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Category: Child abuse

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Alice Miller Autobiography Child abuse Film Hojas Susurrantes (book) Holocaust

Nobody wanted to listen, 3

Offended by casual acquaintances

Some would say that Gerardo, from whom I would also distance myself, didn’t tell me anything about my manuscripts because, as a relative, he didn’t want to commit himself. But there have been other filmmakers who have nothing to do with my family and who behaved worse when I brought up the subject of what happened to me as a teen.

In 2003 I used to go to some get-togethers of filmmakers, all of them older than me, who met at noon on Sundays at the Cineteca café in Mexico City. One of those Sundays Elsié Méndez, Fernando Gou and his wife [none of them swarthy by the way] offended me in such a way that I didn’t visit again those gatherings that I hadn’t missed since I met them. Elsié was infuriated by my feelings of outrage at the abuse of minors: she felt threatened. But laughing at one’s suffering during puberty, which she usually does in social gatherings, is a way to avoid pain and to mourn behind walls. As Miller has said, that was the nonsense Frank McCourt did in Angela’s Ashes, which even before I discovered Miller irritated me. In his autobiography McCourt never spoke out against his parents or the culture that tormented him. Rather, and like Elsié, he laughs at his past: and precisely for laughing at the tragedy of his childhood he has been applauded in a world steeped in poisonous pedagogy. I confess that what irritated me the most about Angela’s Ashes when it was released were the reviews I read when I lived in Houston: they praised the author’s non-judgmental stance.

Contrary to popular belief, laughing at extreme parental abuse doesn’t cure the internal injury that the abuse caused. The diametrically opposite heals: crying. The raucous anger at the aggressors with which I used to express myself in the gathering is also curative. Miller has said that if Sylvia Plath had written aggressive letters to her abusive mother—remember my Letter—she wouldn’t have had to commit suicide. I lost years of my life by not prosecuting my parents and their society, as I do now. Before I found a knowledgeable witness to guide me into the forbidden territory of healthy hatred, the guilt complex kept me from getting ahead in life. It took entire ages for me to denounce the cruelty of my parents. But in our world it is very common that it’s not cruelty towards children that causes anger, but the denunciation of that cruelty.

For example, seeing my anger at my parents, both Elsié and Mr. Fernando jumped on me to protect their parents from their unconscious anger. Like everything belonging to Alcoholics Anonymous, Mr. Fernando has avoided thoroughly confronting the figure of the father. In Neurotics Anonymous, which I had attended only once twenty years earlier, I witnessed the victim publicly venting out in free associations. I don’t object to this catharsis, but both groups completely omit the elementary: devising social engineering scenarios to eliminate domestic violence towards the child who, already grown up, takes refuge in drinking or neurotic defense mechanisms to mitigate his pain. Part of this pedagogic attitude, understood as ‘educating’ the victim (‘poisonous pedagogy’) instead of social engineering, can be illustrated by the question that Rocío, Fernando’s wife, asked me about my parents:

‘Have you forgiven them already?’

This woman, whose nose was broken by her father, reversed reality with her question. Her negative photographic vision has to do with the false feelings of guilt that prevent us from putting the criminal father on the dock. Whoever is not under the influence of poisonous pedagogy asks the natural question and directs it to the aggressor, not to his victim: Have you already asked your daughter for forgiveness? Society not only ignores that unilateral forgiveness is impossible; not only does it not penalise parental abuse but, seeing the reverse reality, it turns its weapons against the victim who complains about the unredeemed parent. We can already imagine what effect it would have to ask a Russian Gulag survivor if he has already forgiven Stalin’s willing executioners while they still believe they did the right thing.

If the filmmakers of the gathering reflected on the films that they comment on Sundays, they would realise the absurdity of their position. Consider the documentary S-21: La Machine de Mort Khmère Rouge by Rithy Pahn, shown at the Cineteca itself. In this shocking testimony a survivor of the genocide of the 1970s in Cambodia tells the camera that while some dupes speak of forgiveness and forgetfulness, it is not possible to do so while the executioners of two million Cambodian civilians, including young children, not only are not sorry. They don’t even acknowledge that they made a mistake! The same can be said of unrepentant parents who are not aware that they have harmed their child. Unilateral forgiveness is so artificial, feigned and illusory that, at the time when I argued at the Cineteca, Mrs. Rocío didn’t visit her father, who was dying of cancer. But yes: she and her friends demand unilateral forgiveness from me. The ‘Have you forgiven them already?’ tacitly implies that Rocío had unilaterally forgiven her father, something she didn’t do in real life. Commenting on the heated discussion that Sunday, Pancho Sánchez, the author of several film books who presides over these gatherings, told me alone that those who say they have no resentment towards their aggressors were hypocrites.

That impossible forgiveness that a society blind and deaf in psychological matters demands in unison is one of the main features of what Miller calls poisonous pedagogy, and it will be a subject to which I will have to return later. Nowadays, when I openly express my resentments towards my parents—as in the gathering of film fans—I am unable to take it out on others. If I had been given a lesson at school against an absorbing mother’s behaviour, perhaps I would have made contact with my feelings and not wanted to spill them on Elvira [recounted in the previous section]. But school, society, including my educated relatives, see to it that those feelings never surface. But they are there, in the psychic core and eventually they erupt either against the aggressor in the form of an accusatory epistle—a direct and healthy hatred—or against substitute objects: a displaced and insane hatred.

I must clarify that in a meeting with other film fans at the Cineteca my testimony was very well received, and even a lady encouraged me to ‘get it all out’ as the best therapy. It was only at the table that gathered some individuals who had been mistreated in their childhoods when resistance arose. Like my sister Korina, they did this to avoid feeling their own pain. The only way to convey the intensity of the emotions in the discussion that day is to quote my personal diary, even if I have to correct the syntax and rewrite some passages in addition to omitting some insults (not all). Bear in mind that the films that I saw then were pure anti-German propaganda filmed by Jews: something that, as we shall see in The Grail, I didn’t know at the time.

