Category: Psychology

Miller and deMause

Or:

The ten books that made an impact in my life
before I became racially conscious

9.- For Your Own Good by Alice Miller
(read in 2002)

10.- The Emotional Life of Nations by Lloyd deMause
(read in 2006)

In my review of books 5 and 6 I said, “That smart people seem to be drawn to sects has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with the human mind’s strayed ways of trying to cope with the unprocessed trauma of earlier experiences at home.” In other words, the root cause of my former alienation in cults and paranormal pseudosciences was, of course, the previous abuse I had experienced at home. Below I reproduce an index page of my now defunct antipsiquiatria.org webpage (2003-2010), specifically, a version of what used to be the page of the English section of my website, where I explained why I shifted focus from antipsychiatric subjects—the subject-matter of some of my previous entries—to the authors whom I am most indebted with:

My critique of psychiatry is now relegated to a second plane. The reason for such a drastic change is that in the last few years I have read two authors that have changed my worldview: Lloyd deMause, and Alice Miller who died earlier this year [this was written in 2010]. Though Miller and deMause do not focus on psychiatry, their legacy opened my eyes: it made me see that the child abuses in the psychiatric profession are only the tip of the iceberg of a much wider crime.

Since the times of our simian ancestors infanticide was common, and it continued through the prehistory of Homo sapiens in the ancient world. This can be gathered from the remains of the sacrificed victims. For example, in the city in which I live the ritual murder of children was regularly practiced before the Spanish conquest.

I confess that when I read deMause I was unprepared to face the vast body of historical evidence about infanticide, child mutilation, the tight and tortuous swaddling of babies, the ubiquity of incest and other horrors, many perpetrated through millennia. Once in a while I had to suspend my reading of one of his books to give me a break before the horrific nature of the revelations.

Similarly, the books of Alice Miller made me to delve deeply through the very core of my being: something that detonated an emotional atomic bomb. Miller is right when she states that the suffering of a child victim of extreme parental abuse can surpass the level of pain in a concentration camp for adults [for those who can read Spanish, cf. my chapter on Miller in my Hojas Susurrantes].

Due to what John Bowlby calls attachment, parents are the most notorious soul murderers. For those who have been emotionally crushed and years later have made contact with their inner being, this is obvious. However, it’s not obvious at all for most of mankind. Because of our attachment to the perpetrator, what we are dealing with is the foundational taboo of civilization: what Alice Miller called “the forbidden knowledge.”

♣

For the other eight books see here.

Tags Trauma model of mental disorders

Pseudoscience Psychiatry Psychoanalysis Psychology

Psychotherapy: the queen of the cults

Post author By C .T.
Post date June 14, 2012
10 Comments on Psychotherapy: the queen of the cults

Or:

The ten books that made an impact in my life
before I became racially conscious
7.- Final Analysis
(read in 1999)

Do you know that one of the editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the official diagnostic guide of the American Psychiatric Association used by all psychiatrists, holds that for a “patient” to state that a therapist is boring is a primary sign of “the self-defeating personality disorder”? I propose the following experiment to those racially conscious individuals who believe that psychotherapy on mental issues represents a legitimate profession: Make an appointment in the nearest therapist office and express your racial concerns.

Your concern will be immediately labeled as pathological by the professional whether he or she is a psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst or a clinical psychologist.

I have devoted one of my most thoughtful papers to the subject of pseudoscience in biological psychiatry, but have not touched the subject of the non-psychiatric professions in the so-called “mental health” field. Here I would like to mention the book that has debunked psychoanalysis as ferociously as Phil Klass debunked the field of UFOlogy, or as James Randi, mentioned in my previous entry, has been exposing the “psychics” for decades. I refer to Jeffrey Masson’s Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst.

Final Analysis is, by far, the most searing exposé of psychoanalysis that I am aware of. Keep in mind that Masson was a Harvard professor, a prominent psychoanalyst and that later, when he realized that his own profession was a fraud, Masson completely abandoned the very lucrative practice of therapy.

Only from the literary point of view, Final Analysis is a treat: Masson’s misadventures in the cult of psychotherapy are as readable as any entertaining novel. It is true that, as a typical liberal, Masson ignores that race matters. But the above thought-experiment that any racialist could put into practice to check for himself the legitimacy of the therapeutic profession, moves me to quote Masson’s final words of his book:

There are no experts in loving,
no scholars of living,
no doctors of the human emotions
and no gurus of the soul.

♣

For the other nine books see here.

Autobiography Parapsychology Pseudoscience Psychology

Parapsychology

Or:

The ten books that made an impact in my life
before I became racially conscious

5.- A Skeptic’s Handbook of Parapsychology
(autographed inscription 1989)

6.- The Relentless Question
(autographed inscription 1990)

In “The Sickle” I said this Tuesday that I arrived to the San Francisco airport in 1985. Living in San Rafael the very first days after my arrival to the US, I paid a visit to San Francisco and found in a bookstore the just released A Skeptic’s Handbook of Parapsychology. I remember a pic of James Randi on the dust cover among other notable skeptics and wanted to purchase the book. Alas, I didn’t since I had very limited economic resources and was only starting to look for a job at Marin County.

I mention this little anecdote because had I purchased the book I could have been spared from the extremely agonic stage in California. As explained in “The Sickle,” when I lived there I was immersed in the fantasy to “force the eschaton in history.”

But how do I know that my Quixotic—to say the least—endeavor that so much suffering caused could have been avoided by a book? Because when I returned to Mexico, in 1989 the main contributors to the skeptical handbook, Ray Hyman, James Alcock, Paul Kurtz and James Randi visited my native town and, finally, I could afford to purchase A Skeptic’s Handbook of Parapsychology: which started a cognitive process that completely and absolutely disabused me from my “eschatological” beliefs.

Well, it’s more complicated than just a single book. In fact, after these skeptics visited Mexico City I subscribed The Skeptical Inquirer and ordered many books on the paranormal published by the skeptical contributors of Kurtz’s group. If I chose a single book to convey the fact that the process of reading them started an apostasy process of my belief in ESP and PK (again, cf. “The Sickle”) it’s because the copy of A Skeptic’s Handbook that I own was signed by Kurtz in front of me on November 12, 1985.

