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Homosexuality Jared Taylor Sexual "liberation"

Taylor

See the recent video of Jared Taylor criticising the sexual psychosis affecting the West. Taylor’s point of view is infinitely more sane than Andrew Doyle’s and Peter Boghossian’s POV mentioned in a previous post today. Unlike those liberals, Taylor calls a spade a spade: homosexualism, in the sense of indulge in homo behaviour all your life, is plain and simple psychopathological.

Sadly, this sort of thing can no longer be said on YouTube, which has been taken over by the radical left. But at least today Taylor’s video can be watched, in addition to Rumble, on BitChute, and Odysee.

Categories
Homosexuality Sexual "liberation"

Pathological homosexuality

by Gaedhal

The radical trans-exclusionary feminists are usually full-throated supporters of homosexuality.

Again, it is not my intention to whip up violent hatred either against Trannies or homosexuals. We have had internet pornography launched at us—by Jews—as a psychological weapon for thirty years now. Trannies and homosexuals are victims of this. Trannies and homosexuals who mind their own business have my deep respect and sympathy. I wish them no harm or ill will.

Who voted for thirty years of internet pornography? Nobody did. Fuck democracy. Do you think that Hitler would allow this?

That being said, Gluck’s arguments that transanity is Pornogenic, i.e. a pathology created through porn use could easily be used with homosexuals. Pornography, as she says, is like heroin. You need harder and more concentrated doses of it to achieve the same effect. You start off with the nude women of Playboy. Before long, it is scat porn. It is lactation porn. It is gangbang porn. Some years go by, and then it is gay porn, then it is transexual porn. Some years go by and then it is so called “child porn”. Gluck is correct when she says that we live in a pornified culture. I remember remarking to myself that the early 2000s were disgustingly pornified. All the Jewish “entertainment” media was exceedingly pornified.

Trannies are at the stage in their porn addiction, according to Gluck, where they need trans porn to be sexually stimulated. Trannies aren’t quite at the “child porn” stage. In my view, though, homosexuals are only one stage behind the trannies, and only two stages behind the paedophiles.

If Gluck advances pornogenesis and the contagion model for transanity, then why cannot I advance pornogenesis and the contagion model for homosexuality? If Gluck says that Trannies are on a trajectory that leads inexorably to paedophilia, then why cannot I say that homosexuals are merely one step behind trannies on this same trajectory? If transanity spreads by social contagion, according to Gluck, then why cannot I say the same thing about homosexuality?

Categories
Alice Miller Homosexuality

Analysing Dahmer

The series of documentaries and videos that have recently come out about Jeffrey Dahmer, a homosexual who became a serial killer—about whom I have written three posts this month and last month—allow me to present the trauma model of mental disorders for visitors to this site.

First of all, the trauma model is not taught in academia. One of the things that surprised me most when I discovered the Swiss writer Alice Miller at the turn of the century, is that in one of her books she said that there was not a single chair in any university in the world that looked at the mental havoc that abusive parents wreak on their offspring. Not a single one!

Picking up on what I said in my September post on Dahmer, that the human mind resembles what computer programmers say, society does an exhaustive analysis of Dahmer’s ‘garbage out’. It goes into infinite detail about all the grisly things he did to his victims. But the ‘garbage in’ is almost absent: an in-depth analysis of Dahmer’s childhood and early adolescence in the context of family dynamics.

Lionel Dahmer and Jeffrey Dahmer

In this video, for example, four professionals analyse Dahmer’s mind and his father. Both were interviewed in prison after Dahmer had been sentenced. Interestingly, these professionals, who study serial killers, agreed that the father’s role aroused strong suspicions. But what the commenters said in the comments section of that video was more interesting than what the professionals said. Here is a sample of what six commenters had to say about the interview:

Commenter 1: I’ve never met a gay person who wasn’t abused or neglected as a child, myself included. Literally not one. They usually try to minimize it, saying things like, “I had a mostly normal childhood.” But if you talk to them long enough, the truth will come out. It may be something they didn’t view as abuse, probably because they were raised by a narcissistic parent who told them over and over how good they had it.

Commenter 2: Notice how careful J Dahmer was to NOT say anything bad about dad. The very few times he said ANYTHING were brief and almost vague. Imagine how much more difficult it is for a child to tell his feelings to abusive parents… Even interviewers were more interested in the gore that J Dahmer had created and ad revenues this gore tale would bring from increased viewership, but nothing about J Dahmer’s feelings from childhood through the current moment.

Commenter 3: You can see in the interview his dad is still controlling him.

Commenter 4: Yup! Very sad!

Commenter 5: I don’t get why so many people are convinced that Lionel abused sexually his son. Who said it? It looks like people want to find the simplest explanation for Dahmer’s homicidal behaviour, and sexual abuse is supposed to explain everything that went wrong in life.

Dahmer’s father was indeed guilty, but I doubt that he was guilty of direct abuse. Probably, he was guilty of neglect of his son. Remember that he was an old-fashioned fella. He was raised to believe that nurturing the newborn is only a mother’s responsibility. He was for breadwinning, she was for raising the kids. Many men of his generation never even changed the diaper or held their baby, it was considered strictly a mother’s task…

There is a whole theory about forming an attachment and the importance for a newborn to bond with their primary caretaker (usually it is the mother, but it can be any other figure). In the case of Dahmer, the bonding didn’t occur. His mother was unable or disinterested in bonding with her son and the father was also not there. Sometimes mothers have difficulty [in] bonding…

Some mothers have mental health issues, postpartum depression or psychosis or some of them never wanted a child in the first place. For most kids, things are going fine; the bond with the mother is somehow created. The mother is their first object and due to this relationship, children are learning how to recognize their own needs, and emotions and how to communicate with the world. They trust their mother and gradually learn how to be a human, how to behave, and how their behaviour affects others around them.

Dahmer seemed to be completely devoid of this first primal socialization and he never caught up with his peers later in life. For him, his mother was the first non-reactive, distant object, with whom he had minimal human interaction. In a metaphorical sense, she was like an inanimated, robotic, aloof “thing”.

Dahmer later in life treated his victims the same as his parents treated him: as if they were things without needs, emotions and self. He drugged victims to unconsciousness, so they were reduced to inanimate bodies and he cut them open as if they were, for example, clocks, cars or computers and he was a mechanic.

There are people severely neglected in early childhood. Fortunately, not all of them turn up to be serial killers, but many of them suffer from reactive attachment disorder that later can lead to conduct disorder in teenage years, and after that, it can lead to antisocial personality disorder if a child is not treated and fails to form a healthy relationship with parents…

What made Dahmer “special” was his extremely rare paraphilia that he developed and his lack of inhibition due to alcohol consumption. He was also a sex addict. He talked a lot about compulsions. Nevertheless, [he was] a severely disturbed individual, stuck in a very early developmental state his whole life.

Commenter 6: The Father knew mom was on 27 different pills during her pregnancy. Father left Dahmer alone with her more and more—he begged his father not to leave him with her. You guys need to look closer. It would be fascinating.

Although Dahmer repressed the causes of his pathology, he didn’t repress it completely—not even in the interview at his father’s side. Shortly before 1:07 and after 1:15 in the video linked above he said that the lack of control he experienced as a child and in his early teens was mixed with his emerging sexuality. In other words, being at the mercy of some unmentioned adults in his childhood and adolescence, presumably rabid impotence, eventually got displaced into surrogates where Dahmer avenged his pent-up rage.

I have said that no university dares to teach the havoc that abusive parents wreak on the minds of their children. So-called mental health professionals are as clueless as celebrity Youtuber David Rubin, who is ‘married’ to a man and the couple have adopted a baby to raise as a son.

