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Free speech / association Holocaust

Ye shall know the truth…

and the truth will set you free, white man. But when it comes down to it, Kevin MacDonald is afraid to discuss the holocaust in his webzine and Greg Johnson says we should forget it—as if the genocidal system was not importing masses of non-whites under the pretext that we must atone for the Nazi sins!

I have surfed the sites of white nationalism for nine years and only today I learned that there is Castle Hill Publishers (CHP): a publishing house that specialises in revising the holocaust theme. Either I had not surfed well or the white nationalists did not mention this publishing house with due emphasis.

I think that all those who want to be free should start studying these books, especially since Amazon Books eliminated the 69 books from the CHP collection last year! Now you have to use other channels to request them. However, even if we do not have time to read them, or the money to purchase them, we are obliged to keep, in our hard-drives, the PDFs that CHP offers us on their site. As Jim Rizoli says about CHP, the time will come when not even these PDFs will be available on the web, so we should store them in our homes as soon as possible.

Nor did I know anything about the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH), which I discovered today, founded by Bradley Smith (1930-2016), which seems to be merging with CHP according to the Metapedia article. I recommend a very short video that presents, in a few words, the books published by CHP (here).

Today I will begin to save everything I can from this publishing house—a house as generous as David Irving’s books, which can also be obtained for free on his site.

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Psychiatry

View from the tower

History is the mighty Tower of Experience… It is no easy task to reach the top of this ancient structure and get the benefit of the full view. There is no elevator, but young feet are strong and it can be done. —Hendrik Willem van Loon.

Psychiatry is a pseudoscience and an Inquisition. The chapter ‘From the Great Confinement of Louis XIV of France to a Chemical Gulag’ can now be read, in due order, on my Ex Libris page (here).

As I have said, while white nationalists know that in the universities some fields are pseudoscientific (for example, gender studies or so-called historical grievances), in the same universities there are other pseudoscientific areas that go completely unnoticed.

Psychiatry is one of them and, since I researched it a few years ago, having translated one of the chapters from my online book, why no translate a few others for this site?

But first I must finish the translation of a book I did not write: Deschner’s lifetime research on Christianity, from which I still have to add nine posts before the first volume is available, I hope, as a printed book through Lulu Inc.

The history of Christianity and the history of psychiatry have something in common. The System has hidden from us the facts of what happened. Reaching the mighty tower that Van Loon talks about is one of the objectives of this site.

Categories
Evil Mainstream media Psychiatry

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

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

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

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

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Evil George Orwell Newspeak Psychiatry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Industrial Revolution Inquisition Louis XIV of France Paris Pseudoscience Psychiatry

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


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

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

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

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

Categories
Racial right

Anglin’s playground

‘History is the mighty Tower of Experience, which Time has built amidst the endless fields of bygone ages. It is no easy task to reach the top of this ancient structure and get the benefit of the full view. There is no elevator, but young feet are strong and it can be done’, wrote Hendrik Willem van Loon in The Story of Mankind.
In theory, if there is anything that should matter those who want an Aryan nation, it is the facts. History should be considered the most important of the humanities, yes: the tower of experience. But I do not see much interest in the white nationalism forums for ancient historical facts in Europe, especially those facts that explain why the white race is going extinct. (What we see in most of the forums are opinions and news comments; these days for example, Trump meeting with Putin.)
When are they going to be interested in their roots, the old history of their race? What is it that prevents them from reading William Pierce’s only non-fiction book (and let’s not talk about heavy treatises like Deschner’s)? Could it be that both Pierce and Deschner were anti-Christians? Could it be that they are clinging to their parents’ religion like a baby with a pacifier? Are not yet prepared to digest strong meat? Will I continue to be talking to myself with these Deschner translations because they’re still in Anglin’s playground, like kids living in the present?

Categories
Ancient Greece Child abuse Civilisation (TV series) Day of Wrath (book) Emigration / immigration Human sacrifice Infanticide Psychohistory Wikipedia

Day of Wrath, 18

What is redeemable in psychohistory?

The best introduction to the sane side of the deMausean thought available on the internet appears in the third part of the book The Emotional Life of Nations, especially in the final chapters: “The Evolution of Childrearing” and “The Evolution of Psyche and Society.” However, even in the following pages, where I would like to spare the salvageable part of deMause’s legacy, I will continue the criticism of his psychohistory.
 
