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Category: Autobiography

Categories
Autobiography Chess Child abuse

The human side of chess, 5

2 Tort – Colín

The park that welcomed me

This game was played in the park where I played chess in the Colonia del Valle in Mexico City, very close to where I lived with my grandmother. This park welcomed me in my teens when I fled from extremely abusive parents and school. It was a different place than the public parks where the outcast underclass used to take refuge to play chess and dominoes. It’s true that when I was repudiated by my parents I found myself as marginalised as the underclass, but in Las Arboledas Park there was a cultural level very different from that of the parks with the tents in the centre of Mexico City. It was there, in this park for middle-class people, that I really learned to play chess.

FRIENDLY GAME
Las Arboledas Park
(ca. 1985)

1 e4 e5

2 Bc4

This was my favourite move in the park. I won countless games with 1 PK4, PK4; 2 BB4, as it was written then in the descriptive notation (as opposed to the algebraic notation that I use in most of this book). The idea was not to play the hackneyed lines of the Bishop’s Opening, but the gambit that ensues after 2… NKB3; 3. NKB3, NXP; 4. NB3!? whose theory no one knew. In this game Marco Colín eluded the gambit and simply transposed to the Two Knights Defence, so he came out unharmed from the dangers of this opening.

2 … Nf6

3 Nf3 Nc6

4 d4

When I made this move Marco complained that it was a prepared book line. The advantage of friendly games over tournament games is that you can unleash your emotions; you can even curse and there is no rule against it.

4 … Nxe4

5 dxe5

Here Marco exclaimed: ‘Bishop takes pawn, check!’ in the sense that he had seen the threat. ‘Damn brother!’ Only Marco called me with the pleonastic nickname ‘El hermano brother.’

5 … Nc5

6 Nc3 Be7

7 Nd5 O-O

9 O-O Ne6

8 Nxe7 +

I remember that I was worried about the bishop on c5 and wanted to eliminate it as soon as possible.

8… Qxe7

10 c3 b6

11 Bb3 Bb7

12 Re1 Rd8

Since I wrote down this game from memory only when I got home, I don’t remember if the order of the last two moves was correct. Did I play the rook first and then the bishop?

13 Nd4 Rfe8?!

When Marco played this I was surprised. I thought that because of my next move he had to exchange knights. At postmortem he told me he didn’t want me to join my pawns. But he should’ve taken the knight (Kasparov says that when he manages to bring a knight to the f5-square he already feels won). As in the previous game, I didn’t use computer systems to analyse this game. What I write down here were the memories of what I was thinking during the game in the mid-eighties, without outside help.

14 Nf5 Qc5

15 Qh5!

If now 15… Nxe5; 16 Rxe5, winning.

17 … g6

16 Ch6 + Kg7

17 Qf3 Qe7

18 Qg3 Kh8

19 Ng4 d6

One of the Arboledas players, Antonio Galán, who had been watching the game, told me alone when we were walking in the park while Marco reflected: ‘NB6 and pélas!’ although I had already seen this move before he told me. In Mexico this expression is used when a person has been left out of something, for example, eliminated from a competition: ‘Pelas!’ Antonio used the expression in the sense that he saw the black’s defence collapsing. In Spain the pélas colloquialism means something very different: money, as in the neighbouring country to the north it’s colloquially said buck instead of dollar.

20 Nf6 Nxe5

Otherwise a very dangerous attack on the king would come.

21 Nxe8 Rxe8

22 Bxe6! Qxe6

It took me a while to reassess this new position. (Although clock games weren’t played in the park unless they were blitz games, this and others that I played with Marco, Antonio and Enrique Legorreta were virtual tournament games.) Marco then indicated that he intended to play 22…Ng7 if I hadn’t taken the knight from him.

23 Be3

The game is technically won, but this was a trap Marco missed.

23 … c5?

24 f4

Marco made an angry exclamation and shook his head. The interest that we both had invested in the game was considerable because we hadn’t played for a long time with each other.

24 … Nc6

Marco was still flustered and visibly pissed off when he made this last move.

25 Bd4 + Nxd4

26 Rxe6 Nxe6

27 f5!

If this one survived among the countless games I played in the park, it was because of something that caught my attention. As I noted in my diary many years ago: ‘I had always wanted to kill Marco with a queen sacrifice right in this position a few moves later. Synchronicity?’, referring to Jung’s theory. Although I am now sceptical of that theory, the coincidence is interesting: one of the reasons that prompted me to score this game.

27 … Ng7

28 f6 Nf5

29 Re1

I remember Marco’s shock when he saw this move.

29 … Be4

30 Qf4 d5

31 g4 Nh4

32 Qh6 Nf3 +

33 Kf2 Rg8

34 Re3

I thought about this a lot, making sure that after:

34 … Ne5

I immediately made the following pseudo-sacrifice of queen to surprise the old friend:

35 Qxh7 +

Marco removed both his king and my queen from the board as a sign that he was resigning. He was so outraged by the defeat that we barely commented on the postmortem, and at a fast pace he headed for the subway station División del Norte while, naively, I wanted to talk to him after not seeing him for so long. But to be fair I must say that the next day, after his severe moods he confessed to me ‘You played very well!’

Regardless of the game above, it hurts that other games that I played with Marco and those in the park have not been preserved. How I would like to have, for example, that ‘historic’ game in which, playing both blindfold chess, I beat Gerardo Brauer in 1978: a game that merited a bet between my admirers in the park and those of Gerardo. I would also like to be able to reproduce, at home, that five-hour game when I beat Enrique in front of his girlfriend, or those that I beat Gilberto Rangel in a match that he and I played at my grandmother’s house, or the Volga Gambits that with the black pieces I played against Fernando Pérez Melo until he devised a good reply to the defective gambit. (Although he came from the underclass, Fernando had a very good taste for art cinema. I remember that he liked Andrei Rublev when the Russian Embassy premiered it in Mexico.) Only Antonio took the trouble to transcribe some of the games he played in the park. Thanks to his initiative I was able, twenty years after it was played, to reproduce one of the games that Antonio played with Gilberto; although he didn’t want to give me the score sheet of another one where I beat him with white when, from attacking to his queenside, I suddenly switched to a kingside attack. Instead of reproducing his game with Gilberto that he provided me, I would like to say a few words about
 

This friend who never was

We men are supposed to be very tough, like the tough guys in Hollywood movies: that we don’t cry and that we face our problems alone. This code leads men to seek comfort in gambling, alcohol, a drug, or another artificial balm to alleviate the internal sting. Gilberto, one of the park’s children who threw himself the most on Caissa’s skirts, had a permanent scar on his face caused by a dish that his mother had thrown at him. His friend Roberto, a good-looking, fair-haired lad who also went to the park, had been raped by a priest of the Catholic church on Avenue Cuauhtémoc on the corner of Concepción Beistegui street.