Yesterday I saw an interview in which an Australian Youtuber interviewed this homosexual. Rubin said that the Woke Monster was mysteriously spawned in 2015. He doesn’t even realise that he is part of the Woke psychosis with the fight for so-called gay marriage and the aberration of two men raising a baby as their child. I mention the Rubin case because it is analogous to the utter lack of insight, empathy and compassion of so-called mental health professionals when it comes to the basic aetiology of another kind of monster, such as the compulsion that drives the serial killer.

In one of the revelations that came out in the Dahmer interview with his father by his side, I was able to empathise with Jeff. Shortly before 1:17, the father asked his son when he realised that one is solely responsible for one’s actions. The father always wanted to exonerate himself from his son’s monstrous pathology, even in the book he wrote. Jeff replied that it was when his father had sent him books on the (pseudo-science) of creationism, which (supposedly) refutes Darwinism.

I can empathise with Jeff because I know how a parent can literally programme his child’s mind on religious matters. What the adult Jeff believed about the fundamentalist pseudo-science called creationism parallels what I believed at the age Jeff was when he was interviewed with his father.

As I confess in the entry ‘Introjection’, my father had drummed into me the idea that the so-called Shroud of Turin was the cloth that enveloped Jesus’ body before his Resurrection. Unlike Jeff, over the years I was able to work out an antivirus of the mind that disabused me. Although only those who know my autobiography will understand the details, on this page I mention some of the cognitive steps in my struggle against the parental introject about Turin shroud. Although the pseudoscience of creationism isn’t the same as the pseudoscience that Christian apologists proclaim about the shroud, the aetiology of the pathology of believing in both pseudosciences is the same: parental introjects that are almost impossible to get out of one’s head.

There is much I could say about the trauma model, but the subject is huge. And I find it dismaying that what Alice Miller (1923-2010) said continues to this day: the mental havoc wreaked by parents on their children is not studied at any university. One has to read the writings of independent authors.

Categories
Free speech / association Homosexuality Savitri Devi Vladimir Putin War!

Putin speaks out!

Kremlin says: The US has long bombed civilians and used nuclear weapons in Japan at the end of WW2. So the US president has no right to lecture Russia. For context, RT’s recent article about Putin’s speech yesterday (click here for the whole speech) is an eye-opener. Here there are some excerpts:

Ultimately, the West’s desire to maintain its global dominance is the root of the ongoing Ukrainian turmoil, as well as crises in the other parts of the globe, Putin believes. ‘Today, the entire planet has to pay the price for the ambitions of the West, for its attempts by any means to maintain its crumbling dominance’, he said. Concerned only with their ‘vested interests and super profits’, the Western elites led the world into the current situation through ‘years of mistakes and short-sited decisions’.

For instance, the impact of the anti-Russian sanctions, imposed over the Ukrainian conflict, is already being felt by the common people in the West—while the elites have been bizarrely trying to blame it on Moscow, Putin noted.

‘I want ordinary Western people to hear me as well. You are being persistently told that your current difficulties are the result of Russia’s hostile actions and that you have to pay from your own pockets for the efforts to counter the alleged Russian threat. All of that is a lie’.

Emphasis in the original. Andrew Anglin has commented today on RT’s article: ‘Of course, no Westerners will hear this, except you dear readers and others who already understand the situation… At some point, you would think someone, somewhere in the media would be offering some kind of counterpoint here, or at least saying “just at least listen to what Putin is saying”. Instead, everything is banned. RT is blocked outright in most countries and banned from social media. No Western outlet will publish transcripts of these Putin speeches’. He adds:

When I was censored, virtually no one stood up for my right to share my thoughts, excluding Tucker Carlson and a few others. Then, three years later, the sitting President of the United States was silenced. All dissenting information about coronavirus was silenced. Glenn Greenwald pointed out that this was a big transformation, as they had gone from political censorship to information censorship. That largely went unnoticed.

Anglin concludes: ‘If free speech was not de facto illegal in America (and literally illegal in Europe), none of this would be possible’. We must, therefore, understand what young white nationalist Nick Fuentes also said yesterday. He encourages brave Russian soldiers who are fighting to ‘liberate Ukraine from the Great Satan and from the evil empire in the world, which is the United States’ (see clip here).

Indeed. ‘The Russian army is the last bastion against the satanic new world order’. This is a literal quote from the official Russian Officer’s Handbook. Captured by Ukrainian GUR, the document appears authentic (see source here).

Also recently, Robert Morgan said on The Unz Review that the US started out as a nation; a group of biologically related individuals occupying a definite geographic range. But it forswore true nationhood when it decided to admit negroes to citizenship—courtesy of Christian ethics! That changed it into the so-called ‘proposition’ nation. It’s now become an empire; a global empire based on the technological ‘progress’, Morgan states, that dominates worldwide culture, sucking up everything in its path, homogenising it, and changing the West into itself.

I can even observe this phenomenon in Mexico. Yesterday, out of curiosity, I saw what a very popular anchor was saying on a pundits show and it looked like his nails were painted. I don’t see anything of Mexican media because it disgusts me. But this time I made an exception and found out, through Google, that this swarthy guy is a vulgar fag. When was I going to see an anchor with painted nails in the Latin American media when I was a child? The idealisation of Sodom and Gomorrah began in the neighboring country to the north, specifically in what occurred to the mayor of San Francisco. Then the Gomorrahite idealisation passed to Zapatero’s Spain, and finally to Latin America. But all this shit originated in the United States of America.

The moral of this story—America delenda est, just like those two biblical cities were turned to ashes—can be guessed in my editor’s note today, regarding the book by the priestess of the sacred words we have been translating from French (we still need to translate the last chapter…).

Categories
Homosexuality

The wars to come

‘The Wars to Come’ is the fifth season premiere episode of HBO’s fantasy television series Game of Thrones, and the 41st overall. It aired on April 12, 2015. It was in very bad taste in this 5th season premiere to film another homoerotic scene of Ser Loras. It seems as if the creators of the series did this on purpose to annoy us. But most annoying than those who control Hollywood is that white people consume these things greedily.

Outside of that scene there’s nothing to tell about this premiere, except to show how Tywin’s body lies in the Sept of Baelor before he is buried. Incidentally, in a future episode the man who will preside over the Sept, the High Sparrow, will explain to Jaime: ‘Do you know why we use these stones [placed on the eyes of the dead]? To remind us not to fear death. We close our eyes on this world and open them on the next’.

Categories
Feminism Homosexuality Mainstream media Wikipedia

What is dead may never die

‘What Is Dead May Never Die’ is the third episode of the second season of HBO’s medieval fantasy television series Game of Thrones, first airing on April 15, 2012. In the image we see Yoren talking to Arya, a good man from the Night Watch who dies in this episode.

We see the first bad message in this episode when the warrior Brienne of Tarth wins a tournament against Loras Tyrell. Yesterday I saw the title of a video on YouTube about how the transgender guys who are now allowed to compete in women’s tournaments are destroying those sports because they easily beat the weaker sex. But the scene between Brienne and Loras sends the opposite message to us, and I find it amazing that Westerners are consuming this reversal of reality.

The tournament was held at the camp of the self-crowned King Renly Baratheon. Tournament warriors compete in full armour, and when the big warrior no one’s seen yet beats Loras, Renly asks:

‘Rise. Remove your helmet’.

The warrior does it and murmurs are heard among the spectators when they realise that the imposing blonde warrior was not a man but a woman. Renly continues:

‘I’ve seen Ser Loras bested once or twice, but never quite in that fashion’.

The implication is that warrior women can be as capable as warrior men. Now that, in my preparations to write this article, I opened the Wikipedia article on this episode, I came across a pop-up that informed me that on this day we should celebrate the Wikipedia initiative to close the gender gap in favour of women. Scenes like this one in the most popular television series of all time, in which a woman defeats Ser Loras, the heir to the immensely wealthy House Tyrell, support that cause.

