life: and not even this long epistle will be enough to explain it to you.

_________

Above, the first pages of Whispering Leaves’ first book. Hard copies of this first book in English are now available here (to contextualise it among the other ten books see here). Let me know if, due to the Chinese virus, you have problems with the delivery service.

Categories
Autobiography

Next month…

Romulus’ material kingdom favoring the mighty is transformed into a spiritual one favoring the humble. It certainly looks like the Christian passion narrative is an intentional transvaluation of the Roman Empire’s ceremony of their own founding savior’s incarnation, death and resurrection.

—Richard Carrier

Remember what we have been saying about the legendary founder and first king of Rome. If, as Dawkins says, a meme is like a gene, we could also compare SARS CoV-2 with a virus that has put in our minds the Jewish god Yeshu by deceiving our white cells, which were tricked into believing that the story of the New Testament was Romulus-friendly, a mere protein so to speak, letting it enter in Rome itself in the 4th century of our era.

The rest is history.

The legacy of the Enlightenment didn’t cure the West of Christianity because religion, and even Christian ethics, are social and parental introjects. Just as SARS CoV-2 is transmitted from person to person, the Semitic virus for the Aryan mind has been transmitted from parents to children. As I have told some Christian or neo-Christian visitors who have commented on this site, they are unable to distinguish between the empirical world and the structure of their inner selves. That is, they have failed to follow the commandment of the Oracle of Delphi, know thyself.

From Jesus to Hitler is the first work that comprehensively analyses a real-life case of our parents, who implanted in our minds the Judeo-Christian meme (a ‘virus’). Although my family is Catholic, this also applies to Protestants. If my legacy were to multiply as T cells, that is, if many assimilated From Jesus to Hitler when it’s fully translated, these ideas will help the immune system of the Western body in its fight against the Semitic infection.

Hopefully, the translation of the first of my eleven books will be ready the next month.

Categories
Autobiography

El Grial

I have deleted the category ‘De Jesús a Hitler (book)’ for the simple reason that I changed the title of the book. Now it is called El Grial (The Grail), and it contains a couple of texts more compared to the edition with the previous title. El Grial is a corollary to my two thick volumes, written in my mother tongue, that appear almost to the bottom of the sidebar.

Changing the subject, Mike’s expression, ‘bending the knee to Jewish deities, Yahweh and Yeshua’ is terrific. It should be used by trolls in the comments section of the sites of purported anti-Semitic racists tolerant of Christianity.

Categories
Autobiography Racial right

Beyond myopia

One of the things that I liked about Richard Spencer’s recent eschatological speech about his country is that he recognises that what is at stake is the entire American paradigm.

If one reviews the sites of white nationalism, they are nearsighted. They try to locate the origin of white decline in the Jewish quarter without any substantial self-criticism about what caused the empowerment of Jewry in the first place. People like Tom Sunic have said, in public conferences full of white nationalists, that the Jews ‘did not fall from the Moon’, but that their empowerment was due to factors intrinsic to Western civilisation. The same I can say about Spencer. Unlike the endemic myopia in the movement, Spencer is an intellectual who has begun to see the big picture.

Spencer is a relatively isolated case. It is a pity that the other American intellectual who wasn’t myopic, Michael O’Meara, has retired from the forums of white nationalism. But if there is something irritating in the movement, it is for Christians to go out with specious arguments such as pondering whether Christianity is compatible with racialism, given the racial history of the United States at times when they seemed not to be fighting each other.

This is a specious argument as I said. This winter, for example, I suffered a terrible respiratory illness that, in my case, is chronic. The polluted air of Mexico City is killing me: and this shows more and more every winter.

It is silly to say that the capital’s air is compatible with health as apparently the contamination doesn’t affect my sister, with whom I live. Rational would be to recognise that the air is toxic, although at first it doesn’t affect everyone. Living in a toxic environment for health and saying that it isn’t toxic because the symptoms are not yet noticed is magical thinking. As magical as saying that Christianity hasn’t adversely affected us during every single historical stage of the West.