I never knew of anyone who approached Gilberto to talk about the abuse he had suffered at home. The player is able to sit in front of his opponent for years without knowing anything about his life. The purpose of the chessboard between these tough guys is to function as a kind of isolation barrier, and I would like to confess what happened to me when I wanted to break that code of isolation between players. Like Gilberto, what I needed back then was a friend who could listen to me about the huge problem I had at home. But I had none, and when I dared to bring up the subject with Antonio he went to complain to the others that ‘we all have problems’, in the sense that my position was self-centred. As the gossip reached me, Antonio added that he was a friend of mine ‘just to talk about chess’.

If he really said that, he was wrong. I was not self-centred. The proof is that Antonio’s family problems with his brothers were not so serious as to prevent him from pursuing a career. Mine or Gilberto’s were so big that we were left without a profession. The fact that such an elementary reality, one of those that between women so well communicate with each other, is impossible to communicate between men speaks very badly of the player’s psychology, so well portrayed in Dostoevsky’s tale. Precisely because our society forbids us men to mourn, or to have an intimate confidant, Roger Bayde, another of our friends from the park, committed suicide. Like Gilberto, Roger had had a traumatic past with his mother since his childhood, but no one listened to him. Although I’m not sure, it seems to me that the Department of Psychiatry at UNAM, the university where Roger worked, prescribed him psychotropic drugs instead of offering him the ear that he so badly needed.

Roger’s story is not an isolated case in the troubled kingdom of Caissa. Iván used to visit the cabin whose photo appears in the Introduction. This friend became psychically disturbed due to parental abuse (once I spoke to him on the phone he exhibited all the symptoms of ‘word salad’: the peculiar way some people labelled as schizophrenic speak). On one occasion we saw how a man with a hat dragged him by the hair while taking him out of the cafe of the old Gandhi Bookstore: the only time I saw his father. If so he mistreated him in public, how could he not do it in private (his brother shot himself dead in front of his father)?

I could mention other cases of chess players who, like Iván, Roger, Gilberto and Fernando were beaten by their parents and their lives were shattered. But it is unnecessary. Rather, and although very belatedly, I would like to answer the friend who never was: What would I give so that there would be a little more communication between men. And a little less chess…

Categories
Autobiography Chess

The human side of chess, 4

1 Grushka – Tort

A beautiful game

If I kept this game it is because I showed it to the poet Jaime Sabines in a 1981 letter, a copy of which I still have. I had played several games of chess with Sabines at his house. In times when my parents’ treatment had spoiled my future, I believed that, being the governor’s brother in Chiapas, he would help me find a job.

Carlos Grushka, the opponent in this only game that I kept from my first tournaments had been, the previous year, youth champion of his country and later he would be Argentine runner-up; he represented Argentina in four Olympics, drew with Karpov and beat Larsen.

I have no interest in analysing this game with the computer system, which didn’t exist then. The analyses that I transcribe are those that appear in my letter to Sabines, when I was twenty-three years old. The poet, by the way, didn’t reply to my letter. But some time later I went to see him in Chiapas in search of work: something that constantly fails us players who were marginalised by our families.

 

CLUB ‘EL ALFIL NEGRO’, FIDE TOURNAMENT 1981

Time control: 2½ hours / 40 movements

CATALAN OPENING

1 Nf3 Nf6

2 g3 d5

3 Bg2 Nbd7

I hadn’t studied this opening, so I improvised according to my own sense.

4 d4 e6

5 O-O Be7

6 c4 O-O

7 Nbd2 c5

8 b3 b6

9 Bb2 Bb7

10 Rc1 Rc8

11 e3 Rc7

12 Qe2 Qa8

13 Ne1 cxd4

14 Bxd4 Bb4

Threatening 15 … Bxd2 and 16 … dxc4, leaving a weak and isolated pawn on an open file.

15 Nef3 dxc4

16 Nxc4 Rfc8

17 Rcd1 b5

18 Nce5 Nxe5

19 Bxe5 Rc2

20 Qxb5 Ng4

21 Ne1

If 21 Qxb4 Bxf3; 22 Bxf3 Qxf3 threatening both 23 Nxf2 and taking the bishop.

21… Bxg2

22 Nxg2

He played that because 22 Nxc2 would lose a piece.

22… Nxf2!!

I have forgotten many moves, games and even opponents that I’ve faced over the board, but will never forget this great knight move. Grushka wasn’t expecting it.

23 Rxf2 Rxf2

24 Nf4

If he took my rook, the check of my other rook would be deadly.

24 … Qf3

25 Qd7

Had he taken my bishop, 25 … Qxd1 would also be fatal.

25 … Rcc2

26 Qd8 + Bf8

27 White resigns

Grushka got upset when I wanted to comment on this game as a postmortem. It’s obvious that his defeat didn’t match the image he had cultivated with his friends from the Club Mercenarios who had brought him to the tournament. After this game, in a raid that some young members of the Mercenarios gave me, Manuel López Michelone, with whom I would also play in that tournament, said something in front of me of bad taste. I was in the back of the car savouring my victory. Manuel, who was in the lead, said to his friends: ‘Who knows why Grushka lost’. It was as if the triumph wasn’t due to how I played, but to something mysterious!

