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Child abuse Film Psychiatry

Joker, Molyneux and CC

Or:

An opportunity to present the trauma model
 

In recent years I don’t usually go to the movies. If there is something I say to my nephews when I see them it is that, in the media and the cinema, all the messages are bad. But yesterday I broke my habit after watching Stefan Molyneux’s video about the Joker movie.

I am glad that, as Molyneux confessed in one of his latest videos, eighty percent of his audience dropped last year. Is it because of his dishonesty about the JQ? Whatever caused the drop, from alt-lite to neo-Nazism, passing through white nationalism, Molyneux is the only notable personality in our underworld who has consistently talked about child abuse.

As the visitors of this blogsite know, I spent more decades investigating child abuse than the single decade I’ve dedicated to investigating the darkest hour in the West: whose report, The Fair Race, now appears as a free PDF. Since my oldest specialty is the subject of child abuse I must say that what Molyneux tells us in his one-hour video is, in general terms, correct.

The video revolves around the character Arthur Fleck / Joker, a mentally-ill man who dreams to become a stand-up comedian but so disregarded by a hellish and diverse Gotham City that decides to become a criminal. Curiously, the actor Joaquin Phoenix did not look to previous Joker actors for inspiration: he simply read some reports about political assassinations.

Hollywood movies usually lack psychological realism. For example, in the 1989 Jack Nicholson movie the Joker origin story simply falls into a vat of acid. The 2019 movie, on the other hand, gives its central character a plausible origin. So plausible that the film has been described as reminiscent of mass shootings in the US, and the incel community loved it. What’s more, some people from the establishment have expressed concern that Joker could inspire real-world violence.

In a moment of the first minutes of his video, Molyneux confesses that he has received horrific verbal abuse just for mentioning the naked facts of his own childhood, and that hostility toward those who were abused as children or teenagers is not uncommon if the adult victim dares to open his mouth.

At this point I would like to distinguish between dysfunctional parents and schizogenic parents, that is, parents who literally murder their children’s souls. While almost everyone I know comes from family dysfunction in one way or another, the category of schizogenic parents simply does not exist in our society. Since the 1950s the Big Pharma has ensured that civil society does not find out that there is a trauma model to understand the mental disorder that competes with its profitable medical model.

But what does all this have to do with the recent film Joker? As can be deduced from Molyneux’s video, and regardless of the sinister motivation of its Jewish creators, the film could be used, by us, to present the trauma model to the public. I was the one who started this Wikipedia article on the trauma model, an academic text that appeals to the left hemisphere of our brains. He who wants to delve deeper into this research line, and in a more literary way, can read my book Day of Wrath. On the other hand, he who prefers a personal testimony that presents the trauma model appealing to our right hemisphere could read John Modrow’s touching autobiography, How to Become a Schizophrenic.

Furthermore, he who is unwilling even to read any the above literature, but willing to educate himself on the subject having some fun, could see the films Shine (1996), Monster (2003), The Piano Teacher (2001) and even Artificial Intelligence by Spielberg, which can be used to grasp what proponents of the trauma model call ‘the problem of attachment to the perpetrator’.

Although it may seem incredible, sometimes fairy tales portray the destructive interaction of parents with their children. In almost all fairy tales, including modern fairy tales like Kubrick/Spielberg’s A.I. or Harry Potter, the parental figure is substituted so as not to touch it directly. In the case of the Potter series the abusers are Harry’s uncle and aunt. As to David, the child robot in A.I., obviously he had no biological parents but Monica functions like a substitute mother. But sometimes the storyteller sneaks parents directly into the story as the villains who abandon their children (for example in Tom Thumb).

But there are more serious forms of abuse than abandoning your child in the woods, what also happened to David. What Molyneux says about not forgiving schizogenic parents is true. I would go as far as to claim that to forgive such parents is the most toxic thing for the mental health of the victim. Mine is an opposed claim to what the establishment wants us to believe.

Why is the forgiveness that religionists and therapists preach so toxic? Because it is the abusive parents and society the ones who are currently murdering young souls. As the Armenian lawyer said in Spotlight, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2015: ‘This city, these people [Boston people] are making the rest of us feel like we don’t belong. But they’re no better than us. Look at how they treat their children. Mark my words, Mr. Rezendes [another Armenian]: If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one’ (emphasis added).

For the victim, unilaterally forgiving the perpetrator or a society that never accepts its soul-murdering sins is simply a betrayal of oneself and the other adult victims, now suffering from mental stress and even disorders.

In addition to the first minutes of Molyneux’s video, using as a paradigm the Joker’s abusive interaction with his mother Penny in Gotham City, Molyneux advances ideas analogous to what I have known for a long time. Watch also the segments after minute 35 of his video: how female evil is still taboo in the film industry.

It is curious to note the chasm between those who, like Molyneux and I, have investigated child abuse due to our past, and those who did not have such destructive parenting.

Greg Johnson for example is a Batfan. In his recent review of Joker, which he writes under the penname of Trevor Lynch, Johnson prefers Heath Ledger’s Joker in the 2008 The Dark Knight than the Joker of the movie released this month. Johnson expresses very derogatory of this latest Joker: ‘You’d want to squash him like a bug’. ‘Ledger’s Joker launched a million memes, both because of his character and his lines. Phoenix’s Joker will have no such influence. He’s a pathetic nobody with nothing to say’. ‘Arthur [the Joker] is entirely absorbed in self-pity’. ‘Joker is a boring movie about a disgusting loser’.

Well, it didn’t look boring to me… But the commenters on Counter-Currents who opined about Johnson’s review said very similar things: ‘People like him deserve to get left behind by society, and the true tragedy of this movie is that successful, well-adjusted men like Thomas Wayne insist on trying to love the Arthur Flecks of the world and take care of them’. Really? The conservative commenter also said: ‘The defects like Arthur would be put in mental asylums and [eugenically] sterilized’. [1]

Such commenters remind me that, in the movie, Thomas Wayne, the billionaire father of the future Batman, labels those Gotham residents envious of the wealthy as ‘clowns’, not only the Joker. I don’t know how many viewers enjoyed the moment when, by the end of the movie, a rioter corners the Wayne family in an alley and murders Thomas and his wife sparing the child Bruce. Another commenter said: ‘One of the great things about Heath Ledger’s Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is that he does not have an origin story’.

