To contextualise this series about psychiatry, see: here. Below, an abridged translation of a chapter of one of my books:
Let us imagine Dora, a girl in a state of trauma because she was raped by her father. Imagine that instead of taking her to a common hospital, she is taken by her father to a psychiatric ward. The girl does not want to go there. All she wants is for some of her loved ones to comfort her. What would she feel if the admissions officer to the ward told her?:
We are going to commit you. The rape did not cause any trauma. That is completely surpassed in scientific psychiatry. You live in a paranoid, world Dora. Because of your symptoms, my diagnosis is that you suffer from schizoidism. And you run the risk of schizophrenia. A chemical imbalance in your brain is causing your anxiety attacks.
I see that my scientific interpretation causes you panic… Do you know, Dora, that the first sign of recovery of a teenager who feels violated is to accept that she is a sick woman? For the same reason, and to help you accept it, my prescription is to bombard your brain with antipsychotics.
Any rejection of my diagnosis and prescription will be considered resistance. And the resistance to you taking your meds, my dear Dora, is involuntary commitment in this ward.
Would not this ‘bio-reductionist’ interpretation—which reduces our pains to a biological factor—be an additional blow to this minor, something even more devastating than her father’s rape? The example, although hypothetical, illustrates what happens to many adolescents in the doctors’ offices: something that I call the re-traumatization or re-victimization of a victim, which could be defined in thus:
In common jurisprudence, measures are taken against the aggressor. In psychiatric jurisprudence, measures are taken against the victim.
Does this sound like Alice in Wonderland? In real life there was a case in which psychiatrists diagnosed a young victim of rape as ‘schizophrenic’. And even more incredible: a fourteen-year-old girl in a state of trauma for having been raped was electro-shocked, against her will, by the psychiatrists.[1]
These are not isolated cases. The following is an example of psychiatric re-victimization in the United States:
Rana Lee remembers the time she went to her doctor because her husband was beating her. The doctor, she told a congressional committee, ‘prescribed 10 milligrams of Valium three times a day to calm me down… He refilled it for five years, with no questions asked’. [2]
This doctor prescribed to drug not the aggressor, but the victim of the aggressor. I have heard testimonies from women that something similar happened to them. But at least these women were saved from a psychiatric diagnosis, not another victim of domestic abuse:
Psychiatrists are fond of stressing how much suffering schizophrenia causes. However, I can truthfully say being labeled a schizophrenic has caused me a hundred times as much suffering as the so-called ‘illness’ itself. Since recovering my sanity in 1961, I have spent decades struggling to gain some measure of self-understanding and self-esteem. In this regard, I never fully recovered from what psychiatry and my parents did to me until I finally realized I had never been ill in the first place. [3]
This confession comes from John Modrow. Re-victimized by psychiatrists, Modrow concludes that psychiatric praxis seems to be calculated to drive a person, who has already been traumatized, into madness.
A psychological re-traumatization is a direct violation of the Hippocratic oath: Primum non nocere!, first, do no harm. The practice itself of psychiatry represents a violation of this oath. ‘How, for example, can a psychiatrist validate his identity as a medical doctor without labeling others as mentally sick’, asks Modrow, ‘that is to say, without dehumanizing others and thoroughly destroying their identities?’ [4]
Of the theoreticians who approached the subject of what I have called here re-victimized victims, Harry Sullivan made the most valuable contribution to understand the interior world of these individuals. According to the Sullivan-Modrow model, the panic that makes a re-victimized victim enter a state of madness is caused by a consecutive series of external assaults that collapse the individual’s defences. In his self-analysis, Modrow ratifies Sullivan’s notion that when these defences collapse, ‘the individual goes into an intense state of panic and simply comes “unglued”, so to speak. In this panic state, the individual has a terrifying vision of himself as a person of no value or worth’. Talking about his own experiences, Modrow adds that ‘painful memories once repressed rise and come flooding into awareness with a gruesome, hallucinatory vividness’. [5]
The experience of the demolishing panic of the inner self could be described as a tearing up of the self where the betrayal of the universe is experienced. We could illustrate it if we imagine that Dora escaped the mental institution just to be repudiated by her extended family, as it was accustomed to do with raped girls. What would she feel? According to Modrow, the panic state that immediately preceded his own mental breakdown was ‘the most appalling and devastating experience that any person can undergo’. [6]
Pre-psychotic panic is the state when the mental health of an individual is at most risk. In this state the mind loses its centripetal force that gives cohesion to its inner self, so to speak.