Fortunately, friend Gerardo Brauer congratulated me and made very favourable comments on my plan to have brought the queen to square A8 to double my rooks on the C-file, which gave me a good development in addition to the beauty of an attack on the king from the corner of the board. Not all chess players are able to recognise that the other simply played well. But what stuck me the most that night was what another member of the Mercenarios told me, who was driving the car. He did it with the best of his intentions, but it hurt me. He told me that he had met my mother and that he ‘liked her very well’. I was speechless. I didn’t even smile. It was precisely she who had caused the abuse at home: something that Mario Guevara couldn’t know, and in fact in 1981 I didn’t even live with my mother but with my grandmother. I couldn’t communicate it due to the taboo of never criticising the parents, so I kept quiet among these young chess players and about the rest of the raid I don’t remember anymore.

Categories
Autobiography Chess

The human side of chess, 2

Introduction

When I sat down to write this book, I was officially retired from chess. It was the talks with Rafael Martínez, an old friend from a park where I played chess many years ago, that motivated me to confess what I have thought about the game since my retirement.

(Left, in 1975 outside of ‘La Cabaña’ I played my first game in the park with Señor Cervantes.)

My goal here is to break various taboos. In the first chapter I address a topic hardly touched by other chess players. I am talking about the emotions that affect the player during the game: a topic that I address by analysing my emotions in some games that I have played in tournaments. There are very few chess players, and one of them was the Mexican grandmaster Marcel Sisniega (a pure Aryan about my age, who passed away in 2013), who describe their moods after the rounds. I haven’t read Crónica Personal de un Torneo de Ajedrez of Sisniega, but I suppose that the descriptions I make here are more crude and direct.

In a short passage in the second chapter I try to show that chess treatises omit the biological cause that some play better than others. I also venture a program that I consider useful to face the emotions not only in defeat, but for the average player to understand and accept his skill level.

For centuries, chess theorists have avoided going into the subject of personal tragedies that have led some to seek solace in the game; tragedies that have devastated the sanity of some masters, grandmasters, and even world champions. This blind spot has existed from the 1620 treatise by Gioacchino Greco, considered the first chess professional, to Kasparov’s recent work on his predecessors. The motto of the inveterate tabletop gamer seems to be:

Elude the Knowledge of Thyself

Avoid settling accounts with the existential sting that made you seek comfort in an activity as elusive as the game of chess or any other game.

Among chess players there have been cases of crossing the line from simple escapism to madness. In the third chapter I break with the biggest taboo not only in the community of players, but of humanity in general. I talk about the cause of disorders of the spirit and what we can do when a loved one suffers a psychotic crisis. The fate of Carlos Torre, the best Latin American chess player after Capablanca, serves as a paradigm for me to point out what we should never, ever do when a family member suffers a crisis: go to the psychiatrist.

After that important chapter I include an epilogue about what I think of the game.

Juan Obregón, who gave me some information about Carlos Torre, probably has the largest number of interviews from people who knew the Mexican grandmaster. But without the help of the late Alfonso Ferriz, the great lover of the game-science in Mexico, it would have been impossible for me to collect the most relevant information about Torre. It saddens me that my conclusions from the same information that Ferriz so generously provided me cast a shadow over this wonderful person who was Don Alfonso; and I publish this little book not without some remorse in order to expose private matters that could help the West to regain its sanity.

Categories
Autobiography Catholic religious orders Julian (novel)

The Gift

‘The Gift’ is the seventh episode of the fifth season of HBO’s fantasy television series Game of Thrones, and the 47th overall. The beginning of this episode is one of the darkest in the series, but since I promised not to tell the details of Ramsay’s infinite sadism, I won’t do it now.

But I’ll tell another terrible thing from the beginning of this episode. A snowfall falls that is about to spoil Stannis’ plans to invade Winterfell. The witch suggests that he should sacrifice his only daughter, who loves her father so much, so that her god will grant a victory. Stannis asks her ‘Have you lost your mind?’ but in a subsequent episode we’ll see that he ends up obeying her.

In my previous post I said that normies prefer fiction to the incomprehensible facts of the real world, and this example illustrates it. In the real world my father, originally sane, ended up obeying the witch of the house to the point of destroying my teenage life. Sometime later I would find out that exactly the same happened in other families. What distinguishes me most not only from white nationalists but from people in general is that, when some of them suffer similar tragedies, they fail to report them in autobiographies. They are able to sublimate their own tragedy by consuming episodes like this one when a father betrays his little daughter, but they never talk about their own family with real names, as I do.

It’s good to see that scene, Melisandre poisoning Stannis’ soul to sacrifice his daughter, because in today’s West the practice continues. While the sacrifice of the child’s body has been prohibited, parents are allowed to sacrifice his or her mind. When a normie hears that someone has been (pseudoscientifically) diagnosed with schizophrenia, if we decipher the psychiatric Newspeak it means that her parents murdered her soul. But who among the visitors to this site has thoughtfully weighed what I say in Day of Wrath?

But even in this episode with such a dark beginning they managed to film, later, several feminist scenes in Dorne: the absurd argument between Jaime and his teenage daughter and, in the cells, how the very masculinised Tyene mocks Bronn by exposing her breasts. These women can range from seduction to fearsome warriors whenever they feel like it: pure screenwriter shit.

However, from a strictly cinematic point of view, the episode shows us a master scene at the end. I have said that to understand Antifa one must understand the movements that preceded it. And I’m not just referring to the Antifa that Hitler and his people had to deal with before coming to power. I mean what we have been saying about the 4th and 5th centuries of our era, the destroying monks of the Greco-Roman world, and a thousand years later: the most fanatical monks among the Fraticelli. In Game of Thrones the figure of the High Sparrow embodies something of the spirit of at least one of those times.

The scene when the High Sparrow shows Cersei the oldest altar of the Faith of the Seven in King’s Landing must be seen, even in isolation. Actor Jonathan Pryce played this fanatic monk of very mild manners extraordinarily. I mean the dialogue immediately preceding the moment he accuses Cersei because of Lancel’s testimony (this is where the title ‘The Gift’ came from).

