Yesterday, India’s Gukesh Dommaraju conquered the chess crown from China’s Ding Liren in the World Chess Championship organised by FIDE, a progressive organisation whose motto is Gens una sumus (‘We are one Family’), in the sense that humanity is one. Compare that neochristian nonsense with the motto of this site, Gens alba conservanda est.
As former chess champion Garry Kasparov has commented, both India’s Gukesh and China’s Ding Liren when the latter held the crown should better be called ‘FIDE champions’ because the real champion is still the Norwegian Magnus Carlsen, even though officially he is no longer the champion. Carlsen still wins almost every major tournament and has the highest Elo rating in the entire professional chess community. By rating—the real parameter, not FIDE championships—the Aryan Carlsen is still #1 (see e.g., the ratings of the first twenty players in 2024), even though he has refused to participate in the latest FIDE championships for the crown.
FIDE has become politicised. In my day, it would have been unthinkable that a Russian player would have been banned from playing in official FIDE tournaments because of his political views. But in 2022, Russia’s Sergey Karjakin, the player who had come closest to taking the crown from Magnus Carlsen by Carlsen’s own admission, was banned from tournaments for supporting Putin’s military operation in Ukraine. Without that ban, perhaps the World Chess Championship that ended yesterday might have had a white face, Karjakin’s, as he could have challenged Ding Liren for the crown (or in the previous world championship two years ago when Liren beat the Russian Ian Nepomniachtchi).
In other words, the fact that for the first time in history there are no white men in a world championship, only an Indian and a Chinese, could be interpreted as a political decision. In any case, Gukesh’s emotions in the video linked above vindicate what I have said about chess: although it looks like a game of scientists, it is a tremendously emotional game.
Regarding the FIDE championship match that ended yesterday, I would like to say a few words.
It bothers me that several commentators, including some famous chess grandmasters, are saying that Ding Liren’s blunder in his last game with Gukesh is the most serious in the history of the world championships. That is not true! Here are three blunders in the world championships at least as serious as yesterday’s blunder by Liren during a drawish endgame. Those were the days when only those with white skin contested the World Championship crown…
Here we see the position between Mikhail Chigorin and Wilhelm Steinitz, before FIDE existed, for the World Championship in the 23rd game of 1892 (from 1886 to 1894, Steinitz was the first World Chess Champion). There were more than a thousand spectators in the playing hall and everyone was commenting on Chigorin’s brilliant play. Steinitz’s imminent surrender was expected. Suddenly there was a commotion when the Russian, instead of taking the pawn on b7, forgot that his bishop on d6 protected his king from being checkmated and moved it to the b4-square. Steinitz took the pawn on h2 with a check and everyone stood up when they saw Chigorin put his hands on his head. The obvious mistake that an ordinary amateur could easily see cost the Russian master from taking the crown from the champion Steinitz!
A second blunder of the kind that even players like me wouldn’t usually make, but which being human even the best chess players sometimes make because World Chess Championships get on the nerves of both participants, occurred in the 19th game of the 1929 match for the crown between Alexander Alekhine and Efim Bogoljubov in The Hague: a game that started with a Queen’s Gambit. In that endgame any player of my chess level (which is extremely modest compared to the professionals) would have played 70…Ke4 cutting off the white king, and the game would have ended in a draw. Instead, Bogoljubov played 70…Kg4?? and six moves later had to resign.
FIDE was organised after the death of the champion Alekhine in 1946, who had played tournaments sponsored by the Third Reich. In one of the FIDE World Championships when the Soviet school of chess was unbeatable, an error occurred that even a third-rated player could not have committed.
I am referring to the sixth game of the match for the crown between David Bronstein and Mikhail Botvinnik in Moscow in 1951. Bronstein, the twenty-seven-year-old challenger, played the champion Botvinnik, already forty years old. Inexplicably, Bronstein played 57. Kc2? and after 57…Kg3 by Botvinnik, Bronstein had to resign (57. Nd6+ and 58. Nd4 would have prevented the pawn from crowning). That match ended in twelve points for each player (one point for each game won; zero points for each game lost, and half a point for each game drawn) and Bronstein never won the championship title because FIDE had a curious rule. In the event of a twelve-point for each player in a twenty-four game match, the champion, in this case, Botvinnik, would retain his title. We can already imagine the implications of this blunder! But errare humanum est…
Above we see Alekhine (left) against Bogoljubov; a former champion, Emanuel Lasker (seated), and others watching. Compare the elegance of how chess players dressed a century ago and how they dress now. It is perhaps worth saying that, unsuccessfully, Bogoljubov disputed the crown with Alekhine in 1929 and in 1934, when Hitler was on the rise in Europe.
More civilised times, when the Aryan wasn’t yet a self-hater…
When I wrote the above book I was asleep in the womb of the System as far as the most elementary historical and socio-political realities were concerned. It was only in 2021 that I modified my old text by inserting, here and there, some disconcerting phrases on Jewish and racial issues. While these additions do some violence to the original text, in this postscript I will be unashamed to spit out the naked truth.
Perhaps in 2004, when I circulated the rough draft of the above-linked book among friends, I was the first to recount the chess player’s agonies in confessing what we feel in tournaments. But now some fans of the game, like Stjepan Tomic who blogs on his site Hanging Pawns and other YouTubers, have begun to talk about their agonies. I welcome this small breakthrough in chess psychology, but it is only a baby step. In the other areas mentioned I still see wasted talent, or idiot chess players in the etymological sense of the word.