I dislike medical terminology to speak about problems of the soul. Yet, I could say that Modrow’s panic attacks were iatrogenic. Iatrogenesis (from Greek iatros, physician) is one of the aberrations of the psychiatric profession. In his misguided endeavours to heal the therapist provokes new and more serious disorders than the already existent.[7]
The re-victimization of a victim of family abuse, frequently iatrogenic, is central to understand the nature of psychiatry but very few critics of psychiatry have pointed out to something so consequential. The exception is precisely Modrow:
The psychological harm which psychiatrists inflict on their patients is a subject which is not often discussed. One reason why this topic is seldom discussed has to do with the fact that the people who are the most knowledgeable on this subject—namely, the people who have been psychologically damaged by psychiatry—are rarely listened or taken seriously. The entire narrative section of this book [How to Become a Schizophrenic] illustrates the kind of psychological harm which psychiatry can cause. [8]
Due to the double spiral of extreme abuse, parental and psychiatric, the young Modrow had a psychotic episode. For a brief time he believed himself to be John the Baptist: a delirium of grandeur which, according to Modrow himself, was nothing more than a desperate attempt of his unconscious to super-compensate the feeling of bestial humiliation occasioned by his parents and the doctors paid by his mother.
___________
[1] The young man’s case is mentioned in Peter Breggin: Beyond Conflict: From Self-Help and Psychotherapy to Peacemaking (St. Martin’s Press, 1992) p. 107; that of the girl, in T. Baker: ‘The minor issue of electroconvulsive therapy’, Nature Medicine, 1, pp. 199-200.
[2] Rana Lee, quoted en Breggin: Toxic Psychiatry: Why Therapy, Empathy and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock, and Biochemical Theories of the ‘New Psychiatry’ (St. Martin’s Press, 1994), p. 219.
[3] John Modrow: How To Become a Schizophrenic: The Case Against Biological Psychiatry (Apollyon Press, 1996), pp. 147f.
[4] Ibid., p. 227.
[5] Ibid, p. 18.
[6] Ibid., p. 19.
[7] An explanation of psychiatric iatrogenesis appears in chapter 5 of Robert Baker’s Mind Games: Are We Obsessed With Therapy? (Prometheus Books, 1996). Incidentally, in 1994 I talked to Dr. Baker personally in a conference of critics of pseudosciences.
[8] Modrow: How To Become a Schizophrenic, p. 226.
Faced with a multi-billion dollar business that has subtly bought the doctors, universities and the media, it is virtually impossible for the civil society to see what is happening. Just as in Heinroth’s time political actions were covered up in medical garb when the ideals of the Revolution were in the air, after the rebellion of the 1960s psychiatry reacted by covering itself more and more with the clothes of hard science, the paradigm of our days. In 1999 Professor Leonard Duhl of the University of California defined mental illness and poverty in the most perfect sense of the ideologists of the Great Confinement of the 17th century: ‘the inability to command events that affect one’s life’.[31]
The consolidation and enlargement of the psychiatric power continues in the 21st century. The tenfold increase in the use of neuroleptics in minors since the mid-1990s to the first five years of the new century, which is done with the publicity stunt that they are ‘at risk’, shows the cynicism of this marketing design.
Heinroth was a great visionary. He foresaw that drugs could be the prisons of the future. Although the neuroleptics had not been invented, Heinroth already spoke of ‘pharmaceutical means of restriction’ and ‘restrictive surgical means’, anticipating the lobotomy that Moniz would develop a century later.
Since the regulations that would define the policies of the psychiatrists were enacted in the 19th century, the expansion of the chemical Gulag meant that long-term involuntary hospitalization changed to long-term voluntary (or involuntary) drug addiction. Psychiatrists, of course, would say things differently. They say that in the treatment of mental illnesses the most outstanding event of the 20th century was the capability to synthesise these substances in laboratories. But this is one of the allegations of scientific progress that, analysed closely, is discovered fallacious.
In psychopharmacology there are no biographies of John, Peter or Mary when they are prescribed neuroleptics, neither when they are prescribed antidepressants, when stimulants are prescribed, or when tranquilizers are prescribed. There are no people in biological psychiatry, or biologicistic psychiatry as I prefer to call it, only biochemical radicals that have to be normalized by other chemical substances. In an age that seeks easy solutions to the problems of the world, it is not necessary to delve into the past. Just calculate the dose of ‘happy pills’, be it Prozac or any other.
This also happens with the abuse of illegal drugs and the only difference is that the psychotropic drugs are legal. Approximately thirty million people have taken Prozac (fluoxetine), a drug that Newsweek has advertised with cover articles. The situation points more and more to the scenes of Brave New World of Aldous Huxley where, at the request of the State, every citizen consumed the drug called soma.
(First edition in the United Kingdom of Huxley’s famous novel.) In the medical profession the environmental factors that prick our souls have disappeared from the map. If the philosophy of the biologicistic psychiatrists is right, all our passions, traumas and conflicts, loves and fears, are not the result of our desires in conflict with the external world, but of the swings of small polypeptides in our bodies that are transformed into despair.
In the preface to some editions of the DSM it is said that the future will completely erase the ‘unfortunate’ distinction between the popular concept of mental disorder and physical illness. On January 1, 1990, California became the first American state to accept the main dogma in psychiatry: that mental disorders are, in reality, diseases originating in brain dysfunctions. For example, it is claimed that a high dopamine causes madness, and a low serotonin, depression. (This reminds me that for Benjamin Rush, the father of American psychiatry, insanity was caused by low blood circulation in the head.) But in real neurological science the dopamine and serotonin claims have been debunked.[32]
Bioreductionist psychiatry is anything that sees supposed biological abnormalities in the body rather traumatic events in the family or the environment. It is like studying trauma not as a reaction to an outrageous act, say, the incestuous rape of Dora [mentioned in the online book], but rather studying the temporal lobe of the raped girl, where the treatment is headed. The drugs, or the hammer of the electroshock, are the result of the medical axiom: ‘He who only knows how to use the hammer treats all things as if they were nails’.