To have the god of the Jews as our god; obeying the precepts of a supposed new testament addressed to us gentiles (out of the pen of Jews, of course) and continuing to ignore Aryan history* is a formula for the continuing ethno-suicide. In fact, if we analyse it deeply, the ideology of white nationalists, in which I include secular webzines such as those by Johnson and MacDonald, is more in line with this continuous slip toward suicide than to what would be an authentic intellectual reaction against the American paradigm.

But at least someone like Spencer begins to glimpse that the problem has a much larger dimension than what myopics see in the movement.

________

(*) With the exception of Jake F., Arthur Kemp and an Englishman who sat on my right in one of the private meetings of the London Forum a few years ago, nobody I know properly values the only non-fiction book of Pierce.

Categories
Autobiography Child abuse Racial right

Christmas alone

I did not share the Christmas table yesterday and today with what is left of my family after a couple of deaths. And how could I do it if they give me what I call ‘air treatment’?

My so-called family has learnt that I’ve been writing for the last few decades. I have let them know that I write about them in the first comprehensive autobiography of a family tragedy that has been written in history. Only my nephew Cristóbal, when he was six years old, was interested in what I was doing. He is now a degenerate teenager, like the rest of my nephews (we live in the most degenerate era of the West). Although as a child he used to ask me how my literary project was going, now, a decade later, he never does it.

Before my biological family I am air, I was air, and I will continue to be treated as air: they transparent me in their minds as if I were not present.

As I have already confessed on this site, most of my life I thought that Jesus of Nazareth had not only existed, but that he was a special being. It was precisely the tragedy in such a Catholic family that killed two people and left me reduced to a kind of three-eyed crow that moved me to question my parents’ religion.

This is something that many white nationalists fail to do for the simple fact that they have not faced tragedies as directly as I have. When I mentioned last year that one of my first cousins strangled his daughter and then hanged himself, even that event seems minor compared to what appears in my first ten books.

I will not explain the details of the family events here. I leave that to my readers once the English translations begin to be available as hard copies. But the point is that, as some may understand, such events force the victim to question everything hold sacred.

Since entangled in a tree I’ve spent my life ‘seeing’ the past to understand the present, I’ve developed the talent of being honest with the bare facts. This is the starting point to understand other issues. If one is honest at the biographical level, one becomes honest at the historical level, as history is simply the sum of the biographies of a conglomerate of people.

History and biography (or autobiography) are interconnected. Once one survives the lies of a family (see the context of this quote [1]: here) it’s easier to see the historical lies. Thus, if I cannot sit at the Christmas table it’s because what is left of my family plays what I call the perverse game of the happy family. (Don’t be surprised that many people get depressed in the Christmas season: playing that perverse game in dysfunctional families causes depression in the most honest or sensitive members.)

I would say the same about many white nationalists. In the Christmas season they play the perverse game of a happy culture, as if the celebration of the Jew Jesus was something good for the 14 words, noble and to be celebrated.

Actually, celebrating the birth of a fictional Jew, or not condemning it openly [2], lays the foundation for Aryan decline. What we should celebrate is the birth of Leonidas, Hermann and Uncle Adolf. The mere fact that millions of whites ignore who Leonidas and Hermann were, or that they have believed the propaganda that demonises the uncle, shows how lost the fair race is.

_____________

(1) ‘This other girl is powerless, helpless, trapped, and overwhelmed. She can’t stop the abuse, she can’t escape it, and she can’t predict it. She is trapped in her family’s societal denial, her age, threats, physical violence, family rules and double binds. How does the little girl cope?’ (a quotation from my only book that has been translated).

(2) See for example the lukewarmness of the articles in this Christmas that appear in Counter-Currents, the ‘secular’ webzine of white nationalism (1, 2, 3, 4 and 5).

Categories
Autobiography Child abuse

Aborted prologue to the English edition *

My books deal with a subject that is the greatest taboo of all. Throughout human history no society has awakened to the fact that, in our species, some parents drive their children mad. Demonstrating this requires not only the creation of a new literary genre, but that dense autobiographies such as this one multiply in posterity.