Idiot is a word derived from ἰδιώτης, idiōtēs from ἴδιος, idios (private, self). It began to be used in ancient Greece when there was direct democracy (not the so-called representative democracy of our days: deception of the people by those in power). But even in such healthy times as ancient Greece one or the other citizen was too private or selfish: he didn’t care about public affairs. He was an ‘idiot’. Now, people, in general, persist in their bourgeois and private attitude without, let’s say, inquiring into the real causes of mental disorders [there’s a chapter on disorders among chess players in the above-liked book]. And chess continues to be a refuge for idiots or apathetic people who are not interested in the real world but in intellectual autism.
Worse, when some renowned chess players deign to engage in political activism, their pronouncements are beyond idiotic: they are toxic. The most popular pair of world champions of our time, the ethnic Jew Kasparov (1985-2000 champion) and the Gentile Carlsen (2013 champion to date) exemplify this. However, in this postscript [to the above-linked book—note of 2023] I shall call Kasparov by his real Jewish surname: Weinstein, even if it is worse what gentile traitors like Carlsen do because the traitor is worse than the subversive Jew.
In a recent interview, Weinstein said: ‘Tucker Carlson has become a mouthpiece of Russian propaganda. That’s the gift from heaven for Putin’s propaganda machine’. The Baku-raised Jew, who emigrated to New York, thus repeats the lies of the US television networks at the hands of his fellow Jews. I confess that on the days I wrote this paragraph I was reading the chapter on Korchnoi in translation of the fifth volume of Weinstein’s My Great Predecessors (I own the whole collection). I am impressed that he who wrote such didactic treatises on chess is the same person from whom we could quote veritable nonsense, but I will confine myself to a couple of absurdities. Weinstein tweeted: ‘Le Pen is a weapon, part of Putin’s larger war, a second front in attacking Europe and democracy. I am often critical of Macron’s dealings with Russia, but he is an essential bulwark in France today’. And Weinstein endorsed in a news broadcast what, for us, is the paranoia of CNN and other TV channels: ‘I think Russia is behind…’ Trump’s 2016 election victory.
Weinstein’s pronouncements are infinitely worse than Fischer’s paranoia [recounted in the above-linked book], who saw his abusive mother’s Jewish cronies everywhere.
I won’t go into detail about the war in Ukraine. Anyone interested can read my posts on Russia on this site. Suffice it to say that Russia has become a healthy barrier to the sexual degeneracy of the West and, thanks to the newly formed bloc with China, there is finally an alternative power to stand up to the LGBT flag of crazy Uncle Sam: one provides the economic muscle and the other the nuclear umbrella. The typical subversive Jew, like Weinstein doesn’t like it when someone stands up to degeneracy even though, thanks to his mother Russia, he became world champion. But the attitude of an idiot like Magnus Carlsen, as I said, is even worse as he comes from a Scandinavian country where the majority are pure Nordic. Shortly after Putin’s invasion, Carlsen organised an online tournament supposedly to help Ukrainian children. Once again, this is worse than being a mere idiot as the current world champion, who has accepted invitations to George Soros’ mansion, is thus supporting the propaganda of the Establishment.
Carlsen has lunch and plays chess
with Soros at his summer home.
The cretinism of the apolitical chess player is also evident in all other chess players. No master or GM, as far as I know, complained about Sergey Kariakin’s punishment for political incorrectness regarding the invasion of Ukraine. Unlike his Russian compatriot Yan Nepomniashchi (‘Nepo’)—a bien-pensant player—Kariakin spoke out in favour of Putin’s special operation. Although with enormous efforts Kariakin had earned the right to participate in the most important tournament of all—the Candidates Tournament for the world crown—in 2022, for that political pronouncement he was disqualified by FIDE, which put a Chinese player in his place.
I finish writing this postscript when the Chinese, Ding Liren, and the Russian Nepo, have just two games left to define who will be the next world champion (the Norwegian Carlsen refused to defend his crown). If the Chinese wins, it will be the first time in history that an East Asian has won the chess laurel.
Back to the subject. Given the current war against the white man, we must see white-skinned people in love with Caissa [the goddess of chess] as idiots. If nature made us intelligent, burying talents like that is a crime deserving of the lord’s wrath. That said, chess need not be inherently alienating. I am reminded of a film in which a 19th-century Russian in traditional dress played with wooden—not plastic—pieces with one of his compatriots in the open air. So, taken lightly and without the agony of tournaments, the game could become a healthy recreation as long as we only spend a little time on it.
But what is real chess [the new title of the above-linked book, once I add this postscript]?
Chess of ideas involves more than a fierce critique of the egalitarian dogma of our age; more than a complete and utter refutation of that worldview to replace it with another. This is what I am engaged in in The West’s Darkest Hour. The new white religion of alleged race equality, what Newspeakers call ‘gender’ equality and sexual identity, must be destroyed.
In this little book, I would just like to confess that this last year I have suffered from a moral hangover for having used my talents to buy a score of books on chess openings. I read and studied them because I was planning to play a couple of more tournaments. Finally, I decided not to do so for reasons confessed in my intimate chess diaries. Let me just say here that the only thing that matters is real chess: to checkmate the Christian ethics that white atheists currently suffer.