My previous post was about Childhood’s End, the novel that most influenced my life. I recognize that it must sound crazy that someone took a novel so seriously as to believe that the eschaton could be forced by purely psychic means in the real world. How could I have fallen into such grandiose delusion? (A couple of days ago Deviance, a commenter put it this way, “When I read you, Chechar, I wonder if intelligence is a blessing or a curse—smart people seem to be drawn to sects, cults, pseudosciences and false theories of all sorts…”) The answer is devastatingly simple.

A pseudoscience is a system that pretends to be scientific but that is not. In other threads of this blog I have stated that the process of debunking a sophisticated pseudoscience requires an extraordinary input of energy. You need to be a specialist in a specific pseudoscience (e.g., a skeptical specialist in parapsychology, another in UFOlogy, still another on a very specific conspiracy theory such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, etc). The sheer mass of literature and conferences on purported conspiracies of, say, the assassination of JFK, is such—thousands of books—that it took Vincent Bugliosi twenty years of research to address and refute each claim.

Generally, people who believe in pseudosciences, cults or conspiracy theories never dare to seriously study the critics of their cherished beliefs. That’s precisely the religious mindset: never listen to the critics. Although I was ready to listen when, standing in a San Francisco bookstore I learnt that a skeptical handbook had just been released, I was so sure that parapsychologists had demonstrated the existence of “psi” that I didn’t bother to listen the other side even when I finally got a job in California.

When I believed in the existence of paranormal phenomena, John Beloff of Edinburg University (right), who eventually became my editor in parapsychological matters, was the single most important author that convinced me of the realities of such phenomena. Again, just as I chose A Skeptic’s Handbook as a paradigm of the literature that eventually would became a vaccination for my mind, if I mention Beloff’s The Relentless Question it is only because he sent me by mail a copy of his book with his longhand inscription: “For C. T. who has the courage of his convictions from John Beloff, June 1990.”

When I received The Relentless Question I had already read much of what Beloff had written in professional journals, including some of the articles contained in his book. Just as A Skeptic’s Handbook of Parapsychology is representative of what I may call a vaccination, The Relentless Question is representative of the continuing infection that took place in my cognitive process since I left Eschatology for the more “scientific” parapsychological research.

To answer Deviance, that “smart people seem to be drawn to sects, cults and pseudosciences” has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with the human mind’s strayed ways of trying to cope with the unprocessed trauma of earlier experiences at home. This of course goes beyond the reach of this entry, but I nevertheless mention The Relentless Question because it is written in the terse, academic language by a respected professor of the psychology department of a well-known European university: the only university that held an academic chair of parapsychology in the western world.

In the previous incarnation of this blog Lawrence Auster discussed with me the subject of parapsychology: he as a believer and I as a former believer (now turned skeptic). For those who have not made their minds as to whether paranormal phenomena might be real or not, these two books, one edited by the founder of a skeptical group, the other authored by a late professor, are good starting points to listen to both sides of the debate.

♣

For the other eight books see here.

Pseudoscience Psychiatry Psychology

Laing and Anti-Psychiatry

Or:

The ten books that made an impact in my life
before I became racially conscious
3.- Laing and Anti-Psychiatry
(read in 1983)

Sometimes it is not an entire book what causes a deep impression in one’s values and worldview. Sometimes it is a single chapter; a single phrase.

The overwhelming majority of white nationalists are unaware of the fact that psychiatry is a false science. I mean: psychiatry is as false as, say, the Boasian anthropology that has become axiomatic throughout all anthropology departments in the West.

Before I entered the racialist arena I devoted quite a few years of my life to research this pseudoscience. The result was a massive exposé of psychiatry that benefited the Spanish-speaking people (for example, today I learnt that a blog was started with the title of one of my book chapters exposing the history of psychiatry).

The whys of the toleration of a pseudoscience within the academia and throughout the West have to do with the fact that the basic etiology of mental disorders lies in the abusive modes of parenting. But this truth has become a heresy in a world that only aims to perpetuate the status quo, including those nuclear families run by abusive parents.

When in 1983, standing in a bookstore because I was too poor to purchase the book, I read the interview of psychiatrist Theodore Lidz in Laing and Anti-Psychiatry, I corroborated what I suspected: that some parents are driving their children mad. Lidz’s words that a schizophrenogenic mother simply cannot conceive that her child sees the world with different eyes than her own made a huge impression on me to understand the dynamics in my own family.

More recently I have extensively written on this subject in Spanish, of which I have translated only a fraction to English (e.g., here and here). But all of my writing was possible only thanks to my reading this Lidz interview in a bookstore almost thirty years ago with no soft sofas. Lidz was one of the very very few psychiatrists that dismissed the medical model of mental disorders taken for granted in his own profession and proposed a trauma model instead. Abusive parents are the real and only culprits for the emotional fall of their offspring; blaming the child’s brain or the child’s genes, as his colleagues do, is a political rather that a scientific endeavor.

It is worth saying that when I lived in Houston I phoned Lidz, who was already in his nineties, and he appeared as warm and lucid as if he was in his prime. How different from Ronald Laing, the guru whose last name was chosen for the title of the book’s collection of anti-psychiatric essays. (In his later writing Laing looked like an intellectual snob rather than someone who fully sided the child against the all-out assault perpetrated at home in some extremely dysfunctional families.)

Laing and Anti-Psychiatry was published in 1971. Those who are under the impression that psychiatry has since proven the biomedical basis of mental stress and disorders would do a favor to themselves by reading the much more recent How to Become a Schizophrenic: The Case Against Biological Psychiatry by John Modrow (whom by the way I used to correspond).

♣

For the other nine books see here.

