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From the Great Confinement of Louis XIV of France to a Chemical Gulag (part 3)

The great revolution in modern psychiatry occurred in the 1930s. Previously, with his instruments Heinroth and his colleagues had assaulted the body of citizens to control. But in the 1930s the assault on the body was abandoned by a more effective method: assaulting the brain directly. Metrazol shock, insulin shock and electroshock were introduced knowing that it killed brain cells.
Pentylenetetrazol (commercially known as Metrazol in North America and Cardiazol in Europe) causes a huge reaction in the victims. They suffered seizures so violent that they frequently broke their teeth, bones and spine. Metrazol shock was so devastating to the brain that, once its effect passed, some suffered regressive states and acted like babies; they played with their faeces, masturbated and wanted the nurses to mollycoddle them. When they recovered they prayed ‘in the name of humanity’ that they would not be injected with Metrazol again: a drug that subjugated even the hardest of the military. But by 1939 it was common to use Metrazol in most hospitals of the United States, which meant that in those times some inmates used to receive several injections.
The New York Times, Harper’s, Time and even Reader’s Digest joined the chorus of praises about a similar psychiatric treatment: insulin shock, which also produced frightening seizures. A Time writer wrote that while the patient descends in the coma ‘he shouts and bellows, gives free vent to his hidden fears and obsessions, opens his mind wide to listening psychiatrists’. The psychoanalysts interpreted the complaints of the victims in favour of their colleagues. In a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association Roy Grinker interpreted that the patient ‘experiences the treatment as a sadistic punishment attack which satisfies his unconscious sense of guilt’.[16] Robert Whitaker, the author of a study on American psychiatry, calls this epoch, the first fifty years of the 20th century, ‘the darkest time’ in the history of psychiatry.
1935 marked the birth of lobotomy. Egas Moniz, a Portuguese psychiatrist, had started his experiments using alcohol to destroy the brain tissue of the frontal lobes, but changed the method by cutting them directly with a scalpel. His first guinea pig was a prostitute, and three months later he had lobotomised twenty people, each time daring to cut off more brain tissue from his victims. According to Moniz ‘to cure these patients we must destroy the more or less fixed arrangements of the cellular connections that exist in the brain’.[17] Moniz’s work led to an explosion of lobotomies in the West, especially in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom, Italy, Romania, Brazil, Cuba and eventually in Mexico.
In 1941 the neurosurgeon Walter Freeman called this practice ‘brain-damaging therapeutics’.[18] At least we must give Freeman credit that he did not express himself in Newspeak, but in the lingua franca of Heinroth: he recognised that lobotomy damages the brain. But in that decade the Swedish Academy awarded Moniz the Nobel Prize in medicine and the media was enthusiastic about the novel therapy, including the New York Times, Time and Newsweek. A New York Times editorial celebrated with these words the success on lobotomised people: ‘would-be suicides found life acceptable’.[19] With such social support tens of thousands of lobotomies were practiced in the 1940s and 50s. It was believed that college students who had emotional problems, and even spoiled children, were ideal candidates for Freeman’s lobotomy.
Whitaker mentions the effects of this radical operation. A lobotomised woman was described as ‘fat, silly and smiling’. Although she had been of lineage, another woman who underwent the operation defecated in a garbage dump. Lobotomised patients grabbed the food from the neighbour’s plate, or vomited in the soup and kept eating. Some of them did not get out of bed unless a family member ordered them to do so, and it was common for them to urinate there. Others just looked out the window. Those who had had jobs before the operation were unable to make a living by themselves. It was possible to insult them and get a smile in response.
Some referred to lobotomy as ‘a surgically induced childhood’, and you can already imagine the burden it represented for families to support them. But Freeman and his assistant Watts had a more positive view of things. They wrote that the lobotomised patient could be considered ‘a household pet’.[20] The reports of the scientific journals also painted things in a favourable light for the medical profession. The language of science claims to be neutral, apolitical and non-emotional. It does not wield value judgments: the diametrically opposite to what I do in this book. In the professional literature where graphs and figures abound it is easy to write articles where the tragedy left by these semi-vegetable humans was not perceived as a crime.

Walter Freeman at the moment of cutting the healthy
brain of one of his victims. Note how this was done
openly with students learning from the lobotomist.

The ‘brain-damaging therapeutics’ of Moniz and Freeman lost momentum in the 1960s and 70s. It is currently difficult to know how many lobotomies are made in the world each year. According to an article in defence of lobotomy in Psychology Today (March/April 1992), at the beginning of that decade there were at least 200 to 300 ‘psychosurgeries’ openly declared every year. In fact, in the new century a few doctors still promote ‘psychosurgery’ for severe emotional problems and in some states of the United States special councils have been formed to review all proposals for these operations.[21]
Although lobotomy fell into relative disuse, electroshock remains a standard psychiatric practice in the 21st-century profession. The electroshock was developed in 1938, inspired by a slaughterhouse in Rome where the pigs were electro-shocked to make it easier to slice their necks. A psychiatrist, Ugo Cerletti, had been experimenting with electric shocks on dogs, putting electrodes on the snout and anus of the dog. Half of the animals died of cardiac arrest. After seeing the electro-shocked pigs Cerletti decided to use it on humans.
Cerletti’s first guinea pig was a homeless man who roamed the train station in Rome. Shortly after, in 1940, electroshock therapy was admitted at the other side of the Atlantic. Manfred Sakel, who introduced insulin shock in medical practice, compared his technique to the electroshock and commented on the latter: ‘the stronger the amnesia, the more severe the underlying brain cell damage must be’.[22] This was another form of the ‘brain-damaging therapeutics’ of Moniz and Freeman.
Although the psychiatrists recognised all this in their specialised journals, in their public pronouncements they were more cautious. They painted ‘electroconvulsive therapy’ as a harmless therapy and said that the loss of memories was temporary. The media took the propaganda as honest science, and by 1946 half of the beds in American hospitals were occupied by psychiatric patients, some of whom had suffered the therapy.
Two years later Albert Deutsch published The Shame of the States and an article appeared in Life magazine with impressive photographs about a reality that the American people ignored: what happened in the concentration camps called psychiatric institutions. Although the images contributed to the reform of the public facilities in the United States, the 20th century witnessed two other psychiatric revolutions. One was the consortium between psychiatrists and pharmaceutical multinationals; another, the invention of chemical lobotomies in the 1950s. Surgical lobotomy would fell into relative disuse in favour of the use of neuroleptics: a more subtle form of social control.
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[16] The revelations about Metrazol appear in Whitaker’s book.
[17] Egas Moniz, quoted in Mad in America, 113.
[18] Freeman, quoted in ibid, p. 96.
[19] Quoted in ibid, p. 138.
[20] Freeman, quoted in ibid, p. 124.
[21] Lobotomy, Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2000. On the resurgence of lobotomy, see Breggin: Toxic Psychiatry, pp. 261ff and an article by Lawrence Stevens that can be read on the internet: ‘The brain-butchery called psychosurgery’.
[22] Manfred Sakel, quoted in Mad in America, p. 98.

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Evil George Orwell Newspeak Psychiatry

From the Great Confinement of Louis XIV of France to a Chemical Gulag (part 2)

At the end of the 18th century, there was no psychiatry as a medical specialty. The word ‘psychiatry’ was coined by Johann Reil in 1808. The new profession took for granted a postulate that had roots in the medicine of ancient Greece. A postulate is a proposition that is admitted without proof. The postulated platform of the new profession assumed the organic origin of psychic disturbances. This postulate elevated to an axiom, and even to dogma, prevented the introduction of subjectivity in the study of mental disturbances.
As we saw with John Modrow [explained in a previous chapter of the online book], the reality is the diametrically opposite. Only by introducing the subjectivity of a soul in pain, and by rejecting the organic hypothesis, is it possible to understand what the hell is going on in the innermost chambers of those who suffer from mental distress and disorders. Objectivity in matters of the internal world of a subject is as impossible as the opposite case: approaching the empirical world in the manner of philosophers like Plato, who, from his idealist Olympus, despised the practical study of nature.
This colossal error cost the Greek culture its moving upward, just as the antipodal error of reducing the humanities to science is misleading our civilisation. It is a categorical mistake trying to understand psychological trauma through neuroscience, as it is a categorical mistake trying to understand the empirical world, say astronomy, through social discourse. Postmodernist philosophers and psychiatrists represent two symmetrical, albeit diametrically opposed, attempts at extreme ideologies. The former want to reduce science to the humanities; the latter, the humanities to science: and none respects the other as a separate and intrinsically legitimate field. In another place I will delve into these two antithetical errors.
The birth of modern psychiatry occurs when the outcast leaves the jurisdiction of the houses of confinement in France and the rest of Europe and is left in charge of the medical institution. In the profession of the 21st century, armed with a battery of genetics, neurology and nosological taxonomy, it is impossible to see what psychiatry is at its root. But in the book by Johann Christian Heinroth, Lehrbuch der Störungen des Seelenlebens (Textbook on the Disturbances of Mental Life), published in 1818, we see the fundamentals of psychiatry without the pseudoscientific smokescreen so common in our days.
Following the tradition of the 17th and 18th centuries, Heinroth used the expression ‘mental illness’ and defined it as ‘selfishness’ or ‘sin’: terms he used interchangeably. Heinroth not only equated the Christian concept of sin with that of mental illness. Although he considered mental illness an ethical defect, Heinroth’s great innovation consists that he treated it with medical procedures.
How did Heinroth take this conceptual leap? Or we may ask, why should MDs reroute the flock of the straying sheep? This turn was not contemplated in the blueprints of the architects of the Great Confinement of the 17th century. Once the Inquisition was officially abolished, Heinroth himself wonders who would be the new social controller: ‘would this be the task of a doctor?, or perhaps of a cleric?, or of a philosopher?, or an educator?’ [7]
The task fell, finally, on the physician. Presumably this was because, as the doctor deals directly with the physicality of human beings, it was easier to cover physical violence in the medical profession than in the other professions. At a time when the ideals of the French Revolution were still in the air, civil society would have suspected a cleric or a philosopher with jurisdiction over other people’s bodies, but not a doctor.
In order for people to accept the new inquisitor, they also had to literalise the central metaphor of the profession. Originally ‘mental illness’ was understood as a mere metaphor of what in previous centuries had been called ‘men of unreason’, which put together the dissidents with the disturbed. When the doctor assumed the responsibility of occupying the role that used to be occupied by the officials of the houses of confinement, Heinroth assumed that the selfishness and sin that he treated were medical entities: something like saying that the ‘viruses’ that infect our hard drives are not metaphor of subversive programs, but microorganisms.
The literalisation of the metaphor ‘mental illness’ into an authentic illness would not have been possible if Heinroth and many other professionals of mental health had not counted with societal approval. The 19th century was the most bourgeois of recent centuries, and the social forces that drove the wealthy to lock up the undesirables were still expanding, even more than in the times when Heinroth himself was born.
The only way to understand Heinroth and his philosophy of the hammer is to let him speak. I have borrowed the following paragraphs from a study of Thomas Szasz. The first quoted sentence is taken from Medicina Psychica Politica (Psycho-Political Medicine): a title that perfectly illustrates how, in its origins, the psychiatrists did not speak in Newspeak but in Oldspeak. Heinroth wrote: ‘It is the duty of the State to care for mentally disturbed persons whenever they are a burden to the community or present a public danger; and the accommodation, cure, and care of such individuals is the duty of the police’. But who are ‘mentally disturbed’? He answers: ‘It is those least deserving of freedom, namely the maniaci [maniacs], who love freedom best; and as long as they are left to themselves and to their perverted activity, even if only in an Autenreith chamber, no recovery is thinkable’.[8] The Autenreith chamber and the mask of the same name were torture apparatuses on which he explains his modus operandi:

Experience has shown that the patient in the sack is in danger of asphyxiation and of falling victim of convulsions… [In the confinement chair] the patient can remain bound in the chair for weeks on end without incurring the slightest bodily harm. [The pear is a] piece of hard wood, with the shape and dimensions of a medium-sized pear, has a cross-bar with straps which can be tied at the back of the neck of the patient. Since the oral cavity of the patient is more or less filled by the instrument, the patient can obviously utter no articulate sounds, but he can still utter stifled screams.[9]