That same episode shows us a second homoerotic encounter between Loras and Renly (the first we had seen in the first season). This second scene had disappeared from my memory since the first time I saw the series. It is very bad taste to put these things on the screen, but the white race is so degenerate that they can reject Martin’s profound message from the finale and not be disgusted by these homosexual scenes.

As I always do in my morning routine, I check my email and today I came across the title and first lines of the latest article from The Occidental Observer. It’s about Jews in the media but who is more to blame for the state of the West: they or the gentiles who consume the shit from HBO and Netflix?

Categories
Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Homosexuality Pederasty

Hubbard’s book

As I promised Patrick on this thread, I started reading Thomas Hubbard’s, Homosexuality in Greece and Rome, available online.

After reading at least the introduction my opinion remains the same. The only type of homosexuality tolerated in a Fourth Reich should be that of two adolescents beautiful enough not to cause revulsion in a heterosexual who sees them together.

Below I reproduce some excerpts from the introduction to Hubbard’s book, omitting the bibliographical references. As can be seen, homoeroticism was not always accepted in Greece and Rome:

______ 卐 ______

 
In Wasps, Aristophanes assures his audience that his tastes are not pederastic, and comedy generally ridicules those who seem exclusively or excessively devoted to boys or men, as if to imply that their preferences were not the norm, but they were nevertheless a recognizable group in ancient Athens. Roman satirical texts from authors such as Petronius, Martial, and Juvenal recognize that some men were genuinely incapable of sex with women…

Artistic evidence also suggests that the symposium, or drinking party, was a locus of homosexual admiration, courtship, and even sexual acts.The tragedian Sophocles ogled cute serving boys, and in myth Ganymede was brought to Olympus to be the cupbearer of the gods and Zeus’ favorite. As figure 23 shows, serving boys would often tend to their duties naked. That Plato and Xenophon both set dialogues on love at such gatherings is significant. Most male homoerotic lyric poetry was probably intended for delivery in such a setting. 1.85, 1.88, and 1.89 are skolia (drinking songs) that may have been meant for recitation at banquets as an expression of homosocial values common to men of the upper class…

One should not necessarily assume from the number of references that such behavior was more common in Rome than it was in Greece: it may be that sexual passivity on the part of free citizen males was even more offensive to Roman sensibilities (for which it was not acceptable even in free youths) and hence became a potent satirical topos for moral disorder and inversion of values, as is suggested by the uniformly hostile tone of the sources.

Greek and Latin shared a term for such men: kinaidos/cinaedus. It may have been used as early as Archilochus. Its first certain attestations in Aristophanes are not distinctively sexual; it just appears as one of many terms of abuse for rascality. But by the fourth century its meaning is more specific: the orator Aeschines abuses Demosthenes as one, and Plato has Socrates refer to their life as “terrible and shameful and to be pitied”…

It therefore seems unwise to limit the term kinaidos/cinaedus to the sexually passive: its range seems potentially to include anyone who is perceived as sexually excessive or deviant. I have therefore adopted the somewhat unsatisfactory translation “pervert” in numerous passages throughout this volume, inasmuch as that English word combines the same vagueness of reference with an equally strong element of censure and disapproval. The cinaedi as a group are too often mentioned to be merely imaginary projections, however embroidered with fiction each individual story may be.Antiquity, like our own society, had its share of sexual dissidents and nonconformists.

 
Varieties of moral judgment

Just as sexual behavior in Greece and Rome was irreducible to any single paradigm, moral judgments concerning the various species of same-gender interaction were far from uniform. The widespread notion that a “general acceptance” of homosexuality prevailed is an oversimplification of a complex mélange of viewpoints about a range of different practices, as is the dogma that a detailed regimen of protocols and conventions distinguished “acceptable” from “unacceptable” homosexual behaviors.

There was, in fact, no more consensus about homosexuality in ancient Greece and Rome than there is today. In these heavily discourse-oriented cultures, as in our own, sexual dissidence was a flash point of ideological contention…

Although there is no question that comic invective holds the greatest scorn for effeminates and/or sexual passives, adult effeminacy was merely seen as the most extreme and visible manifestation of an institution (pederasty) that, even when practiced in a “normative” way, effeminized, prostituted, and corrupted adolescents who were one day destined to become the city’s leaders…

The sum of this evidence, together with the association of pederasty with upper-class venues like the symposium and wrestling school, suggests that it was primarily an upper-class phenomenon, at least in Athens; only men with a certain amount of wealth, leisure, and education were in a position to provide boys with the attention and courtship gifts they might expect, whether tangible or intangible. The majority of Greek men lived close to the subsistence level and had neither the time nor the wherewithal for such pursuits.

Even within elite intellectual circles there were many Greeks who had their doubts about any physically consummated form of pederasty. Xenophon’s Memorabilia presents a Socrates who cautions his young followers against pederastic involvements; and Xenophon’s Symposium seems to place a higher valuation on heterosexuality at the end. “Platonic love,” as articulated in Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, attempts to rehabilitate pederastic desire by sublimating it into a higher, spiritual pursuit of Beauty in which the sexual appetite is ultimately transcended. The idea of a chaste pederasty gained currency in other fourth-century authors, and may have some precedent in Spartan customs, but Plato’s last work, the Laws, appears to abandon it and present an entirely negative view. Even in the Phaedrus, Lysias’ speech and Socrates’ first speech flesh out serious and specific reflections on the harm that the wrong kind of pederasty could do a boy, suggesting that the concept of Platonic love was developed as a response to widespread censure. Texts such as the comic fragment 3.29 show that even in Plato’s own day, some were skeptical whether such a chaste pederasty could exist in reality; later satirical texts take it for granted that these philosophical pretensions were fraudulent covers.

Censure of same-gender relations in Roman culture was differently motivated: class considerations played less of a role, and the inappropriateness of sexual passivity for a Roman male, even during his youth, is the central theme of many texts. Some texts go further and condemn active forms of pederasty, even when practiced with a slave or foreigner: this preference is either impugned as Greek and un-Roman or singled out as a sign of luxury and self-indulgence. Roman oratory, like its earlier Greek counterpart, assumes an audience that is generally hostile to all forms of homosexuality, whether active or passive. Despite the libertarian utterances of some early Stoics (5.21–22), Stoic philosophy of the Roman period was profoundly negative concerning any form of sex that could be considered “against Nature”, a philosophical objection some sources advanced even during the Greek period.

 
Power dynamics

To the extent that literary texts display a power differential, it is rather to emphasize the powerlessness and even emotional helplessness of the lover and a privileged position of control occupied by the beloved youth: this configuration permeates Greek lyric texts from the archaic to the Hellenistic period. Even poems in which a lover congratulates himself on becoming free of a youth’s tyranny or admonishes the youth to beware of the future reflect a sense of desperation on the part of an unsuccessful lover. These protestations should not be dismissed as merely hollow convention.

Whatever advantage an older lover might have in experience, social connections, or verbal charm, the youth had the countervailing power of Beauty on his side, which was a rarer commodity. Simple demographic reckoning tells us that eligible youths in that short-lived, but most desirable, window of efflorescence (from about fourteen to eighteen) were far fewer in number than the adult lovers who might pursue them (Greek men typically did not marry until their thirties). And even among the demographically eligible, many boys would either not be interested or would be closely guarded by their fathers or pedagogues (slave attendants); others would prefer the company of youths closer to their own age (as implied by Socrates’ proverb “youth delights youth”). It was emphatically a seller’s market. Vases seldom show more boys than wooers, but often the reverse; vases often show boys rejecting advances or acting noncommittal. Boys like Lysis and Charmides are surrounded by a mob of admirers in Plato’s dialogues, and even the hypothetical boy addressed in Lysias’ and Socrates’ discourses in the Phaedrus is assumed to have his choice among several lovers and non-lovers (the latter being a less emotionally heated version of the former)…

The most desirable boys were precisely those from elite families, like Alcibiades or Timarchus, and the goal of a pedagogical mentorship was not to objectify and subordinate them, but to advance their socialization into the elite male world of the symposium and athletics, and eventually politics and the life of the mind…

If the Greeks’ principal interest in pederasty were as an institutionalized phallic confirmation of the sociopolitical supremacy of adult citizen males, one would expect far more attention to pederastic relationships with slaves, as in Rome, or with lower-class boys. But as we have seen, it was boys of the best families who were most likely to attract admirers.