Tags Trauma model of mental disorders

Psychology

The character of Harold Covington

Post author By C .T.
Post date June 7, 2012
15 Comments on The character of Harold Covington

From the desk of Covington:

In May of 2010 I received an e-mail from someone asking me the question “Harold, why does everybody talk bad about you on the internet?” I restrained my first instinct to ask him to define the term “everybody” and responded. His questions are [indented]:

That said, it has to be asked, where does all this anti-Covington hatred come from? I know no one else who inspires this kind of reaction.

—Gregory H.

Lordy, lordy, where to begin, where to begin?

I just got back from an organizing road trip into Idaho and so I am catching up with all kinds of backed-up e-mails, a news commentary column, several blogs, and other stuff, so right now I don’t have time to sit down and tap out a long Philippic on this topic. I will give you the simplest and briefest answer(s) that I can.

First off, I am sure it is no news to you that our movement has a lot of people associated with it who have no business within a hundred miles of any kind of alternative politics. We have serious character issues, and since they are largely what is preventing us from mounting an effective resistance to the crisis in our civilization, I refuse to be polite and look the other way. I say out loud what has to be said. I hold up mirrors, and a lot of people don’t like what they see.

Secondly, as the late Dr. Pierce once put it to me in the last civil letter he ever addressed to me, “The problem is, Harold, that we are all chasing the same buck.” Bluntly put, a lot of the anti-Covington mess originates either directly or indirectly from certain Fearless Leaders who don’t appreciate even my limited competition for that same buck. I think a little research will reveal that a large part of the somewhat misnamed Movement in-fighting over the past 50 years between all manner of personalities and groups on the right has its roots in competition for the donation dollar.

Third, a lot of these people who are doing this are simply insane. The internet has allowed too many people to get in touch with their Inner Nut, and when some of us sit down behind the computer keyboard we get a visit from Mr. Hyde. I know because I am susceptible to this myself, and I concede there have been times when I have let the badger loose to howl at the moon, if you will pardon my mixed metaphors, so I know whereof I speak.

Finally, as self-absorbed and conspiracy-theoretical as this sounds, in the case of one major Goat Dancer, I genuinely believe this man to be wearing more than one hat and to be acting on an ulterior agenda. I don’t know for certain. He may be just a kook, but if he is, he has demonstrated a remarkably consistent, persistent, and determined pattern of destructive behavior over the past 23 years for a mere loon. Remember, just because you’re paranoid, that don’t mean they ain’t out to get you. Paranoids have enemies too.

Is there any specific allegation, accusation, or incident I can clarify for you?

—HAC

[Follow-up e-mail]:

The big claim that is made is that you defamed a lot of people within the movement.

—Gregory H.

If by “defamed” you mean that over the years I have publicly discussed people, issues, and events which certain Fearless Leaders desperately did not want discussed in public, then guilty, m’lud. I also have a hideous habit of being right. For instance, I was shouting out a warning on Kevin Alfred Strom as early as the year 2000, when I saw his web site with the pictures of little girls and beefcake photos of himself posing in his underwear on it.

Specifically, that allegedly you wrote this history of the white nationalist movement that contained a great deal of scurrilous material about all sorts of people within the movement including William Pierce, Ben Klassen, and Will Williams.

The document you refer to is a roughly 30,000 word monograph or pamphlet entitled A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement. Actually, Will Williams isn’t mentioned in it at all, which is probably why he’s so pissed off about it.

In point of fact, no, I did not write the Brief History. At least not all of it, and not for that specific purpose. What happened is that somebody came along and plagiarized, collected, and collated a number of articles and bits and pieces from the past 50 years on Movement internal matters and melded them all together into a single report or long article. Some of that “borrowed” material is mine, yes, such as the bulk of the section on Glenn Miller and a good bit of the material on Benny Klassen.

But the Brief History also contains sections which were either written or paraphrased from works by Bill White, Louis Beam, the late Rick Cooper, Dr. Edward Fields, the late David McCalden, “Maguire” and a number of other writers and commentators.

However, I will say this: whoever wrote the Brief History, they know their beeswax. While to be sure some of it is opinion and editorializing, I have been able to find only one single factual inaccuracy anywhere in the report, the allusion to the “late” Bradley Smith, who is still alive. I think that’s another thing that’s driving the Goat Dancers nuts—they can’t refute anything in the report factually, so they scream “HAC wrote it! HAC wrote it!” which they presume must automatically discredit the document.

The hell of it is, the Brief History is not in fact all that pro-HAC or pro-Northwest. The author makes clear that he is not a supporter of the Northwest Migration and that he thinks I’m foolishly wasting my time.

I know none of the people involved and have no way to tell who is right and who is wrong. The temptation is therefore to just say, “everyone involved with this movement is insane and incapable of getting along with each other. We should read everyone’s ideas, but have nothing to do with these people on a personal level or we’ll get sucked into all this too.”

Which may be one reason for all the sound and fury.

You have to bear in mind that most of these specific teapot tempests are decades old, shit going back to the late 1970s in some cases. I have often wondered why none of it ever seems to die down, why someone always seems to go to great effort stirring it up again every couple of years.

One person who I gave the books to some time ago has actually taken the gap but told me that under no circumstances did he actually want to get involved with the “official” Northwest Front because he didn’t know who to trust. Again, that may be the hidden agenda here. I’m not worried. This person will eventually come around.

How do we know who to believe?

Look at my work, look at my life, look at the people who are saying these things–none of whom seem to use their real names–look at the world around you, and then wonder why we have gotten nowhere in our efforts to resist. What can I tell you? You’ve read my novels. Everything I have to say is in there.

—HAC

Good points. The last one I have to ask about is probably the most painful — your brother. Why do you think he turned on you the way he did?

Hopefully after this we can talk about more productive matters. —Gregory H.

No, I have no problem at all discussing Benjie, since he took the first step and went public with his bizarre interview. He chose to do what he did, and now I have no choice but to deal with it.

Prior to that I had been active in the Movement since 1972. During that period of almost four decades, never once did I bring any member of my family into anything I did politically, nor did I ever make any public reference to any family matters other than an internet attempt around 2004 and 2005 to communicate with my children in Ireland, using a blog because I had no e-mail addresses for them. Nor did my father, for all his many faults, ever publicly attack or denounce or embarrass me. Benjie was the one who first violated this ironclad family prohibition. Not surprisingly, he lacks our father’s strength of will and self-discipline in such matters. He’s not the man our father was. (But then neither am I, thank God.)