Heinroth articulated some guidelines for the psychiatrist: ‘First, be master of the situation; second, be master of the patient’.[10] Szasz comments that in these phrases psychiatry appears naked as to what it was and continues to be today: subjugation, enslavement and control of one human being by another. He also comments that contemporary psychiatrists, although they do similar things, do not speak frankly as they used to speak in Heinroth’s time.
However, Heinroth understood from the beginning that in his profession he had to disguise the torture chambers for social control as a hospital activity, for which he recommended: ‘all impression of a prison must be avoided’, a situation that persists today. In Spain, for example, contemporary psychiatrists have changed the bars of the windows by external blinds, some cosmetic though rigid metal sheets that serve as prison bars. The façade of psychiatric gardens of our century follows 19th-century regulations. About what happens behind the façade, according to Heinroth:

The edifice should have a special bathing section, with all kinds of baths, showers, douches, and immersion vessels. It must also have a special correction and punishment room with all the necessary equipment, including a Cox swing (or, better, rotating machine), a Reils’s fly-wheel, pulleys, punishment chair, Langermann’s cell, etc. [11]

Here are other words of this doctor who lived a century before Orwell wrote 1984. According to Heinroth, the psychiatrist

appears to the patient as helper and saviour, as a father and benefactor, as a sympathetic friend, as a friendly teacher, but also as a judge who weighs the evidence, passes judgement, and executes the sentence; at the same time seems to be the visible God to the patient… [12]

Heinroth seems a hybrid between the Orwellian O’Brien and a contemporary man of his times: Sade. The fact that some psychiatrists see in Heinroth one of the founders of modern psychiatry and the precursor of Eugen Bleuler, speaks for itself and does not need further comment.
Thanks to Heinroth and other apologists of medical violence, in the mid-19th century the metaphor ‘mental illness’ was recognised as an authentic disease. In England, the parliament granted the medical fraternity the exclusive right to treat the newly discovered disease. The first specialised journals in psychiatry appeared. The American Journal of Psychiatry, which was originally called the American Journal of Insanity and whose first issue appeared in 1844, published data, since its inception, that now are known to be fraudulent.[13] Throughout the 19th century countless of ‘imprudent’ women like Hersilie Rouy and Julie La Roche [cases mentioned at the beginning of the online book] were imprisoned by their parents and husbands; and the psychiatrists resisted attempts to inspect their ‘asylums’, as they were then called, because it interfered with medical autonomy. Many doctors tried to obtain important positions in the asylums.
The psychiatric profession, in its modern version, was born.
In the 20th century, the psychiatric profession consolidated its power and prestige in society. A smoke-screen terminology was developed and, for the man of the street, it became impossible to see psychiatry in its naked simplicity. Some sadists like Heinroth became ‘psychiatrists’, their tortures ‘treatments’, the social outcasts ‘patients’, the asylums ‘hospitals’ and dementia praecox ‘schizophrenia’.
Before the creation of the Newspeak the asylums were properly called Poorhouses. Before drugs were designed to induce tortuous states for the mind, Emil Kraepelin and Bleuler used other methods of subjugation. In 1911 the latter experimented with a particularly disgusting medication that caused bleeding vomit, but at least Bleuler confessed with a frankness something no longer seen in today’s psychiatry: ‘His behaviour improves. From the ethical point of view, I cannot recommend this method’.[14] Similarly, in 1913 Kraepelin used to inject sodium nucleate to cause fever in his patients, who ‘become more docile and obey the doctors’ orders’.[15]
____________
[7] Johann Christian Heinroth, quoted in Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Psychotherapy (NY: Syracuse University Press Edition, 1988), p. 73.
[8] Ibid., pp. 74-75.
[9] Ibid., pp. 76-77.
[10] Ibid., p. 77.
[11] Ibid., p. 79.
[12] Ibid., p. 78.
[13] See, for example, Robert Whitaker: Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus, 2001), pp. 75ff.
[14] Bleuler, quoted in John Read, Loren Mosher & Richard Bentall: Modelos de Locura (Herder, 2006), p. 39
[15] Kraepelin, quoted in ibid.

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Industrial Revolution Inquisition Louis XIV of France Paris Pseudoscience Psychiatry

From the Great Confinement of Louis XIV of France to a Chemical Gulag (part 1)


Above, French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel releasing so-called ‘lunatics’ from their chains at the Salpêtrière asylum of Paris in 1795. Below, a Spanish-English translation from my site critical of psychiatry. Since it is a chapter within an online book I’ll be adding explanatory brackets after some sentences.
 

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Aristotle said that to obtain a truly profound knowledge about something it is necessary to know its history. To understand what happened to the orphan John Bell [Bell’s testimony appears in another chapter of the online book] it is necessary to know how the profession that re-victimised him emerged. The following ideas about how the psychiatric profession was born are taken from Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation, that I will paraphrase here.
In England, three hundred years before John Bell was born, the pamphlet Grievous Groan of the Poor appeared, in which it was proposed that the indigent be banished and transferred to the newly discovered lands of the Oriental Indies. From the 13th century it had existed the famous Bedlam for lunatics in London, but in the 16th century it housed only twenty inmates. In the 17th century, when the pamphlet to banish the poor appeared, there were already more than a hundred prisoners in Bedlam. In 1630 King Charles I called a commission to address the problem of poverty and the commission decreed the police persecution of vagabonds, beggars ‘and all those who live in idleness and who do not wish to work for reasonable wages’.[1] In the 18th century, many poor and destitute people were taken to correctional facilities and houses of confinement in the cities where industrialisation had marginalised part of the population.
Prisons for the poor were also established in continental Europe. The spirit of the 17th century was to put order in the world. After leprosy was eradicated, the medieval leprosariums that had remained empty were filled with the new lepers: the destitute. Foucault calls this period ‘The Great Confinement’ and emphasises the fact that the concept of mental illness did not exist yet.
Isolating the leper, a true sick person, had had a hygienic goal in the Middle Ages. But isolating the destitute had no such goal: it was a new phenomenon. 1656 was an axial year in this policy of cleaning up human garbage from the streets. On April 27, Louis XIV ordered the construction of the General Hospital, a place that was hospital only in name: no doctor presided over it. Article 11 of the king’s edict specified who would be imprisoned: ‘Of all sexes, places and ages, of any city and birth and in whatever state they are, valid or invalid, sick or convalescent, curable or incurable’.[2] Lifelong directors were appointed to head the General Hospital. Their absolutist power was a miniature decal of the power of the sun king, as can be read in articles 12 and 13 of the edict:

They have all power of authority, direction, administration, commerce, police, jurisdiction, correction and sanction over all the poor of Paris, both inside and outside the Hôpital Général. For this purpose, the directors would have stakes and rings of torture, prisons and dungeons, in the aforementioned hospital and places that depend on it, as they deem it convenient, without being able to appeal the ordinances that will be drafted by the directors for the interior of said hospital.[3]

The goal of these draconian measures was to suppress begging by decree. A few years after its foundation, the General Hospital housed one percent of the population of Paris. There were thousands of women and children in the Salpêtrière, in the Bicêtre and in the other buildings of a ‘Hospital’ that was not a hospital but an administrative entity that, concurrently with the royal powers and the police, repressed and guarded the marginalised.
On June 16, 1676 another royal edict establishes the foundation of general hospitals in each city of the kingdom. Throughout France this type of prison is opened and, a hundred years later, on the eve of the Revolution, there existed in thirty-two provincial cities. The archipelago of jails for the poor covered Europe. The Hôpitaux Généraux of France, the Workhouses of England and the Zuchthaüsern of Germany imprisoned young lads who had conflicts with their parents; vagabonds, drunks, lewd people and the ‘fools’. These prisons were indistinguishable from common prisons. In the 18th century an Englishman was surprised to see one of these prisons, ‘in which idiots and fools are locked up because they do not know where to confine them separately’.[4] The so-called alienated were confused with the sane, though destitute, individuals; and sometimes it was impossible to distinguish one from the other.
In the Middle Ages pride was a capital sin. When the banking flourished during the Renaissance it was said that greed was the greatest sin. But in the 17th century, when the ethic of work was imposed not only in Protestant countries but also among Catholics, laziness—in fact: unemployment—was the most notorious of sins. A city where every individual was supposed to become a cog in the social machine was the great bourgeois dream. Within this dream, groups that did not integrate into the machinery were destined to carry a stigma. 17th-century men had replaced medieval leprosy with indigence as the new exclusion group. It is from this ideological framework of indigence considered a vice that the great concept of madness will appear in the 18th and 19th centuries. For the first time in history, madness would be judged with the yardstick of the work ethic. A world where work ethics rules rejects all forms of uselessness. He who cannot earn his bread transgresses the limits of the bourgeois order. He who cannot be integrated into the group must be an alienated.
The edict of creation of the General Hospital is very clear in this regard: it considers ‘begging and idleness as sources of all disorders’.[5] It is very significant that ‘disorder’ remains the word used by psychiatrists today. The very Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [henceforth referred by its acronym, DSM: the ‘Bible’ of today’s psychiatrists] uses the word ‘disorder’ instead of ‘illness’. As the 17th century marks the line in which it was decided to imprison a group of human beings, it would be wrong to believe that madness waited patiently for centuries until some scientists discovered it and took care of it. Likewise, it would be wrong to believe that there was a spontaneous mutation in which the poor, inexplicably and suddenly, went mad.
Imprisoning the victims of a big city was a phenomenon of European dimensions. Once consummated the Great Confinement of which Foucault speaks, the censuses of the time about the prisoners who had not broken the law show the type of people they committed: elderly people who could not take care of themselves, epileptics disowned by their families, deformed people, people with venereal diseases and even those imprisoned by the king’s letters.
The latter was the most widespread confinement procedure since the 1690s, and the petitioners that the king wrote a lettre de cachet were the closest relatives of those imprisoned. The most famous case of imprisonment in the Bastille by lettre de cachet was that of Voltaire. There were cases of foolish or ‘incorrigible girls’ who were interned. ‘Imprudent’ was a label that would correspond more or less to what in the 19th century would be called ‘moral insanity’ and which currently equals the adolescent oppositionalism or ‘defiant negativism’ in the contemporary DSM. I would like to illustrate it with a single case of the 18th century:
A sixteen-year-old woman, whose husband is named Beaudoin, openly claims that she will never love her husband; that there is no law to order her to love him, that everyone is free to dispose of her heart and body as she pleases, and that it is a kind of crime to give one without the other.[6] Although Beaudoin’s woman was considered foolish or crazy, those labels had no medical connotation. The behaviours were perceived under another sky, and confinement was a matter settled between the families and the legal authority without medical intervention.
People who would be committed were considered: ‘dishonest’, ‘idle’, ‘depraved’, ‘sorcerer’, ‘imbecile’, ‘prodigal’, ‘impeded’, ‘alchemist’, ‘unbalanced’, ‘venereal’, ‘libertine’, ‘dissipater’, ‘blasphemous’, ‘ungrateful son’, ‘dissipated father’, ‘prostituted’ and ‘foolish’. In the records it can be read that the internment formulas also used terms such as ‘very evil and cheating man’ or ‘inveterate glutton’. France had to wait until 1785 for a medical order to intervene in the confinement of all these people: a practice that subsequently took shape with Pinel [pic above]. As I have said, moving away from the social norm would bring about the great theme of madness in the 19th century, as we shall see with Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill by the end of this online book. It is from this point that we must understand the classifications of Kraepelin, Bleuler and the DSM of the 20th and 21st centuries.
In our century there are psychiatrists who openly say that ‘suicide is a brain disorder’: a blatantly pseudoscientific pronouncement. In the 17th century the pronouncements were not pseudoscientific yet, such as ‘murderer of himself’, a crime ‘against the divine majesty’ (i.e., the Judeo-Christian god). In the records of commitment for failed suicide attempts the formula used was: ‘s/he wanted to get rid’. It is to those who committed this crime against the Judeo-Christian god that the torture instruments were first applied by 19th-century psychiatrists: cages with an open lid for the head and cabinets that enclosed the subject up to the neck. The transformation from an openly religious trial (‘against the divine majesty’) to the realm of medicine (a purported ‘brain disorder’) was gradual. What is now considered a biomedical disease in the 17th and 18th centuries was understood as extravagant, impious behaviour that endangered the prestige of a specific family.
In the 17th century, for the first time in history, people from very different background were forced to live under the same roof. None of the previous cultures had done something similar or seen similarities between these types of people (venereal, foolish, blasphemous, ungrateful children, sorcerers, prostitutes, etc.). That behind the confinement existed a moralistic judgment is discovered by the fact that people who suffered venereal diseases were locked up—the great evil of the time!—, only if they contracted the disease out of wedlock. Virtuous women infected by their husbands were not at risk of being taken to the General Hospital in Paris.
Homosexuals were locked up in hospitals or detention centres. Any individual who caused a public scandal could be committed. The family, and more specifically the bourgeois family with its demands to keep up appearances, became the rule that defined the confinement of any of its rebellious members. This was the moment in which the dark alliances between parents and psychiatrists that would produce Dr. Amara’s profession would make a deal [I tell the story of psychiatrist Giuseppe Amara, who still lives, earlier in the online book]. Biological psychiatry would have an easy delivery with the gestation of the pair of centuries from the Great Confinement of the 17th century. The origins of the profession called psychiatry today can be traced back to that century.
Throughout the 18th century the confinement of people who did not break the law continued, and by the end of that century the houses of internment were full of ‘blasphemers’. The medieval Inquisition had had power in the south of France, but once the Inquisition was abolished, society found a legal way to control dissidents. It is known the case of a man in Saint-Lazare who was imprisoned for not wanting to kneel in the most solemn moments of the mass (this strategy was also practiced a century before). In the 17th century the unbelievers were considered ‘libertines’. Bonaventure Forcroy wrote a biography about Apollonius of Tyana, a contemporary of Jesus who was credited with miracles, and showed with this paradigm that the Gospel stories could also have been fictional. Forcroy was accused of ‘debauchery’ and imprisoned, also in Saint-Lazare.
The imprisonment of pariahs and undesirables was a cultural event that can be traced back to a specific moment in the long history of intolerance of post-Renaissance and post-Reformation Europe. The psychiatric values of Western man were moulded in the 17th and 18th centuries, values that continue to determine the way we see the world.
 