October 26, 2003

Today the damaged ones attacked me. Some of the things I heard were beyond incredible: ‘You have to blame yourself for everything that happens to you; otherwise you have no power over your life’. Elsié believes that she has a power that she doesn’t have. And Fernando the same.

When I came up with my favourite arguments to refute them, suitable arguments for moviegoers—Sophie’s Choice, a movie that everyone saw, and the girl raped by her father—the incredible happened: the victims were blamed. Elsié commented: ‘They are already thinking about how it was possible that they went like lambs to the slaughterhouse’. That is to say: there are no culprits. Regarding Sophie, they denied my thesis that the only thing she could do was what she did: commit suicide. As to the other case, they said that the girl could perfectly rebuild her life as an adult. In other words: no people are destroyed.

Fernando was more aggressive. When I said that only those who get to the core of pain pull the dagger out of their hearts and that the approach of those in Alcoholics Anonymous was epidermal, he replied that I was ‘arrogant’, and that Alcoholics Anonymous was about ‘reducing the ego’ in the sense of not seeing your pain but that of others. This is just the opposite of my autobiography, which, while I see things like the Gulag, the starting point is my own life. The way Fernando spoke of the ego was like saying that you have to forget in order to forgive.

Pancho, the only one who was not a victim of beating at puberty, didn’t attack me. Reason? He lacks an idiotic defence mechanism that I unintentionally triggered with my observations. Now I will have to stop seeing them because I see that, with that mental block, a genuine friendship couldn’t prosper. I’d have to go just to listen and shut up when the victims are blamed, something I’m not willing to do. The funny thing is that I unwittingly provoked them so that Rocío and Elsié would talk about the most horrendous stories of parental abuse in their lives. Even Fernando said that when he told his father that he wanted to study oratory, he replied: ‘You stutterer are not good for that!’

All three, damaged. Fernando, remember, was an alcoholic for many years. He was extremely pissed off that I said I had found the dagger in my heart—the internalised parents—and the way to pull it out, and that I doubted Alcoholics Anonymous, analysts, and psychiatrists could pull it out (‘arrogance’). The one who surprised me the most was Elsié, because on another occasion she had understood Fernando’s repression about his pain and today she changed sides. When I mentioned the case of Sor Juana, everyone came out that she, not the archbishop and Miranda, was the winner! I told them about Juana’s self-immolation and they said that the world remembers her. This reasoning is so stupid that it is not worth refuting.

Octavio Paz wrote a great book about how an archbishop and a confessor cornered Juana de Asbaje.

A real pandemonium of the status quo reaction was triggered today by my attackers. In a soliloquy that I just threw on the street, I realised that the hatred towards the victim—reminiscent of Dr. Amara, the psychiatrists, and the serial killer Miller speaks of—is because they cannot bear the pain of having been themselves victims. Not wanting to see their total helplessness, they come out with ‘I’m over it’, ‘You have to forgive’, ‘You have to forget’ and so on. The worst thing is when they repeat the social clichés, the most nefarious of all, like the one that those stagnated in life haven’t wanted to get out of their victimising stance. I tried to refute them with the case of the Eschatology cult [see the first article in Daybreak] in which I was and chess: that only when I wasn’t aware of the role my parents played did I get stuck and was a looser. That made Fernando angry, who told me things that hurt me, and Elsié and Rocío supported him.

But here’s their story…

Elsié was married when she was almost a child and her abusive father told her: ‘Just one piece of advice: always say yes to your husband’. Already married she cried and cried and didn’t know why. She had two horrendous marriages in which she was beaten. She repeated the patterns of a battered woman with her husbands, she couldn’t get rid of them: something had her ass hooked to them. Rocío’s father broke her nose at age twenty because she dared to confront him with a ‘Why?’ when her father told her ‘You won’t speak to that boy again’ (Fernando). When his father got home, all her siblings shit out of fear. He always beat them undeservedly. They continued with their public confessions but the essential is understood: they told horror stories and cannot see another victim who now wants to make a literary career on the subject. It is painful for them and for Fernando who, although he didn’t say many things due to male circumspection, it is clear that his father crushed him.

The funny thing is that both Rocío (‘have you forgiven them yet?’) and Elsié (credulous of psychoanalysis) and Fernando (credulous of Alcoholics Anonymous) have as a defence mechanism the New Age bullshit that one is ‘the arbiter of one’s own destiny’. Everything has to do with not facing the pain: especially the pain that impotence in childhood was total: the opposite of the lies of the New Age. Ah! I had forgotten to say that Elsié came out with a BS similar to that of Arnaldo Vidal about his brother Juan Carlos, who told me that ‘it made him very comfortable to be sick’. Elsié told me that David Helfgott wanted to stay as a child.

Juan Carlos Vidal, an acquaintance of my family and grandson of the famous Victor Serge, became a mentally-ill lad because of the behaviour of his parents. Helfgott also became ‘schizophrenic’ for the same causes. The filmmakers knew the latter case very well from the movie Shine. The grotesque thing about their position is that if I took them to an asylum, they would say that all diagnosed as schizophrenics found it very comfortable to stay as children.

That’s why Elsié and Fernando get hooked into victim-blame philosophies like psychoanalysis and AA: it is their defence mechanism to believe that they had more power than they actually had. Remember, Caesar, how twenty years ago it bewildered me in Neurotics Anonymous when they talked about ‘selfishness’, and that because of that ‘selfishness’ the poor devils who went there were in bad shape. Whoever presided over that place blamed herself and the rest of the group for their emotional state. I never imagined when I left in the morning that this would be the last day that I go to the gatherings at the Cineteca. The way Elsié and Fernando spoke today was to repeat the social slogans that ‘negative thinking’, mine supposedly, hurts; and rosy glasses heal. And by the way, two of Rocío’s sisters didn’t marry and don’t see their father.