I first need to give you a little family history. Like many dysfunctional families, we Covingtons are also a highly creative lot, each in our own way. Our father was a talented musical performer of traditional American folk music, who during the folk craze of the 1960s used to open on the North Carolina coffee house circuit for big names like Joan Baez, Burl Ives, and Pete Seeger. He had his own musical TV show on TV in Greensboro for a while. He was also a writer of paperback Westerns of the kind that were popular in the 1950s and he once came close to getting a Hollywood screenwriting gig, which would have changed a hell of a lot of my personal history if I’d been dragged to Tinsel Town at age 8 or so.

My middle brother is a fairly well known B-list composer of symphonic, choral, and other high-brow music. He has a masters degree in musical composition, of all the useless things, but he apparently didn’t actually get his Ph D. from the University of Iowa for some reason I’m not aware of, so technically he’s not Doctor Covington. You can buy his stuff off various music sites on the internet, but since I sell most of my own work on Amazon.com and the like, I’m hardly in a position to sneer.

I’ve listened to some of his music. Not my cup of tea, frankly, but then I rather doubt that my fiction is his cup of tea. At least I listened to his compositions on my computer. So far as I know, neither he nor my other brother have ever actually read any of my books. The interview you refer to with Benjie contains comments of his that indicate to me he hasn’t actually read Fire and Rain, the novel he complains about, and so I doubt he’s read anything else.

My daughter in Ireland is an extremely talented up-and-coming young artist in Dublin, and I will say no more about her for fear of messing up her chances in a very liberal and left-wing milieu. I understand she is recently married; if she was speaking to me I’d be hectoring her demanding grandchildren. My son in Ireland is the rock musician of the family, or was. Don’t know what he’s doing now, delivering pizzas for all I know, but apparently at one time he had a fairly well known rock band in the local Dublin club scene for a while.

Now, regarding my youngest brother, who later went so dark side on me: this is the story I got from our mother. Very few details, because Mama wasn’t supposed to be meeting with me at all in those days and she was very reluctant to discuss most family matters with me, for fear I would contaminate everything with my wicked Nazi mojo or whatever, but basically, the story goes like this:

Benjie was supposed to be the actor in the family. Graduated North Carolina School of the Arts, and faced the usual young actor or theatrical techie’s choice: Broadway or Hollywood? Nowadays there’s a few more choices, Europe or Vancouver or various indie outfits, but in the 70s there were only those two.

For whatever reason, Benjie chose Broadway. He lived in New York for a couple of years, fell flat on his face, and he couldn’t make it. He eventually came crawling back home and went to work for the state, which in conservative North Carolina is what one does with unemployed relations who can’t make it in the private sector.

Okay, so far not an unusual scenario. A lot of young dramatic hotshots who go to New York never make it onto Broadway and end up waiting tables or going back home and selling used cars for Daddy, or teaching freshman high school English. But this was back during the time when I was still having my Fifteen Minutes due to Greensboro and the 1980 Republican primary wherein I received 43% of the vote. My name was well known among the Jewish community, and in an industry such as theater in New York, an industry and a city both run by Jews, a young man from North Carolina with the name of Covington looking for a job was going to have a hard row to hoe.

My mother could never force any sort of admission between her lips that I might, just might have been right about something, anything. The Official Version is that I am supposed to be insane, period, end of story. Oh, and evil with it—but she managed to feed me enough lines to read between (deliberately, I think, so she could convey the truth without actually having to say it) so as to let me know that my brother was in essence blacklisted by the Jews. They conveyed to him in a manner the reverse of subtle that he would never work in their town and to get his redneck ass back down to the tobacco and cotton fields where he belonged. There was also something about a bad car crash Benjie was in on the New Jersey turnpike that allegedly affected his mind, but I didn’t get all that at the time and I don’t remember what that was about.

Anyway, the upshot of it all is, is that Benjie probably blames me for ruining his great acting career. I don’t blame him. Teaching a few high school dramatics classes to niggers and wetbacks at East Wake High School is sure as hell a big comedown when you once started life with Oscars and Tonys on your mind. Maybe you could say I did ruin his chances, although it was completely inadvertent on my part. Or maybe he just didn’t have the chops for it, and he washed out on his own. I have no way of knowing.

You would think that after an experience like that he would blame the people who are really at fault, the Jews and the whole system that subjected him to a political litmus test rather than judging him on his actual talent and character, but I long ago learned that people aren’t very logical in these matters.

And that’s about the size of it. I am really sorry that crap like this has to be dealt with in public instead of truly great and serious ideas and deeds and people, but one of the many problems we have these days is that everything has become so petty.

There is an old saying: “Great minds talk about ideas; average minds talk about events; little minds talk about people.” We have an awful lot of little minds running around these days.

—HAC

Conspiracy theories Holocaust Psychiatry Psychology

Popular Mechanics on 9/11

Post author By C .T.
Post date May 25, 2012
37 Comments on Popular Mechanics on 9/11

Ever since in an article of a white nationalist blogsite I was called “a Jew” and that my “behavior indicates that he’s a Jew” (by “behavior” the author meant my criticism of the truther movement), I realized that truthers suffer from huge psychological issues. For example, a commenter in that article’s thread who has the Truth Movement as a sort of litmus test for what he believes is the true nationalist, stated that the other “‘WN’ bloggers… are probably posting from Tel Aviv.”

While demonstrating that I am not a Jew is quite easy in these times of DNA tests, what I found disturbing is the notion that those who strongly disagree with truthers must be Jews, or even conspiracists themselves.