I am not caricaturising the profession. In November 2002 I had a long discussion with Dr. Miguel Pérez de la Mora, an experimental cell physiology physician of the Department of Biophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and director of the Mexican Academy of Sciences. In the discussion with Pérez de la Mora I was struck by the fact that, when I mentioned the mental state of the inmates in the concentration camps, my contender immediately jumped to the subject of the amygdala and the anxiety that he studied in his laboratory: an anxiety understood in a strictly biological way.
In our surreal discussion, I took a long time to make the obvious point to the doctor: that the cause of the mental stress of the inmates were the brutalities in the camps. But even granted this point Pérez de la Mora added—without laboratory tests—that only those inmates in the fields who presumably had a genetic predisposition could have been the ones who became upset. For this neurologist and his colleagues, the concentration camps were a mere ‘trigger mechanism’ for the disorder of a prisoner whose biology, presumably, was already defective!
I must clarify the concept of ‘trigger mechanism’ of a supposed latent mental disorder.
This is one of the main mantras of the psychiatrist, and exemplifies what I have called bioreductionism. For the bioreductionist, the human rights and psychological trauma are located in the background, and the only thing that matters is the genome project and the search for the ‘gene’ responsible for the disorder (or another strictly biological line).
The specialty of Pérez de la Mora is studying anxiety disorders in the laboratories of the UNAM, and during our discussion he confessed that the firm that manufactures the psychiatric drug Valium had financed his research. I pointed to Pérez de la Mora that a research financed by the same drug companies produces results with a clear biological bias. The eminent scientist told me that researchers rarely sell themselves to companies.
The reality is that the way that the pharmaceutical multinationals buy the scientists is infinitely subtler than direct bribery. Roche, which manufactures Valium, simply finances professionals who postulate biological hypotheses, and no other. Never Roche or the competition would give us a penny to those who investigate psychological trauma. Our line of research is a proposal that requires social engineering and changes in the nuclear family to avoid mistreatment of the children. But in our world nobody wants to finance the researcher who puts the parents in the dock.
For example, no institution funded the research to write this online book. On the other hand, the medical model promotes the drugging of the abused child without changing the parental mistreatment that caused the mental distress in the first place. Only in this way does the field enjoy the approval of society. If the anxiety that Perez de la Mora studies, or panic, depression, addictions, phobias, mania, obsessions and compulsions are the result of an abnormal biology, the human and existential content that has caused these experiences becomes irrelevant.
The thinking of our time is being confined to a one-dimensional world as far as mental health is concerned. Bioreductionism, the ideology of the medical doctors with blinders that do not want to see the social sides, is a doctrine whose conceptual frame is quite simple: determinism and reductionism (‘Your biology is your destiny’). But as psychiatrists present this doctrine to us with all its scientific sophistication, the matter apparently is complicated. The following Szaszian analogy illustrates how simple, at the bottom, biopsychiatry is.
The primitive witch-doctor, who tried to understand Nature in human terms, treated objects as agents: a position known as animism. The modern witch-doctor, who tries to understand the subjectivity of man in terms of Nature, treats agents as objects: a position known as bioreductionism. Primitive man has been demystified in our scientific era. Who will demystify psychiatry doctors?
There is a small group of thinkers who can do it: those who know how to distinguish between good and bogus science.
____________
[31] Leonard Duhl, quoted in Szasz: Pharmacracy, p. 95.
May 1954 is a memorable date for psychiatrists. For the first time, a neuroleptic (popularly known as ‘antipsychotic’) was marketed, chlorpromazine, commercially named Thorazine in the United States and Largactil in some European countries, which revolutionised treatment in the profession.
The first generation of phenothiazines from which chlorpromazine emerged had been used for pesticide purposes in agriculture. In addition, experiments were known to induce catalepsy in animals.
The neuroleptic was a chemical intentionally designed as a neurotoxin, but millions of Thorazine prescriptions were prescribed in the United States. Under the effects of chlorpromazine, patients now could be ‘moved about like puppets’, and the first psychiatrist who experimented in the United States with this neuroleptic said that it ‘may prove to be a pharmacological substitute for lobotomy’.[23] The campaign to sell Thorazine to the American society was so fierce that the same professionals called ‘Thorazine assault troops’ the propagandists of the company that manufactured them.[24]
This was the first massive incursion in the world of public relations carried out by a pharmaceutical company in a market that previously was very small: institutional psychiatry. In its first year of marketing, Smith, Klein & French obtained 75 million dollars with that drug. The rest, as they say, is history.[25]
In 1955, Time magazine called the professionals who opposed chlorpromazine ‘ivory tower critics’. Gregory Zilboorg, the same psychiatrist who held the authors of the medieval Malleus Maleficarum in high esteem, said that the public was being deceived and that the drug only served to control the inpatient. Another doctor raised his voice and said that chlorpromazine was more dangerous than heroin and cocaine. But the publicity muffled all internal dissidence.