I dare not judge the Marvel universe as I feel deeply revolted by it. But in the real world, isn’t it good to know, say, the psychopathological motivations of those women in the Charles Manson family? But the commenters’ lack of elemental compassion is even noticeable about the previous Joker represented by Heath Ledger, an actor that incidentally has already passed away. In one of the dialogues the now dead Joker explains his scars. He said that his father ‘comes at me with a knife. “Why so serious?” He sticks a blade in my mouth. “Let’s put a smile on that face”.’

This father strikes me as ‘soul murderer’. Note this other phrase from the CC commenter: ‘Arthur [the Joker who’s alive] is far too damaged for any regular person to identify with him’.

How will a normie commenter identify with him if only one percent (or less) of Westerners have endured schizogenic parents?

Incidentally, last night, as I watched the psychological thriller, there were times when I laughed (as the character does in the film) when the audience was serious and nobody laughed. That happened to me, yesterday, in the climax of the film when the Joker kills the establishment character that Robert de Niro represented.

As I said, I usually don’t go to the movies now. But decades ago the same phenomenon occurred to me with some films by Luis Buñuel, whom I met personally, in which nobody laughed. It also happened to me when I watched Dr. Strangelove by Kubrick on the big screen. I laughed at the black humour in which the nuclear extermination of humanity was at stake while the hundreds of people watching the movie with me were quiet in the theatre. Only when I read a Kubrick biography by Vincent Lobrutto did I find out that Kubrick had a very black sense of humour. Then did I understand me and the non-laugher spectators of Dr. Strangelove!

Joker ends when Arthur laughs and tells a psychiatrist that she would not understand the joke…

_____________

[1] In the comments section on Joker in Counter-Currents Johnson shows how ignorant he is about psychiatry: a supposed branch of medicine with as little scientific basis as parapsychology or the study of UFOs, as shown in my writings (for example: here). Johnson wrote ‘If Arthur is adopted then his mental illness cannot be inherited from this mother’. This is a credulity stance regarding the psychiatric allegations that mental illness is genetic. Apparently, Johnson forgot what I said in one of my articles in which he himself corrected my syntax (see this piece which appears in my Hojas Susurrantes).

Categories
Kali Yuga Real men William Pierce

Why the fair race will go under

by William Pierce

Big business, including those sectors of it relatively free of Jewish control, is in favor of continued non-White immigration as a means of maintaining a plentiful supply of relatively inexpensive labor.

As depressing as the situation is among the military rank and file, it is even worse among the higher military leaders. A weeding-out program during the past 30 years has virtually eliminated career officers above the rank of captain who are willing to express any disagreement with the racial program imposed on the U.S. armed services. Eliminated with them has been any realistic hope of a military solution to America’s internal political and racial problems.

Those who are working for the West’s ruin know well the psychology of mass man; they know how tenaciously materialistic he is, how he will cling to his comforts and luxuries at the expense of his honor, his freedom, and even his life, deceiving himself all the while as to his own motives. Perhaps the very best example of this fatal weakness is provided by the behavior in recent years of the Whites of Rhodesia and South Africa, a subject treated elsewhere in this [1980] issue of National Vanguard.

It is true that the world—including the rest of the West—ganged up on them; it is true that they are saddled with twice as many Jews, per capita, as the people of the United States; it is true that they were stabbed in the back by the Christian churches, in which they had foolishly placed their trust; it is true that their news media are controlled by the same gang which controls ours. But the fact remains that the Whites of southern Africa have, with their eyes wide open, chosen prosperity over racial integrity. As a consequence, in the long run they shall have neither.

The same shopkeeper mentality which made them fear an economic boycott more than the mongrelizing of their posterity prevails throughout the West. It is the mentality of what historian Brooks Adams has called “economic man”; men of this type have wielded power in the West since the Industrial Revolution, and their values are shared as well by most of the powerless.

The values and way of thinking of economic man may be tolerable for a while in an all-White world, but they are lethal in a world which also includes Jews. In the very near future they will be just as lethal for America and Europe as they have been for White Rhodesia.

In view of these trends—trends which transcend party politics and the short-term fluctuations of changing government administrations, trends which show every promise of remaining unchanged in the years ahead, indeed, of becoming increasingly worse—there can be little room for debate as to whether the West will go under. It has already passed the point of no return in its descent. The water is up to our necks, and the only question is, when will it reach our noses.

The ship, in other words, is going down, and it is going down not just because the captain doesn’t know how to sail and because there is a gang of saboteurs aboard who have opened the sea cocks, but also because it has become irreparably unseaworthy.

Now, this is a very important conclusion. It separates the National Alliance from the right wingers, who believe there’s still time to save the ship (or, if there isn’t, all is lost and so there’s no point in doing anything); from the liberals, who believe that the more water the ship takes on the better it will sail; and from the mass of voters, who, although they have a dark suspicion that something is seriously wrong and a nagging fear that the captain doesn’t know what he’s doing, are much more concerned that their feet are getting wet than that the ship is going down.

The most important distinction for the Alliance is the first one. The right wingers see the value of the West in its outward forms: its governments, its economic systems, its life-styles. When those are broken up—when the ship of state goes down—there is, for them, nothing left.

But the National Alliance sees the value of the West in its biological essence, in the human genetic material which was responsible for the building of Western civilization—and which has the capability of building another civilization to replace it. When the ship goes down, there will be lots of passengers in the water, and they will drown. What is important is to make certain that some passengers—the right ones—are in lifeboats, with a compass, oars, and directions to the nearest land.

The events of recent years must be depressing in the extreme for intelligent conservatives and right wingers. Unless they are blind to what is happening in the world, they must feel utterly overwhelmed by the prospect of trying to patch the old tub up and keep it afloat. For those of them who are racially conscious, the realization that each passing year brings us a population that is more mongrelized, an electorate that is more degraded in its sensibilities, must be terribly discouraging. How can one salvage such a mess?

To be sure, after accepting the view that the mess can’t be salvaged and that one shouldn’t even try, the prospect is no less grim. The breakdown of order, the unleashing of anarchy, is destructive of true human progress even under the mildest of conditions. In the racially mixed urban jungle of America it will be indescribably terrible. There will be a grisly justice in that most Whites who have collaborated with the enemies of the West in sinking it will themselves be drowned. It is almost amusing to contemplate the fate of the White gun-control advocates in America’s cities in the days to come, when they will be even more at the mercy of roving gangs of Black thugs than they are today.