Pseudoscientific charts
DeMause likes to interpolate ever-ascending charts on the historical treatment of children in his books, and even once he wrote that primitive humans treated their children better than our ape ancestors. I do not think that is true. The most terrible form of interactions between parents and children is the ritual sacrifice and cannibalism of one’s own children: a level of cruelty that has not been observed in primates other than man. Also, deMause assumes a gradual improvement in child treatment from 460 AD to approximately 1100 AD: an impossibility if we consider that we have no childrearing data around 8th century Europe. This mistake does not invalidate the salvageable part of deMause’s model: only the dogmatic idea that the treatment of children was always from worst to least bad.
In The History of Childhood deMause writes: “The image of Medea hovers over childhood in antiquity.” But in post-Homeric Greece it was already unusual to kill grown-up children as Medea did. The insistence on denigrating the Classical World is derived from the deMause’s dogma that childcare has always gone from worse to less bad, from major to minor abuse: the eternal upward charts in deMausean psychohistory. The prolific Jewish psychohistorian Robert Godwin, for example, emphatically dispatches the Greco-Roman world as barbarian in terms of upbringing. Once again: regarding the Jewish narrative versus the Aryan, in the next chapters we will see who were really the most barbaric.
One of the things that piqued my interest when I first encountered psychohistory was the secularized Judeo-Christian spirit breathed in it. DeMause and Godwin seem to reject the vision of the Enlightenment: to consider the Middle Ages darker than the most lucid moments of Greece and Rome. In contrast to deMause’s claims it does not seem likely at all that the Middle Ages was better as childrearing methods are concerned, or that Christendom was better compared to Pericles’ Athens or Republican Rome. In my own version of psychohistory, the Athenians should have treated the children well enough to allow the explosion of arts, philosophies and politics that we have inherited. However, due to the tenet that “the further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care,” deMause has blinded himself to see the obvious. True, an archaic ritual performed at Knossos by the non-Aryan natives included the cooking and eating of children as part of the fertility celebration (see the history on the white race by William Pierce in Who We Are). But as Ramón Xirau writes at the beginning of his Introducción a la Historia de la Filosofía, the Greece that we know is great precisely because it gave up such practices: something I’ve always related to the Hebrew story of Abraham, who at the last moment changed his mind as to sacrifice his child. The veracity of Xirau’s opening paragraph can be substantiated in the final chapter of the most erudite contemporary study on the subject, Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece by Dennis Hughes. To the Greeks of the time of Plato and Theophrastus, says Hughes, human sacrifice was a thing of the past; what was left in their time were isolated cases “and the custom is particularly associated with non-Greeks.”
Not only does the classical world refutes deMause. Julian Jaynes, the author of the book that could be classified as a different kind of psychohistory, implied that the cruel Assyrian law contrasted sharply with the Code of Hammurabi, written six centuries earlier. However, deMause might not err in his assessment of the West from the 12th century AD onward. One of my most memorable readings, based on the captivating television series by Kenneth Clark, was the second chapter of Civilisation about the “The Great Thaw” of Europe at the beginning of the 12th century, as well as the next chapter on courtly love: the West had invented love. The thaw was nothing other than the beginning to treat European women better than what non-westerners did in the rest of the world; hence the treatment of these women to their children changed. From the late 13th century begins the historical record of the death penalty in cases of voluntary infanticide. In addition to their relatively high IQ, psychogenically speaking the people of Europe would evolve more than the rest of the world.
But the white man of the present is suffering the worst psychosis in the history of the West. When by the end of 2008 I called deMause’s attention on the issue of the betrayal that the white man inflicts on himself with mass migration, I realized he knew nothing about the subject. This has led me to think that his chart that appears in his texts about the evolving historic personalities is flawed. DeMause puts there as inferior the psychoclass that has as its model the “patriotic” man compared to the “activist.” The truth is that patriots are precisely the ones who defend their nations against the greatest evil of our times: race replacement. Unlike the ivory tower where both deMause and the academics live, it appears that the recent Western self-treason represents the most serious, plummeting drop in psychogenesis since prehistory.
The case of deMause is aggravated by his Jewish colleagues who abhor not only the Classical World but the West in general: a position that has infected and corrupted his school of psychohistory since its inception. I have not been able to corroborate that deMause himself comes from a Jewish family, although the names he gave to his children, as well as his extreme aversion for the Third Reich, would seem to suggest it.
 
Shoddy scholarship
DeMause’s mistakes do not end with the discussion in previous pages. Since he sometimes uses his sources very loosely, the possibility exists that his psychohistory could consist of assumptions based on little, if any, evidence. I have found that occasionally deMause takes his data out of context, and that some of his pronouncements on subjects I know better contain serious errors. (For example, instead of the Mexica patron god, Huitzilopochtli, in his books he writes of him as an “Aztec goddess.”) Although such errors do not invalidate his theory, deMause could have used his sources more carefully.
So far the only interesting discussion about psychohistory I am aware of can be read in several discussion pages of Wikipedia. After Ark insulted the editors of the article mentioned above, he returned for a brief time to edit and discuss in the article “Infanticide.” In the discussion page Julie Hofmann Kemp, the editor whom Ark had insulted, responded to him and the other Wikipedia editors in a reasonable manner:

Problems with this. You’re using shoddy scholarship to try to back up an unprovable claim. DeMause provides no analysis or discussion of his sources, merely a catalog of horrific quotes. We cannot tell the context, nor can we take them as representative.

What Julie told Ark next is more substantial:

Anybody can go through books and pick out quotes to make an argument. Since deMause’s work is criminally lax in scholarship, I suggest you try to use better sources. I just reread “A Modest Proposal,” and could see absolutely nothing that referred to rotting corpses of babies in the streets. The only reference was to children accompanying their mothers begging. This certainly makes me question the veracity of other statements in this article.

Ark angrily replied that she could not accept the reality of infanticide because it was very uncomfortable for her. Julie responded:

No, Ark—I am fully aware that we live in a society where people do horrible things to children. I am also aware that this has long been the case. There are plenty of records out there for at least the Victorian area on things like the treatment of children in workhouses, and they clearly indicate widespread abuse of minors and women. I removed what I did [from the Wikipedia article] because I reread Swift and the deMause article you used as sources. Unfortunately, there seems to have been a lot of stuff quoted out of context. Some of the sources, like Philippe Ariès, I’ve read. If you want things to stay unchallenged, you’ve got to make sure they have recognizable merit. This is why I think we need to look beyond deMause. DeMause is only one of thousands of people writing on child abuse and infanticide. As a historian, I can see great gaping holes in deMause’s use of sources. It doesn’t make him wrong, but it certainly sets off warning bells—if the scholarship doesn’t stand up, then are the conclusions he draws really proven?

After further critical responses from other editors, quite reasonable and civic, Ark quit editing Wikipedia, and this time definitely, on my birthday of 2002. I agree that the way deMause has used the sources lacks academic rigor. However, if as Julie and others advised, it could be possible to source deMause’s model with non-deMausean references, the psychohistorical structure would be supported upon a new sort of column.
That is exactly what I did. In March and April of 2008 I massively edited “Infanticide,” the same article where years before Julie and Ark had discussed, adding a hundred references that I did not read in deMausean texts, but in a voluminous treatise of Larry S. Milner published in 2000. The model of the breakdown of the bicameral mind by surpassing the infanticidal psychoclass, is the cornerstone on which rests what remained of the psychohistorical building after my critique. Therefore, I will reproduce here what I added to that article, which I also translated for Wikipedia in Spanish. In my second book the critique of psychiatry contained such incredible facts that, unlike the other books, I was forced to include bibliographical notes. For the same reasons here I will do the same.
 
___________
The objective of Day of Wrath is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering. If life allows, next month I will reproduce another chapter. Day of Wrath is available: here.