By the mid-1960s more than ten thousand medical articles had been written about chlorpromazine. There were television campaigns that omitted any mention of the Parkinsonian-like effects of the drug, and the magazines were paid substantial sums if they advertised in their main articles the miraculous chemical. Time, Fortune and the New York Times were some of these prostitutes of the pharmaceutical corporations.
The use of neuroleptics soon was considered cutting-edge among psychiatric treatments, triumphing over the induced commas with insulin, electroshock and lobotomy. In the 1960s the revolution of this miraculous alchemy, from pesticides to antipsychotics, was consummated and the mindset of the public had been implanted with the message that they were ‘anti-psychotic’ medicines: an idea that persists today.
By 1970, nineteen million prescriptions for neuroleptics had been prescribed, and not just for people who were disturbed. Some juvenile delinquents and rebellious teenagers who were given the neuroleptic called it ‘zombie juice’, but the professionals counterattacked by introducing the euphemism ‘major tranquilizers’.
At the end of March 2001 in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, the prescription number of so-called ‘anti-psychotics’ was estimated in 43 million. In the case of children and adolescents, one study showed that between 1987 and 1996 the number of children who were given the drug had doubled. Between 1996 and 2000 the figure multiplied to reach the figure of one in fifty, although the most important age group was between 5 and 9 years old.[26]
The propaganda through which multinational drug companies infect civil society about the ‘need’ to take these neurotoxins is performed through campaigns of ‘education’ to medical visitors and counsellors of schools and parents. Joe Sharkey, a financial journalist and author of Bedlam: Greed, Profiteering and Fraud in a Mental Health System Gone Crazy, has reported that by the end of the 1980s, 25 percent of the earnings paid by health insurance went to the pockets of those who work in the area of mental health, largely due to the psychiatric treatment of these rebellious adolescents.[27]
Furthermore, since the 1970s these professionals entered into a frank association with the drug companies. The consortium between psychiatrists and Big Pharma (pharmaceutical multinationals) is so brazen that all psychiatric conferences are financed by these corporations, and in some medical centres all laboratory research is also financed by multinationals. These companies also fund psychiatric journals. In addition, a study of eight hundred articles by some of the most prestigious scientific journals that do not specialise in psychiatry (Science, Nature, Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Medicine) found that 34 percent of the authors had financial interests with the Big Pharma.
The pharmaceutical industry is the largest sponsor of psychiatric research in the United States, including research in universities and medical schools. It is estimated that in 1994 alone it spent one and a half billion dollars in academic research.[28] Some people have used the expression ‘Is academic medicine for sale?’ to describe this situation.
This is fundamental to understand why I say that psychiatrists, despite their impeccable medical credentials, enact a biased science. It is clear that the sponsorship that these companies provide results in biologicistic and pro-drug bias in research. The editors of specialised journals are very cautious when publishing articles by professionals who criticise biological psychiatry, especially if they question the effectiveness of psychotropic drugs or if they mention the terrible effects of drugs, such as tardive dyskinesia and dystonia produced by the so-called ‘antipsychotic’, symptoms which doctors euphemistically call ‘extrapyramidal symptoms’.
Drug companies spend huge sums on advertisements that appear in specialised journals, and the publishers are not willing to offend their sponsors with articles that denounce the epidemics of drug-induced tardive dyskinesia, on the threat that the companies will withdraw the advertising. The economic dependence of the journals with these companies leads not only to discretion, but many authors resort to self-censorship. As some mental health professionals say, the pharmaceutical industry owns the data obtained in the clinical tests it subsidizes and decides which studies should be published; chooses the authors, writes the articles and even the reviews to interpret the data.[29]
On the other hand, it is natural for new professionals in medical research to choose the area of the most promising future, that which is generously financed by the drug companies. That is where the funds for their careers are found. There is a whole book on the subject, How the Pharmaceutical Industry Bankrolled the Unholy Marriage Between Science and Business of Linda Marsa, and this trend is much more evident in psychiatry. In a psychiatric journal there is less guarantee of scientific accuracy than in other specialised journals. In the profession it is no longer heard, as it used to be in the 1950s and 1960s, that abusive parents drive their children mad. The economic interests to hide this reality are enormous.
For example, in the mid-1990s a pharmaceutical market analyst claimed that the US $1 billion market for neuroleptics could grow to 4.5 billion a year. In May 2001, a report by the Wall Street Journal evaluated the neuroleptic market at 5 billion dollars a year, five hundred percent growth in five years.