There’s something esle. Both Elsié and Rocío had helping witnesses: their own siblings. But they condemn those who didn’t have them: Caesar, Helfgott, Sor Juana. Also, they don’t want to see that there is a stark difference between the pain of a woman like the one in the movie Sophie’s Choice—I used this example many times—and other pains. Fernando got pissed off and said that the pains cannot be compared. Neither he nor Elsié know that there is a limit of resilience in human pain. If that limit is crossed, the mind breaks down.

In the section on Shine of my previous book I spoke about the latter: an argument that I brought up in one of the previous gatherings but that Mr. Fernando ignored.

Their ravings—that Sor Juana emerged triumphantly; blaming Helfgott, and denying that only suicide could detonate Sophia’s mountain of pain—are clear proof that my arguments were devastating. They had to come out really crazy when I put them on the defensive. Another thing. If someone comes to Alcoholics Anonymous in trauma, the worst thing they can tell him is that he has to ‘get down on the ego’. His damage is in the ego, not in an inflated ego as Fernando believes, but in a wounded ego. The climax of yesterday’s psychotic breakdown were Elsié’s words: ‘You have to blame yourself’ for everything that happens to me in order to ‘have control over life.’

The New Age doctrines are so absurd that they would even lead us to blame the passenger victims of a plane crash. It is so unnecessary to spend ink in refuting them that I better continue with my diary:

Another breakdown: when I mentioned the example of Auschwitz Rocío jumped up claiming that the prisoners in concentration camps had control in some way, meaning that those who survived were the good guys. It is this type of psychotic breakdown in the face of my arguments that makes it unjustified to return to sit at their table. But yes: I will nail them in my books…

October 28. I’ve been thinking more about what happened on Sunday and discovered a thing or two. Both Fernando and Elsié are in cults. I was ignorant of it, so I didn’t realise that saying that Alcoholics Anonymous therapy was ‘skin deep’ was going to cause anger and rage from the cultists. Likewise, when I spoke of Sophie’s pain, they came out with the idea that ‘pain can be an incentive for life’. As if any pain and Sophie’s were the same!, who was made to choose, in front of her children, which of them went to the gas chambers: the fateful ‘Sophie’s choice’.

As I said, what bothers this trio the most is the impotence in the face of evil and the criminal will of the Other. In order not to feel their pain (‘blame oneself’, ‘reduce ego’, ‘forgive’, ‘pain can be a spur for life’) they insulted me. Elsié, it hurts me to say it because at the time she hurt me, told me that self-pity was the worst, and that one had to get out of that victimising position. I felt very bad when, following that line, these idiots blamed the prisoners of the concentration camps. And by the way, Fernando’s bilious zeal when speaking of the ‘Higher Power’, an entity that is instilled in them in Alcoholics Anonymous, was very similar to my old father’s zeal when speaking of God. It is clear that it is the zeal of a cultist.

A few words about self-help groups in general and Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) in particular are worth it. In short, it is not enough that some people are willing to listen to our problems, even our deepest demons, as is done in such groups. The victim of abuse must have an enlightened witness: someone who doesn’t come up with idiotic defence mechanisms in the face of tragedy. Now, the difference between the hearing of an enlightened witness and a simple audience such as Alcoholics Anonymous is abysmal. I know a subject who was in AA whom I had to distance myself from because, although he overcame his alcoholism, he displaces hidden anger on his friends. Likewise, there are AA people who transfer their alcoholism to bulimic behaviour, or become addicted to gambling because their psychic damage was never addressed. They are called ‘dry alcoholics’. The dry guy I distanced myself from, for example, once he got over his alcoholism took refuge in chess. He never processed his pain. Divorced and with two small daughters living with their mother, this mature man displaces his anger on others. Alcohol is a balm for pain that the mind is unable to process. Alcoholics Anonymous will have saved him from that false balm, but not from his pain.

Mr. Fernando got very angry when I said that AA therapy was skin deep. But that is exactly what these types of therapies are. Only the enlightenment that comes from an ‘accomplice witness’—a better translation than ‘knowledgeable witness’, one of Miller’s terms [she wrote in German]—along with writing about our lives, can result in true psychological healing.

The key to the keys, Caesar, is that you cannot argue with people who blame the victims of the concentration camps. Exercising such violence to reality hides an infinite aversion to the fact that there is Evil in the world and that we have no control over the evil acts of others. But I’m going to leave these people alone. It’s already eighteen pages of my diary. It’s so sad that I can’t make friends in a world like this…

Remember that, in those days, those movie fans and I watched Hollywood films and knew nothing about the malicious anti-German propaganda or the Jewish question. Independently of that, the disagreement at the Cineteca hurt me in such a way that I promised myself that this would be the last time I would behave cordially with those who, in the future, offend me with poisonous pedagogies. During the 2003 discussion I was still reticent to speak out all of it. I didn’t respond to the filmmakers as vehemently as, alone, I did in my diary, but rather respected social conventions. But respecting them leaves the offended with an irresistible desire for revenge, as we will see in the next few pages.

Categories
Autobiography Child abuse Exterminationism Hojas Susurrantes (book)

Nobody wanted to listen, 2

‘Normal people’

Not all my close friends are as primitive as a pastry chef who, like a balm, tries to spread whipped cream to his existential pain. In my adolescence there was a time when Hector Covarrubias and my father commented on the wonders of 2001: A Space Odyssey at the house in Palenque. As I said in the narrative section, the film culminates with the return to Earth of a man turned into an overman to eradicate Neanderthalism. Arthur Clarke himself suggests this at the end of the novel, which Hector had read. Of my relatives, Hector was considered the most intelligent in the family and as a teenager I visited him, being impressed by his clear and transparent rationalism. The lectures on physics he gave me individually in 1977 had moments as lucid as I would later hear on Carl Sagan’s shows. But Hector was blinded about the conflict with my parents. He didn’t see the dysfunction in our family even when, because of the seventh circle of hell at home, he saw me completely broken. His house was an Enlightenment room as long as we touched on the topics of science, rationalism, and the criticism of magical thinking. The problems of the soul were forbidden. Instead of seeing my family problem, he repressed the whole thing and looked me down. He disowned the nephew who most admired him…