And the rich White liberals in their exclusive suburbs—the fashionable writers, the ACLU lawyers, the pulpit prostitutes, the organizers of fund-raising dinners for trendy causes, the socially conscious coupon clippers who won’t own stocks in corporations doing business in South Africa, the news editors who conscientiously excise any mention of race from crime stories, the school board members who pretend that all is well in the racially integrated hells they supervise, the overpaid bureaucrats, the coke-snorting sophisticates who party with the new non-White elite and plan to ride high while their race goes down—will fare no better when the pets they have so long boosted as the “equals” of working-class Whites come surging out of the cities in their multihued millions. The ravages of these pampered non-White hordes in the years ahead will make the sadistic butchery of the Manson gang of the last decade seem like good, clean fun in comparison.

Unfortunately, the innocent and the wholesome will perish along with the guilty and the degenerate; the racially conscious and the racially valuable will go down with the deracinated egoists and the half-breeds. Nature’s justice operates at the species and subspecies levels.

Nor will anyone evade the suffering ahead, neither those who perish by it nor those who survive it, neither the grasshoppers nor the ants. It is said that suffering is good for the soul; if this is true, Westerners can look forward to a great deal of spiritual improvement.

But whether the maxim is true or not, the suffering is necessary. As long as he is moderately comfortable, the average man will not change his ways. Only when existence becomes utterly intolerable and there is no alternative can he be persuaded to do what he should have done from foresight and through self-discipline at the beginning. That is his unalterable nature, and it is why democracy is such a catastrophe.

And who will survive to be the founders of a New Order? No one can say, on a person-by-person basis. But if one understands the nature of the tragedy that is upon us, one can state some general guidelines.

The first thing to understand about the going under of the West is that its more dramatic elements, the violence and the bloodshed, are not the really essential elements. The essential aspect of what is happening to the West is spiritual. It is decadence which has sealed the fate of the West, not the birthrate in the Third World. It is the absence of a common purpose which has sapped the West’s viability, not just the scheming of the Jews. It is the loss of racial consciousness which has left the West defenseless, not the growing strength of our enemies.

What is important is that the corruption of the West’s spirit will continue in the years ahead—perhaps for decades—while the increasing anarchy, the more frequent breakdowns of order and flareups of violence, the economic disintegration, will be only incidental. There undoubtedly will come a great bloodletting, a time of mass throat-cutting and mass rape, when the West’s internal enemies will have free rein for a while. But the West will already have sunk before then.

And most of the inhabitants of the West will have sunk too, to the point where little of value will be left to be lost in the bloodletting. This is a point worth emphasizing again: the majority will perish with the civilization to which they are inseparably bound.

The problem is not to cull out the mongrels, the Judaized, the degenerates, the moral prostitutes from a healthy mass, so that the cull can be destroyed and the mass saved. The problem is to pick the few who embody the best of what the West once was and to take the necessary measures to see that that which they embody does not perish with the mass.

Those who would survive—more correctly, those who would have a hand in determining which genes and which values survive, for the time scale of the West’s sinking is such that no individual now alive can be sure of living to see the new age dawn—must have these qualities:

They must be both willing and able to fight for the right to determine the shape of the future; the meek and the disarmed will vanish without a trace.

They must be free of the superstitions and prejudices of this age; those who are mentally bound to this age will go down with it.

They must be pure in spirit and strong in will; this is the age of egoism and materialism, of self-indulgence and permissiveness, but the passage into the new age demands both selflessness and self-discipline.

They must be united in an organization which combines their strengths and focuses their wills; in this age of atomized individuals, where each person is submerged in the mass, without identity and without power, only those who are united can prevail.

They must be motivated by a single purpose, the overwhelming importance of which is always foremost in their minds; it has been the purposelessness of this age on which the West has foundered, but the new age will be illuminated and shaped by a common purpose transcending all other considerations: namely, the purpose of bringing forth a higher type of man and attaining thereby a higher level of consciousness in the universe.

__________________

Note of the Ed. This is an abridged version of ‘Why the West Will Go Under’ published at National Vanguard (no. 74, 1980).

Seven years ago I had reproduced the entire article on this site, but what I now put in red is worth remembering.

Categories
Julian (novel)

Julian, 77

Chapter XV

On 6 January, the Galileans celebrate something called the feast of the Epiphany. It is the day the Galilean is supposed to have been baptized. Suspecting my dislike of the Galileans, Nebridius announced to the city that I would attend the feast of the Epiphany at the Vienne charnel house, a brand-new basilica paid for by Helena’s numerous gifts to the bishops. I was furious but dared not show it. I am sorry to say Oribasius was amused at my predicament.

Grimly, I did what I had to do. I spent two hours meditating on the thighbone of some villain who had been eaten by lions at Rome, while the bishop delivered a considerable sermon at me, praying that I would throw the weight of my majesty against the enemy Arians. He even turned political by suggesting that as Constantius was Arian and I possibly Athanasian, the line might then be drawn between us in all things, and the side of “truth” (also the side of the majority, he added pointedly) would prevail, supporting my throne like columns, I believe was his metaphor, or it may have been holy caryatids. When it came time to pray, my words were addressed to the Galilean but my heart spoke to Zeus.

The winter was a time of waiting. I was now ready to march. All that I needed was a sign from heaven. Though the prefect at Rome would not allow my emissaries to consult the Sibylline books, a friendly priest of the old order was able to look at a part of that book which describes our period. According to his secret report, I would indeed be the next emperor. My reign would be stormy but long. That is all I ask for: time. Time to make an old world young again, to make winter spring, to free the One God from the triple monster of the atheists. Give me twenty years, O Helios, and I will fill the earth with praise for your light, and illuminate the dark windings of Hades’ kingdom! Even as Persephone returned to Demeter, so shall our time’s living-dead return to your arms, which are light, which is life, which is all! […]

* * *

“What do you want?” Oribasius had divined my mood, as he so often does.

“To restore the gods.”

“But if they are real and do exist…”

“They are real! There is no ‘if’! They do exist!” I was fierce. His laughter stopped me. “Then they exist. But if they exist, they are always present, and so there’s no need to ‘restore’ them.”

“But we must worship what God tells us to.”

“So the Christians say.”

“Ah, but theirs is a false god, and I mean to destroy them.” Oribasius stiffened at the word “destroy”. “Kill them?”

“No. I shall not allow them the pleasure of martyrdom. Besides, at the rate they kill one another, it would be gratuitous for me to intervene. No, I shall fight them with reason and example. I shall reopen the temples and reorganize the priesthood. We shall put Hellenism on such a footing that people will choose it of their own free will.”

“I wonder.” Oribasius was thoughtful. “They are rich, well organized. Most important, they educate the children.”