I have already said it several times but I must repeat it. If someone wants to flee from reality because of how crude reality is, instead of watching television series they should read two novels by Gore Vidal and Umberto Eco about the 4th and 14th centuries.

Categories
Autobiography Beethoven

My father’s tale

I’ll be busy for a few days and won’t post articles until I finish a course. But I would like to leave these lines during my absence. The thing is, when reading Karlheinz Deschner’s chapter on Pope Gregory I came across this sentence:

Archbishop Maximus did public penance in July 599, prostrate after hours in a street and shouting: ‘I have sinned against God and blessed Gregory’.

The anecdote reminded me of a story that my father told me decades ago. A king had to humble himself for days at the doors of the pope’s residence because he feared for the salvation of his soul: begging the Vicar of Christ to forgive him (I think the pope’s name was Gregory). Finally the pope deigned to open the doors and forgive him. My father told me this with enthusiasm, in the sense that even the most powerful king had to humble himself before the headperson of the Roman Catholic Church. The lad I was didn’t like that story, but only much later did I begin to understand my father’s mind.

One of the milestones in understanding why he was so destructive to me was Silvano Arieti’s book that I have already talked about in Day of Wrath. In Father, the sixth book of my series of eleven I quote some passages from Arieti that astonished me and I’m going to explain them with my own examples. Think of the baby monkeys that are sold as pets, how they cling to the owner as if she were a mother (the instinct is hard-wired in the creature as it’s vital not to fall from the trees). The point is that some adults deal with childhood trauma like these young pets do with their owners: by desperately clinging to authoritarian figures.

Arieti mentions his patients who, to use my example, hung themselves like little apes onto substitute images of their parents: a church, a political party, and even their own spouse. In Father I analyse how, in repressing his childhood traumas, he clung to no less than three defensive mechanisms: religion, nationalism, and his wife. But we are talking about pathological levels of hanging onto the surrogate parent, like an ape who never grows. The example that comes to mind is a biographer of Mary Baker Eddy who recounted that one of her most faithful disciples declared that even if she had seen Mrs. Eddy commit a crime, she wouldn’t believe her own eyes!

That is the level of co-dependent subjugation my father wielded regarding his church, the nationalist myths of the country where he was raised, and his wife. So when in my adolescence my mother went crazy my father went crazy too: what in my books I’ve called the captive mind or folie à deux.

I am not going to explain here everything I said in my sixth book in Spanish. The English speaker can order a copy of my first book to get an idea (see Letter to mom Medusa on the sidebar). What I want to get to is that some insecure people tend to fall into a state of folie à deux not only with the wife, but with the church or political party to which they belong. Analogous cases of Eddy’s disciple are endemic, for example, when I try to argue with those who cannot conceive that Mesoamerican Indians ate their children despite the overwhelming evidence from the first ethnologist of the American continent.

Once the defence mechanism is established, for instance the nationalistic pride of some Mexicans, the subject is capable of the most irrational scepticism before the evidence for the simple fact that what he is doing is protecting a worldview, his ego or substitute parent. From this angle we can understand why even some Jew-wise racialists, as we saw in my post yesterday, don’t tolerate that one fails to honour the god of the Jews. That powerful archetype functions like a surrogate parent.

Arieti’s book is entitled Interpretation of Schizophrenia and, although it deals with psychiatric cases, as I read it I realised that it could apply equally to an enormous number of people who have never been diagnosed psychiatrically.

My father comes to mind. He was enthusiastic about the pious tale of the pope who made a king humble himself in Rome. Now many Americans, equally childish, desire a powerful father in the form of the State and are excited that the country of the First Amendment will soon repudiate that amendment. It doesn’t matter whether the defence mechanism is religious or political: the psychological need is the same. Just as Eddy’s disciple wouldn’t believe her eyes as Mrs. Eddy became a god-like figure, I have met people who deny the historicity of Lenin’s and Stalin’s crimes.

The drive that compels us—to quote the lyrics of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—to believe in ‘a loving Father behind the starry vault’ means that Beethoven had a drunken father who, as a child, often beat him. We are mammals and, as the monkey of the anecdote, the unconscious need to have a surrogate father once our dad fails is infinite: a Christian attempt to heal childhood traumas. But it is deceptive magic because Yahweh is not our father, he’s our enemy.

Those who haven’t read my essay ‘God’, a page from one of my eleven books, could read it now.

Categories
Arthur Schopenhauer Autobiography New Testament Racial right

Whipping the fog and pride

‘It was as useless to fight against the interpretations of ignorance as to whip the fog’.

—George Elliot, Middlemarch

Throughout the first decades of my life I was very naive. I believed that it was possible to reason with people simply by citing facts and solid arguments based on those facts. I hadn’t realised that humanity is a failed species, and that throughout civilisations humans have believed simply what they want to believe, even if they are the most horrible and cruel religions or secular ideologies.

After reading Schopenhauer I realised that everything has to do with the will, and that it is impossible to change the worldview of an ordinary human unless one first gains his will.

When I learned in my twenties of liberal Christian criticism about the historicity of New Testament accounts, in my infinite naivety I believed that I could use that knowledge to argue with my father. For example, I once told him that Herod’s massacre of the innocents could not be historical since Flavius Josephus, the historian of the 1st century of our era, would not have overlooked it in his famous history of Jewry. But Josephus doesn’t mention it. The only thing my father did was get angry, and of course my solid argument didn’t make the slightest dent in his traditional Catholic worldview.

The same I came to observe with the people of the left whom I dealt with. As my visitors know, I grew up in a country in Latin America. In the days before the internet, my acquaintances were not interested in what could be accessed through the cultural magazines of the country, for example, the magazine Vuelta by Octavio Paz: who criticised Marxism-Leninism. The left-wing people whom I dealt with weren’t interested in Paz’s magazine, even though he was the Spanish speaker whose prose was the most lyrical in his day.