Only in this way, by playing real chess and abandoning the other chess for good, would I cease to be an apprentice of the sacred words and become a true priest of those words. And only by reading my books would the reader know what I meant in this last paragraph.
I have been told that the technical process of exporting content from the old incarnation of The West’s Darkest Hour (WDH) for import into this new incarnation will be completed tomorrow.
I am re-posting this article today, July 1st, because a couple of days ago it was accidentally deleted. When two people work on the same administration page, this time the technician and me, accidents like this can happen: that’s why I didn’t add entries in the last fifteen days.
Fixing this site has been a task that left me with almost no funds on my debit card. But it’s worth it because, as I say at the end of this post, after what happened last month I will dedicate myself body and soul to the health of WDH.
So I now resume my work on this site.
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In ‘Doctors, Psychotherapists, Liars and Butchers’ Jordan Peterson recently weighed in on Matt Walsh’s documentary ‘What is a Woman?’ which denounces the medical profession that now is, literally, castrating boys and cutting off girls’ breasts.
It strikes me that it is only until very recently, with the Chinese virus lockdowns and this Walsh documentary, that some are beginning to question the medical establishment.
Unlike these recently purple-pilled semi-normies, I knew, since 1976 when I was seventeen, that there was something horrendous in an institution where psychiatric doctors always take the side of the parents in conflicts with their children, no matter how sane the child is or how disturbed the parents are (see my Spanish texts on the subject).
Already since the famous Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), voices have been raised exposing a profession that has committed perfectly sane people to asylums. But it is better late than never to put the medical profession in the dock. It’s about time that a few are realising that the real purpose of medicine is profit, at least in the area of surgeries on teenagers suffering from sexual dysphoria (‘trans people’ in today’s Newspeak) or unproven vaccines. But most dissenters in this century have lost memory that since the time of the author of Robinson Crusoe, some already knew that another branch of medicine, psychiatry, was fraudulent (I refer specifically to the 18th century Salpêtrière asylum of Paris). And the same can be said of psychiatry today.
However, as I said about Matt Walsh last month, this Christian is not one of us. A few days ago, celebrating the recent Supreme Court decision on abortion, Walsh said that such a decision was like the American victory in WW2 and the liberation of concentration camps. Like hundreds of millions of normies, Walsh ignores that it is precisely the accepted wisdom about WW2 that is causing the current white psychosis.
But he is not alone.
Although Walsh is not a racialist, Jared Taylor recently wrote an obituary about a young man who helped him in AmRen. This young racialist also repudiated, like Walsh, German National Socialism. The 29-year-old race realist who suddenly and inexplicably died (covid vaccines?), and many American racialists who offered Taylor their condolences, have been also ignorant of the root cause of today’s white self-hatred.
But the most relevant thing I have been thinking about these days is something quite different. No racialist site, to my knowledge, said anything about the fact that WDH was taken down. It made me think how incredibly fragile a site can be if there is no one to relieve the editor-in-chief.
Since my sister suddenly died, I’ve been taking very seriously that death can surprise any of us at any time. If I die, say of an unexpected heart attack, and no one picks up the torch I left on the ground, the real cause of Aryan decline goes into obscurity, since there is no other site that goes to the bottom of the Christian Question (CQ).
And all this got me thinking about something I said last year about my hobby (see my book The Human Side of Chess): that I would prepare to play another FIDE tournament this year. What happened last month, and the possibility that if I die at the wrong time all my work on CQ will be lost, moved me to add a postscript to my slim book. From that unpublished postscript I would like to pick up the final paragraph:
Here I would just like to confess that this last year I have suffered from a moral hangover for having used my talents to buy several chess books, and read them, in case I get to play a couple more tournaments. But even if I do it, it wouldn’t be worth recounting any of this. The only thing that matters is the real chess: to checkmate the Christian ethics that millions of white atheists currently suffer. Only then would I cease to be an apprentice of the holy words and become a true priest…
Although these days the exciting 2022 Candidates Tournament of chess can be watched live on YouTube, for me to stop being a mere apprentice and take my vows of priesthood, I must devote all my time to WDH. Chess is a very demanding game, a great time waster; and I cannot presume to be a priest if I don’t take my perpetual vows to the sacred words, especially now that I have seen how fragile a website can be.
From this post I resume my efforts, now redoubled, after last month’s accident. What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.
– For the context of these translations click here –
Ignorant, criminal on a grand scale and a good Catholic
It is true that we cannot judge that epoch, an epoch of ignorant, superstitious, fallacious and bloody people, with our modern—oh so ethical—modern standards: we must not act anachronistically against history! But can we and should we still measure that era, a thoroughly Christian era, by Christian criteria, by certain biblical criteria, such as the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount or the commandments of the Decalogue? And precisely because we look at it in this way, shouldn’t we recognise it by its fruits?
The Catholic author Daniel-Rops, too, feels a prevailing sense of ‘horror’ at ‘the continually repeated spectacle of crimes that are frankly unspeakable’. ‘Everywhere there is blatant violence, ready to explode at any moment. Nothing stops it: not family ties, not the precepts of the most elementary decency and not even the Christian faith’. Not even that? Didn’t the faith allow all that to go on? Didn’t it provide what we might call the supreme consecration, the endorsement of the status quo? Didn’t the faith pray for the rulers, the generals, the cutthroats? Didn’t it pray before wars, during wars, and after wars? Didn’t it participate in wars and plundering, or make continual donations to the Church from the spoils of war or plunder? Didn’t it fatten the powerful on the misery of the masses?