The following excerpts, taken from James B. Meigs’ foreword and afterword of Debunking 9/11 Myths corroborate that truthers are a little paranoid to say the least. Meigs is, technically, our foe—he writes as if “racism” and “anti-Semitism” were something wrong. Nonetheless, I find his arguments demystifying conspiracy theories compelling (no ellipsis added):

Foreword

Popular Mechanics set out to investigate conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks in late 2004, just as those claims were emerging from the swamps of extremist websites and radical Islamist organizations. We had no idea how much trouble we were about to stir up. Our first magazine article on the topic, which appeared in the March 2005 issue, closely examined the major scientific, military, aeronautical, and engineering-based claims commonly cited as evidence that 9/11 was, as conspiracy theorists like to say, an inside job. Our investigation found no evidence in support of the conspiracy claims.

The article unleashed a flood of criticisms and accusations from those supporting such theories. These attacks ranged from the preposterous (it was said our magazine had published this investigation on orders from a cabal of Masons and Illuminati) to alarming (death threats were referred to our security department). Clearly, we had touched a nerve. The article quickly became the most widely read story in the history of Popular Mechanics’ Web site, with over 7.5 million views. (A detailed account of the reaction to our article, and what that reaction says about the conspiracy movement, can be found in the original afterword to this book on page 121 [see below].)

A team of Popular Mechanics reporters and editors then started work on a far more detailed book-length version of the report. By the time the first edition of this book was published in the summer of 2006, the 9/11 conspiracy furor was reaching a tipping point. The flurry of books on the topic had grown into an avalanche, with certain writers, such as former Claremont School of Theology professor David Ray Griffin, building a thriving cottage industry around the topic. Conspiracy fans had, with Orwellian overtones, taken to calling themselves “the 9/11 Truth Movement,” or simply “truthers.” Extremist talk radio programs such as The Alex Jones Show pushed the issue nonstop. And a video pastiche of conspiracy theories, a quasi-documentary known as Loose Change, was becoming an Internet sensation.

Popular Mechanics’ 9/11 project represented one of the relatively few attempts by mainstream journalists to grapple seriously with the conspiracy theory claims. So it was telling that most conspiracy theorists quickly decided that Popular Mechanics too was part of the conspiracy. In their minds, all our research could therefore be rejected a priori. We had run head on into a worldview that some experts call “conspiracism.” It is a mind-set that insists on reaching a predetermined conclusion regardless of what information is presented. Any facts that don’t fit the conspiracy paradigm need to be explained away. Since 2004, leading 9/11 theorist David Ray Griffin has written seven books and edited two others on the subject of 9/11. He devoted a chapter in his book, Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory, to explain why, in his view, the 9/11 reporting by Popular Mechanics and other mainstream journalists is invalid.

Griffin’s book devotes many pages to the idea that Popular Mechanics and our parent company, the Hearst Corporation, are somehow implicated in the vast conspiracy he sees behind 9/11. He digs up century-old controversies and finds tenuous links between the magazine’s staff and various government officials. But he never explains how a magazine—much less a major corporation—could possibly convince its employees to help cover up the most notorious mass murder in our nation’s history. Popular Mechanics has close to 30 editorial staffers and dozens of freelance contributors. Does Griffin imagine that whenever we hire new editors I bring them into a secret bunker and initiate them into an ultraclandestine society for world domination? Why wouldn’t such prospective employees run screaming from our building? In the years since we began our work on 9/11 conspiracy theories, a number of our staffers have moved on to other jobs. What would stop them from revealing a conspiracy that, if true, would be one of the biggest journalistic scoops in history? Did we swear them all to lifetime secrecy? As with so many conspiracy claims, the whole elaborate fantasy becomes practically laughable on close examination.

The original Popular Mechanics article addressed 16 of the most common 9/11 conspiracy claims. The first edition of this book expanded that list by four, and added much more detail. As a result, many of the more adept theorists simply moved on to new theories, or shifted their focus to issues that our team had not covered as deeply. For example, at the time we published the first edition, there was still no definitive account of why World Trade Center 7—which was not hit by planes, only damaged by debris—also collapsed. Not surprisingly, as the truther community moved away from talk about missiles and pods, it began focusing obsessively on elaborate theories concerning WTC 7. (With the benefit of much more detailed engineering analysis, this edition addresses—and debunks—those WTC 7 claims in depth.)

It is hard to argue without facts. And yet that is the position in which 9/11 conspiracists increasingly find themselves. One by one, the key factual underpinnings of their theories have been demolished. But still they argue on, their passionate conviction undiminished.

In the end, the truther community’s tendency toward unintentional self-parody has perhaps done as much to undermine its credibility as has the work of Popular Mechanics. Just when the conspiracy movement seemed to be making real headway toward deeply influencing American culture, a funny thing happened: it began to turn into a punch line. South Park offered a brutal parody of the conspiracist worldview in an episode called “Mystery of the Urinal Deuce.” Comedian Jon Stewart started tweaking truthers on The Daily Show, at one point holding up a sign reading “9/11 WAS AN OUTSIDE JOB.” And, in a common-sense answer to the vast legion of conspiracy-oriented websites, an assortment of sharp, and often satirical, blogs has emerged to challenge the truthers on their own turf. In particular, the blog Screw Loose Change offers devastating analysis of the truther community, and links to point-by-point rebuttals to the claims advanced in Loose Change.

Of course, conspiracy theories involving 9/11 will never fully go away. And a book like this, no matter how widely reported or carefully updated, will never convince the most dedicated conspiracists. But, on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, it is important to have a clear, objective, and thorough response to the consistently false and deeply malicious claims of the conspiracy movement.

New York City
2011

Afterword

On February 7, 2005, I [James Meigs] became a member of the Bush/Halliburton/Zionist/CIA/New World Order/Illuminati conspiracy for global domination. It was on that day the March 2005 issue of Popular Mechanics, with its cover story debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories, hit newsstands. Within hours, the online community of 9/11 conspiracy buffs—which calls itself the “9/11 Truth Movement”—was aflame with wild fantasies about me and my staff, the magazine I edit, and the article we had published.

We had begun our plunge down the rabbit hole. Within hours, a post on www.portland.indymedia.org, which claims to be dedicated to “radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of truth,” called me “James Meigs the Coward and Traitor.” Not long afterward, another prominent conspiracy theorist produced an analysis that concluded that Popular Mechanics is a CIA front organization. Invective and threats soon clogged the comments section of our Web site and poured in by e-mail:

YOU HAVE DECLARD YOURSELF ENEMY OF AMERICANS AND FRIEND OF THE MOSSAD!