Hector was already a married man with daughters when I stopped visiting him in the early 1980s. But I have also been offended by relatives younger than myself. When my first cousin Octavio read my Epistle to the mother in 1990 he commented to me: ‘My view of your parents is changing!’ I remember those words very well while, sitting and reading it absorbed, he had the manuscript on the desk. However, some months later he spread the gossip with my father that I could publish it. Octavio had been the closest of my intelligent cousins, but like years later with Pablo, I felt very hurt by his behaviour and I distanced myself permanently from him. Something not so grotesque happened with my cousin Carmina when I visited her at her house, next to Hector, our uncle. When I made a sheepishly critical comment on parental abuse, my cousin jumped, ‘You think your parents are demons’. I don’t know why she reacted like this. I suppose that from other relatives she was familiar with my ideas. It was the last time I visited her. Hector, Octavio and Carmina are sophisticated people. But their reactions were typical cases of extreme dissociation before the most elemental psychological reality.

Gerardo Tort filmed De la Calle, a film about homeless children in Mexico City. He is one of the two cousins Korina referred to in her letter of advice and scolding. Surely my cousin Gerardo could hear me, I thought. I had read an approximation of the script for his film before the script reached its final elaboration, and I gave him my opinion. What would be my surprise when Gerardo didn’t comment on a draft of my first two books, nor would he do so in subsequent years. And he didn’t tell me anything even though, on one occasion when I ran into him on the street, I brought up the subject of the manuscript I had given him. Not even a filmmaker my age, with whom I had talked about so many things against the established order in the past, could hear my story. Gerardo can bring his guts to the camera into the sewers where street children live. But he doesn’t have them to listen to his cousin about what happened in one of the Tort families. My sister would say that those who act like this ‘are normal people who run away from problems; they are not interested and cannot do anything about it’. I’d say they are Neanderthals—exterminable Neanderthals indeed, as I will argue elsewhere.

Categories
Autobiography Child abuse Hojas Susurrantes (book)

Nobody wanted to listen, 1

One of the problems with translating fragments of a book is that you lose context. Strictly speaking, the ten chapters that I will translate from Hojas Susurrantes (Whispering Leaves), pages 378-430 and 443-444, can only be well understood after having read the previous three hundred and seventy-seven pages.

However, when I recently reviewed the syntax and edited that text, which I had not reread for several years, I realised that those pages were understandable if I translated them. Similarly, Day of Wrath (see the sidebar) contains translated pages 472-634 of my Hojas that, even in isolation from the rest of the book, make perfect sense.

So here is the first of ten instalments of pages 378-430 that I’ll be translating this month. It begins with some anecdotes that happened in 1976…

 

______ 卐 ______

 

NOBODY WANTED TO LISTEN

Hurt by my loved ones

In the most difficult moment of my life, my seventeen years, I fled to the house of San Lorenzo with my grandmother. A few days later there was a meeting at her home. Besides grandma Mecho there was also my grandma Yoya; I remember Aunt Esperanza and also Aunt Elsa: my father’s sisters-in-law, and I think my Aunt Mercedes was also there. As I tell in Letter to mom Medusa, at that time my character was extremely self-conscious because of what my parents had done to me. But despite my inhibition, I plucked up my courage and threw a comment on the table that was intended to reveal the tragedy at home. At that time they had just released One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and I projected myself into the stuttering lad who commits suicide at the end. My mother, still at a distance, continued to harass me: now through the infamous Dr. Amara. In the film it is mentioned that the lad had a possessive mother. I projected myself because, just as in the movie the villainous nurse was an ally of his mother, that doctor was an ally of my mom. Thus, at dinner with my aunts discussing the film, in a moment of unusual courage I said to my grandma Yoya:

‘There are mothers like that with their children!’

I meant that there are mothers who destroy their children as in the film. Although I don’t remember my exact words, I said it not only with great emotion, but with immense anguish. When I write these paragraphs I have to get up from my desk to walk around in the modest study in which I live. The memory touches me so painful fibres that penetrate so deep in my being, that I need a little peripatetic comfort before I sit down again to write. Yoya perfectly got what I wanted to say, and what I am about to tell is what hurts me.

Here is a minor who, for mysterious reasons for her aunts and grandmothers, runs away from home to take refuge with his grandma. This boy is patently distressed, self-conscious, and in great stress when speaking. He makes a herculean effort and, using a movie, tries to talk about his own drama. Instead of his anguished comment marking the beginning of some serious communication with the family, Yoya, who has said that I was her favourite grandson, immediately turns to Aunt Esperanza with the words:

‘But Blanquita and other mothers aren’t like that, right?’

Yoya repeated the question (‘Oh no, of course!’ Esperanza answered) and mentioned my mother’s name in the second or third repetition. My grandma originally used my absent Aunt Blanquita to avoid mentioning my mother directly; and she meant that if these things happen in other families, never in ours.

The pain of which I speak has to do with the fact that it is this sort of axiomatic deafness, this root disbelief, this anti-empathy towards an extremely anguished boy who desperately needs a friendly ear, that destroys a life.

Anyone who has been the victim of their parents to the level that I was, suffers a panic that undermines his mind when, to boot, no one shows the least compassion; that is, when the kid lacks what Alice Miller calls ‘a helping witness’. I didn’t have a single person to comfort me when I was being attacked by my parents. On the contrary, the family and my friends put up incredible resistance (and let’s not talk about the analyst). As Jeffrey Masson wrote on page 17 of his anti-therapy pamphlet, ‘Whenever our own truth is denied, ignored or invalidated we experience the greatest fear we can ever know: the threat of the annihilation of our self’. For those who haven’t been victims of parental beating, it is impossible to imagine how the universe falls; how the sky breaks and the stars collapse when the child has absolutely no one who wants to hear his story.
 