The Church unreservedly sided with the scoundrels and butchers. And while the violent acts of the kings are more and more unbridled, the chain of blood vengeance never ends, the murders of relatives multiply precisely among the great ones: the Catholic son kills the Catholic father, the brother kills the brother who is as Catholic as him, the Catholic uncle kills the Catholic nephew, and while the robberies of the Merovingian kings occur, the annihilated enemies who were Germanic princes, and the snatched booty of gold, jewels and weapons could hardly be hidden any longer under the underground vault of the palace of Braine; the episcopate saw in those crowned Catholic criminals the legitimate representatives of state authority, the representatives of God on earth.
Since the Church sided with the Merovingian potentates from the beginning as their ally, it was able to develop as it hadn’t done for a long time. Its influence grew, and both the secular and monastic clergy became incredibly wealthy. And to a large extent the almost permanent catastrophes, and the terror that rarely ceased, greatly favoured the appearance of donations to the Church. ‘As people expected protection and help from them, and were continually threatened by looting, arson, murder and violence, they turned to the Church and its saints’ (Bleiber).
The Church thought nothing of opposing this. Its wheat increased. It was only between 475 and the beginning of the 6th century that the number of Gallic monasteries increased tenfold; but in the first half of the following century more abbeys were built there than ever before or since. And looking back to the middle of the 7th century, a modern researcher even speaks of ‘an episcopal and monastic state’ (Sprandel). The episcopate, which was a ‘great power’ not only economically but also politically (Dopsch), played almost as decisive a role in the kingdom as the absolute sovereign monarchy did in the Church. The two were closely linked and intertwined, for the ruler also had to show himself devotissimus of the Church and, at least in the Carolingian period, was regarded ‘as a clergyman’ (Brunner).
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Editor’s note: Chess, as it is known today, emerged in Medieval Europe as an evolution of a Persian game which in turn evolved from an Indian game (the earliest reference to the latter is found in the Mahabharata: an epic-religious text of the Aryans from the 3rd century BC).
As can be seen in the picture, two bishops flank the king and queen in the original formation of the game, already in its European incarnation.
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The whole period, cruel in the extreme and extraordinarily fraudulent, was at the same time very ‘pious’. Attendance at Sunday mass was widespread ‘at the ringing of the bells they crowded into the churches’ (Pfister). Eucharistic communion became almost as widespread. Church singing was zealously cultivated. Almost everyone attended the processions. Catholic festivals were celebrated as great popular festivals. People prayed before they began to eat, and not a glass of water was drunk without first making the sign of the cross. And it was not only God who was prayed to, but all imaginable saints were invoked continually. Numerous churches were built with marble columns and marble-covered walls, stained glass windows and many paintings; the rich even had their own domestic chapels. The kings dealt with saints, as Theuderic I did in 525-526 with St Gallus in Cologne (who set fire to a temple there, ‘because none of the foolish pagans were to be seen’ after which the arsonist took refuge in the royal palace). Childebert I visited a saint. Queens, like Radegund for example, washed the feet of bishops. Crass superstition was commonplace. Relics from Rome and Jerusalem were hoarded, and pilgrimages were made, looking for health, to the supposed tombs of the apostles.
In a word, there was a deep conviction ‘of the reality and power of the living God’ (Heinsius). There abounded ‘a vigorous and fresh faith in God and his providence; one dealt with the divine, not as an abstraction or an idea, but as a very real force. This conviction prevailed among all, shared by ecclesiastics and laymen without distinction’. The first half of the 7th century was openly regarded as ‘a flourishing period of the Frankish Church’ (Hauck), which was seen to be ‘deeply rooted in the people of the Franks’ (Schieffer), and the bishops and episcopal synods ‘applied to the work’ (Boudriot).
These days the World Chess Championship is being played between the world champion Magnus Carlsen (Norway) and the challenger Ian Nepomniachtchi (Russia), organised by FIDE (International Chess Federation). In the picture we see a red-haired chess Grandmaster commenting on the game played today, with pictures of the old Soviet-era world champions. Note that the USSR flag doesn’t bother the fans. As I have already said, the idol of my adolescence was Alexander Alekhine who had to flee, even as world champion, to Portugal after the defeat of Germany (Alekhine played several tournaments under the auspices of the Third Reich). We can already imagine a Nazi flag, with Alekhine’s picture, in a retrospective account of chess in the 1930s commented by the same red-haired master…
In The Human Side of Chess I said that I might play another FIDE tournament after sixteen years of not playing tournaments endorsed by the FIDE. But chess is no easy matter: one has to keep up to date, during preparation, with books on the latest opening analyses, where the authors often make use of computers. And it is true that I bought some books since I translated The Human Side of Chess into English. But those are not books that can be read like a novel. Rather, they resemble the maths books we had in junior and high school, when one had to do lots of exercises to assimilate mathematical concepts.
It seems to me a crime to spend so much time in chess when I should be acting as a priest of the fourteen words. I don’t mean I’m going to abandon the project of playing next year, but in an ideal world one would have to relegate the study of chess to a minimum. And this made me fantasize this morning what I would do if I had a special sponsor who would send me, for about a decade, enough money to order books to honour the sacred words.