The total sales of neuroleptics in the United States in 2000 was 2.5 billion dollars, and international sales reached 6 billion dollars that same year. Only the neuroleptic Zyprexa gave Eli Lilly $ 1 billion in profits in 1998 (the incorrectly referred to as ‘antipsychotics’ are even used in veterinary!). In 1999/2000, the United States led the Western consumption of neuroleptics with 65 percent, followed by Europe with 22 percent and Latin America with 2.5 percent. (I am not counting Russia, Asia or Africa). Given that there are many people who want to control others in prisons, asylums, insane hospitals, correctional facilities for minors and even at home, the growth of market demand for these terrible drugs is comprehensible.[30]
These figures are key to understanding the psychiatry of our days: a chemical Gulag.
_______________
[23] Heinz Lehmann, quoted in ibid., p. 144.
[24] These words from the pharmaceutical company Smith, Kline & French appear in Loren Mosher: ‘Soteria and other alternatives to acute psychiatric hospitalization’ in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (1999, 187), that I read on the internet.
[25] Loren Mosher, Richard Gosden & Sharon Beder, ‘Las empresas farmacéuticas y la esquizofrenia’ en Modelos de locura, pp. 141s.
[26] These figures appear in Modelos de locura, pages 124s.
[27] Sharkey: Bedlam, p. 4. Sharkey’s book takes as a central theme the unjustified hospitalisations set up by psychiatrists, especially children and adolescents, to get as much money as possible from the insurance companies of their parents.
[28] This information appears in Valenstein: Blaming the Brain, pp. 199 & 187.
[29] Modelos de locura, p. 144.
[30] See Whitaker: Mad in America, and Valenstein: Blaming the Brain, chapter 6. See also Richard Gosden and Sharon Beder: ‘Pharmaceutical industry agenda setting in mental health policies’ in Ethical Human Science and Services (Autumn/Winter 2000). I wrote this piece fifteen years ago and have not checked the latest stats in scholarly journals. However, I keep watching Robert Whitaker’s updated videos in YouTube. Nothing in recent years has moved me to change my mind.
Four years ago I had posted this chapter here but now, that I’ve used engines to check the grammar, I realised the old text was plagued with syntactic inaccuracies. Although I feel it is greatly improved (see below) I can never be sure as English is not my native language. Now that the revision is almost compete, as soon as I order a proof copy, and get it from Amazon Books, the softcover will be available again for the general public.
______ 卐 ______
(Abridged Spanish-English translation
from the introduction to ¿Me Ayudarás?)
Men are the devils of the earth, and
animals are their tormented souls.
—Schopenhauer
At fifty-three, I received a surprise in what in Hojas Susurrantes I call the cursed house. Someone had left a box on the shelf outside the bathroom for visitors. When I opened it I saw something that amazed me. A divine little animal! He looked like a very young bunny but it was so beautiful and graceful that it could not be a rabbit, I told myself. It took me a long time to recognize that he was really a white bunny, but so otherworldly it seemed to me that I had difficulty in reconciling my two hemispheres: one telling me that it could only be a divine creature, and another telling me that it was a little rabbit that had come into the world not long ago.
Almost abandoned in a non-custodial box, it had been one among many gift bunnies to the kids at a birthday party that one of my irresponsible siblings had bought, the father of the celebrated child. Elsewhere I might tell how I came to interact with the creature, whom I would rescue from an uncertain destiny due to the pettiness of my family and the Mexicans in general. I had never interacted in such way with an animal before. In fact, I had never wanted to have a pet even though I did not get married and have no offspring. But seeing a being so helpless and at the mercy of the modified apes in my family moved me to adapt it. Elsewhere I may tell anecdotes, but the only thing I can add now is that, over time, the white rabbit would help me in my way out from the inverted world of Alice.
A little less than two and a half years later I would receive a great shock. The Mirror reported that four teenagers from Seaham in Durham, England, tortured and murdered Percy: a bunny who, in the picture that can be seen online with the naked young people, seems identical to my pet; now, an adult rabbit. They tried to shave and rape Percy; set her on fire, tried to drown her and then threw her dying but still alive from the window. The human monsters, all white, even recorded on their cell phone what they did: a video that the owner of the bunny could not see when the police arrested the perpetrators; only a frozen image to identify it. The punishment for these criminals was negligible in today’s Britain. I would have tortured them—exactly what they did to the rabbit—and then cast them out the window to let them die in agony lying on the ground (eye for an eye). In fact, if by a miracle of fate an extraterrestrial force had empowered me on my latest visit to the United Kingdom, I would have done it.
We must bear in mind that if the Anglo-Saxon demons had allowed Germany an empire from the Atlantic to the Urals, in the areas under the Nazi flag the torment of the animals would have been greatly reduced. Personally, I regard Hermann Göring one of my patron saints: and he should also be for those who long for a world free of this type of abuse. Let us not forget the 1933 caricature in which the freed animals—“No more vivisection! No more experimentation with animals!”—salute their savior Hermann. Unlike my beloved Nazis, in one of my blogs I spoke of what non-Nazis are capable of doing with defenseless animals. I mentioned fur coats factories in China where some mammals are skinned alive; farms in Mexico where they hang rabbits from their ears until they die, which has also happened in some Australian farms. That and what they did to Percy pierced my soul. Her photograph in The Mirror shows her in a posture of serene confidence before the humans who would torture her: identical image to the postures of my own little bunny who, accustomed as Percy was to her benign owner, relaxes placidly in human presence. The betrayal of the universe that Percy had to experience before the change from her angelic owner to human devils must have been such that I caressed the idea of dedicating this volume to her memory.