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[1] Quoted in Michel Foucault: Historia de la Locura en la Época Clásica (Volumen I), p. 106.
[2] Edict of Luis XIV, quoted in ibid, p. 81.
[3] Ibid, p. 81s.
[4] Ibid, p. 182.
[5] Ibid, p. 115.
[6] Quoted in ibid, p. 213. It is interesting to compare the encyclopaedic history of so-called madness by Foucault that I’ve paraphrased above, written in opaque prose, with the brief though clear history of psychiatry by Thomas Szasz (e.g., Cruel Compassion: The Psychiatric Control of the Society’s Unwanted, Syracuse University Press, 1998).

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Aztecs Day of Wrath (book) Isaac Newton Pre-Columbian America Pseudoscience Psychiatry Psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud Stefan Zweig

Day of Wrath, 17

A critique of Lloyd deMause


Henry Ebel said that in psychohistory Lloyd deMause stands out among his epigones as a locomotive single-handedly tugging those who publish in his journal: all of them moving only thanks to a motor that is not theirs. Ebel had left the congresses of psychohistory even before I knew of their existence. However, no sooner I initiated my study of deMause’s texts I realized that both Ebel and deMause were human. All too human…
 
A string of nonsensical claims
One of the most cockeyed theories of deMause is that the warfare fantasies of political leaders and the media in times of war reflect childbirth traumas. Even Alice Miller has criticized this specific theory.
Glenn Davis was one of the first disciples of deMause: a young man that committed suicide. When Davis was doing his oral examination for his doctoral thesis, Stanley Renshon, a member of the committee, fired a question at Davis about something he had written following deMause’s theories: “It says in your book, ‘Groups go to war in order to overcome the helplessness and terror of being trapped in a birth canal’.” People laughed all around the table. What I find it fascinating is that, decades after Davis’ suicide, deMause still does not perceive the bad reputation that this sort of theories that he originated cause in his most serious readers.
In the issue of Spring of 2007 the Journal of Psychohistory published “The Conquistador and the Virgin Mary” by Madeleine Gómez. The article is an authentic string of nonsensical claims. According to this psychohistorian, in the Spanish conquest of the empires Mexica and Inca “the birth trauma was reenacted with few variations,” and on the next page she adds that the endeavor to conquer the seas in each exploration voyage is but “attempts to surmount the birth trauma.” After putting Cortés and the rest of the Spaniards as the villains of the story, Madeleine informs us that in the war for Tenochtitlan “the drumbeats in the air” can “easily be associated to the fetal heartbeat.” And writing on the denunciation by Francisco de Aguilar about the Indian sacrifices, she interprets that “it was easier to project upon the other…” That is, if the chronicler is shocked of the sacrifices, that only conceals the projections of his own European wickedness. Summarizing her interpretation of the Conquest, Madeleine writes: “There was arduous time spent in a womb-like mothership, with subsequent rebirth upon reaching shore.” These analytic interpretations remind me the worst nonsense of Freud recounted in my second book. The psychohistorian concludes that the Spaniards were “abusive, devaluing of women and children” without mentioning in the slightest the sacrifices of women and children in Mesoamerica.
Something similar can be said of deMause’s own views about the human placenta, a theory that he calls “The fetal origins of history.” Such importance he gives to this theory that he devoted the cover illustration of his book Foundations of Psychohistory to it. In an email I asked deMause what did he mean with the eight-headed dragon that appears on the cover. DeMause informed me that there were seven heads (the drawing is ambiguous), “a placental beast” that he relates with terrifying unconscious motivations.
 
Satanic Ritual Abuse
The confusion of my feelings about deMause—lucubration such as those are psychobabble but deMause’s discoveries potentially could be a great lighthouse for the humanities—moved me to annotate each cognitive error I encountered in his legacy.
In 1994 deMause devoted more than a whole issue of his journal to one of the scandals originated in his country that destroyed the reputation of many innocent adults: claims of multiple victims, multiple perpetrators during occult rites in daycare centers for children, known as “Satanic Ritual Abuse” or SRA. I was so intrigued by the subject that, when I read deMause’s article “Why Cults Terrorize and Kill Children” I devoted a few months of my life to research the subject by reading, printing and discussing in the internet (texts that would fill up the thickest ring-binder that I possess). I also purchased a copy of a book on SRA published by Princeton University. My objective was to ascertain whether the man whom I had been taking as a sort of mentor had gone astray. My suspicions turned out to be justified, and even worse: by inviting the foremost believers of SRA to publish in his journal, deMause directly contributed to the creation of an urban myth.
The collective hysteria known as SRA originated with the publication of a 1980 sensationalist book, Michelle Remembers. Michelle claimed that Satan himself appeared to her and wounded her body, but that an archangel healed it. In the mentioned article deMause wrote credulous passages about other fantastic claims by Michelle, and added that the people who ran certain daycare centers in the 1980s put the children in boxes and cages “as symbolic wombs.” DeMause then speculated that “they hang them upside down, the position of fetuses” and that “they drink victim’s blood as fetuses ‘drink’ placental blood,” in addition to force children to “drink urine” and “eat feces as some do during birth.” DeMause also referred to secret tunnels that, he wrote, existed beneath the daycare centers: “They often hold their rituals in actual tunnels.” In fact, those tunnels never existed. In Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Ritual Abuse in History, published in 2006, professor David Frankfurter wrote about deMause’s article: “In this way a contemporary writer can assemble a theory of ritual power to explain rituals that have no forensic evidence.”
This is the sort of thing that, in Wikipedia’s talk page about psychohistory, culminates with rants like the one that I rescued before another editor deleted it: “Don’t ever listen to this lunatic!” (deMause). It is true that Colin Ross is another gullible believer of SRA, as seen in a book that includes an afterword where Elizabeth Loftus disagrees with him. But since the mid-1990s the SRA phenomenon was discredited to such degree that sociologists, criminologists and police officials recognized what it was: a witch-hunt that led to prison and ruined the lives of many innocent adults. The movie Indictment: The McMartin Trial, sponsored by Oliver Stone and based on the most notorious of these hunts, sums up what I mean. Using invasive techniques for adults in the interrogation of little kids, the therapists of the McMartin case and other kindergartens obtained confessions full of fantasies: that the children had been abducted and taken through a network of tunnels to a hidden cave under the school; that they flew in the air and saw giraffes, lions and the killing of a rabbit to be returned to their unsuspecting parents in the daycare center. Kyle Zirpolo was one of the McMartin children. At twenty-nine in 2005, several years after the trial, Zirpolo confessed to reporters that as a child he had been pressured to lie:

Anytime I would give them an answer that they didn’t like, they would ask again and encourage me to give them the answer they were looking for. It was really obvious what they wanted… I felt uncomfortable and a little ashamed that I was being dishonest. But at the same time, being the type of person I was, whatever my parents wanted me to do, I would do.

In its heyday in the 1980s and early 90s, and in some ways similar to the Salem witch trials of 1692, SRA allegations reached grotesque levels. Proponents argued that an intergenerational group of families raised and kidnapped babies and children in an international conspiracy that had infiltrated the police and the professions of lawyers and doctors. Conspiracy theorists claimed that the FBI and the CIA were involved to discredit the veracity of the phenomenon. The allegations ranged from brainwashing and necrophilia, kidnapping, sexual abuse and child pornography, to black masses and ritual killings of animals and thousands of people every year. In the McMartin case they talked about children washed away when the perpetrator pulled the toilet chain taking them to hidden rooms where they would be molested; orgies in carwash business, and even flying witches. Needless to say, no forensic evidence was found to support such claims.
After the legal catastrophe that McMartin and several other cases represented, small children have not been questioned with the aggressive techniques that led them to fantasize so wildly. Nowadays there is no witch-hunting going on in the US, Britain or Australia caused by coercive techniques of fanatics that induce either false memories or outright lies (like Zirpolo’s) to please therapist and parent. However, despite the consensus in sociology and criminology of the new century—that the SRA was a case of moral panic from which there is no forensic evidence—deMause did not change his mind. The work that describes his thinking more broadly, The Emotional Life of Nations, published in 2002 and translated to German, contains a brief passage where he still regards SRA as something real.
 
Revisiting Zweig
I do not regret having compared deMause with Newton in a previous chapter. In the days when deMause disappointed me I watched the film The New World starring Colin Farrell and Christopher Plummer. It bothered me greatly the myth of the noble savage when Farrell’s voice in off says the following about an idyllic village of American Indians:

They are gentle, loving, faithful, lacking in all guile and trickery. The words denoting lying, deceit, greed, envy, slander, and forgiveness have never been heard. They have no jealousy, no sense of possession. Real, what I thought a dream.