My mind flew to the Open University of the UK (OU) books on the history degree, or rather, the classical studies degree. On this site I have translated the texts of a Spaniard on Sparta and Republican Rome. But formal study requires not only the basics of a BA (I wouldn’t have to formally subscribe to the OU, just order their books), but more specific studies about Sparta and Republican Rome.
Largely, studying chess is nothing more than a lack of funds, since one spends tons of time digesting a single chess book; it’s cheap to study this game at the amateur level. On the other hand, studying history is more expensive. Unlike the metaphor I have been using on this site, that of the three-eyed raven who in an inhospitable cave on the other side of the Wall can see the past paranormally, in the real world one needs not only the money to have a good collection of the Loeb Classical Library, but the time to read them, the security of sustenance and a roof over our heads. That is the only way to ponder what the Aryan race really was in the pre-Christian world.
There is something else. Recently I was thinking that, given that Christianity and secular neochristianity are axiologically the same, a neologism should be coined to encompass these two concepts in one. Upon reflection, I remembered the term ‘Jew obeyer’ which I first used on this site in 2018.
Indeed: Christians obey the precepts of the Jews who wrote the New Testament, and atheists indirectly obey them, albeit wrapped in the ideology born with the French Revolution (‘human rights’, etc.—cf. what Savitri said on anthropocentrism in today’s other post).
The only way for the priest of the 14 words to prove definitively that Christian ethics and the ethics of Western atheists are two sides of the same coin, is to steep himself in classical culture. In an ideal world I would inherit the fortune of a relatively wealthy man. With the proper funds it would no longer make sense to study, even a little, chess as long as I could ‘see’ the past through my classical studies.
After a few years of studying the classics, the question of whether there was anything like these ‘Jew obeyers’ among the Aryans of pre-Christian Europe would begin to dawn on me.
Presently, it seems to me that there was not: that there was nothing so much as an egalitarian hysteria where the last (the poor, the blacks, the trans) will be first and the first (the proud Aryans) will be last. My working hypothesis is that all this madness that has metastasised in our secular world today had, as its first cancerous cell, Mark’s gospel as we have been saying on this site when talking about Richard Carrier’s book. But we would have to be as sure of that as Carrier is now about Mediterranean religion in the first centuries of our era.
If I can’t do that formal study, it would be great if someone else could do it in the future. The premise that the ‘ethical’ system that is killing the Aryan originated from the mental virus of Christianity can be formally addressed by studying pre-Christian Europe.
I would like to use this post to thank a sponsor who sends me a fixed amount per month. If I had more such sponsors I could surely abandon the couple of chess books I am reading for a better cause.
I just removed this image from my Monday post because I changed my mind and now I want to use the below image of José Raúl Capablanca on the cover of the Spanish version (an image of Alexander Alekhine will appear on the cover of the English translation).
Note the size of the pieces with which the masters played in Capablanca’s time and compare it with the reduced size with which chess is played in official tournaments today. And the same can be said about the clothing from a century ago compared to the shitty T-shirts of today: courtesy of American culture. The collapse of the Aryan man can be seen from the way we dress to the music we listen to, which prompts me to say something more about another of the booklets published by Third Reich Books: Translations of the Originals.
This booklet is titled The SS Calls You! and is addressed to very young Germans. When I got to page 7, I couldn’t help but think that I shouldn’t visit again the sites of white nationalism, as they are crap compared to this fighting spirit. It is precisely because the US is founded on that materialistic phrase that contains the misleading word ‘happiness’ that makes America the antithesis of the Aryan hero.
Page 64 and others mention music as career number 87: ‘SS officer and SS music officer’. It refers to classical music of course. How many American racialists repudiate the degenerate music of their country to the point of never hearing it? And page 66 says ‘Sooner or later your son will become a soldier’. We can imagine saying that to racialist libertarians!
Many of those who visit this site do not take seriously what I’ve said: here. For example, the final pages of the booklet are about the Insignia Colours of the Waffen-SS. Those in the concentration camps got light brown. Could an American racialist, say one of those libertarians who comment on AmRen, conceive one of his children with light-brown insignia during a project of ethnic cleansing on American soil?
By the way, of the original 206 participants of the 2021 Chess World Cup, in the semi-finals, which will start tomorrow, all non-whites have been disqualified. Only four whites remain: the champion Magnus Carlsen, the Russian Sergey Karjakin, the Polish Jan-Krzysztof Duda and another Russian, Vladimir Fedoseev. Yesterday, Karjakin eliminated the American Sam Shankland, who is not properly white. As long as Americans continue to mix their blood with non-whites thanks to their declaration of independence from Europe and all that stuff about ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, they will never have another Morphy or a Fischer.
I will dedicate this weekend to polishing the typeface of The Human Side of Chess for publication.
Today I got the proof copy of my chess book that I was talking about on Monday. Before publishing the English version, I will have to read this copy in the original language to see if it contains errors.
In the emails they send me I found out that a visitor to this site likes chess and we even played a correspondence game last year. With that exception I don’t see many chess fans visiting The West’s Darkest Hour.
Non-fans ignore that the stress on the player is so great that it affects even world champions. In 1974 for example, in the candidates match between Korchnoi and Karpov—a virtual World Chess Championship for the title because Fischer would refuse to play the following year—due to stress Karpov (right) lost his weight and ended up weighing 47 kilograms (about 104 pounds).