Although what those damned humans did in Durham was condemned by other Englishmen, so-called normal people are not left behind. Humans whom I consider exterminable are able to pour concentrated solutions into laboratory rabbits, and to prevent them from closing their eyes, hold their eyelids with tongs. How many women ignore that their cosmetic products have been tested in this way… This happens today with the approval of society precisely because the Second World War was won by the wicked. Few know that from 1944 to 1947 the Soviets and the Americans, including Jews on both sides, practiced a real holocaust of Germans, the “Hellstorm,” preventing among other things that the benign policies of Hermann, who had saved our mammals cousins in the very brief historical window that represented the Third Reich, were implemented in the West after the war.
Science philosopher Thomas Kuhn used the optical illusion of the duck-rabbit to show how a paradigm shift causes one to see the same information in a completely different way. If Westerners had not been brainwashed, instead of seeing a duck (the Nazis were bad) they would see a rabbit (actually they were the good guys). I noticed this psychological phenomenon in 1992 when I studied the so-called Faces of Bélmez in a small town in Andalusia. (The author at thirty-three in Spain’s “House of the Faces”.) Originally I believed that the faces of Mrs. María Gómez Cámara’s kitchen were a paranormal phenomenon until, once, seeing the face called “La Pelona” (part of the concrete block with this image is behind my back in the photo above), I made a change in my inner subjectivity. I experienced the sensation that the crude strokes of the face were the work of a human hand, debunking the parapsychological investigation in which I had placed my hopes. Perhaps in the future I will have a life to write the details of that adventure in Spain. Suffice it to say that the paradigm shift comes from the internal will. Following Kuhn’s example, the volitional faculty of my mind stopped seeing a bird and discovered another small animal. The same can happen in our inner eye as we transcend Christian and neo-Christian values to their National Socialist antithesis. Many white nationalists, mostly Christian theists and Neochristian atheists, are frightened by The Turner Diaries. Unlike William Pierce, with their stupid love for the modified apes they condemn other animals to a torture of millennia—as potentially the Aryans, who are extinguishing themselves, are capable of becoming Görings. For a truly integrated individual it is obvious that moral is putting a screeching stop to the sadism towards our cousins, and the only way to do this is to get rid of the human devils. A change from love to hatred towards sinful humanity—great hatred I mean: a hatred à la Yahweh in the mouth of Jeremiah—represents a paradigm shift.
Do you remember the quote from Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End that I included in the fifth and final book of Hojas Susurrantes? In this novel human beings are metamorphosed into a higher entity. I will quote one of those passages again. In the novel “Karellen” was the leader of the extraterrestrial visitors, physically indistinguishable from the iconography of the devils:
“If you want a single proof of the essential—how shall I put it—benevolence of the Overlords, think of that cruelty-to-animals order which they made within a month of their arrival. If I had had any doubts about Karellen before, that banished them—even though that order has caused me more trouble than anything else he’s ever done!
That was scarcely an exaggeration, Stormgren thought. The whole incident had been an extraordinary one, the first revelation of the Overlords’ hatred of cruelty. That, and their passion for justice and order, seemed to be the dominant emotions in their lives—as far as one could judge them by their actions.
And it was the only time Karellen had shown anger, or at least the appearance of anger. “You may kill one another if you wish,” the message had gone, “and that is a matter between you and your own laws. But if you slay, except for food or in self-defense, the beasts that share your world with you—then you may be answerable to me.”
No one knew how comprehensive this ban was supposed to be, or what Karellen would do to enforce it. They had not long to wait.
The Plaza de Toros was full when the matadors and their attendants began their processional entry. Everything seemed normal; the brilliant sunlight blazed harshly on the traditional costumes, the great crowd greeted its favorites as it had a hundred times before. Yet here and there faces were turned anxiously towards the sky, to the aloof silver shape fifty kilometers above Madrid.
Then the picadors had taken up their places and the bull had come snorting out into the arena. The skinny horses, nostrils wide with terror, had wheeled in the sunlight and their riders forced them to meet their enemy. The first lance flashed—made contact—and at that moment came a sound that had never been heard on earth before.
It was the sound of ten thousand people screaming with the pain of the same wound—ten thousand people who, when they had recovered from the shock, found themselves completely unharmed. But that was the end of that bullfight, and indeed of all bullfighting, for the news spread rapidly.
Before I woke up to the real world and stopped diabolizing Hitler, Childhood’s End had been my favorite book. Now I see that the devil Karellen, as Clarke painted him, was too magnanimous with humans. The mere fact that there are seedy slaughterhouses should move us to take more drastic measures than those of that character.