After the turbulent years

If as a teenager it was a miracle that I made up my mind to denounce my parents, in my twenties I managed to do it more frequently. In the 1980s my adolescent agonies were distant. Years had passed and I was much more emotionally robust. So I criticised my mother in various conversations.

Hearing my criticisms in a conversation alone with Godmother at her cozy flat, whom I had dreamed of when I was very little in that beautiful dream in which she approached me happily dancing [a dream recounted in the previous section], she raised the palm of her hand as a sign of please stop my dear! In my late twenties her lack of empathy didn’t cause me the terrible panic I had suffered as a boy with the psychoanalyst. But it hurt me in such a way that I stopped talking to her for a long time: something that no relative had dared to do. Godmother, the sister closest to my grandma Yoya, was a respected figure in the family because as she stayed single she acted as a counsellor to the relatives. But like the deaf analyst, the family counsellor was unable to listen to any accusations about the parents, despite the fact that on one occasion she commented to me ‘If you could see what they come to tell me here!’

On another occasion, and also in the 1980s, my uncle Beto did something similar. He was the one who had rented us the house in Ermita, the place of my first memories, and with whom Elvira herself had worked after her stay in Palenque [recounted in the previous section]. When Uncle Beto heard my criticism of my mother, he raised his eyes to the ceiling as a sign that I had crossed the line into forbidden territory. Although Uncle Beto, Godmother and Yoya’s younger brother, didn’t enter into an argument about something so important to me, I didn’t get angry or stop talking to him. Not long after he would die. But the unspoken message from my great-uncles, grandmother, and analyst was the same: they weren’t willing to listen to something that touched parents.

It could be thought that only that generation of people wasn’t prepared for this type of revelations. Neither is mine. Not even my younger brother allowed me to communicate my views to him.

In 1998, without any inhibition and with a fully developed intellectual capacity, in a restaurant I quoted to Pablo some passages from a treatise by Silvano Arieti. The tract showed how paranoia was due to the stalking mother of his young female clients, and these passages surprisingly portrayed the delusions of one of our sisters. In a gesture that I felt rude, my brother closed the Arieti book that I had on the table between us. That aborted discussion marked the beginning of a total and absolute estrangement with my brother.

Pablo, the fifth of my siblings, at thirty years old didn’t want to know anything about the dark side of our parents because he wasn’t abused as a child. But the incredible thing is that I’ve also been hurt by my battered sisters when I wanted to communicate my findings. Since Genevieve follows me in age—the photograph in which she and I embrace as children is a treasure in my heart [photo that appears in the previous section]—she is the one I feel closest to. But by introjecting our mother’s paranoid vision of me since her teens, a phenomenon that Theodore Lidz once called folie en famille, Genevieve distanced herself from her older brother: something that has hurt me deeply. The only time in my life I asked to speak to her about the family, she refused. And when I put the manuscript of my Letter to mom Medusa on her bed a few days later, she returned it to me without having read it: a gesture that, like Pablo’s, naturally offended me.

From my family Genevieve has been the only one who has distanced from me of her own free will due to the discord that our mother sowed (‘… she took you out of the family and turned the whole world against you with pure lies’, my sister Korina wrote me in her own handwriting about our mother when I had gone abroad [an already quoted sentence in Letter to mom Medusa]). I would distance myself from others because of their lack of compassion, or in the case of Korina herself, because of her lack of empathy. As seen from the quote in this paragraph, Korina was the only one who made deep emotional contact with my adolescent tragedy. However, my sister believes that the family tragedy shouldn’t be made public, and has vehemently maintained the social convention that it is wrong to bring up the subject with others.

Humanity ignores that communicating one’s own tragedy to someone is essential to settle accounts with our past. Humans, in general, see reality backwards. For example, instead of trying to understand my autobiographical mission, throughout my adult life Korina has treated me with sobering attitudes. This is very ironic because in my family only she developed great compassion for me (which is why I had thought to dedicate my first book to her) and also because our mother martyred her. But Korina refused to read the manuscript of the Letter that I planned to dedicate to her when I lived with her and her little son. Even after I left her home, and despite my pleas for her to stop meddling in my confessional passion, she continued to bother me. Like the rest of humanity, Korina has a fear of radical soul surgery. For her, my initiative to speak out about my findings in family psychology isn’t intelligent behaviour: it is foolish behaviour before which the sister, assuming the role of a new mother, reprimands the memorialist. I quote the crucial passages from the last of her epistolary scolds without adding ellipsis between unquoted passages:

Caesar:

The other time I spoke with one of the Tort cousins and he told me that you had sent him part of your book and that it’s not the first time you do this. I know you want the whole world to read it or something like that since you worked so hard on it and it’s your life and what my parents did to you and all that, and believe me I understand you. But what you don’t understand, Caesar, is that people don’t like problems, let alone problems as big as yours, and even less if they are about the family. Also, think that even if people read it, that’s not how the world is going to be fixed, Caesar, that’s not how the Revolution is going to do you justice. The damage is done and only you can fix it.

And just think about this, I say in good faith Caesar, once more. People don’t like problems. If I weren’t your sister and I knew you, the third day you arrived and told me this, Caesar, I would dump you because what you don’t understand is that not all people in the world are therapists or psychiatrists or psychoanalysts and we don’t want to hear about problems, let alone such serious ones. We are normal people who run away from problems. We are not interested and cannot do anything about it.

If you need to get it out of your head, go with someone to tell them as many times as you need, and I’m not talking about a therapist, maybe a friend or someone who wants to hear from you. Remember when you told me that a married couple who had lived in a concentration camp [a fictional film: Left Luggage], that the lady no longer wanted to hear any of that afterwards because it hurt her a lot, but that it was good for the husband to talk about it because he took it out, it was like his therapy.

Well, if you understood that, I don’t know why you don’t understand that reading your book hurts me and a lot of people in the family.