“We shall do the same!” I was thinking as I spoke; I had no plan. “Even better, we could take the schools away from them.”

“If you could…”

“The Emperor can.”

“It might work. Otherwise…”

“Otherwise?”

“You would have to reign as a bloody tyrant and even then you’d lose.”

“I am not so pessimistic.” But Oribasius had put an idea into my head, one which will save us all. Curiously enough, though we had often spoken of what it would be like when I became emperor, none of us had ever really considered in much detail what form the contest between Hellenism and the Galileans would take. We agreed that when I could I would publicly repudiate the Nazarene, but none of us had thought what the reaction might be, particularly from the common people of whom perhaps half are Galilean. Only the army is truly religious. The men worship Mithras. There are few Galileans in the ranks, though a third of the officers believe in the triple monster.

We talked until it was morning. Just as the sun appeared over the world’s edge, like an omen, Dagalaif returned to camp with Count Lucillianus as prisoner. […]

* * *

On the night of 20 November I was working late. Lamps filled with cheap oil smoked abominably. The three night secretaries sat at a long table, mountains of parchment stacked in front of them. At a separate table I was writing a letter to my uncle Julian, trying to reassure him—and myself—that victory was certain. I had just finished the letter with one of those postscripts which even old friends say they cannot decipher, when I heard footsteps quickly approaching. Without ceremony the door flew open. The clerks and I leapt to our feet. One never knows if assassins are at hand. But it was Oribasius, out of breath, a letter in his hand.

“It’s happened!” he gasped. Then he did something he had never done before. He dropped on his knees before me, and offered me the letter. “This is for you… Augustus.”

I read the first line. Then the words blurred together and I could read no more. “Constantius is dead.” As I said those extraordinary words, the clerks one by one fell to their knees. Then, as in a dream, the room began to fill with people.

All knew what had happened. All paid me silent homage for I had, miraculously, with the stopping of one man’s breath, become sole Augustus, Emperor of Rome, Lord of the world. To my astonishment, I wept.

Categories
Constantinople Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 122

Editors’ note:

To contextualise this section of Vol. II of Karlheinz Deschner’s encyclopaedic history of the Church in 10-volumes, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, see the abridged translation of Volume I.
 
 

Emperor Justinian, dominator of the Church

Justin died on August 1, 527 at the age of 76, when an arrow wound reopened in the foot, followed by his nephew Justinian. Justin first energetically removed his nephew, as he did not want to release the helm of the State. It is probable, however, that Justinian was from the very beginning the guiding spirit of Justin’s politics.

Justinian I (reign: 527-565) son of Macedonian peasants as his uncle, but exquisitely educated, was forty-five years old when he began his government. He was a piknic [note of the Editor: since this is a German term for a type of physical constitution characterised by broad thorax and short and thick limbs, the very famous portrait of Justinian at the top of this entry might be misleading; the above one might be more accurate], of medium height, round-faced and with premature baldness.

Probably a dynamic type, a man full of contradictions and enigmas, at that time and in our day a demigod or a devil according to the angle from which we look at him. The liveliness of his spirit mixed with an almost exceptional capacity for work and also with distrust and envy. He was thorough, energetic, somewhat fabulous and simulator; an unscrupulous intriguer. He ate little and sometimes fasted for several days. He wanted to do everything himself, as corresponds to a human type obsessed with activity, so in love with the detail that his actions often scratched pedantry.

He used to sleep little, the ‘sleepless emperor’. He must have spent many nights arguing with bishops and men of great holiness. ‘The night’, says Procopius, a model of Byzantine historiography in his Secret History, ‘he spends it sitting, talking without surveillance […] and intends to subtly unravel the enigmas of Christianity with the help of old priests’. He ruled the world without just leaving his palace, from his desk, so to speak. With the help of his generals Belisarius and Narses he forced the re-conquest and reconversion of the West to Christianity.

Three-quarters of his reign, which lasted almost forty years, were engaged in wars. In spite of all this he felt like a representative of God on Earth and consequently also as the supreme leader of the Church: like all Byzantine emperors, both from the early and late imperial times. The patriarch was nothing other than the bishop of the court like any other patriarch, as the pope. He described his signature as ‘divine’, his property and himself were ‘sacred’ (the popes would soon adopt that ‘sacredness’). All the buildings in his palace were sanctified. Let us remember the behaviour of Constantine I, the Saviour, the Redeemer, who called himself ‘Our Divinity’.

If Justinian shows signs of incessant political activity, it is no less the one that unfolds in the theological to the point that it could well be said that he had erred in his profession. Naturally, only before some he could appear as an expert. For others he was simply a kind of an unhappy fan of theology, an amateur. Although he was, almost until the end of his days, a Catholic of firm adherence to the doctrines of Rome—not exempt, however, from opportunistic trajectories in zigzag—he felt as a legislator of the Church, as his master and lord.

It is he who sets the dates of the synods, who reserves the right to convene an ecumenical council and to sanction the council canons by matching them to the laws of the State. He solves the problems of faith autocratically and promulgates decrees concerning the faith. He occupies the bishop’s headquarters according to his discretion, something that had been done, for a long time, in the East. But he is not only a legislator of the Church, he not only decrees ‘what requirements the ordination of bishops or other members of the clergy must meet’, ‘what life the monks should lead’, etc., but is also the author of works of theology and even writes sacred hymns.

As he ages so much more intense and unambiguous is his dedication to theology. He builds Hagia Sophia and presumably spends 320,000 pounds of gold on it. Under his rule, churches and monasteries emerge like mushrooms in all provinces. His constructive passion is, if possible, even greater than that of Constantine I. Justinian, whose desire is the restoration of the empire, is not only the dominator of Catholica, but is also recognised as such by the Roman bishop, by the city of Rome. From Pelagius I (556-561) the West must have the imperial confirmation of the election of a new pope before proceeding to consecrate himself.

Categories
Christian art Richard Carrier

Our patron saint

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas is titled this painting by Vasari, in the Florentine church of Santa Croce. The composition and treatment of the figures reveal the spirit of the late Renaissance.

With the tools of exegesis of our century it is not only possible to doubt, like Thomas, that Jesus rose from the dead. It is even possible to doubt that the guy existed, as readers of Richard Carrier know. Even so, sceptics of the New Testament narrative sarcastically consider Thomas as their ‘patron saint’.

Categories
Constantinople Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 121

Editor’s Note:

Three genocides with millions of victims each have been committed against the Germanic people. On this site we have talked about the genocide after 1945 when the Allies killed millions of defenceless Germans. Historically, the genocide committed in Germany during the Thirty Years War is known, but very few talk about the other millions of Germans that Emperor Justinian killed in cold blood.