 
Origin and chronological development

Most previous discussions of Greek and Roman homosexuality, although distinguishing between the two cultures, tend to treat each culture synchronically, as if attitudes and practices were relatively uniform over time.However, reflection on the various social practices of homosexuality and swings in public attitudes toward it in Western societies just in the second half of the twentieth century should caution us against such static assumptions in the case of ancient societies, which bore witness to many equally wrenching social and political transformations. One advantage of gathering texts together in the format this volume provides is that it allows detailed consideration of significant chronological developments within both Greece and Rome.

The origin of institutionalized homosexual practices in Greece has been a matter of considerable speculation and controversy, with some scholars tracing it back to Indo-European or Minoan origins.Ancient texts variously credit the Spartans or Cretans with a special role as early practitioners, particularly in what may be initiatory contexts. Some lyric texts and the Thera graffiti may support an initiatory interpretation.The earliest artistic evidence is Cretan and suggests a partnership of younger and older warriors. Aristotle connects the introduction of the practice with overpopulation and the desire for a lower birthrate, possibly through delayed marriage. Our earliest textual evidence is from the early seventh century, although Plutarch relates an incident that, if historical, must have occurred around 735–730 b.c.e. There is no clear evidence for homosexuality in the epic poetry of Homer and Hesiod,which could support a thesis of seventh-century origins, possibly in response to population issues.

The evidence is far more substantial for the fifth century and later, when one can note a progressive diminution in the status of pederasty at Athens, apparently in conjunction with the growth and radicalization of the democracy. In the earliest decades of the fifth century stands the legend of the tyrannicides Aristogeiton and Harmodius, who are credited (falsely) with a decisive role in overthrowing the Peisistratid dynasty and inaugurating democratic self-governance. Their legend should be seen as an attempt to situate the practice of upper-class pederasty within the emergent democratic ideology. Art historians have noted that scenes of uninhibited pederastic courtship and sex are common on Athenian vases until about 460, parallel to the celebration of pederastic love in the lyric poets; afterward, however, such representations (and, indeed, even explicit heterosexual scenes) virtually disappear in favor of much more coded arrangements, as in figs. 23–24.This movement away from a libertine and hedonistic artistic style toward more prudish and “family-oriented” modalities seems to parallel the sexual conservatism and enforcement of moral norms evident in comedy and oratory of the late fifth and early fourth centuries, which, as we have seen, appeal emphatically to popular tastes and democratic values. Indeed, Thucydides’ demythologizing critique of the Aristogeiton and Harmodius legend should be interpreted in the same light. The ethics of self-restraint in regard to boys that is praised by Xenophon also attests a growing moral problematization of pederasty in this period. It may not be incorrect to read the evolution of “Platonic love” in fourth-century texts as an attempt to rehabilitate pederasty by imagining a more modest and ethically acceptable form of the institution within a social environment that increasingly marginalized traditional pederasty as both nondemocratic (i.e., upper-class) and corrupting (i.e., teaching venality).

In Rome attitudes toward homosexuality experienced equally significant chronological developments…

During the second century b.c.e., a number of moralistic texts and utterances reject male love altogether, even involving slaves, or worry about the effeminization of Roman manliness under the growing influence of Greek cultural mores. This contrast between Greek and Roman, together with the perception, which may or may not have been historically accurate, that pederasty was imported into Rome from Greece, also becomes a leitmotif in late republican discourse. Cicero feels free to use any association with homosexuality against his rhetorical opponents. It should not surprise us that sexuality became problematized at a time when Rome’s national identity and political system were undergoing such profound transformations: indeed, the poet Catullus uses metaphors of sexual domination to express the loss of political liberty with the demise of the Republic.

By the Augustan period, however, Rome’s political destiny appeared settled and Greek cultural influence was taken for granted. Even if pederasty in the Greek style was still not fully assimilated, it appears to have been considered less of a threat. In moral and satirical texts of the first century c.e. and later, same-gender relations are often the focus of critical comment, but Greek influence is no longer the issue so much as the morally debilitating effects of wealth, power, and appetitive excess, all tendencies observable at the acme of the Roman Empire and embodied in the personae of the emperors. More detailed discussion of these developments in both Greek and Roman moral attitudes is better left to the introductions to the individual chapters.

Categories
Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Death in Venice (movie) Film Homosexuality Pederasty Third Reich

Puritanical degeneracy

The first minute of this speech by a rabbi is unusual, as he tells the truth about how Hitler healed a Berlin that looked like Sodom and Gomorrah. The rabbi says that the first action Hitler took to heal degenerate Weimar Germany was to ban pornography and out-the-closet homosexuality. Which editor of the main webzines of white nationalism is currently proposing to emulate the Führer with such salubrious measures, repressing everything related to LGBT?

I have often said, even personally with some relatives, that the colourful LGBT flag lacks precisely the colour that was relatively accepted in the Greco-Roman world. Since in that world neither the Greeks nor the Romans had been miscegenated to the point of becoming the creatures we see today in Greece and Italy, Federico Fellini was right to choose two English actors for the roles of Encolpius and Giton in his surreal adaptation of Petronius’ Satyricon (the Roman author of that novel lived in 27-66 of the Common Era).

As we can see in this Satyricon clip, it’s about a man in his twenties and an androgynous teenager. Such sort of ‘pederasty’ was the only accepted form of homosexuality in the Greco-Roman world, and seeing the clip doesn’t cause revulsion in the straight viewer as the adolescent Giton, before becoming a fully-developed man, really looks like a girl.

The LGBT Sodom movement will be able to add more colours to its flag now that the genres are surrealistically multiplying. But it will never add to it the only colour accepted in the time of Pericles, or Nero when Petronius flourished (remember that in a revised reading of history, which removes Christian propaganda, Nero was not a villain).

Why do I say that those of the LGBT, who must be swept away as the first cleansing action of the Fourth Reich, will not okay the only homo colour accepted in the ancient Aryan world? A single anecdote will illustrate my point.

A book that can be read online, Thomas Hubbard’s Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents was published in 2003 and can be downloaded for free: here. The following editorial review also appears on that site:

The most important primary texts on homosexuality in ancient Greece and Rome are translated into modern, explicit English and collected together for the first time in this comprehensive sourcebook. Covering an extensive period―from the earliest Greek texts in the late seventh century b.c.e. to Greco-Roman texts of the third and fourth centuries c.e.―the volume includes well-known writings by Plato, Sappho, Aeschines, Catullus, and Juvenal, as well as less well known but highly relevant and intriguing texts such as graffiti, comic fragments, magical papyri, medical treatises, and selected artistic evidence.

These fluently translated texts, together with Thomas K. Hubbard’s valuable introductions, clearly show that there was in fact no more consensus about homosexuality in ancient Greece and Rome than there is today… This unique anthology gives an essential perspective on homosexuality in classical antiquity.

Scandalised by this professor’s academic work on pederasty, half a year ago antifa vandalised his house, as can be read in this article. (You have to be very careful with this journalistic note. It was written by a Latina, and those who protested and vandalised the professor’s house were predominantly feminist women.)

Personally, I don’t think the Fourth Reich should promote pederasty, but it should promote what I quoted recently: ‘We need a regime that bans pornography and erects statues of gorgeous naked nymphs and ephebes in every public square and crossroads’.