Categories
Alexis de Tocqueville American civil war Blacks George Washington Philosophy of history Racial studies

Heisman’s suicide note, 11

Or:

A key to understanding the ethnosuicidal United States

I had said in the previous post that I would not read beyond page 500. But a friend on Facebook suggested that I read what Heisman says about the Norman Conquest and I have found oil. I wonder if those white nationalist scholars in the history of Britain and the United States know this thesis? Although Heisman was a Jew, in good hands his thesis could be a vital piece to put together the puzzle of the whys of white suicide, which leads the United States of America. Heisman wrote:
 
Remarkably, the Anglo-Saxons and Germans are very closely related in their cultural-ethnic origins. Yet during the Nazi period, the Germans continued a cultural-political path that lead to an idealization of the Jews as their greatest mortal enemies, the destruction of Western cultural values inherited from Christianity, and the systematic genocide of the alleged propagators of those values. The Americans ventured towards the total opposite historical trajectory becoming perhaps the most Christian nation of the developed world, the most culturally compatible nation with the Jews, and the greatest ally of the state of Israel. At the root of this historical divergence between the Anglo-Saxons and the Germans lay the Norman Conquest. […]
An essential inheritance of America’s Anglo-Protestant values is an inclination to forget ethnic origins, national rivalries, and presumptions of hereditary status that were characteristic of the Old World. The Anglo-Saxons planted the model of this morality of turning a blind eye to national origins for all other Americans to follow and this implicated the erasure of everyone else’s ethnic origins as well. The freedom to forget the past appears to be the obverse side of America’s traditionally optimistic vision of the future. But why is this past problematic? Why were hereditary origins an issue in the first place?
The “race problem” should not matter in America, yet somehow it is the most American issue, the most relevant innovation of the entire American experiment. The old answers, moreover, that attempted to account for the entire “race” issue simply do not add up. There is a lack of coherent answer to the question of why race matters.
American historian Gordon Wood observed that

the white American colonists were not an oppressed people; they had no crushing imperial chains to throw off. In fact, the colonists knew they were freer, more equal, more prosperous, and less burdened with cumbersome feudal and monarchical restraints than any other part of mankind in the eighteenth century.

What exactly were the colonists rebelling against, then? What was this world-historical commotion called “revolution” really about?
 
Conquering the Conquest, or, Enlightened Saxon-centrism
The unanswered questions about race and revolution can be concentrated into a single historical question: When did the Anglo-Saxon nation stop being conquered by the Normans? For the sake of empirical accuracy, let us refuse to indulge in vague abstractions or undemonstrated traditional assumptions of assimilation. If we demand a specific, empirical date or period that marks a distinct end to the Conquest, what can the study of history offer?
Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, a descendant of an old aristocratic family from Normandy, wrote in his famous treatise on American democracy, “[g]eneral ideas do not attest to the strength of human intelligence, but rather to its insufficiency.” The holy abstraction of “freedom” has effectually pulled wool over the eyes of those who have mindlessly submitted to the authority of the metaphysics of freedom. Freedom, in this way, seems to grant freedom from rational reflection upon the authority of “freedom.” Instead of being misled by fuzzy, mystical, metaphysical abstractions such as “freedom”, let us ask, specifically and empirically, freedom from what? In its distinctive historical context, what exactly was it about the British political order that radicals such as Thomas Paine sought freedom from?
The very title of Paine’s book, The Rights of Man, might suggest a tendency to abstract or grossly generalize his particular anathema to “hereditary government” in England and France in universal terms. Yet this appearance does not fully stand up to scrutiny. In the case of England, he inquired specifically and empirically into the identity of its hereditary government and followed its very own hereditary logic back to its hereditary origins to discover:

that origin is the Norman Conquest. They are evidently of the vassalage class of manners, and emphatically mark the prostrate distance that exists in no other condition of men than between the conqueror and the conquered.

This means that the “prostrate distance” between the conqueror “class” and the conquered “class” was also a hereditary distance. This kinship discontinuity between rulers and ruled suggests possible grounds for ethnic hostility between the descendants of the aristocracy and the majority population.
In The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity, historian Hugh Thomas documented the ethnic hostility that existed between the native English and Normans following the Conquest. Justifying a common tendency to conflate ‘Anglo-Saxon’ with ‘English’, he maintained that English identity ultimately triumphed over both Norman identity and ethnic hostility. His thesis implies a kind of democratic cultural revolution and a belief in Anglo-Saxon conquest through cultural identity imperialism. If Thomas was right, then we should really date the first “modern” step towards democratic cultural revolution around the beginning of the thirteenth century. But was the Conquest really conquered so easily?
If the Norman Conquest, Norman identity, and ethnic hostility were conquered so easily, then how does Hugh Thomas explain these words of Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man?

The hatred which the Norman invasion and tyranny begat, must have been deeply rooted in the nation, to have outlived the contrivance to obliterate it. Though not a courtier will talk of the curfew-bell, not a village in England has forgotten it.

This is a direct refutation of the Hugh Thomas’s thesis, in The English and the Normans, that ethnic hostility ended by the beginning of the thirteenth century. Paine provided a powerful refutation, not simply as an observer, but as a highly influential embodiment of ethnic hostility against the Norman conquerors and their legacy. So who is right, Hugh Thomas or Thomas Paine?
The historian noted, “[l]ong-standing ethnic hostility would have completely altered the course of English political, social, and cultural history.” This unverified assertion that ethnic hostility did not continue significantly past the period covered by his study (1066-c.1220) was also contradicted by Michael Wood’s recollection of his childhood encounter with Montgomery in the 1960s:

Monty, of course, still bore his name and still carried his flag. And that explained his take on the Conquest. For though he was as English as I was, he saw himself as a Norman—and that’s what counts when it comes to matters of identity… as far as I was concerned, Monty would always be a Norman.