If the white man discovered his story, his true story, he would suddenly cross what we have been calling the psychological Rubicon. On the contrary: if the white man is currently committing suicide, it is because the System has lied to him, through astronomical lies, about his own history. The favourite method of the System is what we might call ‘lying by omission’: for example, not saying half a word about what happened in Germany in the late 1940s.

While yesterday we mentioned Justinian in the epigraph to the last chapter of Nixey’s book, the devil about this emperor is in the details. That is why I would like to expand on the chapter that Karlheinz Deschner dedicates to Justinian: whose translation we begin with this entry.

In short, it was not enough for the Imperial Church to have destroyed the Greco-Roman world in the 4th and 5th centuries as we saw in the essay ‘Rome vs. Judea; Judea vs. Rome’ in The Fair Race. In the 6th century, after the fall of Rome, the Emperor of Constantinople went on to commit a direct Holocaust against the Aryan race, which by then had already been established in the Italian peninsula.

The chapter that starts today is taken from Vol. 2: Die Spätantike (Late Antiquity), of Criminal History of Christianity published in 1989. The full title is: ‘Late Antiquity. From the Catholic “children emperors” to the extermination of the Arian Vandals and Ostrogoths under Justinian I (527-565)’. These were the two Germanic peoples that the Emperor of the Mud Empire of Constantinople genocided during his military incursion into Italy.

As I usually do, I don’t include any of the numerous footnotes that appear in the original. Anyone wishing to read an equally abbreviated translation of Volume I can request a hard copy, whose image appears above.

Deschner wrote:
 

______ 卐 ______

 

Justinian (527-565): A theologian on the imperial throne

‘The goal is unequivocally that of a single Empire, a single Church, and, outside it, neither salvation nor hope. And a single emperor whose most noble concern is, precisely, the health of that Church. In pursuit of that goal, Justinian is inexorable to the point of fatigue, chasing down to the last hiding place and with obsessive thoroughness everything that seems false to him’.

– Church History Manual

‘Our fervent longing was always, and continues to be today, safeguarding the straight and untouched faith and firm consistency of the Holy Church of God, Catholic and Apostolic, intact. We have always kept this in mind as the most urgent of our government tasks’. ‘And for the sake of that longing, we really waged great wars against Libya and the West, for the right faith in God and the freedom of the subjects’.

– Emperor Justinian

‘He killed some of them for no reason. He let others escape his claws but struggling with poverty, making them more miserable than the dead, to the point that they implored that the most miserable of deaths put an end to their situation. Of others, he took their lives together with their goods.

– Procopius, contemporary Byzantine historian of the Emperor

‘The smoking ruins of Italy, the annihilation of two Germanic peoples, the impoverishment and the sensitive losses that decimated the aboriginal population of the Western Empire, all this was more than indicated to open all eyes about the true causes of the religious policy of the Empire of the East […]. The Catholic clergy has a good dose of responsibility for the outbreak of the extermination wars of that time […]. The influence of the Church reached the last village’.

– B. Rubín

‘And with that the first Golden Age of Constantinople began’.

– Cyril Mango

 
Justin: From pigman to Catholic emperor (518-527)

With Justin started, literally overnight, a new era in religious politics. Rome and orthodoxy succeed in it.

Born in 450 in near present-day Skopje, the son of an Illyrian peasant rose from pigman to general while his sister continued to work as a full-fledged villager. Justin, who had fought in the Isauria war, in the Persian war and against Vitalian, was a stubborn and grumpy illiterate. He barely knew how to read, let alone write, not even his own name. But he had instead the cunning of a peasant, was quiet, determined and an integral Catholic. ‘He had no qualification to govern a province, not to mention an empire’ (Bury). But, the Jesuit Grillmeier supposes, already before his rise to the throne he was a supporter of the Council of Chalcedon.

Already with sixty-seven years, from the beginning of his reign he was under the decisive influence of his nephew and successor Justinian, who was then 36 years old, and also under that of the Catholic clergy, particularly the monks. It was evident that Justin and Justinian had already long since prepared the change of power. Even before, they had maintained contacts with the champion of the faith, Vitalian, and with the pope.

The true suitors to the throne, nephews of the late emperor, and military chiefs, Hypatius and Pompey were put out of play and all the relatives of the emperor in general were duped to remove them from power. Already during the night Anastasius died, Justin bribed all those who had to be bribed to secure the succession in his favour, even though the next day—what a disgusting farce!—he seemed to resist in every way possible to take upon himself the crown. In it he pulverised all the money he had accepted from the great chamberlain Amantius to promote the candidacy of his nephew. Thus, the next day, July 9, 518, and just as Justin was elevated to the throne, it could be emphasised that he owed to God his imperial galas, and exclaimed again and again: ‘Emperor, you are worthy of the Trinity, worthy of the Empire, worthy of the city’ and the following Sunday a pompous mass was celebrated in Hagia Sophia.

However, this rise to power did not pass without tumult or blood, even though, as was evident, it was plotted and prepared well in advance. There were very few who glimpsed the dense network of intrigues and connections in multiple directions. There were fierce riots, and turbulent scenes in the same Hagia Sophia. Several candidates to the throne emerged to disappear shortly as comets turned off by the boiling tumult. And when the Senate, thanks to bribery, appointed Justin, a group of opponents rushed against him. One of them broke his lip with a punch, but his people immediately drew their swords, slashed some of the attackers and dispersed the others.

In any case, the Catholic illiterate, even if he was helped by the superior intelligence of his nephew, achieved all his objectives in a single day: his election, his confirmation and his coronation.

Already the day after the assassination of the competitors, the names of the popes Leo I and those of the patriarchs of Catholic convictions, were included in the Eucharistic prayer. And on September 7, Justinian, the imperial nephew, was able to communicate to Rome: ‘The most arduous of the problems related to faith have been solved with the help of God’. In his congratulatory letter, the Pope underlined the intervention of the divine will in the election and showed his hope of an early ecclesiastical unification… And the nephew Justinian proclaimed in 520 that Justin based his sovereignty on ‘the holy religion’.

Once again, then, the Chalcedon formula recovered its validity. For Justin, the decisive man of the new government, at least concerning ecclesiastical politics ‘understood that only a clear yes to Chalcedon offered prospects for pacifying the kingdom’ (Bacht, SJ). (Note of the Ed.: SJ means Society of Jesus. This Bacht guy was probably a Jesuit priest.) In other words: the Catholic Church had looked after maintaining eternal discord as ‘pacification’ then meant, as history shows and will continue to show each time the occasion presents itself, the following: oppression of the other religions.