In a few short weeks, Popular Mechanics had gone from being a 100-year-old journal about science, engineering, car maintenance, and home improvement to being a pivotal player in a global conspiracy on a par with Nazi Germany. Not all the responses were negative, of course. One visitor to our Web site, after plowing through dozens of angry comments, left a supportive post that included this astute observation:

Some people are open to any possibility, and honestly examine all evidence in a rational manner to come to a conclusion, followed by a moral evaluation. Others start with a desire for a specific moral evaluation, and then work backwards assembling any fact that supports them, and dismissing any fact that does not.

As the hate mail poured in and articles claiming to have debunked the magazine’s analysis proliferated online, we soon learned to identify the key techniques that give conspiracy theorists their illusion of coherence.

Marginalization of Opposing Views

The 9/11 Truth Movement invariably describes the mainstream account of 9/11 as the “government version” or “the official version.” In fact, the generally accepted account of 9/11 is made up of a multitude of sources: thousands of newspaper, TV, and radio reports produced by journalists from all over the world; investigations conducted by independent organizations and institutions, including the American Society of Civil Engineers, Purdue University, Northwestern University, Columbia University, the National Fire Protection Association, and Underwriters Laboratories, Inc.; eyewitness testimony from literally thousands of people; recordings and transcripts of phone calls, air traffic control transmissions, and other communications; thousands of photographs; thousands of feet of video footage; and, let’s not forget the words of Osama bin Laden, who discussed the operation in detail on more than one occasion, including in an audio recording released in May 2006 that said: “I am responsible for assigning the roles of the 19 brothers to conduct these conquests…”

The mainstream view of 9/11 is, in other words, a vast consensus. By presenting it instead as the product of a small coterie of insiders, conspiracists are able to ignore facts they find inconvenient and demonize people with whom they disagree.

Argument by Anomaly

In an article about the Popular Mechanics 9/11 report, Scientific American columnist Michael Shermer makes an important observation about the conspiracist method: “The mistaken belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking (as well as creationism, Holocaust denial [Post-script note of 2018: Presently I don’t believe this belongs to conspiratorial thinking] and the various crank theories of physics). All the ‘evidence’ for a 9/11 conspiracy falls under the rubric of this fallacy.”

A successful scientific theory organizes masses of information into a coherent, well-tested narrative. When a theory has managed to explain the real world accurately enough for long enough, it becomes accepted as fact. Conspiracy theorists, Shermer points out, generally ignore the mass of evidence that supports the mainstream view and focus strictly on tiny anomalies. But, in a complex and messy world, the fact that there might be a few details we don’t yet understand should not be surprising.

A good example is the conspiracist fascination with the collapse of 7 World Trade Center. Since the 47-story tower was not hit by an airplane, only by the debris of the North Tower, investigators weren’t sure at first just how or why it collapsed hours after the attacks. A scientist (or for that matter, a journalist or historian) might see that gap in our knowledge as an opportunity for further research (see “WTC 7: Fire and Debris Damage,” page 53). In the conspiracy world, however, even a hint of uncertainty is a chance to set a trap. If researchers can’t “prove” exactly how the building fell, they say, then there is only one other possible conclusion: Someone blew it up.

♣

My comment:

Meigs’ afterword goes on for other ten pages but the excerpts quoted above give the picture: a psychological analysis of the truther mentality goes to the core to understand the movement. For instance, this “Someone blew WTC 7 up” is exactly what I call “paleologic” modes of mentation, and illustrated it with a classic example by a psychiatrist: “If the Greeks are afflicted by epidemics, it is because Phoebus wants to punish Agamemnon.” (“Paleologism” is the subject of some chapters of my book.)

Re the Scientific American statement about “holocaust denial” cited above even Mark Weber, a revisionist historian and current director of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) who has authored over a hundred articles relating to holocaust claims, has acknowledged that “it cannot be disputed” that “millions [of Jews] were forced from their homes; millions lost their lives” (listen the April 25, 2012 “Mark Weber Report: Holocaust Deceit, Remembrance and Reality”).

Contrary to what WN truthers claim, I believe that rejecting 9/11 conspiracy theories, and seriously considering the new approach to holocaust studies represented by Irmin Vinson, Mark Weber and David Irving are the mark of the mature nationalist.

American civil war Christendom Deranged altruism Egalitarianism Enlightenment French Revolution Individualism Kevin MacDonald Liberalism Psychology Slavery

Our loose screw

That Whites have got a loose screw is patent even in the writing of the foremost expert on how the Jews are capitalizing on it. In an article at his webzine, The Occidental Observer, Kevin MacDonald put it in simple terms:

My view is that moral universalism and guilt are aspects of individualism as an ethnic trait of Europeans (see here, p. 23ff). These traits are profoundly maladaptive in the modern world where they have been used as swords by the historic enemies of Europeans and their civilization. European individualist culture creates morally defined ingroups rather than ingroups based on kinship, with high levels of altruistic punishment against violators. The Puritan-Yankee culture that was so influential in shaping America is a prominent example, as in the movement to abolish slavery in the 19th century and the Civil Rights movement in the 20th century. These morally defined ingroups function to prevent defection in societies not based on biological relatedness. Guilt then functions as a negative emotion motivating people to adhere to group norms. The success of the culture of the Holocaust in manufacturing guilt is testimony to the continuing success of this strategy.

The strategy of Jewish intellectual movements for destroying Europeans and their culture has been to convince the Europeans of their own moral bankruptcy. Jewish intellectual movements have presented Judaism as morally superior to European civilization and European civilization as morally bankrupt and the proper target of altruistic punishment. The consequence is that once Europeans are convinced of their own moral depravity, they will destroy their own people in a fit of altruistic punishment.