Still, in the twentieth century, the old ethnic identities mattered.
Did “Englishness” mean more than a quirk of geography, and more than “class”, to a hereditary Norman dominion eventually engulfed Ireland and Scotland as well? The label of Englishness certainly triumphed and the very core of the English language re-emerged. Yet England ultimately became something different, neither Norman nor English, but neither and both. Even if we ignore actual hereditary descent, the famous, and distinctively English “class system” dates from the Conquest and can itself be considered a long-term cultural triumph of Norman identity.
Genealogist L. G. Pine attested to the fact that the prestige of a Norman pedigree, associated with the identity of the “best people” or upper class, triumphed to the extent that many ambitious native English wanted to be Normans throughout post-Conquest English history. Ultimately, it was not so much that Normans became English so much that the English became British. The permanent occupation of the conqueror “class” formed the hereditary basis of the “British” Empire. While Thomas is fundamentally wrong, it is fortunate that he has clarified the issue by rightly raising the point that the reality of early post-Conquest ethnic hostility should wake people out of the complacent assumption that Normans and English should ultimately merge into one people.
Cultural assimilation is one thing; genetic assimilation, however, is quite another. Here the deficiency of historical studies that fail to account for biological factors and a general evolutionary perspective becomes most apparent. While Thomas’s scholarship offers many contributions to the debate, especially his balanced judgment on many topics, conclusions about the ultimate effects of the Conquest will remain fundamentally unbalanced if genetic factors are left out of the final equations.
Thomas writes history as if Charles Darwin never lived. Even if the Normans had completely assimilated culturally yet maintained a hereditary monopoly of leading positions within the country, that cannot be called full assimilation. The notion of special political-hereditary rights and privileges passed on from generation to generation that the American revolutionaries fought against in theory are the exact opposite of genetic assimilation.
Thomas’s thesis makes sense only if it can be demonstrated that the Anglo-Saxons are an ethnicity indifferent as to whether their government is or is not representative of “the people.” Thomas’s thesis could be saved only if the evidence verified that Anglo-Saxons are an ethnicity with no sense of the value of liberty, their fawning natural servility allowing them to live together with their new Norman aristocracy happily ever after. In summary, the real question of assimilation is whether the Anglo-Saxons assimilated to the notion that the Normans had a right to conquer them.
As L. G. Pine wrote, “The historian whose unthinking conscience allows them to justify the Norman Conquest, could as easily justify the Nazi subjugation of Europe.” Thomas’s perilous, conciliatory suppression of any negative attitudes towards Normans that could be construed as ethnic hostility led him to acquiesce in a neutral or sometimes even positive attitude of appeasement towards those exemplary Normanitas virtues expressed in ruthless military domination, genocide, and the crushing of all native ethnic resistance (a.k.a. conquest; the antithesis of the rights of man; the negation of the every principle that the most egalitarian of the American founders sought to bring to light in opposition to the founding of the British Empire in 1066).
Michael Mann’s The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing proposed two versions of “We, the people.” He proposed that the liberal version, exemplified by American Constitutionalism, is characterized by individual rights, class, and special interest groups. In the organic version of democracy ethnicity rivals other forms of interest and identity and in some circumstances can express itself in ethnic cleansing. This is the “dark side of democracy.”
In Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union, Mann observed, “democratization struggles increasingly pitted a local ethnicity against a foreign imperial ruler.” The demos was confused with the ethnos. Was America any different? If the Normans conquerors achieved some degree of success in perpetuating their hereditary government over the centuries, and the original ethnic conflict that Thomas documented was not perpetuated with it, then how does one explain that? What would make the impetus of organic and liberal democracy so different from one another?
For the sake of argument, let us entertain this peculiar idea of hereditary separatism, just as John Locke does in his Second Treatise of Government (and try in earnest to assume this has nothing to do whatsoever with the Norman Conquest):

But supposing, which seldom happens, that the conquerors and conquered never incorporate into one people, under the same laws and freedom; let us see next what power a lawful conqueror has over the subdued: and that I say is purely despotical… the government of a conqueror, imposed by force on the subdued… has no obligation on them.

The Declaration of Independence proclaims, “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This assertion implies that the Norman Conquest was illegitimate. The Norman takeover was achieved despite the lack of consent of the governed. That government was instituted with strategic violence against any significant resistance from the governed. From the view of its author, Thomas Jefferson, the Norman Conquest was the institution of an unjust power against the rights of the people. It is thus not a coincidence that the hereditary “English” political tradition was founded in utter violation of the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
In The Rights of Man, Paine explained, “by the Conquest all the rights of the people or the nation were absorbed into the hands of the Conqueror, who added the title of King to that of Conqueror.” Paine posited a remarkable ambiguity between the “rights of the people” and “the nation.” King was equated with Conqueror. In 1066 there existed a right of conquest, but no “rights of the people.” The modern invention of the latter justified, at long last, the reclamation of Anglo-Saxon “rights” from the “hands of the Conqueror.”
The Declaration of Independence further asserts, “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.” America provided an opportunity to do just that.
Taking full advantage of this opportunity meant that America would truly be different from the old world. As The Rights of Man explained, “In England, the person who exercises this prerogative [as king] is often a foreigner; always half a foreigner, and always married to a foreigner. He is never in full natural or political connection with the country.” A lack of “natural” connection between the political elite and the people was significant for Paine. The contrast with America was clear: “The presidency of America… is the only office from which a foreigner is excluded; and in England, it is the only one to which he is admitted.” The new world would be different.
America, for Paine, was the place where foreigners were excluded from that high office. Democracy meant that “commoners” could finally be admitted. Revolution had turned the old order upside down: the rule of the people meant the triumph of Anglo-Saxon ethnocentrism over the legacy of the Norman-centric aristocracy.
It is unfortunate for believers in the distinct superiority of the liberal form of democracy that the organic and liberal varieties are more equal than they think. Faith in the categorical distinction between the liberal and organic expressions of democracy is only a display of naiveté towards the cunning of ethnocentrism. Democratic Saxon-centrism has prevented an appreciation of the ethnic diversity at the very heart of the American founding.
Are the Anglo-Saxon ethnically superior to ethnocentrism and thus superior to all other peoples on Earth in this respect or has something been overlooked? Is it true that Anglo-Saxons are always superior and never inferior to the power and influence of the Norman Conquest or is it at least possible that this unspoken assumption might have something to do with Anglo-Saxon ethnocentrism? It is as if a conquest of the Conquest has been attempted through an enlightened ethnic cleansing of the Norman impact on world history. The Norman conquerors of history, however, were not conquered so easily.
 