Justinian also understood this in writing to the emperor: ‘See as day after day the delirium of the old enemy continues to wreak havoc. Although the problem has been resolved by a definitive trial, peace is delayed’. The Pope wanted a ‘return to love’, to peace—a peace which he praised before the emperor with the pseudo-pacifist biblical words: ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men!’ For men of good will are always only those who want what Rome wants. Rubín, in his brilliant monograph on Justinian, says: ‘Peace for the co-religionists, war and terror for those who disagree’.

Categories
Athens Darkening Age (book) Hypatia of Alexandria

Darkening Age, 27

Below, excerpts from the final
chapter of Nixey’s book:

‘Moreover, we forbid the teaching of any doctrine by those who labour under the insanity of paganism’.

– Justinian Code

The philosopher Damascius was a brave man: you had to be to see what he had seen and still be a philosopher. But as he walked through the streets of Athens in AD 529 and heard the new laws bellowed out in the town’s crowded squares, even he must have felt the stirrings of unease. He was a man who had known persecution at the hands of the Christians before. He would have been a fool not to recognize the signs that it was beginning again.

As a young man, Damascius had studied philosophy in Alexandria, the city of the murdered Hypatia. He had not been there for long when the city had turned, once again, on its philosophers. The persecution had begun dramatically. A violent attack on a Christian by some non-Christian students had started a chain of reprisals in which philosophers and pagans were targeted. Christian monks, armed with an axe, had raided, searched then demolished a house accused of being a shrine to ‘demonic’ idols. The violence had spread and Christians had found and collected all images of the old gods from across Alexandria, from the bathhouses and from people’s homes. They had placed them in a pyre in the centre of the city and burned them. As the Christian chronicler, Zachariah of Mytilene, comfortably observed, Christ had declared that he had ‘given you the authority to tread on snakes and scorpions, and over all enemy power’.

For Damascius and his fellow philosophers, however, all that had been a mere prelude to what came next. Soon afterwards, an imperial officer had been sent to Alexandria to investigate paganism. The investigation had rapidly turned to persecution. This was when philosophers had been tortured by being hung up by cords and when Damascius’s own brother had been beaten with cudgels – and to Damascius’s great pride, had remained silent…

Damascius decided to flee. In secret, he hurried with his teacher, Isidore, to the harbour and boarded a boat. Their final destination was Greece, and Athens, the most famous city in the history of Western philosophy.

It was now almost four decades since Damascius had escaped to Athens as an intellectual exile. In that time, a lot had changed. When he had arrived in the city he had been a young man; now he was almost seventy. But he was still as energetic as ever, and as he walked about Athens in his distinctive philosopher’s cloak – the same austere cloak that Hypatia had worn – many of the citizens would have recognized him. For this émigré was now not only an established fixture of Athenian philosophy and a prolific author, he was also the successful head of one of the city’s philosophical schools: the Academy. To say ‘one of’ the schools is to diminish this institution’s importance: it was perhaps the most famous school in Athens, indeed in the entire Roman Empire. It traced its history back almost a thousand years and it would leave its linguistic traces on Europe and America for two thousand years to come. Every modern academy, académie and akademie owes its name it.

Since he had crossed the wine-dark sea, life had gone well for Damascius – astonishingly well, given the turbulence he had left behind. In Alexandria, Christian torture, murder and destruction had had its effect on the intellectual life of the city. After Hypatia’s murder the numbers of philosophers in Alexandria and the quality of what was being taught there had, unsurprisingly, declined rapidly. In the writings of Alexandrian authors there is a clear mood of depression, verging on despair. Many, like Damascius, had left.

In fifth-century Athens, the Church was far less powerful and considerably less aggressive. Its intellectuals had felt pressure nonetheless. Pagan philosophers who flagrantly opposed Christianity paid for their dissent. The city was rife with informers and city officials listened to them. One of Damascius’s predecessors had exasperated the authorities so much that he had fled, escaping – narrowly – with his life and his property. Another philosopher so vexed the city’s Christians by his unrepentant ‘pagan’ ways that he had had to go into exile for a year to get away from the ‘vulture-like men’ who now watched over Athens. In an act that could hardly have been more symbolic of their intellectual intentions, the Christians had built a basilica in the middle of what had once been a library. The Athens that had been so quarrelsome, so gloriously and unrepentantly argumentative, was being silenced. This was an increasingly tense, strained world. It was, as another author and friend of Damascius put it, ‘a time of tyranny and crisis’.

The very fabric of the city had changed. Its pagan festivals had been stopped, its temples closed and, as in Alexandria, the skyline of the city had been desecrated; here, by the removal of Phidias’s great figure of Athena…

Despite his success, Damascius had not forgotten what he had seen in Alexandria – and had not forgiven it, either. His writings show a never-failing contempt for the Christians. He had seen the power of Christian zeal in action. His brother had been tortured by it. His teacher had been exiled by it. And, in the year 529, zealotry was once again in evidence. Christianity had long ago announced that all pagans had been wiped out. Now, finally, reality was to be forced to fall in with the triumphant rhetoric.

The determination that lay behind this threat was not only felt in Athens in this period. It was in AD 529, the very same year in which the atmosphere in Athens began to worsen, that St Benedict destroyed that shrine to Apollo in Monte Cassino…

Previous attacks on Damascius and his scholars had largely been driven by local enthusiasms; a violently aggressive band of Alexandrian monks here, an officious local official there. But this attack was something new. It came not from the enthusiasm of a hostile local power; it came in the form of a law – from the emperor himself…

This was the end. The ‘impious and wicked pagans’ were to be allowed to continue in their ‘insane error’ no longer. Anyone who refused salvation in the next life would, from now on, be all but damned in this one…

This was no longer mere prohibition of other religious practices. It was the active enforcement of Christianity on every single, sinful pagan in the empire. The roads to error were being closed, forcefully. Everyone now had to become Christian. Every single person in the empire who had not yet been baptized now had to come forward immediately, go to the holy churches and ‘entirely abandon the former error [and] receive saving baptism’…

‘Moreover’, it reads, ‘we forbid the teaching of any doctrine by those who labour under the insanity of paganism’ so that they might not ‘corrupt the souls of their disciples.’ The law goes on, adding a finicky detail or two about pay, but largely that is it.