I doubt that non-fan visitors have an exact idea of what chess really is: for the mind, something tougher than the Olympics. I would like to add an anecdote regarding what I claim in my book.
I was a teenager when Karpov defeated Korchnoi but this just happened today. Pay attention to what Nigel Short says after the break. Chess players suffer when they commit a blunder that costs them the game. In this case, the Iranian who committed it lost the game, thus he was disqualified, and couldn’t pass to the semi-final of the tournament.
Unlike the physical sports of the Olympiads this is a brutal intellectual sport.
The year in which I wrote the first draft of this book marked a century since the birth of Carlos Torre. Our age is, in many ways, worse than 1904: especially in overpopulation and in degradation of culture. But there is more freedom to question the family institution in which some parents assault their kids’ minds. A hundred years ago it was impossible to film Shine or even write about a similar case in real life. Claroscuro was titled this Oscar-winning film in Mexico, where millions of viewers saw how an abusive father literally drives his son mad.
There are two ways of seeing Caissa: as the great whore of the marginalised and even of those who have suffered crises like the one Torre suffered, or as a generous mother who welcomes the marginalised into her lap. In the original version of this booklet of 2004, an abominable bias towards the first interpretation appeared, although when speaking of my nostalgic park we glimpse that this mother welcomed many social outcasts and abused young people at home.
The fact is that not all of us were able to dedicate ourselves to cinema like GM Marcel Sisniega. At sixteen he had managed to become the national chess champion of Mexico. He came from such a wealthy family that he even had beautiful palm trees in his Cuernavaca garden. When Sisniega retired from competitive chess in his thirties, he presented his last book at La Cabaña of Las Arboledas park. I attended the event and at his speech he said that if the will to win had died out, as it had died out in him, it was pointless to continue playing chess tournaments. After that sporting farewell presentation before a select group of fans who went to La Cabaña, Sisniega devoted himself to the seventh art and in 1996 he made his debut in the film industry with the making of a short film. But even though Sisniega was a year younger than me, he died in 2013.
(Left, Marcel Sisniega Campbell.) Not all of us were able to have a career like Sisniega’s because not all of us received support from the family. That is why, although I dealt little with Fernando Pérez Melo in the park (who in a tournament in the 1980s came to play with Sisniega), I dedicate this booklet to that poor fellow who died after Sisniega died. The point is that the marginalised individual has to do something to escape his fate, and along with drugs, Caissa is one of the best ways to do it, although without killing neurons.
As a teenager I read a comic from Editorial Novaro where the origin of the game of chess was explained. With friendly illustrations I saw the story of a king of ancient Greece stuck on an island. His soldiers were hungry. Then the king devised a game to entertain them, from which chess would emerge.
Being trapped on a small island is a great story to understand the psychology of the player, and why many of these powerless individuals, but hungry for fight and life like those soldiers, have had no choice but to become immersed in a simulation of war, as is the magical kingdom of the sixty-four squares. At the time I review this book, seventeen years after the first version, I cannot even fight for the creation of an ethnostate because I am alone. The so-called white nationalists, bourgeois to the core, enact a reactionary, not a revolutionary, ideology. Fortunately, these Americans are heading for the biggest economic crisis in their history, and since the world’s fiat currencies are tied to the dollar, when the latter hyperinflates we will all suffer stagnations comparable to that of the hungry on the Greek island.
I would like to end this booklet with the words of the cartoonist Luis de la Torre from his cartoon series that he entitled ‘The Most Beautiful Way to Waste Time’ that I saw in the newspaper many years ago:
It seems incredible that a macropolis like this one where we survive barely has three or four [chess] clubs. Why in this Valley of Tears is it not promoted as education and therapy in schools, delegations, parks, companies, houses of culture, etc.? It sure can become a vice. But it is the healthiest of all vices.
The first thing to keep in mind when a loved one is in crisis is the Hippocratic oath of doctors: do no more harm. Unfortunately, it is precisely the doctors who violate that oath, since the crises of the spirit should never be the province of the doctor.
Carlos Torre was electro-shocked in Monterrey when he lived with his three brothers, all doctors. I read this in the book 64 Variaciones Sobre un Tema de Torre by Germán de la Cruz. I was so intrigued that I made some inquiries. I spoke with Jorge Aldrete, a bridge and chess fan from Monterrey based in Mexico City, who had sold me several imported chess sets. Both Aldrete and Ferriz suggested that I contact Arturo Elizondo in Monterrey. On April 24, 2004, I spoke with Mr Elizondo, who graciously answered my questions. This man of more than eighty years was neither more nor less an eyewitness of the electroshocks to Torre. When I asked him if what de la Cruz said in his book was reliable, he replied: ‘I am sure because to control his physicality’ he was ‘by his side’ during electroconvulsive therapy. I asked him what the symptoms were so that they took such a drastic measure with the Yucatecan chess master. Elizondo replied: ‘The only thing, he was stubborn but he wasn’t aggressive and nothing like that’. Elizondo only slightly disagreed with de la Cruz’s version insofar as he affirmed that the brothers weren’t directly responsible for the commitment. ‘It was the nephew, surnamed Torre’, a Masonic grand master and colleague of Elizondo at the Nuevo León lodge. According to Elizondo, this happened in 1957 in the psychiatric ward of the General Hospital of Monterrey. Due to Torre’s ‘excitatory stage’ to use Elizondo’s expression, the diagnosis was manic-depressive, which is now called bipolar disorder. It had been the arousal phase of his manic-depressive crisis when they applied electroshocks to calm him down.