The Peculiar Revolution
For the title of original, permanent English colony in the New World, the Pilgrims of the Mayflower take second place. It was the English settlers of Jamestown, Virginia, who were the first permanent English colonists, thirteen years before the Mayflower. Jamestown was birthplace of the United States, and, it just so happens, the birthplace of American slavery of Africans. In 1619, a year before the landing of the Mayflower, the first black slaves were brought to Virginia.
America was born a land of slavery.
In the Old World, it had been “the Norman” who so often represented tyranny, aristocracy, and inequality. But surely things must have been different in America. In the land of freedom, democracy, and equality, perhaps only Southern slavery posed a truly fundamental challenge to these modern values.
The question nonetheless remains, who were these Southern slave masters?
It is as if recent historians have confidently assumed that, in all of human history, there could not be a case where the issue of race was more irrelevant. Never in human history was the issue of race more irrelevant than in regard to the racial identity of the American South’s essential “master race.” This is a truly fantastic contradiction: the South apparently fought a war in the name of the primacy of race, yet the distinctive racial identity of the South primary ruling race is apparently a matter of total indifference.
Virtually every other people in history, from the Italians, to the Chinese, to the Mayans, to the Albanians, possessed some form of ethnic identity. The French, the Germans, and the Russians did not and do not simply consider themselves to be merely “white.” The original English settlers of the North, moreover, are considered, not simply white, but Anglo-Saxon. Why, then, was the South’s “master race” nearly alone in its absence of a distinctive ethnic identity? Is this state of affairs only a consummation of the Northern victory?
Of course, that blacks possessed a distinctive African ancestry is admissible, but the ancestry of the South’s ruling race is apparently inadmissible. This must be a state of affairs almost more peculiar than slavery itself. Everyone else across the world is permitted a distinctive ethnic or racial identity except the great Southern slave masters. For some peculiar reason, the original Southern slave masters are not allowed to have a distinct ethnic or racial identity. This means that the only people in American history who apparently have no distinct ethnic or racial origins beyond being white are precisely the same people who thought other people could and should be enslaved on the basis of their ethnic or racial origins.
These aristocratic planters must have been the most raceless, bloodless, deracinated, rootless, cosmopolitan universalists ever known to history. We must conclude that of all white people, these aristocrats must have valued heredity or genealogy the very least. The Virginia planters were most peculiar, not for being owners of black slaves, but for being the least ethnically self-conscious white people in world history. Is this an accurate reflection of reality?
This is really one of the great, peculiar paradoxes of world history: the elite Southern planters, one of the most extreme, unapologetic, and explicitly racist groups in history, are precisely those who may have the most obscure racial identity in history. Their claim to fame has been tied to identifying blacks as a race of natural slaves and in identifying themselves as race of natural masters—a “master race” without a racial identity. Perhaps the time has come to recognize that they have also merited a claim to fame simply for the obscurity of their racial identity.
Who were they?
The Englishmen who first settled the North identified themselves as Anglo-Saxons. But what about the “First Families of Virginia”? Virginia’s Tidewater elite largely originated from the geographic entity of England. But did these racists consider themselves specifically Anglo-Saxon? This question must be posed as carefully as possible: did they or did they not specifically identify themselves as members of the Anglo-Saxon race?
Who were these American slave masters?
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the North possessed “the qualities and defects that characterize the middle class”, while the South “has the tastes, prejudices, weaknesses, and greatness of all aristocracies.” There could probably be no greater confirmation that South possessed a genuine aristocracy in the traditional sense. Yet this prescient antebellum observation begs the question: how did young America acquire an old aristocracy?
It is as if, in America, of all places, no explanation is required for this profound cultural difference between North and South. America was supposedly a country defined by “the qualities and defects that characterize the middle class.” But the idea of a slave race assumes the existence of a master race, not a bourgeois or middle-class race. The Union was not threatened by the leadership of poor Southern whites; it was threatened by the leadership of a subgroup of whites with an aristocratic philosophy that mastered the entire cultural order of the South.
If the Civil War was fought against slavery, and to fight slavery was to fight the slave-masters, then the Civil War was fought against the slave-masters. Since the slaves were not guilty of enslaving themselves, the argument that the Civil War was about slavery is practically identical to the argument that the Civil War was about the slave-masters. No matter which way one looks at it, all roads of inquiry into slavery leads to an inquiry into these peculiar Southern slave-masters.
Who were they?
“These slaves”, said Abraham Lincoln, “constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.” Did Lincoln state here that slavery was the cause of the war? No, Lincoln stated that slaves, as property, constituted an interest, and this interest was, somehow, the cause of war. The question then becomes, whose interest did these slaves serve?
To speak of aristocracy is to speak, by definition, of a minority of the population. The original aristocratic settlers of Virginia were called Cavaliers. “[T]he legend of the Virginia cavalier was no mere romantic myth”, concluded David Hackett Fischer in Albion’s Seed. “In all of its major parts, it rested upon a solid foundation of historical fact.”
But who were the Cavaliers?
One year before the outbreak of the American Civil War, in June of 1860, the Southern Literary Messenger declared:

the Southern people come of that race recognized as cavaliers… directly descended from the Norman barons of William the Conqueror, a race distinguished in its early history for its warlike and fearless character, a race in all times since renowned for its gallantry, chivalry, honor, gentleness and intellect.

Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology and the Intellectual History of the American Civil War documented the thesis of Norman/Saxon conflict from a literary perspective. Its author, Ritchie Devon Watson, Jr., interpreted this thesis of Norman-Cavalier identity as “race mythology”, just as historian James McPherson has called this peculiar notion the “central myth of southern ethnic nationalism.” Yet how can this thesis be dismissed as myth without a thorough, scientific, genealogical investigation into the matter? Is it a myth, rather, that the Norman Conquest, the most pivotal event in English history, had no affect whatsoever on America? Is it true that representatives of virtually every ethnicity and race have come to America—with one peculiar Norman exception? Were the descendents of the Norman-Viking conquerors of England the only people in the world who were not enterprising or adventurous enough to try their fortunes in a new land?
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union,” Lincoln explained, “and is not either to save or destroy slavery.” Yet it has become commonplace to disagree with Lincoln and to propagate the myth that the Civil War was first and foremost about the slavery of black people. The repeated claim that the Civil War was about slavery can be deceptive because it serves as a means of avoiding focus upon the slave-masters, which further avoids facing the centrality of the identity of the Norman-Cavaliers. The American Civil War was fought primarily, not over black slavery, but over Norman mastery.
There is a sense, however, in which the Civil War was provoked by the slavery of a race of people. Norman-American George Fitzhugh, the South’s most extreme and comprehensive pro-slavery theorist, clarified the relationship between race, slavery, and the Civil War amidst that violent clash of two Americas:

It is a gross mistake to suppose that ‘abolition’ is the cause of dissolution between the north and south. The Cavaliers, Jacobites, and Huguenots of the south naturally hate, condemn, and despise the Puritans who settled the north. The former are master races, the latter a slave race, the descendants of the Saxon serfs.