In Mexico the calves are enclosed in compartments so narrow that they cannot even turn inside the cage. As adults, farmers cut horns, castrate and mark with iron without anesthesia. In trucks on the way to the slaughterhouses, the animals sometimes spend more than a day without food or drink, arriving thirsty and dizzy to the Inferno. The first thing the poor animal sees in the slaughterhouse is a Dantesque spectacle: puddles of blood and corpses skinned or torn from other cows; severed heads on the ground… She enters the first circles of hell in a state of panic. At the seventh circle the blow that the slaughterer gives the cow’s head does not always kill her. Sometimes this noble animal is only wounded, in a state of shock and with the deepest pain, wondering without language why the demons of Hell do what they do to her. Humans are so exterminable that they throw live pigs into a pond of boiling water so that the pain of the Gehenna fire causes the animal to release its hairs. (In Mexico people are fond of eating pork rind—a delicacy for my father by the way—and they dislike seeing hairs on it.) The Spaniards do not stay too far behind. They prepare the bull in a bullfight to make it less dangerous: they cut off the tips of the horns, they put vaseline on his eyes to cloud his vision and an irritating solution on his legs so that the bull is always moving in the ring. (Long before they would have stuck a needle in his genitals to atrophy its growth.) They put tow in the nose to make it hard for him to breathe, they give him strong laxatives before the bullfight, and hit his loins and kidneys with sacks before he faces the bullfighter. And let’s not talk about what can be seen on television at both sides of the Atlantic once the bull goes out to the arena.
Only until now can the strength of my unconscious be glimpsed during my dream in Madrid [recounted also in the introduction to ¿Me Ayudarás?]. If we pass the dream from the unconscious not only to consciousness but to super-consciousness, it means that most human beings should not exist. It is not enough that, according to the polls, most Spaniards of today do not care about bullfighting. The mere fact that they and other peoples are involved in the chain of cruelty to animals—whether using a feminine vanity product that was experimented in the eyes of a bunny or gobbling fried skin from a pig that had been submerged alive in boiling water—should be enough to arouse the exterminationist hatred of the savior devil. Consider for example this passage from a comment by one J. Marone, who in 2005 reviewed for Amazon Books Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhuman Treatment Inside the US Meat Industry:
Cows, pigs and chickens are taken through the slaughter house alive. Cows are often alive all the way through the line, this includes while they are getting their legs chopped off with cutters—imagine that… They do not stop the line for these inconveniences. The workers shove electric prods in their rectums and eyes—deep into the sockets occasionally pulling out the eye to get them moving to the slaughter line.
After reading this I will never eat another piece of meat again. It is not my decision to make any other living thing suffer. But I find it amazing that when you go to share this book, people don’t want to know. They would rather stay ignorant and that in itself has shocked me tremendously.
The italics in the last paragraph are mine and express why it is not enough for humans to claim ignorance, as almost every adult has heard what happens in the slaughterhouses.
When in my preparations to write this chapter I began to read what was happening in those places, I promised myself, like Marone, not to put again pieces of mammalian or bird carcasses into my mouth. I do not believe in the postmortem survival of the soul. However, until one has stopped eating meat (or derivatives from tormented animals), a part of our soul remains unawakened. This goes back to what was stated in the previous pages, which expose the psychogenic evolution of man. If in childrearing the Spaniards represented a psychogenic quantum leap compared to the Amerindians who still ate the flesh of their children, a new leap means to develop, in our times, empathy towards our cousins of the animal kingdom. Unlike Hitler and the vegetarians at the top of the Nazi party most Aryans have not gone through that leap, not even neo-Nazis. It is enough to see the photographs of mammals in laboratory experiments that are carried out throughout North America and Europe to perceive that the human being is truly a wicked species. I will not incur the rudeness of adding those photographs in this text: a task I leave to my readers.
My exterminating fantasies would not seem unhealthy if we do another thought experiment. In Dies Irae I quoted a non-fiction book by Arthur Clarke where he talked about the “judgment from the Stars” that earthlings could experience. If we imagine that in real life someone similar to a Karellen visited our planet, what is the first thing he would see from his distant silver ships, far above the human tingling? Urban spots. Industries that destroy the environment and, bringing his cameras closer, abject human misery and inconceivable suffering of the other species that share the planet with us. If, as in Clarke’s novel, the visitor also possessed machines to open a visual window to the past to study the species, he would perceive that, besides the hell that the naked apes subject their cousins, through history and prehistory they had behaved in an absolutely horrendous way with their own children. It does not hurt to summarize the revelations of the previous pages.
With his machines to literally see the human past this hypothetical extraterrestrial would be taken aghast by the magnitude of infanticide: nine percent of all human births. He would see thousands of young children slaughtered ritually, offered to the goddess of Babylon. He would see the infant sacrifices of the Pelasgians, the Syrians, the sacrifices in Gezer and in Egypt of the centuries that the earthlings call 10th to 8th before Christ. And let’s not talk about what the visitor would see with his machines when focusing on the ancient Semites of Carthage, where the burning of living children ordered by their own parents reached levels that surpassed the exclamation of Sahagún. Something similar could be seen by our visitor about other Phoenicians, Canaanites, Moabites, Sepharvaim, and ancient Hebrews: who in their origins offered their firstborn as a sacrifice to their gods. With his magic to see our past, the alien visitor would learn that both the exposure and the abandonment of infants continued in Europe until a council took action against the custom of leaving the children to die in the open.