Its consequences were formidable. It was this law that forced Damascius and his followers to leave Athens. It was this law that caused the Academy to close. It was this law that led the English scholar Edward Gibbon to declare that the entirety of the barbarian invasions had been less damaging to Athenian philosophy than Christianity was. This law’s consequences were described more simply by later historians. It was from this moment, they said, that a Dark Age began to descend upon Europe…

Free philosophy has gone. The great destruction of classical texts gathers pace. The writings of the Greeks ‘have all perished and are obliterated’: that was what John Chrysostom had said. He hadn’t been quite right, then: but time would bring greater truth to his boast. Undefended by pagan philosophers or institutions, and disliked by many of the monks who were copying them out, these texts start to disappear. Monasteries start to erase the works of Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca and Archimedes. ‘Heretical’ – and brilliant – ideas crumble into dust. Pliny is scraped from the page. Cicero and Seneca are overwritten. Archimedes is covered over. Every single work of Democritus and his heretical ‘atomism’ vanishes. Ninety per cent of all classical literature fades away…

The pages of history go silent. But the stones of Athens provide a small coda to the story of the seven philosophers… The lovely statue of Athena, the goddess of wisdom, suffered as badly as the statue of Athena in Palmyra had. Not only was she beheaded she was then, a final humiliation, placed face down in the corner of a courtyard to be used as a step. Over the coming years, her back would be worn away as the goddess of wisdom was ground down by generations of Christian feet.

The ‘triumph’ of Christianity was complete.

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Miscellany

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Autobiography Conspiracy theories Parapsychology Pseudoscience

Ron Unz and JFK

or

Leaving the courtroom

My comment in the previous post, about Ron Unz’s credulity about conspiracy theories (CTs) of the assassination of John F. Kennedy has made me think, once again, about what we might call the pathology of extraordinary beliefs. As the sceptics of CTs have said, which not only includes JFK but also 9/11, this is a topic that, like religion and politics, should not be touched in after-dinner conversations. People feel very hurt and it is impossible to argue on good terms.

Let’s use the analogy of the lawyer and the prosecutor who bring the experts to court to try to convince the jury; say, the mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald staged by British television between Gerry Spence and Vincent Bugliosi. A good litmus test to know who has a closed mind is simply to point out who, when watching the TV show at home, leaves the room when the speaker is either Spence or Bugliosi.

The fact is that it is those who believe in the CT who usually leave the room, so to speak, in the sense that they never read sceptical books. Their attitude is as surreal as Alice’s Queen of Hearts in Wonderland: first comes to the sentence and then the trial. First we ‘know’ that 9/11 was an inside job, or, in the case of JFK, we ‘know’ that Oswald didn’t act alone. The long trial process that culminates in the sentence is of no importance or consequence for those who ‘know’ the truth.

Ron Unz is reputed to be a voracious devourer of books and articles. But when the issue of the trial between Spence and Bugliosi arrives, he leaves the courtroom every time the prosecutor speaks. Last year, in this discussion thread of his webzine, Unz said he had not read the thick Bugliosi treatise. When a supporter of Bugliosi pointed out that there was a much shorter book of another ‘prosecutor’ (pic above)—a book that with his amazing reading capabilities he could read it in a couple of days—Unz didn’t respond.

That is the all too common attitude among those who believe in CTs. True Believers can read a dozen books promoting the conspiracy but not a single article from the other side (listen how Bugliosi explains this bizarre behaviour: here)! That is why they ignore the most basic arguments of the prosecutor. For example, in the most recent discussion thread about the 9/11 attacks, some visitors got mad at me but none advanced an argument about a video I linked about Building 7 (for the believers in the 9/11 CTs, Building 7 is considered one of their strongest arguments of what they call ‘controlled demolition’).

It is relatively easy to find out who’s the one who leaves the courthouse every time the opposing lawyer speaks. They are those who believe not only in the CT about JFK or 9/11, but in the so-called Fake Moon Landing, Satanic Ritual Abuse, or the existence of UFOs in Hangar 14 of the US government.

Let’s illustrate this with my case. I used to believe in the pseudoscience of parapsychology. I spent many years of my life wanting to prove the existence of ‘psi’ (extrasensory perception and psychokinesis). I didn’t read the sceptics of the paranormal because they were ‘the bad guys in the movie’.

When I finally spoke with them, at a November 1989 conference they invited me to, I was surprised that those I considered closed were, in fact, quite open people. They even subscribed to the main journals of parapsychology. That happened also with UFO sceptics. They were avid readers of their opponents’ literature: those who promote the hypothesis that UFOs are manned extraterrestrial ships. It is the believers of the extraterrestrial hypothesis who never read the literature of the sceptics.

Before, I only read literature from parapsychologists. But after meeting the ‘prosecutors’ in the early 1990s I became familiar, little by little, with their literature. A few years after subscribing to the Skeptical Inquirer there came a time when I felt agnostic (just as there are people who are no longer a hundred percent sure that God exists). Concurrently I realised that my parapsychological colleagues did not read sceptical literature, nor did they respond to the main arguments of the sceptics (Occam’s razor, the falsifiability principle, etc.).

Only until May 1995, thinking outside a subway station, there was a time when I seriously doubted, for the first time in life, the existence of psi (something similar to a priest doubting for the first time in his life of the existence of God). However, it would take me a few more years to understand why had I got caught in such a self-sealing belief system in the first place: an issue I address in my autobiographical books (see sidebar at the bottom of this page).

I mention this just so that it is understood that there are times that we are so absolutely convinced that pseudoscience is real science that we do not realise that it is a cathedral built on clay bases.

When I lived in Marin County I once had the opportunity to realise that the foundations of the ‘science’ I was studying were shaky. In a bookstore I saw that they sold A Skeptic’s Handbook of Parapsychology. Thirty-four years have passed since that night and I still remember the image of James Randi on the dustcover. But I thought I couldn’t afford it. If I had listened to the prosecutor, a dozen (lost) years of my life would have been spared! But I didn’t listen to him and embarked on a quixotic project of wanting to develop psi.

You can’t learn from another’s mistakes. I know that what I say here won’t make any dent whatsoever in the True Believers’ worldview who, like Unz, flee from the courtroom every time Bugliosi speaks. They do this to avoid the most elemental cognitive dissonance, as I did when I was trapped in my self-sealing system. But if I could travel to the past and see Cesar in that California bookstore in 1985, I would tell him, I would beg him, to buy the book he had in his young hands…

Categories
Winston Churchill

Excerpts of Unz’s WW2 article

To put things in plain language, during the years leading up to the Second World War, both Churchill and numerous other fellow British MPs were regularly receiving sizable financial stipends—cash bribes—from Jewish and Czech sources in exchange for promoting a policy of extreme hostility toward the German government and actually advocating war.