This is a key piece of the racial puzzle of America. Fitzhugh implied that the North sided with a black slave race because the Anglo-Saxons themselves are a slave race. Fitzhugh depicted Anglo-Saxons as the niggers of post-Conquest England.
With these words, Fitzhugh verified that the Norman Conquest, in its origins, was a form of slavery of the Anglo-Saxon race. The foundational irreconcilability between North and South is incomprehensible without recognizing that North’s peculiar obsession with “freedom” evolved precisely from the fierce denial that they or their ancestors were, in fact, a Saxon “slave race” born to serve a Norman “master race.”
“True,” Horace Greeley admitted in an issue of his New York Daily Tribune in 1854, “we believe the tendency of the slaveholding system is to make those trained under and mentally conforming to it, overbearing, imperious, and regardless of the rights of others.” Would he have believed, too, that the tendency of the Saxon-holding system in England after 1066 was to make those trained under and mentally conforming to it, overbearing, imperious, and regardless of the rights of others? Could there be any connection between these two very peculiar tendencies?
Could revulsion against the very notion of a slavish Saxon-holding system be the root and source of the inordinately strong Anglo-Saxon tendency toward freedom? The key to understanding the modern fame of the Anglo-Saxons as a free race is to understand the medieval fame of the Anglo-Saxons as a conquered and enslaved race. The Norman-Cavaliers’ belief in the rectitude of slavery was a direct descendant of belief in the rectitude of the peculiar institution of the right of conquest.
Yet, as Fitzhugh made clear, he and other Cavaliers were not the only whites of the South, even if they were as decisive in forming the culture of South as the Anglo-Saxons were in forming the culture of the North. The Jacobites refer to the Scotch-Irish who became the majority of the Southern white population. A smaller population of French Huguenots followed the original Cavaliers and concentrated in South Carolina.
According to the late American political scientist Samuel Huntington, “American identity as a multiethnic society dates from, and in some measure, was a product of World War II.” Huntington believed that America has a Puritan essence. He implied that American identity is rooted in a single ethnic identity and that ethnic identity is Puritan and Anglo-Saxon. If this is true, then it goes without saying that ultimate patriarch among the “founding fathers”, George Washington, must have been a pureblooded Anglo-Saxon. Is this genealogically accurate?
According to one source, the very first Washington in England was originally named William fitzPatric (Norman French for son of Patric). He changed his name to William de Wessyngton when he adopted the name of the parish in which he lived circa 1180 A.D. Another source, the late English specialist in Norman genealogy L. G. Pine, related that George Washington and his family “has plenty of Norman ancestry.” He confirmed that this family was on record as owners of Washington Manor in Durhamshire in the twelfth century and of knightly rank. Since George Washington was the possessor of “a carefully traced decent from Edward I,” this implies that the first president of the United States was also a descendant of William the Conqueror. None other than the twenty-eighth president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, affirmed in his biography of Washington that his Cavalier ancestors “hated the Puritans” and that the first Washingtons in Virginia were born of a “stock whose loyalty was as old as the Conquest… They came of a Norman family.”
George Washington was a Norman-American and a classic representative of the aristocratic, slave-owning, Cavalier culture of Virginia. Unfortunately for Mr. Washington, Samuel Huntington has no room for the kind of diversity represented by America’s first president and his Puritan hating, Cavalier ancestors. Everyone must conform to the Anglo-Saxon, Puritan cultural model if they want to be counted as real Americans—even George Washington. Wasn’t that what the Civil War was about?
How is it even conceivable that Norman conquerors who developed into Southern slave masters could also have played a decisive role in the architecture of American liberty? Huntington, so keen to stress the English roots of American liberty, neglected to point out that Magna Carta was a product of Norman aristocratic civilization. It was the Normans who first invented the formal tradition of constitutional liberty that eventually conquered the world.
So while Washington was an heir to Norman aristocratic tradition, Magna Carta was a part of that tradition. Southern resistance to King George III in 1776 could trace its struggle for liberty to the resistance of Norman barons to King John in 1215 (and this also preserved their special privileges or “liberties” against the tide of assimilation with Anglo-Saxons). It was only in the seventeenth century that Anglo-Saxons exploited and selectively reinterpreted Magna Carta for their own purposes.
The ultimate foil of Hugh M. Thomas’s thesis that ethnic hostility between Normans and Anglo-Saxon went extinct by about 1220 is to be found in the endurance and persistence of Samuel Huntington’s question: Who are we? The “universalism” of the American founding actually emerged out of the attempt to preserve a rather peculiar form of multiculturalism that balanced the democracy-leaning North against an aristocracy-leaning, slaving owning South. The American Civil War resulted in the Northern conquest of the multicultural America that formed the character of the American founding. The Anglo-Saxon conquest of 1865 was the real founding of Samuel Huntington’s presumption of a single Puritan-based American culture.
What Hugh Thomas actually did was to dig up the root of the Anglo-Saxon cultural identity imperialism that late twentieth century multiculturalism began to expose. Thomas’s conclusion that the Anglo-Saxons culturally conquered the Normans in thirteenth century was made seemingly plausible only by nineteenth century conquests of the Normans. Thomas only uncovered the origin of this Anglo-Saxon way of cultural conquest through a struggle against the multicultural England of medieval times.
Multiculturalists who have promoted the contributions of women and minorities at the expense of the usual dead white males of history are following directly in the footsteps of Anglo-Saxon historians who downplayed the Norman impact on their history. The underdog biases of multiculturalism is not an aberration, but only a continuation of the majoritarian bias of democracy itself against a fair assessment of the contributions of Norman aristocracy to world history. William the Conqueror is the ultimate dead white European male in the history of the English-speaking world.
Hugh Thomas’s unspoken assumption is that Anglo-Saxons culturally conquered the Norman Conquest. They, the Anglo-Saxons, were ultimately history’s great conquerors. But is this true? Let this point resound around the entire world with utmost clarity: the issue here is who conquered whom? Did the Normans become victims of conquest by the Anglo-Saxons in modern times through characteristically modern methods?
Is it all possible that Anglo-Saxons might possibly be biased on the subject of the people who once defeated, conquered, and subjugated them? Most humans have submitted to the yoke of a “modern” Anglo-Saxon-leaning interpretation of long-term effects of the Norman Conquest. The repression of the impact of 1066 upon modern times has stifled a rational, evolutionary understanding of liberal democracy in the English-speaking world. The time has come for America and the rest of the English-speaking world to overcome this ancient bloodfeud and reclaim its Norman heritage, a heritage to goes to the very heart of the American founding.
In modern times, the Anglo-Saxon culturally conquered the Normans by Saxoning away their multicultural difference into presumptions of Anglo-Saxon “universalism.” To call America “Anglo-Saxon” is thus tantamount to ethnically cleansing George Washington of his Norman or Cavalier ancestral identity. Was George Washington the victim of a cultural form of ethnic cleansing by the Anglo-Saxon people?
[pages 654-675]

Categories
Athens Autobiography Catholic Church Christendom Darkening Age (book) Evil Free speech / association Library of Alexandria

Darkening Age, 2


 
INTRODUCTION
Athens, AD 532

‘That all superstition of pagans and heathens should be annihilated is what God wants, God commands, God proclaims.’