(Left, Juan del Río and his wife, who invited me to enter Eschatology in December 1978. Both have already died.) Likewise, when I began to apostatise from Eschatology, a cult of the New Age type in which I spent some years of my life (see the first of my essays in Daybreak), my teacher Juan del Río didn’t answer any of my arguments even when I sent them in writing. Juan died because eschatologists believe that all diseases have a psychosomatic aetiology, and despite having the financial means, a colon cancer that tormented him for years wasn’t properly treated. In his book-review ‘Do not rely on “mental healing”, scepticism is healthy’, the American S. Currie tells about a similar case:

My mother left leather-bound editions of The Sickle (1918) and The Sharp Sickle (1938) [the textbooks of Eschatology] to me before she passed away. She used to read to me from these books on Sundays when I was young. I believe her mother, my grandmother, originally introduced her to these books when she was a young woman. Both my mother and grandmother died of colon cancer. My father was a physician. In my mother’s case, she kept her early symptoms secret from my Dad and everyone else so that she could work on them via ‘mental healing’. When at last she did tell my Dad and she went to her doctor, it was too late. I both love these books as my mother’s close possessions, and despise them for encouraging her to ignore modern medicine. I will not leave them to my children.

Some time later, now with the advantage of the internet, I discovered the forums of white nationalists, and it happened exactly the same that had happened to me with my father, the Latin American leftists and the eschatologists: they don’t tolerate cognitive dissonance. If they tolerated it the first thing they would do would be a severe examination of conscience of how it is possible to be Jew-wise and at the same time bend the knee before the god of the Jews. It took me a few years to realise that white nationalists are as closed-minded as my father, the people of the old left that I dealt with, and the eschatologists.

For the record, I have been in this world for over sixty years, and this has been my experience with the common human. Trying to fight ignorance with all of them has been like whipping the fog: a pointless experience. I’m not referring to one hundred percent of Christians, leftists or white nationalists because it is obvious that there are exceptions. I mean the bulk of the population.

What they all lack is a little humility. I abandoned Christianity, leftist ideologies, Eschatology and White Nationalism out of humility (now I don’t consider myself a white nationalist but rather a ‘priest of the 14 words’ to distinguish myself from them): humility to face tough or ugly facts. What all these people suffer from is pride, the original sin to quote their own vocabulary.

Categories
Abortion Autobiography Ethnic cleansing Eugenics Heinrich Himmler Infanticide Nordicism Third Reich

Lebensraum, 2

Demographic crisis

Four years earlier, in December 1935, the entity that would be in charge of the project, Lebensborn—Source of Life—had been created: a social assistance organisation whose main purpose was to offer different types of facilities for single mothers and their babies.

The German population had been declining for decades, and the country was suffering a severe demographic crisis. The birth rate, which at the beginning of the century was 35.8 children per thousand inhabitants, had fallen to 14.7 in 1933, the year of Hitler’s rise to power. For the Führer’s ambition to populate the eastern regions with Aryans, it was essential to reverse this trend. Himmler estimated that 120 million people were needed.

Family life and motherhood were promoted in various ways, notably with special marriage loans and grants for each birth to encourage Germans to bring more children into the world. At the same time, any information on contraception was suppressed and contraceptives were banned. Abortion was also outlawed, which was labelled ‘sabotage against the future of Germany’.

The idea of increasing the population with a large number of children of the superior race was firmly rooted in the mentality of the party. ‘If Germany had a million children a year and eliminated between 700,000 and 800,000 of the weakest, the result would probably be an increase in its strength’, Hitler had affirmed with conviction at a party meeting in 1929.

Here it is worth interpolating vignettes from my own life.

Non-consanguineous relatives had a son who was born the same year I was born. But this guy is mentally retarded, so terribly retarded that he once bit off his sister’s finger. Another case: the only friend with whom I spoke disparagingly about the race of the country in which we were born had a Down syndrome sister whose retardation was so great that, if they left her a few meters outside her apartment, she wouldn’t know how to return home: a lower IQ than a dog.

These real-life cases show that one must be truly lobotomised through Christian ethics to avoid what the ancient Greeks and Romans did with their defective babies. It is more than obvious that Christianity has fried the brains of the white parents of these people I know, and millions of others like them.

Among my relatives, only Uncle Beto admired Hitler. He once said having in mind, I believe, one of my handicapped cousins: ‘I would kill such a daughter and then I would go to hell!’ He meant that he’d kill her if she was his daughter. Although I was not a witness of this anecdote I guess that his sisters, my great-aunts, were scandalised by these kinds of pronouncements.

But let’s continue with the Third Reich.

‘If we could establish the Nordic race from Germany and, from this seedbed, produce a race of 200 million, the world would be ours’, Himmler eloquently expressed. A few months after its founding, Lebensborn opened Heim Hochland, the first home for pregnant women. For this, the National Socialists took over the building of a Catholic orphanage located in the town of Munich.

Initially, the institution could host up to thirty mothers and fifty-five children, and applicants were carefully screened. Only women who had the characteristics of the dominant race were admitted. Candidates had their skull measured, and only those with the highly coveted elongated skull, typical of the Aryans, were eligible for admission. They also had to meet other requirements, such as being blonde, having blue or green eyes, and being in good health.

Those who passed the test received the best care in exquisite surroundings as a reward. Homes were often in stately homes that, as in the case of Heim Hochland, had often been taken from Hitler’s enemies, and other mansions from Jews. The organisation’s headquarters in Munich was in a house that had been owned by the writer Thomas Mann, (who had six children with his Jewish wife). All homes were equipped with modern medical equipment and cared for by specialised medical personnel.

These luxurious conditions had their effect. In 1939, Gregor Ebner, Lebensborn’s medical director, informed Himmler that a total of 1,300 women had applied. Of these, 635 had been considered suitable due to their racial characteristics and their state of health.

The births went very well. While in Germany the mortality of newborns was six percent, in the homes of the Lebensborn Organisation this figure was reduced by half. ‘Deliveries are easy, without major complications, which is attributable to the racial selection and quality of women we welcome’, Ebner wrote proudly. Logically, all this had a high cost: 400 marks per mother. ‘It is not a great sacrifice if we can save a million children with good blood’, Ebner concluded.