However, it is very clear to me that what we see in the above image, and the filth that fortunately Hitler prohibited as soon as he came to power, are two kind of animals not only different but opposed from an aesthetic point of view. But regarding same-sex unions Americans are apparently unable to distinguish between the sublime and the grotesque (the Gomorrah that the Third Reich rightly annihilated).

The United States was once brilliantly described by Richard Spencer saying that it was a mix of Christian Puritanism and sexual degeneracy—both side by side and at the same time! Too bad they recently deleted his YouTube channel and I can’t link to it, but if I remember correctly, that video dates back to the times of the Kavanaugh hearing.

No wonder that a nation suffering from such schizophrenia is absolutely incapable of recreating visually the Greco-Roman world as it really was. Hollywood Rome is not Rome, and although the Jews and the decadent Americans are very good in recreating degeneracy, they’re unable to recreate the healthy pederasty of ancient times. They couldn’t even bring a movie like Death in Venice to the screen. Only an Italian was able to do it with the proper aesthetics, and without any sexual contact in the film (a truly platonic love).

What I said in my entry ‘The transvaluation explained’ can be exemplified by that American chimera between gross sexual degeneration and Puritanism. As long as the Americans don’t dare to see Hitler as the best man in history, and Constantine the worst, they will be unable to bring to the screen the ethos of Greco-Roman antiquity, the truly Aryan world. As to the visual arts on the television and cinema, they will continue to be neochristian in sexual matters.

Our roots are Greece and Rome—not Jerusalem. Keep in mind what Savitri Devi said and the Nazis she quotes in my other post today.

Categories
Alice Miller Autobiography Hojas Susurrantes (book) Homosexuality Pseudoscience Psychiatry

On depression

A Stone Boat (Faber & Faber 1994)
The Noonday Demon (Scribner 2002)

When we repress our anger, writes Susan Forward in her bestseller Toxic Parents, we will likely fall into depression. But not all cases of depression, the most common form of mental disorder, are the result of repressed anger. It may originate from existential causes: the infinite gamut of insoluble problems in life. However, in cases of repressed parental abuse cathartic anger may be a balsam for its cure. Colin Ross, who coined the term trauma model of mental disorders, believes that ‘anger is the most powerful anti-depressant in the market’. Andrew Solomon takes the opposite stance: he idealised the parent and repressed his anger, as I’ll try to show in this essay-review of his books.

Andrew Solomon✡

Solomon is a very peculiar writer, the son of a millionaire of Forest Laboratories: a company that manufactures psychiatric drugs. That we are immersed in the matrix of Big Pharma is evident in the compliments that The Noonday Demon has received, especially the compliments of those who have suffered from depression. I find this so scandalous that I must write this essay, especially because The Noonday Demon was in the New York Times bestseller list. The pseudoscientific propaganda that inundates The Noonday Demon through its 700 pages (I read the Spanish translation seventeen years ago) is such that I could have written a much longer essay-review.

The Noonday Demon received the National Book Award in 2001. Solomon has thus contributed to what Thomas Szasz calls the pharmacratic status quo. Although Solomon mentions Szasz and Elliot Valenstein, he omits to say that they and many other mental health professionals disagree with the biological theories that Solomon presents as fact. It is not even apparent that Solomon has read the dissident scholars. For example, in the 860 references that he boasts in The Noonday Demon he does not mention a single reference of my critical bibliography on psychiatry that I recommend (see below).
 

An American pandemic?

According to Solomon’s bestseller, almost twenty millions Americans suffer from depression. Solomon confesses in his book how he suffered from this malaise since his mother died, and he recounts the therapeutic odyssey he found in a psychiatric profession that he considers benign.

The ‘noonday demons’ was a religious metaphor used since the Low Middle Ages to describe what since the Renaissance would be called ‘melancholy’, and in our times ‘depression’. Through the centuries, those who have been in panic when these demons attack have been prone to experiment with all sorts of quack remedies. Solomon himself tried a magical ritual in Africa; standard psychiatric medication, and New Age alternative remedies. He even experimented with alcohol, cocaine and opium, as he confesses in his book.

Tom Szasz, perhaps the most famous psychiatrist in the United States, proposes to abolish involuntary psychiatry. Szasz doesn’t propose to ban the prescription of drugs for adults, always provided that the professional maintains well informed his client about the risks (something they rarely do). A great deal of the economic power of psychiatry rests on this not so obscure side of the profession, the voluntary side: something that blinds people like Solomon to see that the profession has a darker side.

If an individual wants to take drugs, whether tranquilizers, stimulants, anti-anxiety pills or even illegal drugs, he should be free to do it according to Szasz. Solomon goes beyond this and mentions cases in which people in panic solicited electroshock. Although shock treatment is sometimes voluntary, I don’t believe it should be legal. Solomon himself cites the case of a young woman who told him that after a shock session she forgot everything she had learned in law school. Solomon also cites the grotesque testimony of an individual that requested psychosurgery to eliminate his persistent depression, and the neuropsychiatrists performed it! (a pointless surgery, of course, because the problem was in his mind’s software, not in the brain’s hardware).

Those procedures affected the faculties of these voluntary patients, the remedy resulting worse than the illness, because psychiatry is an iatrogenic profession. If we keep in mind Colin Ross’ words about ‘anger, the best antidepressant in the market’, instead of these harmful treatments I would recommend a depressed patient to write a long letter to the parent who caused the crisis (I myself did it, as we shall see). This is what Sue Forward recommends in Toxic Parents. Alternatively, I would recommend talking with survivors of parental abuse. Forward describes her group therapies for neurotics; Ross describes the same for people in psychotic crises. In the worst of possible cases, say schizophrenia, I would recommend a Soteria-like house, although there are very few of them because the medical profession monopolises treatments.

What neither Solomon nor the orthodox psychiatrists understand is that, by medically treating those who have been abused at home, they promote a status quo that ought to change. Those who want a better society do not propose prohibiting the drugs that are voluntarily consumed. We want to eliminate the conditions that cause mental stress and disorders. However, we do point out that with the medical model of mental disorders we are heading toward the dystopia described by Aldous Huxley. In October of 1949, when Nineteen Eighty Four was published, Huxley wrote to Orwell a letter telling him that the totalitarian state would not control people with a boot on the face as in 1984 but through much more subtle forms of manipulation: the voluntary drugging in the
 

Brave new world

The efficacy of antidepressants, that started to be manufactured a few years after Huxley sent his letter to Orwell, has been enormously exaggerated by the pharmaceutical companies. Solomon ignores that, just like homeopathic meds, the antidepressant that his father distributes basically functions like a placebo: the power of suggestion and autosuggestion. Studies show that a considerable percentage of the people that are told that a marvellous antidepressant has just been discovered are cured of their depression although they were given sugar pills. This effect is called ‘placebo’ in the medical profession. The companies like the one that made Solomon’s father a rich man also minimise the side-effects of the antidepressants.

In a market society it is very difficult to find the study of an independent researcher about the effects of antidepressants. The few existent studies, say those by Peter Breggin and Joseph Glenmullen, have not been rebutted either by the companies that make the drugs, or by the psychiatrists who prescribe them. Breggin, a graduate Harvard psychiatrist, recommends stopping taking any sort of psychiatric meds. It’s irritating that my dust jacket has Solomon as ‘profoundly human’ when Solomon advises people suffering from depression not to stop taking drugs. He even confesses that he got mad with his aunt’s gerontologist because the good doctor advised her to stop taking Celexa (citalopram): the very drug that Solomon’s dad distributes.

As I said, Solomon writes about psychiatric theories as fact. Curiously, at the same time he recommends alternative treatments. Lots of them! Just as the race of birds in Alice in Wonderland, in Solomon’s book all sorts of therapies, allopathic, homeopathic and alternative, win the first price in the treatment of depression. In Solomon’s wonderland absolutely everything is recommended, from the most diverse forms of popular quackery to lobotomy. Since I only have the Spanish translation of The Noonday Demon I cannot quote Solomon verbatim in English (libraries in Mexico are very poor in their English section). But he certainly says that dozens of treatments, from Saint-John’s-wort to psychosurgery, are reasonably promising. If such quackery apparently gets results, it’s all due to the placebo effect.