More technically, at The Occidental Quarterly (TOQ), the academic journal for white studies, Prof. MacDonald approaches the same subject in more abstract terms (e.g., “the free-rider problem,” “altruistic punishment,” etc.) that require previous knowledge from the reader about esoteric fields of inquiry such as evolutionary psychology among humans.

In an article published last year at TOQ MacDonald wrote:

It is noteworthy that the French Revolution had pronounced egalitarian, anti-aristocratic trends, often couched in the language of moral ingroups and outgroups in opposition to the aristocracy. For example, the moral condemnation of social hierarchy by the Jacobin radicals during the French Revolution is a major theme of Lothrop Stoddard’s The French Revolution in San Domingo. Thus Stoddard notes the hatred toward the White slave-owning colonists. During the height of the Reign of Terror, colonists sent home to France were greeted, in the words of one such unfortunate, with “a furious hatred… A hatred so intense that our most terrible misfortunes did not excite the slightest commiseration.” At the same time, mulatto and Black delegates from San Domingo were greeted with delirious applause.

Such sentiments recall the moral fervor of the Puritan-descended Yankee abolitionists in the period prior to the American Civil War. For example, for Orestes Brownson (1803–1876), a prominent publicist and activist, the Civil War was a moral crusade waged not only to preserve the union, but to emancipate the slaves. He argued “for the unity of races and the inherent dignity of each person, and he lambasted Southerners for trying to enlarge their political base” by adding to the number of slave states. Writing in 1840, Brownson claimed that we should “realize in our social arrangements and in the actual conditions of all men that equality of man and man” that God had established but which had been destroyed by capitalism. According to Brownson, Christians had to

bring down the high, and bring up the low; to break the fetters of the bound and set the captive free; to destroy all oppression, establish the reign of justice, which is the reign of equality, between man and man; to introduce new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness, wherein all shall be as brothers, loving one another, and no one possessing what another lacketh.

It’s interesting that whereas the aristocratic-egalitarian military groups emphasized by Duchesne produced cohesion and loyalty as a result of fealty to a successful leader (rather than on the basis of kinship), the East Anglian model for cohesion was the creation of moral and ideological bases of group cohesion (rather than on the basis of kinship). These two models are thus variants on the individualist theme. The Puritans famously imposed penalties on people who departed from the moral/ideological strictures of the society. They were also willing to incur great costs to impose their moral/ideological version of truth. Puritan “ordered liberty” was the freedom to act within the confines of the moral order. This might be called the paradox of individualism: In order to form cohesive groups, individualists have at times erected strong social controls on individual behavior that result in group cohesion.

The logic connecting these tendencies to the individualist hunter-gather model is obvious: Like all humans in a dangerous and difficult world, hunter-gatherers need to develop cohesive, cooperative in-groups. But rather than base them on known kinship relations, the prototypical egalitarian-individualist groups of the West are based on reputation and trust. Egalitarian-individualists create moral-ideological communities in which those who violate public trust and other manifestations of the moral order are shunned, ostracized, and exposed to public humiliation—a fate that would have resulted in evolutionary death during the harsh ecological period of the Ice Age—, the same fate as the derelict father who refused to provision his children.

A possible evolutionary legacy of this phenomenon is a greater tendency to engage in what social scientists term “altruistic punishment,” defined as punishment of people who depart from the moral-ideological consensus that costs the punisher. A cooperative culture derived from European hunter-gathers would be expected to be characterized by high levels of altruistic punishment directed at free-riders. This is studied in a game among strangers who donate to a common pot that is increased by a set multiplier by the experimenter and then divided equally. Free riders contribute little but get all the benefits. Altruistic punishers incur costs to punish the cheaters. This punishment is motivated by moral outrage. Because it is played among strangers, the game mimics individualistic societies. Whatever the political and economic complexities that led to the Civil War, it was the Yankee moral condemnation of slavery that inspired and justified the massive carnage of closely related Anglo Americans on behalf of slaves from Africa. Militarily, the war with the Confederacy was the greatest sacrifice in lives and property ever made by Americans.

The Puritans tended to pursue utopian causes framed as moral issues, not hesitating to endure high costs in order to punish those who violated the moral norms of the ingroup. They were prone to utopian appeals to a “higher law” and the belief that government’s principal purpose is moral. New England was the most fertile ground for “the perfectability of man creed,” and the “father of a dozen ‘isms’.” It goes without saying that all of the great European wars of the 20th century have been rationalized in moral terms—to secure the Enlightenment ideals of freedom, democracy, and individual rights against the state.

To conclude, my proposal is that the culture of the West as it developed in the modern era owes much more to egalitarian individualism than to aristocratic individualism. It’s interesting that all of the intellectual movements discussed in The Culture of Critique involved moral indictments of the West and its history of slavery, segregation, colonialism, anti-Semitism, exclusion of Jews from the Protestant elite. Clearly the most egregious of these moral failings stem from the cultural strand of aristocratic egalitarianism, not the egalitarian individualism that eventually won out.

Nevertheless, these movements have managed to create a moral community that taps into the hunter-gatherer ethic of egalitarian individualism. As noted above, Duchesne attributes the decline of aristocratic individualism partly to “the ethical demands of modern democratic liberalism.” However, the psychological power of the ethical demands of modern liberalism themselves require explanation. The argument here is that the roots of the creation of a moral-ideological ingroup stem from the unique egalitarian-individualist strand of the culture of the West.

The general dismantling of the culture of the West, and eventually its demise as anything resembling an ethnic entity, is occurring as a result of a moral onslaught triggering a paroxysm of altruistic punishment and based ultimately on these evolved tendencies.

MacDonald’s long piece can be read here.

Tags Jewish problem (JP), United States

Alice Miller Child abuse Christendom Friedrich Nietzsche Hojas Susurrantes (book) Psychology

A Christian troll

Usually I don’t respond to trolling. But these days I got a terrible toothache and lost my patience. So here we go.

In my previous post a native German speaker (see how he uses quotation marks below), Thomas Fink, said in a comment that I didn’t allow to pass:

I checked occasionally into Chechar when I came across him on his journey from Larry Auster into eternity. He had a lot of conversions and recently he converted from the „jewish problem“ to the „Christian problem“.