Korina

My sister thinks that reading the book I was going to dedicate to her would hurt her. The truth is that my work would shine a light in her dark mind by understanding what happened in our family. Dark, I say, because she was the one I was talking about with my younger brother about her paranoid delusions: obvious delusions for all her distant friends and close friends. (To give just one example: once Korina told me, crying with extreme anguish and expelling me from her house, that I was part of a plot led by our mother to put poisons in her food.) Furthermore, Korina is wrong in believing that ‘the world won’t be fixed’ if others read my tragedy—or hers—and she also errs that ‘only one can fix’ the damage caused by parents. Like the rest of humanity, my sister is seeing things backwards, in a photographic negative. I don’t want to get my past out of my head. I want to get it into others with my writing. Taking it off leads to psychoses, like hers. Instead, making people aware of the hell caused by parents like ours prevents them.

‘We are normal people who run away from problems; we are not interested and cannot do anything about it’. What Korina and humanity see as normal, in my eyes is the behaviour of a very primitive dude, a Neanderthal. If my sister were correct that it’s healthy not to talk more about the problem, as she advises me in a paragraph that I omitted from her letter, she herself wouldn’t suffer from delusional ideas. On the other hand, I don’t suffer from the slightest mental disorder, not even addictions; but the aforementioned cousin that Korina mentions in her letter did (he once confessed to me and my brother that he was addicted to cocaine). The accepted wisdom in our society is what Korina believes: that burying a tragedy is the correct mental practice. I never tire of repeating it: repression and denial are the royal road for crime and mental disorders.

Korina, who watches soap operas and doesn’t like reading, reproaches me in her letter that ‘I want everyone to read me’. She ignores that we have an obligation to listen to the tragedy of the brother because only that can heal his soul. But at seventeen I didn’t need everyone, just one person. To take the most dramatic example that comes to mind: If, dismayed by my attempt at communication, Yoya would have called me to speak privately during that 1976 family dinner, she could have saved me. A single friendly ear would’ve led me on the right path in life. I wouldn’t have sought my salvation for so many years in stupid cults that alienated me and prevented me from pursuing a career. Although I didn’t respond to my sister’s letter, I can do so in an open letter: What hurts, Korina, isn’t digging up the past, but hiding it under a mountain of cakes. It seems to me that in Left Luggage the adult was the man, and the mental infant, his wife; and it is the man who scolds her for her childish defence mechanism, the pastry. But you, who try to avoid the mourning over our parents in inane distractions, are the one who thinks you are the adult. How daring of you to scold the digger as if he, not the pastry chef, were the child.

In other words, I’m not the one who should change. My family and relatives, Korina and company, are the ones who have the obligation to emerge psychically. Jung saw it clearly: enlightenment isn’t achieved by imagining figures of light (which Korina has tried for decades). It is achieved by analysing our darkness, our own shadow.

Categories
Alice Miller Child abuse Hojas Susurrantes (book)

Nobody wanted to listen

Six months ago a woman told me in the comments section of this site (one of the essays I included in Daybreak):

I read [Alice] Miller 30 years ago in an attempt to understand and resolve a history of abuse and tyrannical Christian teaching. I gave up because confronting my own past would have meant destruction of much on which my life has been built.

I am still unwell, but in advanced age am finally confronting the catastrophic link between the tortured son on the cross as a model for forgiveness and the cruel parent who demands forgiveness, who links pain and love.

Cesar you are a lone voice in a noisy world, but some of us are listening.

Soon I will begin to translate some chapters of the section ‘Nobody Wanted to Listen’, the second part of My Childhood, the third of my eleven books.

In order not to leave the reader in the dark, I would like to remind him or her that only the first of my eleven books has been fully translated into English. Day of Wrath only translates most of the fourth book, and in Daybreak you can read a couple of articles, ‘On Depression’ and ‘From the Great Confinement to Chemical Gulag’ that give an idea of what I say in my second book.

As Elenka told me half a year ago, this is a topic we all shy away from. It confronts us with the core of our pain. But feeling that pain again is the royal road to the healing of those of us who have been harmed by our families.

Categories
Child abuse Film Psychohistory

One more movie

Regarding what I said in my previous posts, that the treatment of children was so atrocious in the past that it caused psychosis in ancient societies, perhaps some visitors have already read a quote in one of the chapters of Day of Wrath:

In my view, the psychohistory of Lloyd deMause is indeed a notable approach to history, in the sense in which Wikipedia uses the term “notability.” I am not personally involved in psychohistory—I am a mathematical sociologist—but here are some thoughts for your consideration.

Psychohistory as put forth by deMause and his many followers attempts to explain the pattern of changes in the incidence of child abuse in history. This is a perfectly respectable and non-fringe domain of scientific research. They argue that the incidence was much higher in the past, and that there has been an irregular history of improvement. This is a hypothesis that could just as easily have been framed by an epidemiologist as a psychologist. DeMause proposes a theory that society has gone through a series of stages in its treatment and discipline of children.

Again, this is well within the bounds of social science. None of these questions are pseudoscientific. Even the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, a bastion of scientific epidemiology, is interested in these kinds of hypotheses.

Except for some Amazonian tribes, in our time parents are no longer allowed to bury their kids alive. Ours is an infinitely more advanced psychoclass compared to the prehistoric psychoclass and even of many historical societies (think for example of what I said yesterday about the Aztecs).

But even in our western society it is taboo to talk about the abuse that some of our parents inflicted upon us as children. Except for what Stefan Molyneux said about his abusive Jewish mother, who among the racialists has raised the issue?

Not long ago I published a list of a hundred movies that could be seen in these times of pandemic. I forgot to mention Stand by Me, which contains a scene worth remembering (linked by the end of this post).

Interestingly, yesterday when I watched a DVD about LOTR’s The Two Towers I later learned that, in the extended edition of one of the films, a scene appears in which Faramir goes through a flashback which shows Boromir and his father Denethor, Steward of Gondor: who doesn’t love his youngest son.