At that moment Farrell plays with a few naked, happy Indian children outdoors. Of course, the historic reality was not so bucolic. Remember the photo of the little Indian boy swaddled by their parents in this book? This was a very common practice among those tribes. I felt Hollywood’s falsifying of reality so insulting that I left the theatre. Psychohistory also made me reconcile with Spain after almost a lifetime of hating her because of the conservative culture of my family which had hurt me so much as a boy. I owe much to deMause for having awakened me to the fact that the earlier Amerindian culture was incomparably more brutal, both for children and for adults.
Isaac Newton is the paradigm par excellence of scientific genius. He invented calculus, discovered the law of gravity, enumerated the laws of motion and showed that light is a mixture of colors. His findings not only revolutionized physics but also finally cracked down the pedestal on which Europe had Aristotle. Europe discovered her genius in Newton: a psychoclass comparable to that of the best Greek minds began to evolve in the 17th century.
The self-esteem that the European scientific mind recovered after Newton is difficult to overestimate. But very few know that after his third year of life Isaac’s mother abandoned him to the house of the grandmother: something that borders on what deMause calls the “abandoning mode” of childrearing. Newton’s biographers know that the child suffered this betrayal greatly. In order to burn his agony, in his early twenties he turned his mind into science. At twenty-six Newton had already discovered all of the mentioned above and even more. However, since at that time there were no survivor forums to vent the anger he felt for his mother and stepfather, Newton suffered a severe depression.
When he recovered he lost his mind: he dedicated the rest of his life to alchemy and fundamentalist theology. His manuscripts on these topics sum millions of words: incomparably more than the Principia Mathematica that Newton had written in his youth. He collected a hundred and fifty books on alchemy and tried to turn metal into gold. Newton “always believed in a personal God—nothing like the God of Spinoza—; in the literal narrative of Adam and Eve, the existence of the devil and in hell.” From this fundamentalist point of view Newton estimated the age of the world in some 3,500 years before his age and invested a huge amount of time to interpret the books of Daniel and the Revelation of John. He thought he had cracked the cipher of both books just as he had deciphered the laws of planetary motion. “It is sad,” writes Martin Gardner, “to envision the discoveries in mathematics and physics Newton might have made if his great intellect had not been diverted by such bizarre speculations.” When Newton died, it was found in his body large amounts of mercury: a poisoning resulting from his alchemical experiments.
However, the difference between Newton and deMause is considerable. Unlike Newton, deMause blended his brilliant Principia to his lunatic Alchimia under the same covers. DeMause’s major works where he did not collaborate with other authors, Foundations of Psychohistory, The Emotional Life of Nations and The Origins of War in Child Abuse are a mixture of historical science with pseudoscience; unprecedented discoveries about the history of the human soul with gross lunacies. Like Newton, deMause was terribly abused as a child. On page 136 of his journal, in the Fall 2007 issue he confesses that when his father beat him with a razor strap, as a way to escape he hallucinated that he floated to the ceiling. And on the first page of Foundations deMause writes: “I, like Hitler, have been a beaten, frightened child and a resentful youth. I recognize him in myself, and with some courage can feel in my own guts the terrors he felt…” The key phrase in this passage is “some courage,” not the full courage that I now discharge across my books. After that line of Foundations deMause’s soul disappears and his theories à la Newton appear: his brilliant insights eye to eye with his string of nonsensical claims.
From the point of view of the psychogenesis that he himself discovered, deMause’s main error is the error of psychoanalysts. Losing his mind was due to the fact that he failed to delve deeper into the wounds of his inner self. DeMause’s work, inspired by political sociology and analytical treatises, worships the intellect at the expense of autobiographical insight. One objective of this work [Hojas Susurrantes] is to break away from this intellectual limitation and unconfessional, academic literature.
Half a century before the publication of Julian Jayne’s book, Stefan Zweig wrote in Adepts in Self-Portraiture that when Western literature began with Hesiod and Heraclitus it was still poetry, and of the inevitability of a decline in the mythopoetic talent of Greece when a more Aristotelian thought evolved. As compensation for this loss, says Zweig, modern man obtained with the novel an approach to a science of the mind. But the novel genre does not represent the ultimate degree of self-knowledge:

Autobiography is the hardest of all forms of literary art. Why, then, do new aspirants, generation after generation, try to solve this almost insoluble problem?
[For a] honest autobiography […] he must have a combination of qualities which will hardly be found once in a million instances. To expect perfect sincerity in self-portraiture would be as absurd as to expect absolute justice, freedom, and perfection here on earth. No doubt the pseudo-confession, as Goethe called it, confession under the rose, in the diaphanous veil of novel or poem, is much easier, and is often far more convincing from the artistic point of view, than an account with no assumption of reserve. Autobiography, precisely because it requires, not truth alone, but naked truth, demands from the artist an act of peculiar heroism; for the autobiographer must play the traitor to himself.
Only a ripe artist, one thoroughly acquainted with the workings of the mind, can be successful here. This is why psychological self-portraiture has appeared so late among the arts, belonging exclusively to our own days and those yet to come. Man had to discover continents, to fathom his seas, to learn his language, before he could turn his gaze inward to explore the universe of his soul. Classical antiquity had as yet no inkling of these mysterious paths. Caesar and Plutarch, the ancients who describe themselves, are content to deal with facts, with circumstantial happenings, and never dream of showing more than the surface of their hearts.[…]
Many centuries were to pass before Rousseau (that remarkable man who was a pioneer in so many fields) was to draw a self-portrait for its own sake, and was to be amazed and startled at the novelty of his enterprise. Stendhal, Hebbel, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Amiel, the intrepid Hans Jaeger, have disclosed unsuspected realms of self-knowledge by self-portraiture. Their successors, provided with more delicate implements of research, will be able to penetrate stratum by stratum, room by room, farther and yet farther into our new universe, into the depths of the human mind.

This long quote explains why I decided to devise a hybrid genre between the self-portraiture that betrays the author and penetrates beyond the strata pondered by Romantic autobiographers, while, at the same time, presents a unified field for the findings of Alice Miller and Lloyd deMause.
 
Playing the fool
So far I have focused my criticism on the crank aspects of Lloyd’s legacy. In the remainder of the chapter I will discuss, in addition to the psychohistorians’ crackpot ideas, their moral faults.
It is not apparent that Lloyd has read Tom Szasz or other very well known critics of Sigmund Freud. This is fundamental for a true psychohistory. As we saw in the discussion of Ark, there are two camps in depth psychology: the deniers of the after-effects of psychological trauma who can be traced back to Freud, and those who recognize it, led by Alice Miller.
Unlike Ark, deMause never broke completely away from his psychoanalytic roots. The logo of his website has the symbol of a globe on an analyst’s couch, and the written presentation of the International Psychohistorical Association mentions the pioneering work of Freud, Reich and Fromm, informing us that psychohistorians come from many fields, including psychoanalysis and psychiatry. It is true that deMause is anything but an orthodox psychoanalyst, but it is extremely annoying that he mentions Freud while ignoring the amount of criticism that has been written about him. As we have seen [I refer to a chapter in Hojas Susurrantes], Freud took sides with the parents against their children, while deMause presents himself to his readers as a defender of children.
The lack of the most basic knowledge about the critics of Freudism makes deMause write about claims that have been abandoned. For example, Freud’s vision of Leonardo da Vinci has been refuted decades ago. On page 173 of Foundations of Psychohistory deMause candidly mentions the Freudian study of da Vinci as if the ongoing refutations had never been published. It is important to mention that when deMause was going to graduate, in his youthful infatuation with psychoanalysis he wanted to insert Freudian ideas in his doctorate of political science. It is understandable that his tutors at Columbia University prevented it. DeMause never obtained his doctorate. Many years later, in the article “The Universality of Incest” deMause even sided Freud against Alice Miller and the most articulate critic of Freud, Jeffrey Masson. Since after 1897 Freud dismissed his original discovery, that some parents sexually abused their daughters, deMause’s position is contradictory.
DeMause’s moral errors are even more worrying when we see his stance on contemporary child psychiatry. How appropriate to quote the key passages of my correspondence with him. In one of my e-mails of March 2006, I wrote:

In your country the psychiatrists hired by the parents are abusing millions of children and teenagers. Even before the advent of drugs in the 20th-century psychiatry had routinely tortured children on behalf of their parents. My quest for your back issues [of the Journal of Psychohistory] has to do with something that very much puzzles me. Have you or the journal contributors exposed this kind of traumatogenic mode of childrearing [i.e., child psychiatry]?

DeMause, who over the years has answered almost all of my e-mails, did not answer this one. Three days later I wrote him again:

I don’t want to press you on a point that you seem reluctant to discuss. I just want to thank you for your work, which I believe will prove to be the most significant in the study of history.

Playing the fool, deMause replied:

I just don’t know anything about what psychiatrists do to patients. I’m not a psychiatrist. Sorry.

“Patients” is Newspeak for sane children in conflict with their parents. I gathered from deMause’s response that no article about the crimes committed by psychiatry with children and adolescents had been published in his journal [the sort of crimes reported in my second book of Hojas Susurrantes].
The funny thing is that we could easily use deMause’s statements against him. He wrote: “Every childrearing practice in traditional societies around the globe betrays a profound lack of empathy toward one’s children,” and a couple of pages later he gives an example: “The use of opium on infants goes back to ancient Egypt, where the Ebers papyrus tells parents: ‘It acts at once’.” But this is precisely what psychotropic drugs like Ritalin do to children not in the distant and exotic Egypt, but in the city where deMause lives!
When I realized that deMause was not going to read the literature on the psychiatric abuse of children that I recommended in another of my e-mails, I knew that sooner or later I would have to publish a critique. And incidentally: the page 166 of The Emotional Life deMause swallows the pseudoscientific propaganda that depression is due to a lack of serotonin. Similarly, the psychohistorian Robert Godwin wrote in one of his articles that some people need to ingest psychoactive drugs; and Henry Ebel commended Melanie Klein, the notorious analyst who blamed infants for projections from their parents, as Jeffrey Masson and Alice Miller have so cogently argued.
 
At the left of Chomsky
In Foundations of Psychohistory deMause wrote:

Our conclusion is that Jimmy Carter—for reasons rooted both in his own personality and in the powerful emotional demands of American fantasy—is very likely to lead us into a new war by 1979.

This is a pretty crazy statement. Foundations was published in 1982. Having had the opportunity to mature the lesson given to him by history, deMause did not retract when his prophecy about Carter, who left the White House in 1981 behaving like a dove before the Iranian crisis, was not fulfilled. What is this: publishing in all seriousness a prophecy refuted by history? It exposes a man completely trapped in his own theory. Also, in The Emotional Life of Nations deMause blinded himself before the threat that Cuba and the Soviet Union represented during the missile crisis. Without taking seriously the threat of nuclear annihilation that these missiles posed to his own country, deMause psychoanalyzed Kennedy’s actions as a case that he unraveled: a psychological reductionism as kooky as what his disciple Madeleine wrote about Cortés.
DeMause went back to his old ways in his latest book, The Origins of War in Child Abuse, first published in his journal, where he psychoanalyzes the 1835-1836 war that his country waged against Mexico to annex the territory of Texas. He also interprets with his bizarre theories the US intervention in the two world wars and continues to speculate on those lines about the wars in Korea and Vietnam. But his followers surpass him. But his followers surpass him. The Fall 2007 issue of the Journal of Psychohistory published an article by Robert McFarland in which the author endorses the most lunatic theories that the US government orchestrated the attacks of September 11, and in the Spring 2008 issue Matt Everett uses quite a few pages of the journal to continue to promote the conspiratorial paranoia. This continued in the Journal of Psychohistory of Spring 2009 and in a book review of the Fall issue of that year. His journal is located at the left of Noam Chomsky, who at least has had enough sanity to dismiss conspiracy theories such as 9/11. In short, deMause reduces all international politics to fantastic speculations. No wonder that after the initial success of the one of his books free of nonsense—The History of Childhood, published in 1974, that sold thousands of copies in several languages—, the wrong turn deMause and his followers took has disappointed the vast majority of his readers, so much so that in a 2010 audio interview deMause acknowledges: “I dropped from 6,000 to 800 subscribers of my journal.” But of deMause’s colleagues among whom, I suppose, many are Jews, there is something much more sinister than all that.
 
The psychohistorians and the hatred of the West
It is striking that, except the articles by deMause himself, many articles in the Journal of Psychohistory have little if anything to do with the original psychohistory. As I said, the original psychohistory tells us that non-Western cultures are more barbarous than ours. Conversely, the Journal of Psychohistory of Winter of 2009 contains an article by Arno Gruen praising the Pawnee Indians without mentioning how they treat children (Gruen even talks of “the white invasion”). The Summer 2009 issue of the journal published a much worse article, “The European-American psychosis” by Frederick Hickling: a diatribe against the West and the white people. From the perspective called transcultural psychiatry, Hickling calls the war of Cortés in Mexico as “delusion of genocidal eradication” ignoring that extermination was never the intention of the Spanish, proof that pure whites are now a tiny minority in Mexico. (Hickling misspells the name of the conqueror, a very common error in those ignorant of the topic, as “Cortez.”) But he does quote Bartolomé de Las Casas accepting the blackest interpretation of the Black Legend: that the Spanish murdered millions of Indians on purpose. Hickling thus minimizes the real cause of the diminution of the native population in the 16th century: the epidemics upon which the natives had no antibodies. The Europe of that century was called “the racist European formation,” and using inflammatory rhetoric Hickling writes of “the European ruthless viciousness to indigenous people in the Americas and in Polynesia,” and calls the European wars in the New World in the 17th century “the delusion of White Supremacy.” And he says something similar about the wars of the 18th and 19th centuries, with expressions like “colossal theft of Africa by Europe.” Writing about contemporary Islamic terrorists, Hickling puts quotation marks to the word “terrorists,” and he quotes Marxist revolutionary Frantz Fanon as he writes of “freedom fighters.” Hickling, a professor of psychiatry in Jamaica, goes so far as to suggest that it is possible to apply the concept of delusion “to a race or civilization” as a whole, referring to the white race and Western civilization.
Hickling is not alone. The same 2009 issue of Journal of Psychohistory contains the article “Some Thoughts on Psychoclasses and Zeitgeist.” Christian Lackner, one of the two authors of the article, translated into German deMause’s The Emotional Life of Nations. Following the most progressive political trends the article by Lackner and Juha Siltala welcome the European Union and praise the profile of the new European psychoclass of males as “androgynes” (sic) for whom war is old history. The gem of the article is that it ends by conceding that “the demographic picture” with such androgynous males must result in that “the population of Europe will eventually die out” without having it for something bad, or a demographic suicide against which we must fight.
DeMause and his little journal have reached their nadir with this issue: pure evil. These pair of articles are not the only of their kind. Other issues of the Journal of Psychohistory idealize the black Obama, and what is worse, the journal does not say a word about the dangers that the growing Islamization of Europe represent for what they themselves, the psychohistorians, call the “helping mode of childrearing.” Alarmed, when I was living in Europe, I sent deMause an e-mail asking what he thought of the Islamization of Scandinavia. He answered me once more by playing the imbecile, saying that Nordics “are helping their children.”
 