That said, I must confess that I didn’t fully understand what had happened in my family until, at the end of 2008, I finished Hojas Susurrantes and in my researches I changed the subject radically: from child abuse to mass migration of Muslims into Europe. It was only in the following years when, after discovering racialist intellectuals on the internet, I located the tragedy of my family from a new paradigm. The best way to crack an annoying cipher is to abandon it for a good season and re-approach it from a broader meta-perspective on what is happening in the world.

My fundamental discrepancy with the internet movement known as ‘white nationalism’ is the diagnosis of the darkest hour in the West. White nationalists blame the Jewish quarter of white decline. I blame the Aryans themselves who let Jewry appropriate their media and a good part of the academic and financial sectors of the West, especially in the United States.

The tragedy in my family began when, during my adolescence, my mother went crazy and began to think and say crazy things about me. But that was not what destroyed the teenager I was. What destroyed him was that, over time, my father began to believe those slanders to the point of traumatising me in the most heartbreaking way you can imagine. Over the years, my parents would do the same to my sister, who now rests in peace.

Similarly, white people began to believe the lies of the New Testament two millennia ago, a process that culminated in the destruction of the classical world and, even after the Middle Ages, in an inverse narrative about who were the martyrs and the perpetrators. (See the literature that I mention in the Introduction after this foreword.) What I want to arrive at is a very simple concept. We should not blame St. Paul so much for having burned ‘pagan’ books in Ephesus but the imbecile whites who followed his example to the degree of destroying, from the 4th to the 6th century, the Greco-Roman world. If the traitor is worse than the subversive, in our times the Aryan who subscribes to the axiological system of the Bible—ethnocentrism for me but out-group altruism for thee—is worse than the Jew.

The following is the scheme of how some parents drive their children mad. On the one hand, there is the donor who provides a delusional system (your son is the devil); on the other, the receiver that over time subscribes to such a system. In my family the great crime was committed by my father, for having swallowed a slanderous vision of his eldest son. In this dynamic of folie à deux the role of the receiver is what counts most. Otherwise, the spouse who raves about her child would simply be considered the nutty of the family. Although having such a mother would harm the son’s morale, she wouldn’t destroy it by herself. It is the shared madness between wife and husband that makes the couple soul murderers.

In the same way, Jewry alone would not be able to destroy the West. The Aryans are responsible for believing the lies of the Jews, beginning with the ethics advocated by the New Testament (out-group altruism) and ending in the secular subversion we see in Hollywood and the American media.

Remember that I didn’t fully understand what happened in my family until I abandoned the subject for a few years, to reopen it after I became much more mature. I suggest that the nationalists read my texts to find, in them, a kind of microcosm of what has been happening, on another scale, in the West. Just as I didn’t understand myself until I turned to other interests, the nationalists would understand better if they could take an intellectual vacation. By reading my eleven books, they would learn that what happens in some families is worse than the Holocaust tall stories with which the Jews have demoralised us.

___________

(*) Today I declined to include, in my translation of the first book of Hojas Susurrantes, this text and preferred to put it here.

Categories
Autobiography Conspiracy theories Parapsychology Pseudoscience

Ron Unz and JFK

or

Leaving the courtroom

My comment in the previous post, about Ron Unz’s credulity about conspiracy theories (CTs) of the assassination of John F. Kennedy has made me think, once again, about what we might call the pathology of extraordinary beliefs. As the sceptics of CTs have said, which not only includes JFK but also 9/11, this is a topic that, like religion and politics, should not be touched in after-dinner conversations. People feel very hurt and it is impossible to argue on good terms.

Let’s use the analogy of the lawyer and the prosecutor who bring the experts to court to try to convince the jury; say, the mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald staged by British television between Gerry Spence and Vincent Bugliosi. A good litmus test to know who has a closed mind is simply to point out who, when watching the TV show at home, leaves the room when the speaker is either Spence or Bugliosi.