The funny thing is that even in the non-extended version that we all saw on the big screen Gandalf tells Faramir the lie ‘Your father loves you’. Similarly, in Stand by Me Chris told Gordie a well-intentioned lie: that it was false that his father hated him.

While there is a chasm between the sacrificial practices of ancient times with the way some parents treat their children today, it is very rare to hear someone confess his pain as directly and emotionally as the boy Gordie did in the movie.

I try to break the taboo in my autobiographical books.

Categories
Child abuse Pre-Columbian America Psychohistory

A response to Rollory

This entry is a response to this comment. Bernardino de Sahagún, a scholar who wrote about the ancient Amerindian practices of the 16th century, wrote:

I do not believe that there is a heart so hard that when listening to such inhuman cruelty, and more than bestial and devilish such as the one described above, does not get touched and moved by the tears and horror and is appalled; and certainly it is lamentable and horrible to see that our human nature has come to such baseness and opprobrium that parents kill and eat their children, without thinking they were doing anything wrong.

Like Frazer, Sahagún organised his treatise in twelve books. I have two editions of it in my bookshelf. And also like Frazer, Sahagún recorded the Aztec practices but didn’t explain them. For me, a satisfactory explanation of killing and eating your own child requires a model of depth psychology that is unavailable to academic anthropologists, who resort to glib explanations.

What is a satisfactory explanation? In short, the one that generates a certain empathy for the victim and the victimizer. Sahagún, a European considered the first ethnologist in Mexico, had empathy with the victim but was clueless about the victimiser’s motives or drives.

Remember that it was a common practice in ancient Mexico to kill and eat your child. Anthropologists today are even worse than Sahagún: they don’t even condemn the Amerindian perpetrator because the coloured are sacred. They even call it ‘noble savage’.

Unlike anthropology, psychohistory sees the atrocious childrearing ways that the perp had suffered. The answer begins to be glimpsed, as what the Amerinds suffered yesterday is identical to what the serial killers of today suffered as children with their parents.

In other words, common childrearing practices in the past were as atrocious as childrearing practices of schizogenic parents today.

If empathy is not generated even with the perp to the extent of understanding his actions (‘put yourself in his shoes’, sandals or even bare feet in this case), the explanations are glib. This is true even when we rightly condemn the serial killer to the electric chair in the justice system.

All current anthropology, without exception, provides glib explanations when we ask ourselves ultimate questions. The toll of severe child abuse is verboten not only in academia, including psychiatry, but among commoners as well. Among racialists, only Stephan Molyneux spoke about it. If he already did a backup of all of his videos in Bitchute, see e.g. his video on Charles Manson’s childhood.

Categories
Child abuse Kali Yuga St Francis

The aetiology of psychosis

The state of collapse of the most elemental manhood among whites is evident even in the forums of white nationalism. In these times when anti-white psychosis is accelerating, who among the admins of the main forums has begun to speak of a revolution like the one Pierce imagined in The Turner Diaries?

What we have is the diametrically opposite to the Diaries: a negrolatric revolution that surprised everyone less those who see recent history as the explosion of the Christian sun in its secular, incendiary form: a red giant that I have called neochristianity, although it is more precise to see it as neofranciscanism.

Today, whites are literally in a state of mind that psychiatrists call flowery psychosis: a red giant that burns their entire culture and even their genes. Since my family’s psychosis started when I was about fifteen or sixteen years old and I have studied that family tragedy, I’d like to be translated already (only most of my fourth book and a censored version of the second I have published here).

The objective would be to show how a normal family can go crazy after one of the parents (in my case, my mother) began to infect other members of the family with her mental viruses. The first to become infected was my father, then some of my siblings (folie en famille) and even so-called mental health professionals subscribed to that destructive psychosis that had originally arisen from my mother’s mind.

Talking about this topic is taboo in every part of the world. Of the alluded admins, he who perhaps could do it would is Brad Griffin (Hunter Wallace), who apparently had a past similar to the one I describe above, but due to the taboo he won’t write on the subject. I can say the same of a pessimistic commenter that I’m not going to name. If he wrote his heart-breaking autobiography in several volumes, as I did, he would know that what happens to the white man and the tragedy of his teenage life are two sides of the same coin.

A tremendous mistake some fans of this site make is to see what I write here as the main thing, and to ignore my work in my mother tongue. The reality is the opposite: precisely because of having analysed the family tragedy I was able to see the western tragedy from my privileged perspective of a three-eyed crow: a fictional entity who has spent his life looking at the past to understand it.

But unlike television movies this crow does not have a single pupil. And how can I have it if only my first book and part of the fourth have been translated into English (the second, as I said, were only censored excerpts)?

Since From Jesus to Hitler is my magnum opus, today I will begin a new reading of the fifth to the eleventh books, as some passages still contain errors of syntax and harmonization with respect to the other books. Let’s not forget that I started writing them at the beginning of 1988 and that I barely finished this year. Harmonizing them so that they may eventually appear under a single cover is a laborious and time-consuming undertaking.

If there is anything in which From Jesus to Hitler can serve the white cause it is my overriding conclusion of such a spiritual odyssey: There is such a thing as voluntary surrender to evil and the current version of human beings, especially suicidal whites, are basically evil (hence my exterminationist recipe for creating a new mankind). In my life, my late father exemplified such evil by believing the slander my mother uttered against the teenager I was. But today all whites who believe Jesus’ slanders, be it in its religious or secular version—christian, neochristian or negrolatric neofranciscan—exemplify evil.

If one is unable to understand one’s family, one will be unable to understand why his race commits suicide. To speak bluntly, I don’t think that anyone throughout the movement called white nationalism understands his family. Otherwise a few of them would have already written tragic autobiographies like mine. Or if they have had kinder lives, they would have at least read a tragic autobiography like John Modrow’s in order to understand the aetiology of psychoses and eventually the folie en mass that the West suffers from.