The sin against the holy ghost
The migration of Muslims into Europe in recent decades illustrates what is an encounter of psychoclasses. Instead of the chosen example—the encounter between Europeans and Amerindians—, the ongoing clash of psychoclasses with the millions of immigrants could have been the paradigm of this book.
But the Islamization of Europe in the 21st century is only the most conspicuous tip of the iceberg. The current group fantasy among westerners is genocidal self-hatred. Demography is destiny. But the West has lost its appetite for life, as seen in the ever-shrinking birthrates of whites. At this rate there will be no replacement for the white people in the coming generations. Westerners do not believe anymore in they ethnicity; in heterosexual marriage, or in their civilization as they still believed when my parents were young. An overreaction against the two great wars appears to have metamorphosed them into pods, as in the movie of the 1950s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Their most unforgivable sin has been their handing over their lands to millions of non-Caucasian immigrants.
Massive Third World migration into the United States, Europe and Australia, promoted by Western governments, is the highest betrayal to one’s own people ever perpetrated in history. While the scenario might remind us the hostile takeover of Rome by a Levantine cult, it is infinitely worse. Constantine may have surrendered the empire to the bishops, dragging it straight into the Middle Ages, but no explicit anti-white exterminationist program was implemented by him and his successors; the program was implicit. In contrast, in the West of today massive numbers of non-whites are being imported at the same time with the demographic decline of the native population: an explicit, anti-white exterminationist program.
This is the most important issue of anything we can imagine: even more important than the child advocacy understood in terms of all races, the theme of this book. If Hyperboreans disappeared, my thirst to fight in the resulting mongrelized culture would die out. It would be a Neanderthalesque regression from my most cherished ideals. Think of the most beautiful female specimens of the Aryan race, for example the painting Lady Violet on the cover of The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour. What whites are doing to themselves is the real sin against the holy spirit of life: placing the very crown of evolution on the path to extinction.
Just as in the past the infanticidal psychoclass sacrificed their children in times of great prosperity, a phenomenon that deMause has called “growth panic,” a mad generation—including deMause’s—, indoctrinated in anti-white racism, sacrifices the future of their children; their grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren… Large numbers of abortions and intercourse with condoms or pills—and mixing their blood with non-whites!—can only mean that an ethnic group is committing suicide. Westerners have decided to erase their history, culture, identity and what is most valuable: their genetic capital.
Such self-destruct ethos reminds me the determined campaign of destruction that, in my family, my mother led when she fell sized with panic before her thriving teenager. Like my parents with me in our beloved home of Palenque [the subject of my other books], reaching the height of its prosperity the West succumbs to unconscious forces turned into a monster which etiology nobody seems to know, not even the readers of Alice Miller, let alone the psychohistorians.
 
___________
The objective of Day of Wrath is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering. If life allows, next month I will reproduce another chapter. Day of Wrath is available: here.

Categories
Autobiography Axiology Catholic Church Child abuse Degenerate art Energy / peak oil Heinrich Himmler Hitler Youth Lord of the Rings Manosphere Music Pseudoscience Psychiatry Psychohistory Racial studies St Francis Who We Are (book)

September 2016 interview

This original canvas signed by Antonio Zucchi (1726-1795) is a landscape in Flemish style, now very near from the desk where I work for this blog.

My friend Jake F. interviewed me last year. These are his words: “The below text is of a scripted interview I was to conduct with C.T. of The West’s Darkest Hour. Due to unforeseen circumstances we could not record. However, Cesar graciously offered to allow this interview to be published on The Right Stuff”.

 

Jake: Hello, and welcome to Manifest Destiny! This is Jake and I’ll be your host today. I have the privilege of bringing you a rare interview with C.T. of The West’s Darkest Hour. What Cesar brings to the table is rare combination of principled fearsomeness and refined sensibility. This interview will serve as an exposition and clarification of his thought for an unfamiliar audience. Questions and answers were composed in advance for purposes of clarity. As always, thank you for listening and enjoy.

Cesar, please give us a brief overview of your background and journey to your present ideological positions. Which books, authors, films, and music inspired you?

Cesar: Thanks for having me here, Jake. I’ll answer straight to the point.

Both of my parents were artists but since my middle teens they became abusive as hell, and I was the target of this abusive madness, which of course destroyed my young life. I explain the tragedy in two books, Hojas Susurrantes and the one I’ve just finished, Exterminio. Both comprise almost half a million words and soon I’ll start the third of the trilogy. As a matter of fact, my sister died this year. In my latest book I claim that her death was probably related to the trauma we endured in our teens.

With my books, I believe, I’m starting a new literary genre. If I manage to finish the third one I will be the first writer in history who analyzes his extremely abusive family in a million-word trilogy.

As to which books and films inspired me, I’d say that 2001: A Space Odyssey exerted a major influence since I watched it in 1968. I was 10 years old then. It was before the abuse at home. After my family became so destructive, Childhood’s End by Arthur Clarke made a huge impact in my life. Still later, the books of Alice Miller helped me to understand my evil family.

With regard to music, since I was a small child I listened to Mussorgski and Stravinsky. Mussorgski’s Dawn over the Moscow River was my first love. Later I discovered Beethoven.

Jake: You seem to be heavily influenced by psychohistory. Could you briefly define it for our audience? What insights have you gleaned from it? What faults have you found with it?

Cesar: This is my interpretation of psychohistory: Most adult children of extremely abusive parents become mad. Really mad I mean: like the magical thinking of the tribes since prehistoric times. And there are cultures that are far more abusive than others.

Psychohistory is a term used by the American Lloyd deMause to research child abuse through recorded history. The meta-perspective provided by psychohistory helped me to contextualize what happened in my family. The problem with deMause is that he’s a rabid liberal, some would even argue that he’s a Jew, like Alice Miller. In the only chapter of my trilogy that has been translated to English I try to Aryanize psychohistory away from deMause’s crazy liberalism.

Jake: You make incisive criticisms of psychiatry as a pseudoscientific field which often fails to draw upon or selectively draws upon neurological research. How specifically is it wounding our people? How deeply do such wounds go?

Cesar: Curiously, Kevin MacDonald used to teach child psycho-pathology in the university before his recent retirement. I don’t know if MacDonald knows that psychiatry is an “iatrogenic” profession, which means that psychiatric drugs often cause a much more serious mental condition for the client than the original distress or disorder.

For instance, there are international studies that show that people in third world countries, with few resources to purchase so-called anti-psychotics, fare much better for those diagnosed with schizophrenia. In other words, so-called anti-psychotics are iatrogenic: they only worsen the original disorder. My blog contains scholarly references to support this claim, but it is something you won’t ever hear in the media, not even in the outlets of white nationalism.

One of the things that I find exasperating while trying to communicate with white nationalists is that, in addition to the pseudoscientific racial and gender studies, there are other pseudosciences. Psychiatry is one of them. Nationalists are completely clueless of the fact that this pseudo-medical profession has as much scientific basis as the study of UFOs.

Let me expand a bit on this.

Those plugged in the Matrix believe that schizophrenia is the product of a chemical imbalance. Unplugged dissidents know that mental disorders are not a biomedical condition. A computer analogy is helpful here. Imagine a technician who doesn’t believe in the existence of computer viruses in the software. This guy always tries to fix computers by messing with the hardware. That’s exactly what psychiatrists do: they are in denial of the existence of the “software” in the human mind, so to speak. So they treat every mental disorder as a brain disorder. For psychiatrists, biology is destiny. Trauma does not exist, or is irrelevant. Only the genes matter.

But psychiatry cannot demonstrate any biological marker, genetic, chemical imbalance or otherwise, in any of the major psychiatric disorders. That’s why neurology, which is real science, is separated in the universities from psychiatry, which is not a science but a big, big business.

Also, all pseudosciences present their central concepts as unfalsifiable hypotheses, that is, hypotheses that cannot be refuted through the scientific method. What most people ignore is that psychiatry also presents its main concept, mental illness, as an unfalsifiable hypothesis. This is explained in detail in one of my scholarly articles.

Jake: You’ve written extensively on child abuse and its racial implications. Chiefly, that non-Whites are much more likely to abuse their offspring and much more likely to do it in horrific ways. Besides obvious things (like removing Judeo-liberal media or moving to a Whiter area) what advice would you have for racially conscious White parents?

Cesar: If you have in mind abusive parents, you cannot educate them. They are simply unconscious of their abuse. In my latest book for example I have published my mother’s entire diary. It is shocking to see that throughout her diary, mostly about the 1970s, she had no clue whatsoever that she was driving her children mad.

In an ethnostate it would be possible that the child finds a window of escape from abusive families through the Hitler Youth. But even in an Aryan ethnostate would-be parents should be taught not to abuse their kids. Together with the Hitler Youth, education for young couples that are about to marry is the only way that occurs to me that children won’t be abused in the future.

Jake: In the past, you have discussed a collapse scenario as presenting the best or only chance Whites will have to exercise the Fourteen Words freely. What if the collapse never comes? What do you think about the collapse as a mythical trope for “fringe” political movements or causes?

Cesar: I have referred to psychiatry as a pseudoscience that the average white nationalist is unaware of. But there are other pseudosciences taught at the academia that nationalists also ignore. Another example is Keynesian economics, that presently influences not only the academia but the Federal Reserve and the banking system.

You cannot have a thriving economy by means of the current system of huge debt and huge spending. The United States has a debt of almost 20 trillion and if the Fed starts Quantitative Easing 4 it will dwarf the previous QEs combined. QE, of course, is newspeak for inflation: expanding the currency supply, the paper dollars. Sooner or later the dollar will hyperinflate because of this astronomic expansion of the currency supply.

Those economists who reject the crazy paradigm that rules the financial world predict that the crash will happen in this decade. And this means something like the depression of 1929. But unlike 1929 there are millions of Negroes out there, especially in the big cities. After the financial accident they’ll chimp out, and contribute beautifully to the collapse of the System. By the way, have you seen the Jew-movie Imperium?

There is a movie character, the one that “Harry Potter” betrayed, hehe.☺ Well, with his group this character tries to produce what he calls “The Event”, which supposedly would awaken whites, a big act of terrorism.

In real life this is not necessary. The Event is coming nevertheless. And not from racists like us, but from the blunders of the Fed and the international monetary policies.

If by December 31 of 2020 the crash has not happened I will recognize I was wrong. But what if I am right? Because if I am right you should start obtaining coins of silver, and if you can afford it, coins of gold. Even the commercials of Fox News are advertizing this.

Jake: Nordicism is a particularly loaded term. Who exactly are the Nordic peoples? Are they a distinct sub race located only in certain White countries? Do they form the upper crust in every White society? Or are they something else entirely?

Cesar: In my opinion white nationalism or Altright, however you want to call it, is fake. The real thing is National Socialism. Unlike the Nazis people in the Altright are like the republicans: they have granted amnesty to millions of non-whites from Mediterranean Europe. The Germans of the 1930s knew better: the standard for whiteness is the Nordic type.

A pundit from Barcelona in Spain has developed a new racial classification that clarifies this matter. He basically says that the European race is divided in three primordial races: the European Nordid White (“White Nordid”), the Nordid Central Asian Redhead (“Red Nordid”), and the Near Eastern Armenid. The white race is actually a mixture of two or more races.