Solomon’s book is inundated with incredible treatments, personal testimonies from his depressed acquaintances, and with the theories of biological psychiatry. For example, Solomon writes that some people who abuse stimulants also suffer from depression in the same family. To him, this indicates that there’s a ‘genetic predisposition’ for the consumption of cocaine and other stimulants.

It doesn’t occur to Solomon that there can be no genes responsible for addictions for the simple reason that the genes of our species are older than the making of these chemicals. For instance, a putative gene that moves the alcoholic individual to drink cannot exist because alcohol is chronologically more recent than the genotype of the alcoholic individual, and there have been no substantive changes in our species since the caveman. Similarly, Solomon’s claim that the type of drugs that his dad makes represents real medicine is unsupportable. For example, he recognises that cocaine heals depression, but he disapproves of it because it’s illegal. On the next page Solomon recognises that Xanax pills (alprazolam), a benzodiazepine, caused him unpleasant symptoms. Xanax is the anxiety killer that Solomon used to take: the very drug that made George Bush Sr. vomit in Japan during his presidency. According to Solomon, with this drug he could crash into a heavy sleep plagued with dreams. However, he does recommend it because it’s legal.

Solomon never reveals in his book that Ritalin (methylphenidate) can be moral and illegal in the adult who takes it without prescription, but that it can also be immoral and legal if it is administered to a child to control him at school. Instead, he reasons like the good boy of the establishment: the legality of his dad’s company makes those drugs, by definition, moral; and the illegality of cocaine and ecstasy makes them immoral. Solomon talks about the permanent damage in the brain’s dopaminergic systems caused by cocaine. But he omits to say that Zyprexa (olanzapine), the neuroleptic that the psychiatrist prescribed him, causes exactly the same damage. Similarly, Solomon talks about the withdrawal symptoms that cocaine causes, but he does not dissuade his readers from taking neuroleptics although akathisia is pretty similar to such symptoms. Curiously, Solomon says he would accept taking cocaine or ecstasy to cure his depression, but that the withdrawal symptoms made him have second thoughts. In another part of his book Solomon recognises that while alprazolam killed his anxiety during the depressive attacks, it converted him into an addict. In a magazine article Solomon confessed he used to take about twelve pills per day, but when he’s in another mood he states that the aetiology of his depression is purely existential.

The cocktail of psychiatric drugs that Solomon has taken for years includes Zoloft (sertraline), Xanax (alprazolam), Paxil (paroxetine), Navane (thiothixene), Valium (diazepam), BuSpar (buspirone), Wellbutrin (bupropion) and Zyprexa (olanzapine). Even though this suggests that Solomon believes in the medical model of mental disorders, he often talks of souls in pain. He writes that he ‘discovered something that should be called the soul’. Other times he appears as the spokesman of psychiatric biologicism. His book is a contradictory compendium of both explicit apologetics of biopsychiatry and soft criticism of biopsychiatry; of existential testimonies of depressed people, and the biological myths of the profession. He advertises Prozac (fluoxetine) and on another page he recognises that his mother complained about its side-effects. (If Prozac and the antidepressants work as placebos, the so-called ‘side-effects’ are in fact the primary effects, the only effects of the drug; and the antidepressant effect would be caused by the power of suggestion.) Solomon also presents a mixture of both: existential and biological problems as the cause of melancholy. He sensibly concedes that extreme poverty and homelessness may cause ‘depression’, but he unreasonably recommends treating the homeless with psychiatric drugs. He adds the remarkable statement that more than in any other case, the homeless’ resistance to take drugs is a symptom of a ‘disease’. Solomon quotes the scientists or pseudo-scientists who say that the cause of the addictions is ‘in the brain’, when common sense contradicts this bio-reductionist approach. Asian people for example would disagree that their gambling is in their defective brains. The same could be said of those Westerners who are addicted to shopping in a consumer-oriented society: the problem is in the culture, not in their brains.

In his book Solomon contradicts himself in a thousand ways. As a master of doublethink, he accepts both the medical model of mental disorders, and the trauma model of mental disorders when both are mutually exclusive. In his chapter about suicide he repeats the slogans of the psychiatrist, for example when he says that we got to understand that suicidal ideation is the result of mental illness, and that mental illnesses are treatable. He recommends electroshock. Not even the horrendous case-stories that he mentions awakened Solomon’s compassion. He didn’t condemn the psychiatric institutions that maintain them alive against their will. But when he writes about the suicide of his mother, Solomon turns suddenly into a compassionate son, and suicide is nothing else than an act of a tormented soul. However, Solomon didn’t condemn the nets he saw in Norristown Hospital that maintained alive patients like mosquitoes in cobwebs to prevent that they killed themselves. They were strangers to him and he accepts involuntary therapies applied to them. But double-thinker Solomon confesses that nothing causes him more horror than the thought that he would be prevented from committing suicide.
 

The ‘unacknowledged revenge’ on mother

Throughout my reading of Solomon’s book the question came to my mind: How is it that someone like me, who writes in a state of virtual poverty in the Third World, never fell in depressions while Solomon, the American junior who spent a fortune in treatments didn’t only suffer from the common blues, but of horrible depressions? Could it be that Solomon has not listened to what Stefan Zweig, the biographer of tormented souls, called the daimon?

Let me explain myself. Solomon writes about some children whose parents took to the psychiatrist’s office for anger therapy. Solomon completely omits to say that this was probably due to child abuse at home. Once the legit anger is crushed in the therapeutic sessions, the shrinks acknowledge that the children fell into a melancholic state (remember Ross’ equation about anger and depression being inversely proportional to each other). Those children are, again, strangers to Solomon and he doesn’t pity them. But in another part of his book Solomon recognises that his depression originated after his mother died. And it was precisely a conflict with his mother, who hated Solomon’s sexuality, what had moved him to write another book: A Stone Boat.

I must confess that what moved me to write this essay-review is my literary project that I have written in Spanish and that I would love to see published in English. Alas, the subject is such a taboo that more than twenty publishing houses in Spain and Mexico have rejected it. There’s an almost symmetrical antithesis between the first of my books, Letter to Mom Medusa and A Stone Boat. Also, there’s an almost symmetrical antithesis between my second book How to Murder Your Child’s Soul and The Noonday Demon.

A Stone Boat is an autobiographical novel in which Solomon eludes discharging the rage he feels toward his mother. In The Noonday Demon Solomon mentions A Stone Boat quite a few times as a description of real events of his life, not as a fictional novel. Unlike The Noonday Demon I do have an English copy of it and can, at last, quote this homosexual writer. Solomon wrote:

I can remember days… that this secret [his sexual preferences] was my unacknowledged revenge on her. I would lie in the silence of my room and imagine the pain I would later cause my mother.

Although on the next page he writes: ‘I wanted somehow to take the unspeakable vengeance’, in the balance A Stone Boat is a politically-correct confessional novel: Solomon is afraid of speaking out the whole truth of his sentiments. The plot starts when the main character, Solomon’s alter ego, arrived in Paris to confront his mother because of her attitude toward his male lover.

I set off to Paris in anger, determined for the first time to act upon anger… I was, at best, trying to see my life as separate from my mother’s.

But he couldn’t. Upon arriving he discovered that his mother had cancer.

Perhaps I was angrier that week than I remember, but I think in fact that when I first saw that my mother might be sick, my anger got put away somewhere, and my mother became as glorious to me as she had been in my childhood.