Universities teach kids psychiatric treatments, such as electroshock, as if they were the praxis of real medical science. No wonder that, being Elizondo a chemist sympathetic to medicine, he repeated to me what is claimed at the universities: that Torre-type excitations are of a ‘neurological nature’, a claim that Elizondo repeated several times during our telephone conversation. The truth is that, without any laboratory testing, psychiatrists rule out psychogenic hypotheses of delusions (see once again my anti-psychiatric site whose address appears on page 3 of this book). He also told me that electroshocks are ‘a very noble therapy’ because it ‘completely relaxes’ the excited. Elizondo participated in the coercive relaxation of Torre, in which he even helped hold him down. He even confessed to me, ‘One or two days I gave him accommodation, then he left with his nephew’. But what Elizondo ignored is that electroshock is a crime. This electric hammer blow to the head frequently erases part of the memory of the people who receive it. One of the cases I mention on my antipsychiatric site is that of a graduate student who, after she was shocked from depression, forgot what she had learned in college. We can imagine the handicap that the ‘therapy’ represented for her career. In Torre’s time there was the aggravating circumstance that it was common to perform marathon electroshock sessions: a practice that some call electrical lobotomy. We can imagine how this barbaric practice could have diminished Torre’s intellectual capacity for chess. Do you remember the scene of the electroshock applied to the character played by Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?
This type of assault on healthy brains (like the character played by Nicholson, the electro-shocked folk had a healthy brain before ‘therapy’) continues to be performed in Mexico. This is done even in the largest psychiatric hospital in the nation: the Fray Bernardino Álvarez Hospital in Tlalpan, where students do their internships. In 1960, three years after his experience in Monterrey, Torre was once again harassed by his sponsors and by psychiatrists. When he lived in Mexico City, he was committed for a few days at the Sanatorio Floresta, which was in San Ángel, under the care of psychiatrist Alfonso Millán. Alfonso Ferriz told me this personally, who in his splendid naivety paid for the commitment. The Floresta psychiatric hospital no longer exists, but as I indicate on my aforementioned website, on November 25, 1970 an article appeared in Siempre! entitled ‘A season in hell’ written by two sane young men who were interned at Floresta. The authors of the article reveal that a grandson of Victoriano Huerta was lobotomised and confined there: ‘Before, he was very aggressive until he had a lobotomy. He now is a child. At meals he twists around on the chair, he eats desperately. While eating he drives the flies away from the table’. Ferriz and Elizondo acted in good faith, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. According to Ferriz himself in one of the interviews recorded by Obregón, Torre felt resented with him for life after the outrage of which he was a victim in the psychiatric hospital. In fact, Torre didn’t see Ferriz again until the latter visited Mérida.
In his book, Gabriel Velasco, ignoring what psychiatry is, after the New York crisis wrote that Torre ‘needed medical care’. There were still no electroshocks in the 1920s. But if Velasco refers to some other psychiatric therapy that was applied to him, this way of using language (‘medical care’) is a euphemism for medical crime. In the prologue to Velasco’s book, Jesús Suárez praises that Velasco has omitted all speculation about Torre’s ills. The truth is that it was pure intellectual cowardice, both by Velasco and Suárez, to have omitted that he was electro-shocked in Monterrey; that in Mexico he was admitted to the Floresta, and that he resented Ferriz for life.
Those who knew him were struck by the fact that Carlos Torre was a very affectionate person with people. He called them all angelito, padrecito, madrecita (little angel, little father, little mother): expressions that portray the goodness of his character. Let’s put ourselves in the master’s shoes for a moment. Imagine that we speak in sweet Mexican diminutives. How would we feel after the involuntary commitment by our loved ones? What would we feel after the assault on the brain in Monterrey? In addition to the intellectual loss, wouldn’t it be an attack on one’s dignity and self-esteem? How would our self-image look after the attack?
Although Ferriz assured me that he wasn’t electro-shocked in Mexico City, they administered him psychiatric drugs at the Floresta. I wonder if Torre was tormented there with drugs called neuroleptics: a ‘hell’ as described by the authors of Siempre! According to the words of Ferriz himself, which I wrote down in an interview at his house in March 2004, I guess that Torre was sane when committed. Ferriz confessed to me: ‘But also, he didn’t seem crazy! It was hard to get what was wrong with him’. Like the ‘stubbornness’ Elizondo spoke of, Ferriz interprets anger as a mental disorder. I didn’t argue with Ferriz or Elizondo. But after the interview with the former I wondered what they had done to Torre in the Floresta, the psychiatric hospital that had Huerta’s lobotomised grandson in custody. And by the way: was this guy lobotomised there? Nobody asks questions of this kind in Mexico for the simple reason that it’s difficult to imagine that a pseudoscience is taught in universities. It is a stupendous irony that in Mexico the medical institution had to have arisen precisely in the same building of the Inquisition of New Spain: the palace of the old Faculty of Medicine.
This brief book is far from my extensive treatise on psychiatry that can be read on the internet. But just to give an idea of what I am talking about, I will mention a chilling fact: In the 21st century, lobotomies continue to be performed in Mexico and the rest of the world. The fact that defenceless citizens are currently electro-shocked and lobotomised, as they did to the character that Nicholson played in One Flew, may seem incredible to us. But a little story will shed some light on this matter.