So we cannot say, “This person is a pure white” but “This person has a mixture of A, B and C races in such proportions.” With terms like Aryan we designate a mixture between White Nordid and Red Nordid and its mild crossing with non-white Armenids or Mongolids—usually people of Germanic and Slavic origin.

While the ideal white is a White Nordid with a Red Nordid, we cannot say that those whites who have some Armenid or Mongolid genes are non-whites. However, we could say they are non-whites if they contain a few drops of Congid blood, that is, Negro genes; or substantial Armenid or Mongolid blood.

In the new racial classification the phenotype is more important than genetic studies. Therefore, based on phenotype we can say that many of us Meds are not properly white. Some of them are, yes. I’ve seen girls as beautiful and Aryan in Spain as in the Nordish countries. But not in the proportion I’ve seen such women even in Texas. Many Meds are mudbloods, something that the Germans knew very well. So well in fact that inter-marriage between the mudbloods and the Nazis was discouraged.

Since this is a scientific subject, I recommend those who want to understand nordicism to study carefully the most scholarly article in my blog. It’s under the title Gens alba conservanda est, which is Latin for “the white race must be preserved”. Alas, most white nationalists are anti-nordicists. They are still under the grip of the egalitarian ideology that has destroyed the West. Most of them sincerely believe that all whites are created equal.

I would recommend they read William Pierce’s only non-fiction book, Who We Are, to grasp my point. Pierce was not a white nationalist. Like the Nazis he was the real thing. The biggest surprise that the reader will find in his book is that the founding stock of the ancient Greeks and Romans was Nordish, real whites.

Jake: Much like Dr. William Pierce, you postulate a Witches’ Brew (essentially a convergence of catastrophic trends) theory of factors leading to the gradual and sometimes rapid extermination of our race. What ranks near the top that most of our people are missing? Conversely, what are we greatly overestimating?

Cesar: For those who accept the premises of Who We Are it is clear that the main enemy of whites are whites themselves, especially the civilizational decadence that comes from wealth-over-race policies.

I have lived in Mexico more than half a century. Latin-America is very similar to Mexico if you visit the countries to the south of Mexico. What the Spaniards and the Portuguese did in the Americas, mixing their blood since the 16th century, was the product of greed, of lust for gold. It was also the result of the universalist creed of the Catholic Church, which considered the Amerindian women as “souls” to be “saved”.

The Iberians that conquered the continent also brought the Inquisition, which persecuted crypto-Jews. But even in Judenfrei New Spain these two factors, economic greed and universalist Christianity, destroyed the gene pool of the Spanish.

White nationalists ignore the history down the south of the US because it breaks their little narrative. Their narrative is that Jewry is the main factor of white decline. The fact is that there are other major factors beside Jewry that nationalists are ignoring. Christianity is one of them as demonstrated in the history of Judenfrei Spain and New Spain.

Jake: On a related note, you’ve produced a volume of writing on different strains of Counter-Semitism. Could you go into more detail on this taxonomy of Counter-Semitism?

Cesar: The Jewish problem is one the most serious problems of the West. For centuries and even millennia Jews have been a hostile minority in the West. There’s no question about it. Just see how they lobbied for a century to open the gates of non-white immigration into the United States. Just see the role they played in the Holocaust on non-Jews committed by the Bolshevik Jews. Just see who controls the anti-white media and how the kikes have been trying to prevent that whites wake up.

The problem itself shouts for a final solution of some sort. This is an aspect I don’t differ much from white nationalists. We both try to find radical solutions to the problem. We agree on the medicine.

But we disagree on the diagnosis. For me it’s clear that the Aryan problem caused the Jewish problem, and not vice versa. Perhaps the best analogy would be to see the Aryan problem as an HIV virus, and the Jewish problem as an AIDS-related infection like pneumonia. Kill off the bacteria if you want. I won’t complain about Alex Linder’s solution. But if you don’t eliminate the virus, you may still have a Judenfrei society that commits racial suicide, as happened here in Latin America.

It is simply untrue, as Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer recently wrote, that “physically removing the Jews will solve every other problem”. No. Our ancestors removed the Jews from New Spain and just look at the mess that Mexico is today: those ancestors still committed ethnic suicide, and on a continental scale!

Jake: From your research, what are the strengths and weaknesses of Nietzsche’s thought in general and in to furthering the Fourteen Words?

Cesar: No Nazi tract that I know mentions Nietzsche, but Hitler sort of admired him. Before Nietzsche lost his mind in January of 1889 his concept on the “revaluation of all values” was very handy. I use it a lot in my anti-Christian trolling. I’ll talk about this later in the interview.

Jake: Blake asks: In your writing, you refer to temples and priests of the Fourteen Words. Please expand upon these concepts. What would be the vocation and training of such a priesthood?

Cesar: Here we must recall what my Spanish friend Manu Rodríguez told me: We need to create the Aryan community, an ecclesia, which by the way we never had. Ecclesia, you know, was the principal assembly of ancient Athens.

The Aryan ecclesias need to thrive in our towns and cities, Manu told me. Our “priests”, for lack of a better word, won’t be experts in theology but in history, anthropology and Indo-European cultures. A priest of the 14 words must teach the Western tradition to his young pupils.

Nowadays, without money to build temples like those in Greece and Rome, we can only organize barbecue gatherings like those of my favorite character in the movie Imperium, hehe.☺

Jake: Your upcoming work From St Francis to Himmler has piqued my interest. Based upon the title alone, it is reminiscent of William Gayley Simpson’s journey from being an itinerant Franciscan to a fanatical Aryan racialist. To what extent are you familiar with his work Which Way Western Man? What is it actually about if not your own voyage?

Cesar: I have not read Simpson’s journey but From St Francis to Himmler will be the third and last volume of my autobiographical trilogy.

Francis is the most beloved saint for many Catholics. When I was abused by my father, who admired St Francis, as a defense mechanism I developed a sort of piety inspired in this Italian saint. After the abuse, the doctrine of eternal damnation, that I internalized from my father, destroyed my image of a benign God. The spiritual odyssey from my adolescent piety, to Himmler’s exterminationism, will be the axis of my last book. It is exactly that: an odyssey; the story of a long, long night of my soul.

Jake: For you, White Nationalism was merely a stepping stone to a much sterner and more disciplined National Socialism. Many American White Nationalists enjoy National Socialist iconography and pageantry, as well. What is the line of demarcation between these two ideologies? Is White Nationalism even an ideology or could it more accurately be described as a sentiment? How can American Whites steeped in republican, individualist beliefs adapt to a more “collective” or duty-oriented belief system? What about National Socialism is non-essential or merely adapted to Germanic norms? Finally, which National Socialist texts are American White Nationalists missing or refusing to read?

Cesar: Instead of responding question by question let me say that the line of demarcation is what George Lincoln Rockwell did: he formed a fascist party. White nationalists don’t do anything of the sort! If Rockwell had not been assassinated, radicals like Dylann Roof would have found a warm home and a healthier way to channel their hatred.

Individualist Americans will radically change, and I mean radically, when the convergence of catastrophes is already under way: something that will happen in the second half of the century. I refer to the tectonic-plate, apocalyptic convergence between energy devolution and a political crisis in the West. That collision will create a real mountain.

If “Our race is our nation” then, theoretically National Socialism is doable among Anglo-Saxons, not only among Germanics. Rockwell saw this clearly and he was right.

The most important book to awake whites is the one that Tom Goodrich wrote: Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany. I believe that any honest white liberal who reads it will break, in his mind, the media narrative about the Second World War. Once you nuke the media narrative, I would recommend a Nazi textbook for young readers, Faith and Action by Helmut Stellrecht. It is available online.

Jake: Blake asks: Many White Nationalists advocate the creation of an ethno-state or ethno-states for White-Aryans to seek refuge in. They often fail to mention whether this goal is their highest aim or merely a tactical one. Assuming White-Aryans had the capability to do with the Earth as they wish, what should they do? You’ve been called quite a few names for suggesting that Earth should be made a Whites-only planet. How do you respond to this?

Cesar: I don’t remember the names I was called. Perhaps I missed those threads? In the book that I’ve just finished, Extermination, I explain why the human race is a failed species. Most of them deserve extermination, save the most beautiful Aryans with good heart for nature, the children and the animals.

Extermination is a subject that has only been partially explored in fiction, at the end of The Turner Diaries. It is time to speak out in the genre of non-fiction, as I just did with my latest book, which will be available in Spanish this month or the next one.

I had said that I was inaugurating a new literary genre. But I omitted to mention that, if completed, my trilogy goes well beyond such autobiographical genre into a philosophical system. From this point of view, exterminationism is more than an odd subject: it is what we may call the Significant A of the coming Overman. But let’s change the conversation to a more “normal” subject.

Jake: Rock music is controversial within racialist spheres. You take an uncompromising stance against it for a host of reasons. Two that come to mind are its negro roots and repetitive notes. But, rock has been so heavily appropriated by Whites that even negroes flee from it now. At what point does White ownership (in terms of content; we know Jews dominate the music industry) erase a genre’s origins? Is this even possible? Are there any healthy modern White music genres? Many would defend folk and electronic music as the latest resurgence of authentic White culture in music. Do you agree? Finally, which classical composers or performers would you suggest to a modern White wishing to expand his or her tastes?

Cesar: Folk music is OK but not what the Nazis called “degenerate music”. Even nationalists have been unable to recognize that such music is used by the System to degrade the spirit of whites, to control them. A passage from 1984, written before the birth of rock, was prophetic. The music in the totalitarian world, Orwell says: “had a savage, barking rhythm which could not exactly be called music, but resembled the beating of a drum… The proles had taken a fancy to it.” Of course, the people of the Altright would be degenerate proles from the Nazi point of view: they listen so-called Retro-wave music.

As to which classical composers, I’d recommend starting with Walt Disney’s 1959 movie Sleeping Beauty. Its soundtrack contains a masterful edition of the music of Tchaikovsky’s ballet. But the trick is not adding classical music to your repertoire. The trick is subtracting degenerate music from what you listen.

I have always compared degenerate music with degenerate sex. A guy just cannot have a healthy marriage with a lovely wife and children and, at the same time, indulging himself in escapades in gay bars. The degenerate side of both sexual lifestyles and music tastes must be completely cut off from our way of life.

Jake: On several occasions you’ve described the Sublimis Deus papal bull as the original sin committed in South America. Could you give us some background on this proclamation? Was it a logical extension of Christian doctrine or an aberration?

Cesar: It was an expansion of the Church’s universalism, where all races can enter the church. “Catholic” in fact means universal. But the original sin was not the Pope’s bull. The original sin of the Spanish and the Portuguese was, as I said, the lust for gold and silver in Mexico and Peru. The Catholic bull that allowed Iberian whites to marry the brown natives was a very serious, mortal sin; but not the original one.

Jake: Lately, the phrase “Pathological Altruism” has been used to describe a weakness of the White-Aryan psyche. Is this valid and sufficient? Do you agree with Dr. Sunic and Pierre Krebs that a universal Christian memeplex is the source of our vulnerability, instead?

Cesar: I don’t know much of Krebs but Sunic is quite smart. He does not only blame Christianity as a more elemental factor of white decline than Jewry; he actually says that capitalism is the main factor.

I believe he’s right. And I must add that Americans love Mammon too much to purge the Jews! Once more, the Aryan problem has created the Jewish problem. Pro-whites must read Who We Are to contextualize historically the claim that wealth-over-race policies is suicidal, even when no Jews are present. March of the Titans by Arthur Kemp also reaches the same conclusion.

Jake: Blake asks: How do we as a race combat our predisposition to choose wealth over a sound society? Alain de Benoist notes that critics of immigration must also critique capitalism lest they contradict themselves. What must be done to slay Mammon once and for all? Or, at the very least, restrain him?

Cesar: Mammon will die in this century of natural death. I not only believe that the financial collapse is coming this decade. I also believe in peak oil and energy devolution later in this century. Once oil is depleted, corporate capitalism can no longer be the economic paradigm for whites, especially after the racial wars change bourgeois whites into blond-beast warriors.