Hence, writes Solomon, ‘through I had gone to France to sever ties’, the beatific vision continued until she died. In the last chapter of A Stone Boat Solomon confesses:

I forgive my mother as though I were spokesman for the very gates of heaven.

Solomon ignores that unilateral forgiveness is a psychological impossibility. The grace of forgiveness only reaches us when the offender recognises her fault. Neither in real life nor in the novel did his mother repent. And Solomon forfeited to confront her directly (the opposite of what another Jew, Kafka, did in Letter to His Father). Moreover, Solomon recounts that in the funeral he saw his mother ‘like an angel’ and, by seeing her in this way, he delivered himself into the open arms of the goddess of Melancholy.

The literary genre that I would like to inaugurate would not only oppose the biologicism that is breathed throughout The Noonday Demon, but the elegant prose of A Stone Boat: a poetic novel that has been described as a reach toward Proust. Vindictive autobiography doesn’t take care of the literary form at all: it’s a barbarous genre that breaks the millenarian taboo of honouring the parent. Without scruples, repressions and with the real names, vindictive autobiography throws in the parent’s face what s/he did to us. Conversely, The Noonday Demon is a book that approaches depression from every possible viewpoint, an atlas of the world of depression as the subtitle says. But what we need is more profundity, not amplitude. This is true not only of The Noonday Demon, but of many other quack books on the subject. The cause of the mental disorders with no known biological marker is in the psyche’s nucleus, not on a surface that a scholarly ‘atlas’ may explore.

In his autobiographical novel, my antipode Solomon wrote:

It was terrible how much I loved my mother. It was the most terrible thing in the world.

This was reinforced by the family dynamics:

My father expected everyone to understand at once that my mother was more important than everyone else [and Solomon] was as much in the habit of believing it as he was. [To the extent that Solomon] thought that if she died I would also have to die.

Solomon’s girlfriend told him: ‘Enough is enough; if you spend every minute with her, you’ll go crazy’. He further writes that ‘to be in the room’ with his mother ‘was like being splattered with blood’. He loved her despite that ‘in the first weeks of her illness, my mother was to reveal more clearly her terrible brutality: She could be harsh, and she was demanding, and she could be selfish’. The metaphor of a stone boat came from his girlfriend referring to Solomon’s idealisation of a perfect family: a myth that, according to her, would sink in the sea.

But she was wrong. Solomon didn’t sink the stony idea in a sea of truth. He continued to idealise his mom as it is surmised from the fact that, after he published A Stone Boat, Solomon embarked on a huge enterprise: the writing of a treatise to repress the aetiology of his depression even further, The Noonday Demon. In this later work, his magnum opus, Solomon tells us that the old Freudian precept of blaming the mother has been discarded.

Solomon is wrong in all counts. Blaming the mother is neither a Freudian principle (it’s Frieda Fromm-Reichmann’s), nor has it been discarded (cf. the work of Alice Miller), and Solomon himself has to get his ass even with his mother’s if he is to win the battle against depression. That’s Sue Forward’s advice, who recommends the depressed adult to read a vindictive letter to the late parent in front of the grave to achieve inner peace. As a researcher, I have been in anger therapies in the Ross Institute for Psychological Trauma in Dallas. The level of overt fury and hate toward the invoked perpetrators shocked me. The emotions I witnessed there were not creatures of the surface but the demons of the Old World that Solomon and his depressing fans don’t dare to invoke.
 

The daimon

Those who fall in depression are like extinct volcanoes that have long passed by the tectonic plates’ hot spot beneath them. Solomon has not done a good introspection: he’s an extinct volcano. Only thus can we understand when he writes that one of the most terrible aspects of depression, the anxiety and the panic attacks, is that volition is absent: that those sentiments simply ‘occur’. Obviously Solomon has no idea of the demonic magma that inhabits beneath him and that desperately needs a way out. The bestselling author on depression doesn’t know what depression is: psychic congestion or a cooled crag that, blocking the escape valve, impedes the deliverance of a monster. Had Solomon choose the genre of the eruptive epistle instead of the toned down novel or a scholarly treatise, he could have confronted the inner daimon that haunts him and vomit the hell out of it.

There’s a passage in The Noonday Demon that suggests this interpretation. Solomon writes that he once believed that his sexuality was responsible for the suffering of his mother: suffering she endured until she died. The mother hated Solomon’s homosexuality, and that hatred was a poison that started to impregnate Solomon’s mind. I’m not inventing this: I’m rephrasing what Solomon wrote from the translated copy of his Noonday that I have access to. Solomon even writes that he cannot separate his mother’s homophobia from his own homophobia to the point of exposing himself to the HIV virus. And he further confesses that this exposure was a way of converting an inner self-hatred into a physical reality. In A Stone Boat he writes that his mother told him: ‘No child was ever loved more than you’, and in the following pages he adds: ‘A minute later I thought of killing her’ to end the mother’s agony. Mom’s cruellest tirade had been telling him she would eat poisonous maggots and die, and that only then would Solomon regret having been a naughty child.

Solomon’s confessions can help us to understand his depression in a way that Solomon can’t. As he writes in The Noonday Demon, which unlike A Stone Boat is not a novel, his mother committed suicide to stop the pain of her ovary cancer. On June 19, 1991 in front of Solomon his beloved mother swallowed red pills of Seconal (secobarbital: a barbiturate). He and the rest of his family assisted the suicide. Solomon confesses us that his mother’s suicide was the cataclysm of his life; that it’s buried in his guts like a sharp knife—these are his own metaphors—and that it hurts every time he moves. In some of the most emotional passages Solomon tells us that his mother took pill after pill, the ‘poisonous maggots’ she had threatened would make him feel really bad. Solomon even writes that by imitating her he later learned to take handfuls of anti-depressants, ‘pill after pill’…

The psychic radiography of Solomon starts taking shape. However, like the proverbial prodigal son that represses in his mind the parent’s behaviour, Solomon tells us that it is nonsense that teenagers reproach their parents when they have done everything for them. His non-reproached resentment metamorphosed into acute melancholy: just what happened to the children whose shrinks eliminated their anger. But it is the prohibition of touching the mother what makes this Œdipus write that we should not deceive ourselves; that we don’t know the cause of depression and that we don’t know either how it came about in human evolution.

That, my dear readers, is biological psychiatry: the art of blaming the body for our cowardice to confront mom.

 
Œdipus’ struggles with the daimon

In his desperate attempts to escape the harassment of his inner daimon, Solomon found the exit door by a fluke. In The Noonday Demon he paraphrases the psychoanalysts who have written insightful passages about melancholy. For example, Solomon writes that, in order not to castigate the beloved person, the melancholic individual re-directs the anger and the ambivalence he feels for the loved one onto the patient himself. And following Sigmund Freud and his disciple Karl Abraham he self-analysed himself well enough when he wrote that during his first crisis, after his mother’s death, he incorporated her into his writing. Unfortunately, he also writes that he lamented the pain he caused to her, and this false sense of guilt persisted. He further writes that her death prevented that his relationship with his mother had a healthy closure. In A Stone Boat he had written: ‘Our flashes of intense hatred had never really undermined our adoration of each other’.

Solomon never crossed through the very door that he opened. In contrast to John Modrow, the valiant memorialist who published a touching autobiography about his maddening parents, Solomon’s struggles with the daimon of honouring the parent never ended. When he published A Stone Boat the daimon of guilt assaulted him once more. In The Noonday Demon he writes that when he published the novel it made him feel like a defiant son, and that the guilt feelings began to consume him. He even writes about an internalised love-object, his mother, and about internalised sadism: what Solomon did to himself. Solomon wasn’t only masochist to defend the idealised image of his mother (cf. what Ross says about ‘the locus of control shift’ in his book The Trauma Model). He broke pictures of himself hanging in his home, and he left the hammer in the middle of the broken crystals.