“Conversion” is the wrong word here. I knew that there was a big Christian Problem since, as a young boy, my father’s doctrine of eternal damnation caused havoc in my worldview, and by 1976 I read Nietzsche for the first time in my life. Hardly can such an old critique of Christianity that gradually matured in my mind be called a sudden “conversion.”

As to the Jewish Problem, “conversion” is the wrong word too. A few years ago I didn’t know that the Jew Yagoda and his Jewish henchmen killed more innocent Whites than the millions of slaughtered Jews attributed to Himmler by orthodox historians. Awakening up to the facts of history—the Bolshevik Jews, not the Germans, started the genocide—is no “conversion,” but an awakening from the matrix of political correctness.

Fink’s trolling continues:

He is obviously a psychologically very troubled person, who was himself quite frank about this.

One of the reasons that I didn’t let Fink’s comment appear in the thread where it was posted, but instead added it as a whole new entry here, is because this is the second time that an angry Christian insults me in the last few days with sentences similar to the above: a perfect inversion of reality.

Why is this is a perfect inversion of reality? Because those who were abused in their childhood or adolescence and speak out vehemently about the abuse as adults are the sanest humans in the world.

Fink should know better, since a native German speaker, the Swiss psychologist Alice Miller, devoted her entire literary career to demonstrate why those who speak out about the abuse are infinitely saner than those who, following the accepted norms of conduct, repress their traumas. I wrote a book on the subject, the third of my Hojas Susurrantes, and cannot discuss this complex subject here (but you can take a look at my other blog, Fallen Leaves).

The Christian troll continues:

I do not think that it is ad hominem to link his anti Christianity with his upbringing as a Catholic and psychologically not resolved problems [my emphasis] with his Catholic parents, documented by himself.

This is an obvious lie. Fink simply has not read my Hojas Susurrantes. He doesn’t know, therefore, how “resolved” or “unresolved” my inner psyche might be.

Fink’s implicit commandment, Thou Shalt Not Talk About Your Abusive Parents, is the flawed implicit commandment of millions upon millions of psychologically dissociated humans: If you publicly talk about your traumatizing childhood or adolescence you must be a dissociated adult. In other words, our society only allows the victim of parental abuse to keep absolutely quiet about his or her life, or perhaps speak only in the privacy of a so-called therapist office. This is exactly why many neuroses and most psychoses cannot be healed by psychotherapy (besides Alice Miller’s work see also Jeffrey Masson’s).

The troll continues:

If someone works in the field of pure logic it is possible to detach the results of his work from his way of living but in the field of religion and social science your personal conduct [Chechar’s], who you are and where you came from is important, even if you can citate [sic] [Karlheinz] Deschner and write coherent sentences in a seemingly detached manner.

You see? Zero arguments.

Fink seems to be saying that because like Deschner—the German scholar who authored the multivolume Criminal History of Christianity—I feel passionate about Christianity, I must be emotionally unbalanced. In other words: I am not allowed to emotionally rebel openly and publicly against, say, the doctrine of eternal torture that my father used against me when I was a little boy.

Nope! You just cannot rebel publicly! Go to the therapist’s office instead! Otherwise that would be “personal conduct” reflecting “unresolved” emotional issues.

This grotesque line of reasoning is like asking Solzhenitsyn to write a “detached” Gulag Archipelago with no mention of any of Solzhenitsyn’s personal suffering he endured in the Gulag System. According to Fink’s logic, should we also call Solzhenitsyn “obviously a psychologically very troubled person” because he dared to speak out publicly using his own life experiences?

Let’s continue with the troll’s comment:

So it is of significance that Chechar and most of the anti Christian right circle around the thinking of a compulsive masturbator who went certifiably mad, that is Nietzsche.

In the last few days, because of his tragic death, I did a little research into the life of another Nietzsche fan, that is Jonathan Bowden. He was a great orator, but he was also a very troubled person, I could sense this on the spot. This is, by the way an ability I have. There is a lot of talk now, that Jonathan only was so great, because he was always on the edge. Maybe. But by definition, everyone who is „on the edge“ is troubled by unresolved sin. And I will never be part of a movement which is dominated by people like this. And this definition of troubled persons includes by the way also many persons who call themselves Christian.

I cannot speak of Bowden’s life, but I have read thick volumes by German authors about the life of Nietzsche, and neither Curt Paul Janz nor Werner Ross ever used the word “sin” against the poor philosopher.

Yes, Nietzsche went mad after his cataclysmic breakdown of January 3, 1889, and never recovered his powerful intellect. A tragedy. But I remember my High School lesson of logic so well! It is a classic ad hominem to dismiss all of Nietzsche’s work prior to 1889 because of what happened to the poor man in and after that year.

Listen to the troll:

In fact this whole anti Christianity boils down to a graffiti on a wall near the Catholic Church in my small German town, which translates as: „Get the bible out of my head!“ which translates as: Get the law of nature out of my head! And that is what Nietzsche found out the hard way: you cannot redefine sin as virtue and live a happy life thereafter. It is not possible, because Gods [sic] law is natures [sic] law, and every unresolved sin will rot in you and make your life miserable.

What a personal and fallacious way of dismissing our arguments! I won’t speak of Nietzsche here, but can speak of me.

Fink simply does not address any of the arguments I have presented so far critical of Christianity. Not a single one. He reminds me of Fjordman, who got mad at another blogger, Tanstaafl, and me when we dared to point out to some philo-Semitic counter-jihadists that besides the Muslim Problem we have a Jewish Problem throughout the West. Half-Jew Fjordman never advanced any argument whatsoever in his many “replies” in the commentariat section of the counter-jihad site. Instead, he insulted Tanstaafl and lied about me.

Fink’s ad hominem stance is so self-defeating that, instead of indulging myself with the last word, I better reproduce his last sentence and leave his comment hanging:

For the non believer the only way out of this dilemma is suicide which now becomes fashionable as antinatalism or the way of the Marquis the Sade which is open rebellion against God by the way of torture and murder.