The paradigm of the future lies in farming. Using an image of the penultimate chapter of The Lord of the Rings, I would say that the new paradigm lies in a return to the bucolic Shire. By the way, that very important chapter, “The scouring of the Shire”, was not filmed in Peter Jackson’s version of The Lord of the Rings. In the book, which I read, the war at the Shire actually happens after the One Ring has been destroyed. The ring is metaphor for gold…

Jake: What are your thoughts on the so-called manosphere? How should Aryans approach courtship in a day and age where it’s too early to procure Sabine women yet too late to find a young woman that isn’t a pod person? On a related note, how should White-Aryans answer the homosexual question?

Cesar: A lot of what is said in the manosphere is true. I’ve started to elaborate a guide for the priests of the fourteen words. He should not discuss with Jews, non-whites or women. He should even try to avoid talking with white Pod women.

Recently I discovered a YouTube blogger, Turd Flinging Monkey. I was shocked to learn about scientific facts that concern all white males that I didn’t find in the more formal writing of Roger Devlin. Yes: Turd Flinging Monkey is an anti-racist, clueless blogger about the Jewish question. But there’s something in his manospheric rants that merits scrutiny. After I finish the corrections of my book I’ll see all of his videos.

Courtship is impossible for the moment except if you move to an Amish or Mennonite community. So what can we do before the collapse of the rule of law, a rule that prevents Aryans from abducting and raping the Sabine women? The blogger Turd Flinging Monkey simply recommends masturbation. Well, well…☺ I prefer to be a workaholic to avoid thinking in sex.

As to homosexuality, it is a pity that some open homos in the Altright are not ashamed of talking publicly about their degeneracy, as if it was normal. Shame on them.

Jake: Unlike most pro-Whites, you stand by Heinrich Himmler with few reservations. What can we learn from him? How does he stand in relation to more “mystical” figures on the Right like Spengler or Yockey?

Cesar: I know almost nothing of Spengler except that he refused to support Nazi ideas of racial superiority. Yockey was a great essayist but the style he chose for his famous book, the very one which gave the name to the recent film Imperium, is too philosophical for my taste.

What I like of Himmler is that he volunteered to do the dirty job, extermination. I identify with Uncle Heinrich because, like him, I don’t look Aryan. But when he visited a specific town in Norway he admired them so much because of the purity of the Aryan breed there.

I believe that later in this century, when the demographic bubble pops as a result of energy devolution, Himmler-like exterminationism should become the religion of the Blonde Beast. Only the best should survive. I envision throughout the Earth the beauty that Hitler and Himmler saw in specific Nordish towns, a return to the Shire so to speak after the death of capitalism.

Here comes handy Nietzsche’s concept about the transvaluation of all values. Remember that I call atheists “Neo-Christians”. When millions of adolescent whites change their T-shirts from Che Guevara to Himmler, you will know that the race is already saved. I can only hope that my books will help young whites to revaluate their fucking values.

Jake: Are pro-Whites approaching the subject of Holocaust revisionism correctly or incorrectly? How should it be approached and why?

Cesar: Incorrectly. One must start with the Holocaust committed by the Allied forces. I sincerely believe that any nationalist who has not read the abridged edition of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and Tom Goodrich’s Hellstorm is a historical fool.

It is not only that after the Second World War the Germans were dishonestly demonized. The biggest secret of our times is that the astronomic crimes of the Allied forces dwarf what the Germans did. What the United States and the Soviet Union did in times of peace was more monstrous than the crimes attributed to the Germans in times of war—precisely because the Allied Holocaust was perpetrated in times of peace! I am talking about the crimes committed by Eisenhower and the Soviets from 1945 to 1947. Most people are unaware of this Holocaust. I would dare to say that if whites do not atone for the genocide perpetrated on the German people they will go extinct.

The root problem of white decline is Christian meta-ethics, what I have been calling “Christian axiology”. National Socialism revaluates such meta-ethics back to the mores of the ancient Greeks and Romans. This cannot happen as long as whites are Christians and neo-Christian atheists.

When the Aryan race reaches maturity, probably in the next century, the calendar must be changed from Jesus to Hitler. Anno Domini will start with the Fuhrer’s birthday, not with the crucified rabbi. White nationalists are incapable to reach this level of priesthood today because they are part of the problem as well as part of the solution.

Jake: Looking North, what are your thoughts on Donald Trump and the Alt-Right? What advice do you have for the average Alt-Rightist? What ideological pitfalls should he avoid that we haven’t already discussed?

Cesar: Alt-rightists might have their 15-minute fame after Trump wins. But when things get really nasty after the dollar collapses the proles will look after more masculine voices, those filled with hatred. Real hate I mean. Not the VDARE, American Renaissance or the Radix Journal types but The Daily Stormer, Neonazi types.

Jake: What is it like being a White or Aryan Man in Mexico? What has been lost in Mexico’s de-Europeanization process? Can the average “race-neutral” or un-awakened American White fathom what a majority colored country is like day in and day out? More broadly, what do we have to lose that we don’t know we have to lose?

Cesar: Recently Donald Trump visited my own town, Mexico City. But Latin America, not only Mexico, is too far gone. Nothing can be done here down the South. You guys have half a century of polluting your blood but there are still millions of pure whites in North America. Here down the south these guys have half a millennium of mestization, and in 500 years no intellectual voice has ever been raised against this genocide of Iberian whites! I can speak volumes on the subject but a single anecdote will be enough.

Recently, a meeting was organized by my former classmates of the Madrid School in Mexico that graduated forty years ago. This was a school founded by those who fled from Francisco Franco after the civil war. Two of my whitest schoolmates, blond and very handsome four decades ago, married mestizo women and formed mestizo families. I was shocked! Presently the young students of the Madrid school, who used to be mostly white in my teens, have become brownish. The second generation! Almost all white Latin Americans have already become Body Snatched Pods. Even Argentina and Uruguay are gone.

In the US you at least have Fox News. In Spanish-speaking countries, Spain included, there’s not even one media outlet that sides Donald Trump. Nothing! What remains of Iberian whites are like Jeb Bush: they’re happily marrying dwarf Latinas. Our only hope is that a tough ethnostate is formed at the North and then proceeds to conquer so-called Latin America.

Jake: Where can our listeners find your work online? Where can they purchase your books? What parting message do you have for our listeners?

Cesar: They can google “chechar” (that is, c-h-e-c-h-a-r) and “WordPress” and they’ll hit a blog, “The West’s Darkest Hour”. My books are linked at the top of my blog.

My parting word is simple: I am not a white nationalist. I am a guy to the right of Himmler. Only one of my books is in English, Day of Wrath that I dedicated to you. Since it will take some time for the rest of my books to be translated to English, read instead William Pierce’s books and see for yourselves how an American also rejected Christian ethics.

Categories
Day of Wrath (book) Psychiatry Psychohistory Psychology

Day of Wrath, 6

Silvano Arieti and schizophrenia

Paradoxically, if something had been impeding the collective form of suicidal psychosis that the West self-inflicts today, the massive migration of inferior psychoclasses, it was Christianity. But Christianity is in crisis and westerners lack a new myth that bestows on them a self-image for social cohesion. Jaynes wrote:

In the second millennium B.C., we stopped hearing the voices of the gods. In the first millennium B.C., those of us who still heard voices, our oracles and prophets, they too died away. In the first millennium A.D., it is their sayings and hearings preserved in sacred texts through which we obeyed our lost divinities. And in the second millennium A.D., these writings lose their authority… And here at the end of the second millennium and about enter the third, we are surrounded with this problem.

Hearing voices is the archetypal symptom of what today is named schizophrenia. But the distinctive traits between ancient schizoids and modern Western man is not absolute. In his magnum opus, Interpretation of Schizophrenia, Silvano Arieti wrote a sentence imagining a space visitor, more integrated psychologically than the Earth dwellers, who would find many instances of “paleologic thinking” (bicameral thought) in the moral, social and religious costumes of Western man.

Those who give credibility to everything that, under the banner of science, the status quo sells us, will consider it foolish that I take seriously an author who published a work about paleologic thinking and schizophrenia in 1955, the edition translated to Spanish. The reason that moved me to do it is simple. As I have said, decades before Colin Ross published The Trauma Model and Schizophrenia, Arieti had already written, with different words, some phrases about “the locus of control shift” (explained above). In 2007 I felt confident to ask Ross if he knew that Arieti had said something very similar to his model half a century before. Ross replied that he barely had read Arieti. His ignorance surprised me but I understood him: the good doctor is more a busy clinician than an armchair theorist. Anyone can acquire through the internet the 2004 book that Ross wrote about schizophrenia. On the other hand, the 1965 Spanish translation of Arieti’s treatise is not even available in the catalogue of out-of-print books. In 1975 a second, revised edition of Interpretation of Schizophrenia won in the United States the National Book Award in scientific subjects. In this chapter I will use both editions: the 1955 edition, and the 1975 edition republished in 1994. (In the second edition the book was thoroughly rewritten and fattened with medical testing on schizophrenia.)

Virtually forgotten, Arieti’s treatise is an authentic mine of theoretical and clinical information to understand psychosis. Most striking about the massive body of literature from Arieti’s colleagues that pointed at the family as responsible for the schizophrenias in their patients is that the theory was never refuted. It was conveniently forgotten, swept under the rug of political correctness in the mental health professions. It is very common to read in the textbooks of contemporary psychiatry and psychology that the theory of the schizophrenogenic parents was discarded because it was erroneous with the most absolute absence of bibliographic references to support such claim. I cannot forget an article written in the present century in which an investigator complains that, despite an extensive search, he did not find any coherent and clear explanation of why the schizophrenogenic theory has been abandoned. As always, everything has to do with the fact that to question the parental deities is terrifying for most people, especially for those who are forbidden from using their own emotions: academics, including the mental health professionals. As deMause said way above: “The usual suppression of all feeling” in childrearing studies “simply cripples a psychohistorian as badly as it would cripple a biologist to be forbidden the use of a microscope.” Biological psychiatrists too suppress their feelings when dealing with family victims.

Arieti distinguishes between a “paleologic” form of thinking, and the thinking that comes from “Aristotelian logic” that rules Western man. Since the first edition of his book Arieti points out that the paleologic thinking, which modern man only experiences in dreams, was omnipresent in prehistoric cultures. Let us consider again the case of major trauma families. In order to avoid a runaway anxiety that drives the victim into panic, the patient diagnosed as schizophrenic abandons the Aristotelian norms of intuitive logic and lapses into the sort of thinking of our most primitive ancestors. Like John Modrow, Arieti acknowledges the value of the work of Harry Sullivan about the panic the child experiences as a result of an all-out emotional assault from both parents. The paleologic regression can be adapted years after the abuse occurred, even when the child has become economically independent. [A chapter on Modrow appears in the second section of Hojas Susurrantes.] The withdrawal from reality, or psychotic breakdown, is the last and most desperate attempt of the unconscious to maintain the ego in a state of internal cohesion. A dramatic regressive metamorphosis arises when, one after another, the defenses that the victim had been using do not work anymore. To a greater or lesser degree all human beings function with a dose of neurosis, but in the psychotic outbreak, when neurotic defenses collapse, the subject falls into even more archaic forms of defense: mechanisms which had been overcome millennia ago, a regression to the bicameral mind.

Arieti’s book contains chapters about his clinical experiences with patients. In the case of two brothers, Arieti describes how one of them suffered a pre-psychotic panic as a result of the abuse at home and observes that, once in a florid state of psychosis, “The paleologician confuses the physical world with the psychological one. Instead of finding a physical explanation for an event, he looks for a personal motivation or an intention as the cause of an event.” Just as the primitive man, in a definitive breakdown of the Aristotelian superstructure, for the disturbed individual the world turns itself animist; each external event having a profound meaning. There are no coincidences for those who inhabit the world of magical thinking. Both the primitive animist and the modern schizophrenic live in distinct dimensions compared to the rational man. The conceptualization of external happenings as impersonal physical forces requires a much more advanced level of cognition than seeing them as personal agents. Arieti wrote:

If the Greeks are afflicted by epidemics, it is because Phoebus wants to punish Agamemnon. Paranoiacs and paranoids interpret almost everything as manifesting a psychological intention or meaning. In many cases practically everything that occurs is interpreted as willed by the persecutors of the patient.

Arieti also writes about the time before the Homo sapiens acquired the faculty to choose an action through what we call today free will, and he adds:

Philogenetically, anticipation of the distant future appeared when early man no longer limited his activity to cannibalism and hunting, which were related to immediate present necessities, but became interested in hoarding and, later, in agriculture in order to provide for future needs.