The fact is that it is those who believe in the CT who usually leave the room, so to speak, in the sense that they never read sceptical books. Their attitude is as surreal as Alice’s Queen of Hearts in Wonderland: first comes to the sentence and then the trial. First we ‘know’ that 9/11 was an inside job, or, in the case of JFK, we ‘know’ that Oswald didn’t act alone. The long trial process that culminates in the sentence is of no importance or consequence for those who ‘know’ the truth.

Ron Unz is reputed to be a voracious devourer of books and articles. But when the issue of the trial between Spence and Bugliosi arrives, he leaves the courtroom every time the prosecutor speaks. Last year, in this discussion thread of his webzine, Unz said he had not read the thick Bugliosi treatise. When a supporter of Bugliosi pointed out that there was a much shorter book of another ‘prosecutor’ (pic above)—a book that with his amazing reading capabilities he could read it in a couple of days—Unz didn’t respond.

That is the all too common attitude among those who believe in CTs. True Believers can read a dozen books promoting the conspiracy but not a single article from the other side (listen how Bugliosi explains this bizarre behaviour: here)! That is why they ignore the most basic arguments of the prosecutor. For example, in the most recent discussion thread about the 9/11 attacks, some visitors got mad at me but none advanced an argument about a video I linked about Building 7 (for the believers in the 9/11 CTs, Building 7 is considered one of their strongest arguments of what they call ‘controlled demolition’).

It is relatively easy to find out who’s the one who leaves the courthouse every time the opposing lawyer speaks. They are those who believe not only in the CT about JFK or 9/11, but in the so-called Fake Moon Landing, Satanic Ritual Abuse, or the existence of UFOs in Hangar 14 of the US government.

Let’s illustrate this with my case. I used to believe in the pseudoscience of parapsychology. I spent many years of my life wanting to prove the existence of ‘psi’ (extrasensory perception and psychokinesis). I didn’t read the sceptics of the paranormal because they were ‘the bad guys in the movie’.

When I finally spoke with them, at a November 1989 conference they invited me to, I was surprised that those I considered closed were, in fact, quite open people. They even subscribed to the main journals of parapsychology. That happened also with UFO sceptics. They were avid readers of their opponents’ literature: those who promote the hypothesis that UFOs are manned extraterrestrial ships. It is the believers of the extraterrestrial hypothesis who never read the literature of the sceptics.

Before, I only read literature from parapsychologists. But after meeting the ‘prosecutors’ in the early 1990s I became familiar, little by little, with their literature. A few years after subscribing to the Skeptical Inquirer there came a time when I felt agnostic (just as there are people who are no longer a hundred percent sure that God exists). Concurrently I realised that my parapsychological colleagues did not read sceptical literature, nor did they respond to the main arguments of the sceptics (Occam’s razor, the falsifiability principle, etc.).

Only until May 1995, thinking outside a subway station, there was a time when I seriously doubted, for the first time in life, the existence of psi (something similar to a priest doubting for the first time in his life of the existence of God). However, it would take me a few more years to understand why had I got caught in such a self-sealing belief system in the first place: an issue I address in my autobiographical books (see sidebar at the bottom of this page).

I mention this just so that it is understood that there are times that we are so absolutely convinced that pseudoscience is real science that we do not realise that it is a cathedral built on clay bases.

When I lived in Marin County I once had the opportunity to realise that the foundations of the ‘science’ I was studying were shaky. In a bookstore I saw that they sold A Skeptic’s Handbook of Parapsychology. Thirty-four years have passed since that night and I still remember the image of James Randi on the dustcover. But I thought I couldn’t afford it. If I had listened to the prosecutor, a dozen (lost) years of my life would have been spared! But I didn’t listen to him and embarked on a quixotic project of wanting to develop psi.

You can’t learn from another’s mistakes. I know that what I say here won’t make any dent whatsoever in the True Believers’ worldview who, like Unz, flee from the courtroom every time Bugliosi speaks. They do this to avoid the most elemental cognitive dissonance, as I did when I was trapped in my self-sealing system. But if I could travel to the past and see Cesar in that California bookstore in 1985, I would tell him, I would beg him, to buy the book he had in his young hands…