Categories
Autobiography Miscegenation Racial right

Devlin postscript

I would like to clarify something about what I recently said in ‘On Roger Devlin’. Last week I visited the home of the Catholic family that I referred to in that article and, now I realise, what I wrote is inaccurate. While it is true that the woman who sent her husband to the asylum is a Catholic, she didn’t belong to the circle of very traditionalist Catholics, as I said in the middle of this month. However, there is something that I witnessed in my recent visit to this very decent family that I must share.

A real nymph of that family, of stunning beauty, very slim, with blond hair and light eyes—like those on my sidebar—will soon marry a swarthy Mexican from one of the southern states of the country. Of course, neither her parents nor the nymph’s brothers are bothered by the matter. That has been happening in Latin America for half a millennium, it is a practice that doesn’t have to change at the last minute.

What I see ignominious in all this is the cowardice, throughout the American white nationalism movement, of not wanting to see something that has been happening on the continent for five hundred years. Recently a Christian tried to post a comment on this site claiming that Europeans genocided Amerindians, as if that would refute the criticisms of Christianity on this site. I didn’t let that comment pass due to his obvious dishonesty: not wanting to see the catastrophe that miscegenation represented in most of the continent. This blood mixing was due to a religion that made no difference between Iberian whites and Amerinds. Both were souls that the Church of Rome could save, exactly alike in the eyes of the Christian god.

One can take a look at The Unz Review, which collects articles published in various sites on white nationalism, the alt-right and the alt-lite, and the ethnic suicide of Iberian whites from the 16th century to date is not even remotely mentioned, despite the immense extensions of land in which it was carried out—and continues to be carried out, like the nymph friend who will soon ruin her blood.

I already said it but it bears repeating. The trick American white nationalists do by blaming Jewry solely and exclusively for Aryan decline is to conceal the history of most of their continent. In his recent article for example, which I referred to in ‘Why I don’t talk about the news’, MacDonald sums up his ideology by committing the usual trick: talking about the Frankfurt school, etc., without mentioning anything about what happened from the Rio Grande to Argentina, even centuries before the Jews emigrated to the US.

I have already discussed this in the last Daybreak article and those interested can either print the PDF, or purchase a copy of it. The only thing I’ll add is that it’s becoming increasingly clear that white nationalism is an extremely dishonest movement. And the reason for their dishonesty is obvious: they don’t want to put their parents’ religion on the dock.

Categories
Autobiography Correspondence Hojas Susurrantes (book)

Nobody wanted to listen, 11

Epilogue

Every time I tried to draw water from the well, the bucket came out dry in the desert of my acquaintances. Parents or personal tragedies, as a subject, was forbidden throughout society. For decades I couldn’t cover the topic with anyone.

For the human galaxy of those who commit suicide that history has seen, ‘at least one soul in the entire world’ could have saved them, some confessed. But they had no one to show solidarity with them and they killed themselves. How many millions of humans could have written a History of My Mind like the one the poet Kleist threw into the flames before blowing his brains out? Throughout my twenties and thirties something similar happened to me: I couldn’t write when I had everything ready to do so. Nor could I study a career, and what is worse, I didn’t understand why. In addition to the Letter I had written, my will faded away as I tried other enterprises. Then someone appeared in my life.

Caesar:

The day before I received your letter. How long the mail takes!

I have finished reading your book, it is so shocking and disturbing that sometimes I had to stop reading because of the sadness and pain I felt. It made me think and once I started to cry and I better stopped reading it because I was going to wet the pages… I understand your suffering and at the same time I admire your strength. Another lad would have become an alcoholic, a drug addict, a homosexual, a robber or whatnot.

Despite everything, I imagine that your parents love you, as well as you love them. How good it would be if they recognised the damage they caused you and changed their attitude towards you. The past could no longer be changed, but perhaps you would feel better in your self-esteem. (I think deep down they feel remorse, but they don’t want to admit it. How humility is necessary to recognise one’s mistakes.)

November 24, 1998. And you walking through those gloomy streets of Manchester, at midnight, with the solitude of Chirico’s paintings. Like a repetitive nightmare: the teenage Caesar slapped and alone. The one who lost his family and only loved his tree. The Caesar who walked around in his bedroom at his grandmother’s house when he turned thirty…

July 17, 1999. The letter you want to send to your mother (‘Postscript: I will never forget the golden stage that, thanks to you, dad and my siblings, I passed as a child in the house in Palenque’) touched me. I really like that about you.

But I am very sad that there is no reconciliation with your family. I felt a lump in my throat when I read your postscript: you love them Caesar. I can’t understand why your parents harden their hearts—they love you too! How sad that out of pride, for reasons unknown, they don’t come near you. How would it feel to lose their child? I don’t want them to leave this world with that abyss towards you…

Don’t take me wrong, believe me it comes from my heart.

Take care,

Paulina.

Returning to the country after a year in the gloomy and rainy city of Manchester, and speaking with her in person, she confessed to me that upon reaching the passage of my Letter where I put on a jacket when running away from home when my father hit me, she felt like a Thumbelina like the one in the children’s story. That Thumbelina, she told me, although she couldn’t travel back in time to that night in April 1976 and console myself, felt all the intensity of my tragedy. She wanted to be, although at least as small as the character in the story, an inner voice of comfort in my heart during the most crucial night of my life.

Paulina’s compassion was the cure for my soul: the antithesis of all the offenses of so many people over so many years. A single word of comfort can save a life. It’s like seeing life in colour again after centuries of seeing everything in black and white. ‘If at least one soul in the whole world…’ said those who would commit suicide.

But they had none.

Categories
Autobiography Hojas Susurrantes (book) Pseudoscience Psychiatry Psychoanalysis

Nobody wanted to listen, 6

A humanitarian analyst

Once again, I will be told that I chose the wrong people: that the Escobars were unfortunate cases and that in the world there are professionals capable of understanding a tragedy for what it is, a tragedy and call a spade a spade. Let’s now see what happened to me with the most benevolent analyst I have ever met.