For three centuries, Western civilisation has been cruel to people suffering from spiritual crises. Although the individual who suffers a sudden crisis doesn’t harm anyone—let’s take as a paradigm the buffoonery of imitating St. Francis on a public streetcar—the brain of he who suffers the crisis is damaged by society. From the origins of the mental institution at Bedlam in London and general hospitals in France, the treatment of the individual in crisis has been simply to torture him with various techniques (see ‘From the Great Confinement to chemical Gulag’, pages 143-166 in my book Daybreak). Although these tortures have nothing to do with real medical necessity, they were given a scientific lustre in the 19th century for public acceptance. I wonder what they did to Steinitz in one of those so-called hospitals. In his time, psychiatrists hadn’t devised electroshock and lobotomy, techniques that directly damage the brain, but they did devise some torments that broke the spirit of the person in crisis. In 19th-century nursing homes, beatings and chains were a thing of every day. There were even torture devices. I have not read the biography of Steinitz written by Bachmann. I suppose the Kneip technique applied on Steinitz, an extreme regimen of ice water baths, was involuntary.
Iatrogenesis is the stupid attempts to heal by doctors that produce new and more serious disorders than the existing ones. I believe that Steinitz’s illusory ideas at the end of his life, such as his belief that he could move chess pieces without touching them, were aggravated by psychiatric iatrogenesis.
The Kneip torment is discontinued in psychiatry. Due to modern technology, since the 1930s medical science has progressed from tormenting Steinitz’s body to directly assaulting the brain—what they did to Torre. In addition to electroshocks, chemical lobotomisers that are administered to those who cross through crises like the one Torre suffered are currently very fashionable. With a prescription, about twenty of these chemicals are sold in Mexico: Clopsine, Ekilid, Fluanxol, Flupazine, Geodon, Haldol, Haloperil, Largactil, Leponex, Leptopsique, Melleril, Piportil, Pontiride, Rimastine, Risperdal, Semap, Seroquel, Sinogan, Siqualine, Stelazine, and Zyprexa. Aliosha Tavizon, with whom I used to speak at the Gandhi Cafeteria and who in his category won the Carlos Torre Tournament in 2003, was given one of these crap drugs due to an unreciprocated love that temporarily unhinged him. For months he had a crooked neck and many other muscles in his body. To speak to him, he had to position his torso in profile: a tardive dystonia that may have been irreversible. Under no circumstances, not even during flowery psychoses, should an individual ingest any of these dangerous neurotoxins. Fortunately, there are principled psychiatrists, like Peter Breggin, who denounce the crime of prescribing disabling drugs in their profession.
The West, and especially the United States, have fallen into the cognitive error of addressing any psychological disturbance from a biological POV, ignoring the humanities. I do not think that this pseudoscience will be repudiated soon despite the iatrogenesis it produces. In my treatise I show, in a nutshell, that the profession doesn’t pass the falsifiability test devised by Karl Popper that distinguishes between science and pseudoscience, and that those who finance psychiatric ‘science’ in journals are the same companies that manufacture the drugs mentioned above. The academia itself has been corrupted by Big Pharma. If the reader doesn’t want to read my book because I am not an established author, read Mad In America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and The Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill (Cambridge: Perseus, 2001). Robert Whitaker, the author, won the Pulitzer Prize for medical matters.
Here we see the position between Mikhail Chigorin and Wilhelm Steinitz, before FIDE existed, for the World Championship in the 23rd game of 1892 (from 1886 to 1894, Steinitz was the first World Chess Champion). There were more than a thousand spectators in the playing hall and everyone was commenting on Chigorin’s brilliant play. Steinitz’s imminent surrender was expected. Suddenly there was a commotion when the Russian, instead of taking the pawn on b7, forgot that his bishop on d6 protected his king from being checkmated and moved it to the b4-square. Steinitz took the pawn on h2 with a check and everyone stood up when they saw Chigorin put his hands on his head. The obvious mistake that an ordinary amateur could easily see cost the Russian master from taking the crown from the champion Steinitz!
A second blunder of the kind that even players like me wouldn’t usually make, but which being human even the best chess players sometimes make because World Chess Championships get on the nerves of both participants, occurred in the 19th game of the 1929 match for the crown between Alexander Alekhine and Efim Bogoljubov in The Hague: a game that started with a Queen’s Gambit. In that endgame any player of my chess level (which is extremely modest compared to the professionals) would have played 70…Ke4 cutting off the white king, and the game would have ended in a draw. Instead, Bogoljubov played 70…Kg4?? and six moves later had to resign.
I am referring to the sixth game of the match for the crown between David Bronstein and Mikhail Botvinnik in Moscow in 1951. Bronstein, the twenty-seven-year-old challenger, played the champion Botvinnik, already forty years old. Inexplicably, Bronstein played 57. Kc2? and after 57…Kg3 by Botvinnik, Bronstein had to resign (57. Nd6+ and 58. Nd4 would have prevented the pawn from crowning). That match ended in twelve points for each player (one point for each game won; zero points for each game lost, and half a point for each game drawn) and Bronstein never won the championship title because FIDE had a curious rule. In the event of a twelve-point for each player in a twenty-four game match, the champion, in this case, Botvinnik, would retain his title. We can already imagine the implications of this blunder! But errare humanum est…