Categories
Alice Miller Child abuse Racial right

Very important subject

I am perfectly aware that virtually all people of white nationalism, or even the alt-lite, are unaware of the psychic havoc caused by abusive parents. The exception, as I have said more than once, is Stefan Molyneux as we saw not long ago in his review of Joker.

What bothers me is that Molyneux’s mother is Jewish, and one would expect a non-Jew of the alt-lite or white nationalism to venture into a subject that I consider fundamental: the actual aetiology of mental illness (as opposed to the psychiatric lies that we hear in the universities).

If the Aryan world shakes off all Jewish influence, beginning of course with a rejection of Christianity and its secular offshoots, over time it will ‘translate’, into Aryan language, the most relevant findings of Jews on the trauma model of mental disorders. In the introduction to my work for a racialist audience I recently wrote for this site:

For now, suffice it to say that Alice Miller continued to mention Hitler under the influence of the official narrative in almost all of her texts, so I currently do not recommend any of her books. It is not that I have repudiated Miller’s findings: a Jewess who, although she suffered as a child in the Warsaw Ghetto, after changing her Jewish surname she never wanted to return to the shelter of her mother’s religion. But I must say that Miller’s psycho-biographical analysis of Hitler is based on the great lie of our times. The Swiss psychologist never considered such elemental issues as the fact that the Holocaust of millions of Ukrainians, largely perpetrated by Bolshevik Jews, caused the legitimate fear, and eventual reaction, of the German state.

But that is a separate matter. The issue that concerns us in Whispering Leaves is very different: the Dantesque hell that some parents put their children in: something that Miller got right.

The issue of abusive parents is not only taboo in all societies, as almost no one connects the dots between mental disorders and poor childrearing. Like the racial issue or the WWII theme, as to mental health the values have been completely reversed.

For example, two years ago, in March 2018, a commenter told me: ‘I have since forgiven my father and every other person of note in my life needing forgiveness’. But forgiveness is a Christian doctrine, although many secular psychotherapists also subscribe such unhealthy way of treating their patients. I answered: ‘I cannot speak for you because I ignore the full story. Generally, for an adult child to forgive a parent who never recognised his fault is psychological suicide. Alice Miller said that a child can excuse his parents, if they in their turn are prepared to recognise and admit to their failures. But the demand for forgiveness that we often encounter can pose a danger for healing. These are some quotable quotes from her’:

• It is the resentment of the past, we are told, that is making us ill. In those by now familiar groups in which addicts and their relations go into therapy together, the following belief is invariably expressed. Only when you have forgiven your parents for everything they did to you can you get well. Even if both your parents were alcoholic, even if they mistreated, confused, exploited, beat, and totally overloaded you, you must forgive.

• The majority of therapists work under the influence of destructive interpretations culled from both Western and Oriental religions, which preach forgiveness to the once-mistreated child. Thereby, they create a new vicious circle for people who, from their earliest years, have been caught in the vicious circle of pedagogy. For forgiveness does not resolve latent hatred and self-hatred but rather covers them up in a very dangerous way.

• In my own therapy it was my experience that it was precisely the opposite of forgiveness —namely, rebellion against mistreatment suffered, the recognition and condemnation of my parents’ destructive opinions and actions, and the articulation of my own needs— that ultimately freed me from the past.

• By refusing to forgive, I give up all illusions. Why should I forgive, when no one is asking me to? I mean, my parents refuse to understand and to know what they did to me. So why should I go on trying to understand and forgive my parents and whatever happened in their childhood, with things like psychoanalysis and transactional analysis? What’s the use? Whom does it help? It doesn’t help my parents to see the truth. But it does prevent me from experiencing my feelings, the feelings that would give me access to the truth. But under the bell-jar of forgiveness, feelings cannot and may not blossom freely.

• I cannot conceive of a society in which children are not mistreated, but respected and lovingly cared for, that would develop an ideology of forgiveness for incomprehensible cruelties. This ideology is indivisible with the command “Thou shalt not be aware” [of the cruelty your parents inflicted to you] and with the repetition of that cruelty on the next generation.

I’ve added italics in the above quotations.

Again, I am not asking my audience to read Miller. But my writings translate, and expand considerably, her findings for an Aryan audience. It is a very important subject for the simple reason that mental health matters, and racialists who have had mental issues are generally clueless about what caused them.

Categories
Child abuse Exterminationism Pandemics Third Reich Welfare of animals

My rider friends

‘Either Aryans will overcome their prejudice against genocide or self-exterminate’. —Tito Perdue

Today I woke up with a dream in which I mentioned to Jared Taylor and Greg Johnson my idea of dispatching the vast majority of mankind for ethical and aesthetic purposes. We were walking on a street in another country and in the end I got to fly, but when I was awake I realised that I didn’t see either of them in the dream: I was talking to them but they were not actually physically there.

Several times I have been told in this blog that I am not talking to myself. But obviously I am, as no one feels the four words as vehemently as I do.

‘Eliminate all unnecessary suffering’ is a call for exterminationism, as the misnamed Homo sapiens is causing hell in many species not only of animals but among themselves, even from parents to children (the subject of my eleven books).

The vast majority of my visitors have not been through hell. And those who have crossed there dissociate everything and do not write a single post about their experiences (I could mention three of them by real name, but I won’t).

Speaking of the four words this day I leafed through two articles, one from Occidental Dissent and the other from Unz Review, which touch on the subject of unnecessary animal torment. I was disgusted in the latter by some things I read in the comments section, and I can only think of the chasm between these Neanderthals and the Third Reich regarding eliminating unnecessary suffering.

Even if the coronavirus kills the same number of humans of the 1918-1920 influenza, that would only represent a very small fraction of the number that must die this century for survivors to understand the need to implement the four words on earth. Fortunately the four horsemen alluded to in my previous posts will help me in this purpose, even if I also die.

Categories
Autobiography Child abuse Racial right

Christmas alone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________

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

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