The sums involved were quite considerable, with the Czech government alone probably making payments that amounted to tens of millions of dollars in present-day money to British elected officials, publishers, and journalists working to overturn the official peace policy of their existing government.

A particularly notable instance occurred in early 1938 when Churchill suddenly lost all his accumulated wealth in a foolish gamble on the American stock-market, and was soon forced to put his beloved country estate up for sale to avoid personal bankruptcy, only to quickly be bailed out by a foreign Jewish millionaire intent upon promoting a war against Germany. Indeed, the early stages of Churchill’s involvement in this sordid behavior are recounted in an Irving chapter aptly entitled “The Hired Help.”

Ironically enough, German Intelligence learned of this massive bribery of British parliamentarians, and passed the information along to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who was horrified to discover the corrupt motives of his fierce political opponents, but apparently remained too much of a gentlemen to have them arrested and prosecuted. I’m no expert in the British laws of that era, but for elected officials to do the bidding of foreigners on matters of war and peace in exchange for huge secret payments seems almost a textbook example of treason to me, and I think that Churchill’s timely execution would surely have saved tens of millions of lives…

There is a feeling now prevalent in the United States marked by growing hatred of Fascism, and above all of Chancellor Hitler and everything connected with National Socialism. Propaganda is mostly in the hands of the Jews who control almost 100% of the radio, film, daily and periodical press. Although this propaganda is extremely coarse and presents Germany as black as possible–above all religious persecution and concentration camps are exploited–this propaganda is nevertheless extremely effective since the public here is completely ignorant and knows nothing of the situation in Europe…

Given the heavy Jewish involvement in financing Churchill and his allies and also steering the American government and public in the direction of war against Germany, organized Jewish groups probably bore the central responsibility for provoking the world war, and this was surely recognized by most knowledgeable individuals at the time…

With such examples in mind, we should hardly be surprised that for decades this huge Jewish involvement in orchestrating World War II was carefully omitted from nearly all subsequent historical narratives, even those that sharply challenged the mythology of the official account.

The index of Taylor’s iconoclastic 1961 work contains absolutely no mention of Jews, and the same is true of the previous books by Chamberlin and Grenfell.

In 1953, Harry Elmer Barnes, the dean of historical revisionists, edited his major volume aimed at demolishing the falsehoods of World War II, and once again any discussion of the Jewish role was almost entirely lacking, with only part of one single sentence and Chamberlain’s dangling short quote appearing across more than 200,000 words of text.

Both Barnes and many of his contributors had already been purged and their book was only released by a tiny publisher in Idaho, but they still sought to avoid certain unmentionables.

Even the arch-revisionist David Hoggan seems to have carefully skirted the topic of Jewish influence. His 30-page index lacks any entry on Jews and his 700 pages of text contain only scattered references. Indeed, although he does quote the explicit private statements of both the Polish ambassador and the British Prime Minister emphasizing the enormous Jewish role in promoting the war, he then rather questionably asserts that these confidential statements of individuals with the best understanding of events should simply be disregarded.

In the popular Harry Potter series, Lord Voldemort, the great nemesis of the young magicians, is often identified as “He Who Must Not Be Named,” since the mere vocalization of those few particular syllables might bring doom upon the speaker…

While visiting France during 1986 in preparation for an unrelated book, a Canadian writer named James Bacque stumbled upon clues suggesting that one of the most terrible secrets of post-war Germany had long remained completely hidden, and he soon embarked upon extensive research into the subject, finally publishing Other Losses in 1989. Based upon very considerable evidence, including government records, personal interviews, and recorded eyewitness testimony, he argued that after the end of the war, the Americans had starved to death as many as a million German POWs, seemingly as a deliberate act of policy, a war crime that would surely rank among the greatest in history.

Assuming these numbers are even remotely correct, the implications are quite remarkable. The toll of the human catastrophe experienced in post-war Germany would certainly rank among the greatest in modern peacetime history, far exceeding the deaths that occurred during the Ukrainian Famine of the early 1930s and possibly even approaching the wholly unintentional losses during Mao’s Great Leap Forward of 1959-61.

Furthermore, the post-war German losses would vastly outrank either of these other unfortunate events in percentage terms and this would remain true even if the Bacque’s estimates are considerably reduced. Yet I doubt if even a small fraction of one percent of Americans are today aware of this enormous human calamity. Presumably memories are much stronger in Germany itself, but given the growing legal crackdown on discordant views in that unfortunate country, I suspect that anyone who discusses the topic too energetically risks immediate imprisonment…

When intellectual freedom is under attack, challenging an officially enshrined mythology may become legally perilous. I have seen claims that thousands of individuals who hold heterodox opinions about various aspects of the history of World War II are today imprisoned across Europe on the basis of those beliefs. If so, that total is probably far higher than the number of ideological dissidents who had suffered a similar fate in the decaying Soviet Bloc countries of the 1980s…

But if we gradually conclude that the story that all of us have been told during our entire lifetimes is substantially false and perhaps largely inverted, the implications for our understanding of the world are enormous.

Most of the surprising material presented here is hardly hidden or kept under lock-and-key. Nearly all the books are easily available at Amazon or even freely readable on the Internet, many of the authors have received critical and scholarly acclaim, and in some cases their works have sold in the millions. Yet this important material has been almost entirely ignored or dismissed by the popular media that shapes the common beliefs of our society. So we must necessarily begin to wonder what other massive falsehoods may have been similarly promoted by that media, perhaps involving incidents of the recent past or even the present day. And those latter events do have enormous practical significance…

Both of these simple facts have been widely accepted in America throughout my entire lifetime. But combine them together with the relatively tiny size of worldwide Jewry, around 16 million prior to World War II, and the inescapable conclusion is that in per capita terms Jews were the greatest mass-murderers of the twentieth century, holding that unfortunate distinction by an enormous margin and with no other nationality coming even remotely close. And yet, by the astonishing alchemy of Hollywood, the greatest killers of the last one hundred years have somehow been transmuted into being seen as the greatest victims, a transformation so seemingly implausible that future generations will surely be left gasping in awe.

_________

Editor’s note: The original, ‘American Pravda: Understanding World War II’, is a 21,700-word article. As I said in the preface of The Fair Race, this is one of the elephants in the room.