Once he even attacked viciously a friend to the point of breaking his jaw and nose. The man was hospitalised and in The Noonday Demon, where we wouldn’t expect fiction or literary embellishments as in the novel, Solomon confesses to us that he will never forget the relief he felt with each of his vicious punches. He found himself even strangling his friend and says that could have killed him. However, Solomon omits to say if he was arrested or if dad’s attorneys kept him out of jail. He does confess, however, that he hasn’t repented from what he did. He justifies his actions and he wrote that otherwise he would have become mad. And he adds that part of the sensation of fear and impotence he suffered in those times was alleviated by those savage acts. And still further he adds the illuminating confession that to deny the curative power of violence would be a terrible mistake, and that the night of the fighting he arrived at home covered with blood with a sensation of horror and euphoria at the same time.

Miraculously, that night he felt completely released from his daimon! But was the struggle with it over? Nope!: this acting out was nothing else than the displaced fury he felt toward his mother.

Alice Miller has taught us that displaced rage is infinite. It never ends. One is left to wonder what would the hospitalised friend say of Solomon’s fans, who have described him as ‘compassionate and humane’. On the next page of Solomon’s fight he gives us the key to enter his mind. Solomon wrote that he realised that depression could manifest itself in the form of rage.

This cracks the daimon’s cipher. Those who fall in depression and go to the shrink office to pop up a bottle and take a pill don’t know what’s happening in their heads! What these people actually feel is rage and fury toward the perps. But God forbid: we cannot touch them. Parents are to be honoured. A Miller reader would argue that only when our selves get integrated about how and when we were abused, we won’t displace our rage on innocent friends. Solomon also confesses to us that he displaced the anger he felt on his lover: ‘I hated Bernard and I hated my father. This made it easier to love my mother’. This is exactly what Silvano Arieti said in Interpretation of Schizophrenia about one of his patients who ‘protected the images of his parents but at the expense of having an unbearable self-image’. The dots start to be connected. Solomon imagined that he ‘would mutilate his [Bernard’s] cat’. But that was not enough:

I wrote him a letter carefully designed to make him fall in love with me, hopelessly in love, so that I could reject him brutally. I would castrate him with a straight razor. [And also fantasised] putting rat poison in his coffee, but I couldn’t remember why.

Of course he couldn’t: he was still displacing his anger onto a scapegoat (in The Noonday Demon he ratifies the actual existence of the person he called Bernard). Solomon was looking for a safer object to transfer his unconscious affects toward his mother, a mother about whom he wrote: ‘You don’t love me. You are obsessed with me, and you keep trying to drag me down into your illness’. Since displaced anger is infinite, in The Noonday Demon Solomon confesses that, in desperation, he went to Senegal looking for an exorcism. The persistent daimon had to be expelled at all costs, and he tried the ritual called ndeup. But witchcraft didn’t work. The powerful spell that his witch-mother had cast unto him wasn’t broken in black Africa.

After his Senegal experience Solomon continued to look for the cause of depression in psychiatry’s blame-the-body theories, and he also tried many pop remedies. It’s fascinating to see that quite a few of his quack remedies are identical to what Robert Burton prescribed in his famous 1621 treatise on melancholy. Both writers, the 17th-century Burton and the 21st century Solomon, recommend Saint-John’s-wort! And parallel to these Old Age and New Age quackery, Solomon writes a ‘scientific’ chapter on evolutionary biology to answer how could it be possible that natural selection allowed depression.

If we take into account that depression is a crack in our attachment systems due to unprocessed abuse, the above is a pretty stupid question. While I only have minor quibbles with Solomon’s stupidities, when he mentions involuntary psychiatry he sides the parents and the professionals against the patients. The pages that infuriated me the most are the ones in which Solomon sides the parents who label their sane children as mentally ill to control them through psychiatric drugs, especially at school.

It is understandable, therefore, that Solomon didn’t dedicate The Noonday Demon to the child victim of involuntary psychiatry, what I do with my texts. He dedicated it to his millionaire father who financed his investigation and whose income depends on the selling of those drugs for social control.

 

Recommended readings:

Criticism of language is the most radical of all criticisms. The following is the first book of my list because, if in our vocabulary we don’t root out the Newspeak of psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and clinical psychologists, it will be impossible to understand the family, social, economic and existential problems that we all have:

(1) Thomas Szasz: Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus’s Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry (NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990).
 

On the importance of vindictive autobiography:

(2) John Modrow: How To Become A Schizophrenic: The Case Against Biological Psychiatry (New York: Writers Club Press, 2003).

(3) Susan Forward: Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life (2002 by Bantam, first published in 1989).
 

On psychoanalysis and all sorts of psychotherapies:

(4) Jeffrey Masson: Against Therapy: Emotional Tyranny and the Myth of Psychological Healing (Common Courage Press, 1988).

(5) —————–: Final analysis: The Making And Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst (London: HarperCollins, 1991).
 

On the pseudoscientific nature of biological psychiatry:

(6) Colin Ross and Alvin Pam (eds.): Pseudoscience in Biological Psychiatry: Blaming the Body (NY: Wiley & Sons, 1995).

(7) Elliot Valenstein: Blaming the Brain: The Truth About Drugs And Mental Health (NY: The Free Press, 1998).

(8) Peter Breggin: Toxic Psychiatry: Why Therapy, Empathy and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock, and Biochemical Theories of the “New Psychiatry” (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1994).

(9) Robert Whitaker: Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill (Cambridge: Perseus, 2001).
 

Note of 2020:

Anyone who wants updated information can watch Robert Whitaker’s YouTube videos, which includes videos from this year (not to be confused with white nationalist Robert W. Whitaker who died in 2017).

My books on the subject appear on the sidebar: Letter to mom Medusa and Day of Wrath.

Categories
Feminism Film Homosexuality

Downton Abbey (film)

All the films of the last decades contain bad messages, sometimes in a subtle way, even films that could be used as Aryan pride. From the second film of the LOTR trilogy filmed by Jackson, for example, the beautiful Éowyn is empowered as if she was simply another warrior. At least by the end it is implied that Éowyn is going to marry (and have children) with Faramir, fulfilling the traditional role of woman in any normal society. But in the novels of George R.R. Martin who respond to LOTR, Arya, the equivalent to Éowyn, is already a runaway feminist who won’t marry.

Both the television series and the Downton Abbey film contain subversive messages for Aryan preservation presented in a subtle, and sometimes not so subtle way. In Jane Austen’s England women could not inherit in order to force them to marry, depend on a man and have children. That began to change since the late 19th century. Even in the television series, Downton Abbey records the beginnings of the social changes resulting from the first feminist wave that hit England. And in last year’s movie, it is understood at the end that Lady Mary, not an Englishman, will inherit Downton Abbey.

A parenthesis: it’s precisely skinny English ladies like Lady Mary, who below appears at the centre, whom I fancy the most.

That’s not all. In the recent movie, which I saw a couple of days ago, the seeds of a future normalisation of homosexuality are sown. No wonder that Trevor Lynch (Greg Johnson) wrote a review of the film. He may have liked it, but what I saw in Downton Abbey is a description of the first mustard seeds that would grow big, like the evangelical parable about the kingdom of the Jewish god on gentile lands.

I have a hard rule when dealing with movies and television. Keep in mind that as a child I didn’t see non-whites playing leading roles, neither on the small screen nor on the big screen. My rule is: if I see a non-white (usually a black) I immediately change the channel. I do that even in the news (although it is harder to know if one of the anchors is Jewish).

If white nationalists were as purist as a priest of the 14 words, they would do the same. And they would write destructive reviews about products of mass consumption, even about comparatively benign movies such as LOTR and Downton Abbey.

Postscript

The parable of mustard seed is the only parable attributed to Jesus that has three independent attestations in the NT. From our POV, the moral of the story is to weed the tiny plant as soon as it appears: the exact opposite of what Johnson said in his movie review.