Dr. Carlos García had lent money to my parents when they were going to be expelled from their house in Tlalpan for not paying it. Likewise, when I was unemployed at twenty-three, García invited me to play chess with him once a week and paid for my classes. Almost two decades later, the same month as my disagreement with the Escobars, I went to his house to personally deliver a copy of my Letter to him. Let’s see what my diary says of that encounter in his home study:

July 15, 1998

Today I went to see Dr. García and he surprised me with several comments that corroborate my vision of him as a good person. For example, he told me ‘I have never committed a patient since 1960’ and used the word ‘curse’ from Szasz, with whom he says he agrees, when referring to psychiatric labelling.

Given the prestige that the doctor has in society, Tom Szasz says that the semantic stigma with which the psychiatrist denigrates his victim results in a social curse.

He liked Ronald Laing because of his colourful personality, and he told me that Laing played bassoon and had died playing tennis in Monaco.

Also, and this is novel because it qualifies what I wrote in previous pages, it vindicated the role of benevolent analysts like him. He told me that at psychiatrists’ symposia he had been blatantly told ‘That won’t work’—psychoanalysis. ‘This is where the buck is made’— psychiatry—since psychiatrists earn four times as much as analysts. He has had schizophrenic patients and one ‘labelled’—he used that word—of manic-depressive who had been prescribed lithium for life, but he left her well with only therapy, taking away the medicine. The shrink who had treated her before ‘was on the same page’ he told me, pointing to a book by Ramón de la Fuente.

This was a splendid start, and everything suggested that I had finally found a friendly ear in a professional. A doctor who recognises fraud in his profession can be a guarantee of good feelings towards the victims of the parents and the doctors who pay them. A month after I gave him my manuscript I excitedly called García to see what impact my precious text had caused. I don’t know shorthand, but I managed to jot down some important phrases by writing as fast as I could while talking to him on the phone:

17 of August. ‘It is very well written. It is a good testimony, like Kafka’s letter. In my opinion, the family problem must be removed: by removing the names, it could become a good testimony to be known socially; we must remove the character of denunciation and give it more social and collective function. It has curative action. It is a book against family, medical institutions and in particular, ahem, the health [apparently an euphemism for the psychiatric] institution. With pseudonyms… hopefully it may be published’.

This opinion encouraged me and I made a new appointment with him. But I must confess something. Years before I had been offended by García when in his home study he defended Amara against my complaint. That happened before I started my psychiatry research and could properly present my case in two books. But García’s comments about my Letter reconciled me to him, at least momentarily. The day I saw him, back in his home study, I wrote these reflections in my diary:

August 28. Today I went to see him and spent an hour and a half talking to him. I was wrong in believing that García wasn’t compassionate. The first thing he said about my Letter to Mama Medusa was: ‘I was so amazed. I felt moved’.

And he did talk about Amara: that there was no communication, although I remember that he was ambiguous about assigning blame (he implied that it was necessary to find out where the error came from). But he did say that instead of wanting to understand family dynamics Amara turned to drugs. This comment and others end the resentment I had for him when he long ago repudiated my criticism of his colleague. He also spoke of the terrible lack of communication with my parents as a teenager. That was the year [1974] that García met me at my parents’ school. He was incomparably more human than Angelica, Hector and not to mention Solbein. García confirmed to me that no physician in Mexico publicly opposes psychiatry. Almost at the beginning he spoke of ‘the high-risk situation’ in which I found myself as a teenager. But he added that it would be ‘pamphlet’ if I didn’t use pseudonyms, which was ‘the only objection’ he made to my text.

So García advised me the same as Tere: he was more concerned with the public image of my family than with my need to report the case.

Without having assimilated this fact, two years later I would send him How to Murder Your Child’s Soul. Once again, I wrote down what he was saying to me over the phone. The brackets and ellipsis mean that I couldn’t write down his sentences in full, but the fragments are significant to know what García was thinking:

June 9, 2000.

What a disappointment! Dr. García told me:

‘I read half. I haven’t finished it; the question of sight has become more acute. From what I have read, I believe that you are wasting time and vital energy on the family matter. [You have to] put a line, a full stop and dedicate yourself to other issues. The critique of psychiatry is somewhat outdated; I feel it’s anachronistic, like that criticism of Dr. Amara. As far as I have read, if you reoriented your critical skills in another field… I think there was a series of misunderstandings and it led to suffering… My point of view [is that you should abandon your project so] you don’t have to continue paying the toll of what happened to you in youth. [I would suggest that] the question of Dr. Amara be put aside’.

I asked him ‘Are you friends?’ and he replied: ‘Not properly. We don’t treat each other; I don’t know about his activities. My opinion isn’t influenced by a question of friendship’.

García’s little sermon caused me enormous indignation. I embarked on a reflection for several days that made me fill my diary with expletives. I didn’t respond to García either at his home study or in writing because it would have been useless. But on the very day of his paternalistic advice I wrote down this soliloquy:

Do you remember his defence of Amara years ago that hurt me? Good!: history repeats itself. All this corroborates my view that only apostates of an ideology understand reality. García is an analyst. He never apostatised from his profession: he’s part of the guild. His internal alliances don’t allow him to see reality. He’s like Hector Escobar: good people but wrong. I mustn’t interact with them at all! I mustn’t speak to him again. You have to accept your solitude, Caesar: no professional will be able to understand you since the profession itself is a trap. Now the last door is closing…

11th of June. One of the nonsense that García told me that I didn’t write down the day before was that continuing my literary project ‘could harm me’. This shows that analysts know nothing of the mind. What García ignores (‘so that you don’t continue paying the toll on what happened to you in your youth’) is that you cannot start a different life without money. And even with money I would write first and only later would I dedicate myself to the cinema, for the simple reason that it’s now that my soliloquies from those years are alive and need to be written down. I have been a mountain philosopher for decades and it would be a crime if, by dedicating myself to something else, they would go out of my memory. I don’t see in what other areas I could help myself and other victims more than by telling my life.