The reference to cannibalism makes me think that, though unlike Jaynes Arieti maintained that schizophrenia is due to the parents’ behavior, unlike deMause Arieti did not conceive that such cannibal practices, like the ones described in the Preface, could have injured the inner self of the surviving children in prehistoric times. Nevertheless, Arieti disagrees with a psychiatry that sees no similarities between schizophrenic and non-schizophrenic. He believes that such points of view “are fundamentally wrong” and, speaking of non-Western cultures and even of the times of Cro-Magnon man, he writes:

Often the culture itself imposes paleologic conceptions and habits on the individual, even though the individual is capable of high forms of thinking. The more abundant is the paleologic thinking in a culture, the more difficult it is for the culture to get rid of it.

This last phrase reminds me how presently Western culture imposes relativist conceptions on the individual, even though the typical Westerner is potentially capable of discriminating among inferior cultures: a higher form of thinking. Arieti also raises the question of why civilization originated only ten thousand years ago. Like Jaynes, he believes that the incredibly long gestation of civilization had to do with the persistence of paleologic thought, and he adds that presently the paleologic defense mechanisms underlie the human psyche and can return in extreme conditions.

Arieti elaborated his theory twenty years before Jaynes or deMause started to write their books, and he was within an inch of discovering what deMause would discover: precisely that schizophrenogenic forms of childrearing through the Bone Age and the Stone Age had impeded the psychic integration of our ancestors. Getting ahead in time to Ross, Arieti wrote: “A characteristic unique in the human race—prolonged childhood with consequent extended dependency on adults—is the basis of the psycho-dynamics of schizophrenia.”

Arieti defines schizophrenia as an extremely regressive reaction before an equally extreme state of anxiety: a dynamic that originates in infancy and that accelerates in adolescence, or later, due to abuses at home (think of the case of the second girl in the Ross section). “In every case of schizophrenia studies serious family disturbances were found” (emphasis by Arieti). He adds that to produce schizophrenia a drama is needed which is sufficiently injuring to the inner self; a drama that, if we ignore it, we become deaf “to a profound message that the patient may try to convey.” And writing about one of his patients, and getting again ahead in time to Ross, he tells us that this patient “protected the images of his parents but at the expense of having an unbearable self-image.”

Interpretation of Schizophrenia contains the keys to understanding issues that at first sight seem incomprehensible, and even bizarre, for those of us who live in the world of Aristotelian logic: the probable meaning of the symbols of the oneiric world in which the psychotic individual lives; his apparently incoherent salad of words, the linguistic whys of his inner logic and the many regressive stages of the disorder. In Arieti’s treatise there is an enormous richness of ideas and theoretical schemas that I cannot summarize here, as well as clinical analyses of his patients, to understand the gradations of madness. Even though, as I said, in the middle 1970s his book won the National Book Award, in a more valiant world his work would have been influential. But society freaked out before the findings of Arieti and his colleagues because, to understand psychoses, it would have been necessary to point the index finger at the parents. As a Ross reader would say, the problem of the attachment to the perpetrator, the basic and fundamental axiom of the human psyche, could not allow this (Arieti himself dedicated his magnum opus to his parents).

Let us see where the ideas expressed in this chapter drive us when pondering the violent past of ancient Mexico, and how the psychogenic arrest of that culture may serve us to understand the dilemmas that the West faces today.
 
___________
The objective of the book is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering. If life allows, next time I will reproduce here the section on the Aztecs. Those interested in obtaining a copy of Day of Wrath can request it: here.

Categories
Child abuse Day of Wrath (book) Hegel Philosophy Psychiatry

Day of Wrath, 1

In philosophy the concept of alienation appears in the work of German philosophers. Entfremdung for example means “estrangement.” For Hegel alienation and estrangement refer to the moment of beginning to advance in oneself.

Such is my feeling of estrangement, or distance from Spanish speakers, that I stopped blogging in my native language when I realized that people did not leave intelligent comments in my racial blog or my anti-psychiatric blog. In the huge Spanish-speaking metropolis where I live it goes even worse: I do not love a single human being, I just loved my pet.

So in 2009 I started to comment on the forums in English. But it was not long before I began to feel, once again, distanced. In the comments section of Counter Currents for example, Andrew Hamilton once told me that my thinking was unfolding very rapidly. From a normie who knew nothing of the Jewish question, I passed relatively quickly to bicausalism A, then crossed the line to bicausalism B: something that most white nationalists do not like.

To rephrase what Francisco de Quevedo said about time (“el tiempo y yo somos dos”) I could say: humankind and I are two. This is probably because when I discovered the racialist sites, the fearsome spider-robot had already unplugged me from the cable that went from my neck to the Matrix. I mean that, unlike the wisdom accepted in white nationalism, the psychical implications of human childrearing is the most powerful taboo of humanity. Awakening to the Jewish question and the transvaluation of values à la Turner’s Diaries was easy compared to the central taboo of human societies. These latter awakenings—race, Jewish issue and fighting for an ethnic state—were easier than what the robot-spider did, like unplugging the secondary wires that went into Neo’s arms and back.

I think the primary unplug of my nape is what makes me feel an Other compared to humans, especially for the implications of that specific unplugging. What are these implications? Even now, ten years after I finished the first book on the subject, regular visitors of this site have no idea where I come from, nor have they realized what it means to be completely awake in the real world.

In the past, I have translated those texts of my book that give an idea of the trauma model of mental disorders: the model that blames abusive parents instead of the brain of their victims. Those translations, which on the way refute psychiatric pseudoscience, did not make a dent in my readers because what causes the disorders does not interest them. To them I tell you: if you are not unplugged from the central cable, you can never be drained out of the Matrix and see the real world with clean and clear eyes.

But the trauma model is only a prelude to understanding the development of human empathy from prehistory to the contemporary West. And an intrapsychic leap from what I call Neanderthalism to an elevated psychoclass evolves into the 4 words and days of true wrath…

I won’t even try to explain these obscure aphorisms in a blog entry. Rather I will link to the first two chapters of Day of Wrath:

• Dies Irae

• Why psychiatry is a false science

Categories
Pseudoscience Psychiatry

Robert Whitaker

Before blogging in English I used to write about the trauma model of mental disorders, which includes exposing a fraudulent profession taught at the universities: biological psychiatry.

There are two areas in which white nationalists are as integral part of the System as the common normie: economics and the so-called mental health professions. The truth is that the economics taught in the faculties of economics—the Keynesian model—is as pseudo-scientific as the medical model of mental disorders taught in medical schools.

On Fridays I’ve been adding chapters by Mike Maloney on why the Keynesian model will lead the world economy to a financial crisis. But the last decades I studied psychiatry intensely, and the product of my research appears in a site in Spanish. In addition, one of my writings demonstrates that psychiatry is a false science. That paper appears in the only book of my authorship that I have published in English.

Some visitors will find it rather incredible that what the System teaches as legit economics and mental health are two pseudo-scientific areas analogous to, say, parapsychology or the study of UFOs. They would do well to study the links I have been putting on this site. Although in The West’s Darkest Hour I’ve spoken relatively little of psychiatry (see e.g., the second link in my previous paragraph), the curious reader might start by watching this video of Robert Whitaker:

Robert Whitaker should not be confused with Robert W. Whitaker who died last month: the creator of the most famous mantra in white nationalism. The Robert Whitaker I am referring to is a journalist on medical matters. Although he is liberal in social affairs (cf. his ecumenism in the final part of the above interview) he is a very good communicator as to how the official psychiatric narrative is unscientific.

Categories
Free speech / association Islamization of Europe Pseudoscience Psychiatry

Psychiatry

Or:

Woe to you French hypocrites!

 
According to Robert Chardon, the mayor of a French town, “anyone that practises Islam must be immediately returned to the border”. Chardon posted his statements on May 14 in the internet. Psychiatric hospitalization of the mayor was announced the next day.

The mayor has cancer. A man with nothing to lose is certainly dangerous to the status quo. We must regard him a hero of free speech. But the French are hypocrites: they outrageously lie to themselves when thy claim they believe in free speech.

Apropos the 2015 Ile-de-France attacks I wrote this January that “together with niggers and sand niggers, Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, as a massive reaction against the killed, far-leftist journalists, have been waving the flags of every nation on the streets, chanting the ethno-suicidal slogans Liberté, égalité, fraternité! and Pour la démocratie, l’égalité, les libertés. Combattons tous les fascismes! that mark the modern West. These shocking TV images of the current Zeitgeist that afflicts not only Paris and France but the Western world certainly count for a million words…”

I call the French hypocrites because in those days of street manifestations supposedly championing free speech Brigitte Bardot was fined for “Islamophobic” statements, and who defended her on the streets?

As some of you know, before becoming racialist I spent my time researching child abuse (see e.g., the first long chapter of my Day of Wrath, linked on the sidebar). And since it’s very common that—believe it or not—psychiatry sides the abusive parents, I spent many years of my life researching psychiatry, and published my findings in Spanish (here). My point is that a psychiatry that sides abusive parents is the same psychiatry that recently committed Chardon for political incorrectness.

Daniel_Defoe

Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, was the first major writer to expose institutional psychiatry in an article where he complained that some husbands committed their sane wives. For those unfamiliar with the critique of psychiatry this is our definition of this fraudulent profession:

From viewpoint of science, and specifically on the basis of the litmus test to distinguish between science and pseudoscience, psychiatry, a supposed medical specialty, is not a science. The central concept in psychiatry, the entity called “mental illness” is not defined in biomedical but in political terms, and biological psychiatry has not presented its theories in a refutable way: a sure sign of pseudoscience.

From the viewpoint of politics and law, psychiatry is an organ of society that regulates human behaviour. It is a paralegal system of penalties of the System that uses psychoactive drugs for social control, including dissident individuals who have not broken the law (like Robert Chardon).

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche Pseudoscience Psychiatry Richard Wagner Stefan Zweig

A response to Kurwenal

Or:

Why am I reproducing excerpts of Zweig’s book?



In the other thread Kurwenal asked me:

Would it not be more enriching to find out why Rosenberg considered Nietzsche to be one of us rather than to discuss which Jewish author gives a more or less faithful account of Nietzsche’s life and theories.

I see your point, and let me say that this blog has paid due homage to Nietzsche in that sense. See these entries:

• “Atheist scum”

• “Quotable quote”

• “Nietzsche on the Aryan race”

• “Nietzsche on the institution of marriage”

Kurwenal again:

By the way, if you can spare one hour of your time, I have tried to summarize the importance of Wagner and Nietzsche for our cause [links to Counter-Currents added].

I am a huge fan of Richard Wagner too. A couple of days ago for example I had to do some driving in Mexico City and the only way I could protect my mind from the nasty surroundings was precisely by listening the complete Second Act of Parsifal. It worked! I didn’t feel so depressed even when navigating in a sea of non-white troglodytes.

But there’s something more as to why I am excerpting Zweig, and it is so important that I will promote this response as a separate blog entry.

The reason that many years ago I read Zweig’s book and Ross’ and Janz’s biographies of Nietzsche has nothing to do with the discussion in this thread. It has to do with my quest about why Nietzsche, and many other people, lost their minds.

Before arriving to the nationalist camp my field of interest was advancing a counter-hypothesis to the medical model of mental disorders, insofar as I believe that biological psychiatry is a pseudoscience. That’s what, originally, moved me to read thick volumes originally written in German about Nietzsche’s life.

One of my dreams is that, if an ethno-state is formed in North America, their architects will do tabula rasa on the fraudulent professions of mental health (a “therapeutic state” as some critics of psychiatry say). White people will have to rediscover a field of research that the current System started to bury since the late 1970s, and especially in the 80s and 90s. Presently very few remember the trauma model of mental disorders (I started a Wikipedia article under that title). And my big hope is that this model, which unlike biopsychiatry is not unscientific, will be considered very seriously in the new white nation.

The gist of this model is that biographical narrative is pivotal to understand the personal tragedies that drive some people mad. That is the reason why I am adding chapter excerpts of Zweig’s The Struggle with the Daimon. It has nothing to do with a desire to pathologize Nietzsche. As you can see in my linked posts above, he obviously had great insights on important subjects. But we also got to understand why some people with perfectly healthy brains suffer permanent psychotic breakdowns.

This is a “software” problem of the human mind, not a “hardware” problem as the current System wants us to believe. (See my book Hojas Susurrantes for a full explanation of it.)