— St Augustine

This was no time for a philosopher to be philosophical. ‘The tyrant’, as the philosophers put it, was in charge and had many alarming habits. In Damascius’s own time, houses were entered and searched for books and objects deemed unacceptable. If any were found they would be removed and burned in triumphant bonfires in town squares. Discussion of religious matters in public had been branded a ‘damnable audacity’ and forbidden by law. Anyone who made sacrifices to the old gods could, the law said, be executed. Across the empire, ancient and beautiful temples had been attacked, their roofs stripped, their treasures melted down, their statues smashed. To ensure that their rules were kept, the government started to employ spies, officials and informers to report back on what went on in the streets and marketplaces of cities and behind closed doors in private homes. As one influential Christian speaker put it, his congregation should hunt down sinners and drive them into the way of salvation as relentlessly as a hunter pursues his prey into nets.
The consequences of deviation from the rules could be severe and philosophy had become a dangerous pursuit. Damascius’s own brother had been arrested and tortured to make him reveal the names of other philosophers, but had, as Damascius recorded with pride, ‘received in silence and with fortitude the many blows of the rod that landed on his back’. Others in Damascius’ s circle of philosophers had been tortured; hung up by the wrists until they gave away the names of their fellow scholars. A fellow philosopher had, some years before, been flayed alive. Another had been beaten before a judge until the blood flowed down his back.
The savage ‘tyrant’ was Christianity. From almost the very first years that a Christian emperor had ruled in Rome in AD 312, liberties had begun to be eroded. And then, in AD 529, a final blow had fallen. It was decreed that all those who laboured ‘under the insanity of paganism’—in other words Damascius and his fellow philosophers—would be no longer allowed to teach. There was worse. It was also announced that anyone who had not yet been baptized was to come forward and make themselves known at the ‘holy churches’ immediately, or face exile. And if anyone allowed themselves to be baptized, then slipped back into their old pagan ways, they would be executed.
For Damascius and his fellow philosophers, this was the end. They could not worship their old gods. They could not earn any money. Above all, they could not now teach philosophy. The Academy, the greatest and most famous school in the ancient world—perhaps ever—a school that could trace its history back almost a millennium, closed.
It is impossible to imagine how painful the journey through Athens would have been. As they went, they would have walked through the same streets and squares where their heroes—Socrates, Plato, Aristotle—had once walked and worked and argued. They would have seen in them a thousand reminders that those celebrated times were gone. The temples of Athens were closed and crumbling and many of the brilliant statues that had once stood in them had been defaced or removed. Even the Acropolis had not escaped: its great statue of Athena had been torn down.
Little of what is covered by this book is well-known outside academic circles. Certainly it was not well-known by me when I grew up in Wales, the daughter of a former nun and a former monk. My childhood was, as you might expect, a fairly religious one. We went to church every Sunday; said grace before meals, and I said my prayers (or at any rate the list of requests which I considered to be the same thing) every night. When Catholic relatives arrived we play-acted not films but First Holy Communion and, at times, even actual communion…
As children, both had been taught by monks and nuns; and as a monk and a nun they had both taught. They believed as an article of faith that the Church that had enlightened their minds was what had enlightened, in distant history, the whole of Europe. It was the Church, they told me, that had kept alive the Latin and Greek of the classical world in the benighted Middle Ages, until it could be picked up again by the wider world in the Renaissance. And, in a way, my parents were right to believe this, for it is true. Monasteries did preserve a lot of classical knowledge.
But it is far from the whole truth. In fact, this appealing narrative has almost entirely obscured an earlier, less glorious story. For before it preserved, the Church destroyed.
In a spasm of destruction never seen before—and one that appalled many non-Christians watching it—during the fourth and fifth centuries, the Christian Church demolished, vandalized and melted down a simply staggering quantity of art. Classical statues were knocked from their plinths, defaced, defiled and torn limb from limb. Temples were razed to their foundations and burned to the ground. A temple widely considered to be the most magnificent in the entire empire was levelled.
Many of the Parthenon sculptures were attacked, faces were mutilated, hands and limbs were hacked off and gods were decapitated. Some of the finest statues on the whole building were almost certainly smashed off then ground into rubble that was then used to build churches.
Books—which were often stored in temples—suffered terribly. The remains of the greatest library in the ancient world, a library that had once held perhaps 700,000 volumes, were destroyed in this way by Christians. It was over a millennium before any other library would even come close to its holdings. Works by censured philosophers were forbidden and bonfires blazed across the empire as outlawed books went up in flames.

Fragment of a 5th-century scroll
showing the destruction of the Serapeum
by Pope Theophilus of Alexandria