June 17. There is something more serious in García’s response. If Amara keeps destroying teenagers in his office it is deeply immoral to say ‘put it aside’. That advice presupposes as an absolute fact that Amara hasn’t destroyed and is not destroying other young people. García didn’t deny my accusation, he simply ignored it, no matter how obvious the fact that, since Amara and other psychiatrists continue to do these things, my testimony would serve to combat them. Without knowing it, García is part of the system. His message seems to be: Your text is changing the rules of the game for me (he used those words!). I won’t read it all: it may endanger my POV about my colleagues.

June 27th. Another thing. That response from García, allying internally with someone who deserves a trial in court, shows that therapy is really a very bad thing. There is no getting around this conclusion: If García had scolded me for denouncing his colleague in the past, I’d have been terribly confused. Well, something similar happened to me years ago, but in 1976 I would have panicked. I must use this in the future to show the accuracy of Jeffrey Masson’s stance: All therapy is toxic. Now I just hate him. As a teenager he would have hurt me.

Imagine this: suppose my book has already been published and is selling well. If a journalist interviewed García to talk about the literary novelty, he couldn’t have come out with the advice he gave me. It wouldn’t have been so easy to escape. He must have faced what I wrote in that half that he read. But talking to an analyst in private lends itself to violating the most elementary rules of logic and common sense. Therapists despise what their clients tell them and shy away like children. It is too evident that the Amaras, Santarellis, Krassoievitchs, Millanes, Corrales and even Garcías [the analysts who have offended me] should only be challenged in my writings. In other words, their offices are a Wonderland where the accusations are ignored, disregarded.

Remember that counselling the victim instead of reforming the perpetrator is what Miller calls poisonous pedagogy, and the same goes for trying to ‘educate’ the victim without vindicating him against the curse that Szasz spoke of.

It is clear, Caesar, that you shouldn’t expect anything from those in the cult of psychoanalysis, including those who originally showed a good heart. They all belong to a quasi-religion and will not apostatise from it. They will take it to their graves. Forget about them. If they weren’t so religious, García and Escobar could’ve called me to politely discuss our differences. They won’t do it: this is a world without morals and the García case exemplifies it. Instead of telling me something about my accusations, they close their minds. Like my sister Korina, they give advice. It seems that the taboo on these topics is much more widespread than expected. It isn’t just my parents. It isn’t only the old Uncle Beto and Godmother or my cousins Héctor, Octavio and Carmina. People who agree with Szasz himself, such as García, also have closed minds (and let’s not talk about doctors Santarelli, Millán and other renowned analysts who have offended me terribly). That is your world Caesar, like it or not. My message is for other people. Don’t give your pearls to pigs anymore.

June 28th. I can’t leave Garcia alone. I think of the phrases ‘that criticism of doctor Amara…’, ‘there was a series of misunderstandings…’ I didn’t criticise Amara: I denounced him! Using the word ‘criticism’ suggests something like an opinion, a point of view: as if in my book I hadn’t talked about criminal actions, not ‘misunderstandings’! See now this: ‘If you reoriented your critical capacity to another field…’ Imagine telling Solzhenitsyn to redirect his criticism to a field outside Russia! I have been thinking many things about Garcia. It’s a great indicator of how bad his profession is.

García also told me by phone that the National Institute of Psychiatry [known also as INP in Mexico] ‘hadn’t allowed a patient to be committed because it was involuntary’. With this argument he tried to refute my manuscript (‘the criticism of psychiatry is somewhat outdated’) by assuming that in recent years the profession has become more humanitarian. I was speechless. It couldn’t be that I, decades younger than García, knew that the INP is the only psychiatric hospital in Mexico City in which internment is voluntary. In the large psychiatric hospital next door to García’s home, the Fray Bernardino Álvarez Hospital, involuntary psychiatry is practiced, such as electroshocking the inmates! The INP does it too, but it brainwashes the patients into undergoing therapy with their consent. Of course: they aren’t warned that that ‘therapy’ produces amnesia. A woman who was interned at the INP told me in 2005 that the electroshocks that were applied to her there erased her memories of a trip. It is also worth mentioning that the director of the INP, Gerard Heinze, told me personally that he mentions the magic word ‘Fray Bernardino’ to intimidate his patients into submitting to electroshock ‘therapy’.(*)

Garcia’s ignorance of psychiatry in the year 2000 stems from his incredible—truly incredible—blindness before the human rights violations that take place a few blocks from his home. The only psychiatric facility in the country that locks up children, the Juan N. Navarro Children’s Hospital, is also close to his home! In which bubble was Dr. García living? A few months before García told me that the criticism of my manuscript was outdated, the Mexican magazine Proceso had published a cover article exposing the crimes committed in a national psychiatric hospital run by the state. My diary from 2000 continues:

June 29. Oh García: I can’t leave you! Two years ago you told me that the schizoid label is ‘label’ and ‘a curse as Szasz says’. But when a colleague of yours labels me as a teenager while I am perfectly sane, and as an adult I want to denounce him, then you tell me: ‘Amara must be put aside’. Isn’t this precisely schizophrenia?

The anger caused by the old friend’s scolding was such that in my diaries I continued to go after him sporadically in 2001, 2002, 2003 and even 2004. But the above is enough to provide an idea of the bile that I spilled over his little piece of advice and scolding: the ‘poisonous pedagogy’ that Miller speaks of in its purest expression!

Carlos García did exactly the same that my pseudo-friend Tere had done to me. They both advised me to abandon my literary project. They didn’t realise that just by giving me that advice they would become themselves characters in such a project. The only difference is that Tere wanted to dissuade me from publishing my Letter to mom Medusa, where I denounce the crime of my parents; García wanted to dissuade me from publishing How to Murder Your Child’s Soul, where I exposed his colleague Amara. For Tere as well as for García and many others, the crimes that society commits with a family child must remain hidden. No one is to pronounce names. This pair reminds me of the first Gulag fugitive who escaped from an archipelago island and published a book about his experiences. In a crazy western world where Stalin used to be worshiped, the fugitive’s testimony was ignored and its author was subjected to the same kind of expletives that I received.
____________

(*) With another anti-psychiatric activist, in 2002 I interviewed Gerard Heinze, the director of the INP, and later I wrote a report about that visit.