The work of Democritus, one of the greatest Greek philosophers and the father of atomic theory, was entirely lost. Only one per cent of Latin literature survived the centuries. Ninety-nine per cent was lost.
The violent assaults of this period were not the preserve of cranks and eccentrics. Attacks against the monuments of the ‘mad’, ‘damnable’ and ‘insane’ pagans were encouraged and led by men at the very heart of the Catholic Church. The great St Augustine himself declared to a congregation in Carthage that ‘that all superstition of pagans and heathens should be annihilated is what God wants, God commands, God proclaims!’ St Martin, still one of the most popular French saints, rampaged across the Gaulish countryside levelling temples and dismaying locals as he went. In Egypt, St Theophilus razed one of the most beautiful buildings in the ancient world. In Italy, St Benedict overturned a shrine to Apollo. In Syria, ruthless bands of monks terrorized the countryside, smashing down statues and tearing the roofs from temples.
St John Chrysostom encouraged his congregations to spy on each other. Fervent Christians went into people’s houses and searched for books, statues and paintings that were considered demonic. This kind of obsessive attention was not cruelty. On the contrary: to restrain, to attack, to compel, even to beat a sinner was— if you turned them back to the path of righteousness—to save them. As Augustine, the master of the pious paradox put it: ‘Oh, merciful savagery.’
The results of all of this were shocking and, to non-Christians, terrifying. Townspeople rushed to watch as internationally famous temples were destroyed. Intellectuals looked on in despair as volumes of supposedly unchristian books—often in reality texts on the liberal arts—went up in flames. Art lovers watched in horror as some of the greatest sculptures in the ancient world were smashed by people too stupid to appreciate them—and certainly too stupid to recreate them.
Since then, and as I write, the Syrian civil war has left parts of Syria under the control of a new Islamic caliphate. In 2014, within certain areas of Syria, music was banned and books were burned. The British Foreign Office advised against all travel to the north of the Sinai Peninsula. In 2015, Islamic State militants started bulldozing the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud, just south of Mosul in Iraq because it was ‘idolatrous’. Images went around the world showing Islamic militants toppling statues around three millennia old from their plinths, then taking hammers to them. ‘False idols’ must be destroyed. In Palmyra, the remnants of the great statue of Athena that had been carefully repaired by archaeologists, was attacked yet again. Once again, Athena was beheaded; once again, her arm was sheared off.
I have chosen Palmyra as a beginning, as it was in the east of the empire, in the mid-380s, that sporadic violence against the old gods and their temples escalated into something far more serious. But equally I could have chosen an attack on an earlier temple, or a later one. That is why it is a beginning, not the beginning. I have chosen Athens in the years around AD 529 as an ending—but again, I could equally have chosen a city further east whose inhabitants, when they failed to convert to Christianity, were massacred and their arms and legs cut off and strung up in the streets as a warning to others.

Categories
Christendom Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Old Testament Philosophy of history Theology Vegetarianism Welfare of animals

Kriminalgeschichte, 70

Below, an abridged translation from the first volume of Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (Criminal History of Christianity). For a comprehensive text that explains the absolute need to destroy Judeo-Christianity, see: here. In a nutshell, any white person who worships the god of the Jews is, ultimately, ethnosuicidal.

 
Augustine sanctions the ‘holy war’
The amantissimus Domini sanctissimus, as the bishop Claudius of Turin of the 9th century called Augustine, recorded, like no one before him, the compatibility between service to war and the doctrine of Jesus.
The father of the Church Ambrose had already celebrated a pathetic instigation of war, and the father of the Church Athanasius had declared that in war it was ‘legal and praiseworthy to kill adversaries’. However, none of them admitted the bloody office with as few scruples and as the hypocrite ‘angel of heaven’ who looks ‘constantly to God’.
Certainly, Augustine did not share the optimism of an Eusebius or an Ambrose, who equated the hope of the pax romana with that of pax christiana as providential, since ‘The wars to the present are not only between empires but also between confessions, between truth and error’. By weaving his web of grace, predestination and angels, Augustine theoretically committed himself in an increasingly negative way before the Roman state.
Every State power based on the libido dominandi rests on sins and for that reason must submit to a Church based on grace, but in fact not free of sin either. This philosophy of the State, which constituted the historical-philosophical basis of the medieval power struggle between the popes and the emperors, was decisively influential until the times of Thomas Aquinas.
Until the year of his death, Augustine not only asked for the punishment of the murderers, but also to crush the uprisings and subdue the ‘barbarians’, taking it as a moral obligation. It was not difficult for him to consider the State malignant but he praised its bloody practices and, like everything else, also ‘attribute it to Divine Providence’ since ‘its way of proceeding’ is ‘to avoid human moral decay through wars’.
Whoever thinks so, in a childlike and cynical way at the same time, obviously interprets in the same sense the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’. That commandment should not be applied to the totality of nature and the animal kingdom. Augustine discusses with the Manichaeans that it does not include the prohibition of ‘pulling a bush’ or the ‘irrational animal world’ because such beings ‘must live and die to our advantage; submit them to you!’
‘Man owns animals’, complains Hans Henny Jahnn in his great trilogy Fluss ohne Ufer. ‘He does not need to try. He just has to be naive. Naive also in his anger. Brutal and naive. This is what God wants. Even if he hits the animals, he will go to heaven’.
Earlier, authors such as Theodor Lessing and Ludwig Klages had persuasively shown that, as the latter affirms, Christianity conceals something with its connotation of ‘humanity’. What it really means is that the rest of living beings lack value—unless they serve human beings! They write: ‘As is well known, Buddhism prohibits the killing of animals, because the animal is the same being as we are. Now, if one scolds an Italian with such a reproach when he torments an animal to death, he will claim that “senza anima” and “non è christiano” since for the Christian believer the right to exist lies only in the human beings’.
Augustine on the other hand believes that the human being ‘even in situations of sin is better than the animal’: the being ‘of lower rank’. And he treats vegetarianism as ‘impious heretic opinion’.
That God can be pleased with arms is shown by the example of David and that of ‘many other righteous’ of that time. Augustine quotes at least 13,276 times the Old Testament, about which he had previously written that he had always found it unpleasant!
But now it was useful. For example: ‘The just will rejoice when contemplating revenge; He will bathe his feet in the blood of the wicked’. And of course all the ‘just’, logically, can make a ‘just war’ (bellum iustum).
It is a concept introduced by Augustine. No Christian had used it before, not even the easy-going Lactantius, whom he read carefully. Soon the whole Christian world made a iusta bella, based upon a ‘just’ reason for war any minimal deviation from the Roman liturgy. Augustine strongly recommends military service, and cites quite a few cases of ‘God-fearing warriors’ from the Bible; not only the ‘numerous righteous’ of the Old Testament, so rich in atrocities, but also a couple of the New Testament.
Augustine experienced the collapse of Roman rule in Africa, when the Vandal hordes invaded Mauritania and Numidia in the summer of 429 and in the spring of 430. He witnessed the annihilation of his life’s work: whole cities were grass of the flames and its inhabitants assassinated. Anywhere the Catholic communities, depleted by the Church and the State, opposed no resistance; at least there is no relation of it.
Augustine died on August 28, 430, and was buried that same day. A year later Hippo, retained by Boniface for fourteen months, was evacuated and partially burned. Augustine’s biographer, the holy bishop Possidius, who like the teacher was a fervent fighter against the ‘heretics’ and the ‘pagans’, still lived some years among the ruins.

 
 

END OF VOLUME I

 

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