With technology based on unimaginable principles the visitor would also see much worse behavior in the lands of colored people: thousands of babies, mostly women, abandoned in the streets of ancient China, and how those babies that were not abandoned were put in cold water until they died. He would see how in feudal Japan the baby was suffocated with wet paper covering her nose and mouth; how infanticide was systematic in the feudal Rajputs in India, sometimes throwing the living children to the crocodiles; and how in pre-Islamic Arabia they buried alive not a few newborns. The visitor would also see that the sub-Saharan inhabitants of Africa killed their children much more frequently than other races did. He would even see that the sacrifice of children in Zimbabwe was practiced as recently as the beginning of the century that the earthlings call the 20th century. The window to the past would also make visible the incredibly massive slaughter of infants among the natives of the countless islands of Oceania, New Guinea and even more so among the extremely primitive aborigines of Australia, Tasmania and Polynesia. He would realize that in the American tribes, including the redskins, infanticide continued at a time when the practice had been abandoned in Europe. The same happened not only in Central American and South American tribes, but also in the civilizations prior to the Spanish conquest: where the ritual sacrifice of women and children suggests that they did it out of pure sadism. Finally, the visitor would see how, after the Conquest, the sacrificial institution of the Mesoamerican and Inca Indians was forbidden only to be transferred to the animals in the so-called santería in times when our visitor no longer has to use his devices to open the Complete Book of History and Prehistory of the species he studies.
It’s clear where I want to go… If it is legitimate for this hypothetical extraterrestrial to remove from the face of the Earth a newly-arrived species whose haughtiness blinds them from seeing their evil ways, how can it be pathological for an earthling to arrive at identical conclusions? Just because, unlike the visitor, he lacks technological power? The sad truth is that the infanticidal passion and cruelty of primitive humans have not been atoned, only transferred to our cousins.
In Dies Irae I talked about the Star-Child. An eschatology from above would be a son of man who returned on the clouds with great power and glory to judge humanity, or, in the new version of the myth, a David Bowman in a sphere of light approaching Earth. But I, who am skeptical of both personal deities and intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way, could conceive, rather than an eschatology “from above”, an eschatology “from below.” I am referring to the intrapsychic evolution of a human being by developing an infinitely more intense empathy than that developed by the bulk of the modified apes (whom I call Neanderthals).
In other words, the rhetoric currently used by child and animal protectors in the West is just a first babbling of what we have in mind. Unlike the hypothetical Star-Child, the most fanatical animal protectors I have met do not even dare to see that, in addition to humans, there are other species that must be removed from the earth and its oceans. A Star-Child with mile-high empathy and powers would not tolerate, for example, the torture of hours that a pack of killer whales inflict on a whale calf by killing her to tear out her tongue. And the images of hyenas eating a small elephant alive—there are video recordings of how a member of the pack rips off the trunk from the small elephant—speak for themselves and we do not need to think much about how we would proceed.
Regardless of the cruelty of animals with animals, the hatred that the metamorphosed human also feels towards the modified apes that surround him can be glimpsed in the following anecdote. Before visiting England with plans to emigrate I left my pet in the cursed house that, as we saw in the fifth book of Hojas Susurrantes, is virtually on a freeway that goes out to the Cuernavaca highway where trucks and cars are constantly passing, even in the wee hours of the morning. Seeing my bunny in a cultivated garden that is paradise for him, but wrapped in such noise, especially at night, I imagined, with powers à la Bowman, eliminating each and every one of the Mexicans who drive through that stretch of the road in order to avoid the background roar for the little animal. Such a fantasy would not seem far-fetched if, in the new tablets of the law, we value the naked apes negatively; and noble species of animals, like some lagomorph mammals, positively regardless of the relative size of their brains or sophistication of their culture. It does not matter that to cleanse the freeway from humans it is necessary to eliminate millions of Mexicans, since literally millions are taking that road. The interests of a single bunny trump the interests of millions of humans, insofar as the modified apes are valued on the negative side of our scale.
Except for a few nymphs as beautiful as Catalina residing here (see the cover of The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour) no one else from the inhabitants of this city is worthy. Of Creole men, for example, I know exactly no one with honor or true nobility of the soul. In an article that the author himself requested to be removed from The Occidental Observer, Farnham O’Reilly stated that Mexico City needs to be razed and transformed into a memorial atonement park dedicated to Nature. I would add that the sum of millions of modified apes in this city does not give a positive just because they are millions. It gives a great negative. In contrast, a single modified dinosaur (contemporary bird) or a lagomorph, however modest and discreet his life, is a small positive. The arithmetic with which the Star-Child judges the species of the Earth, including the primates, has little to do with the standards about the positive or the negative in the eyes of the latter. A world of cultivated forests turned into an Arcadia, and Percys that will never be molested again by monsters, is what the Earth shall inherit. It cannot be more significant that my most important works to date, Hojas Susurrantes and this one that I begin to write, are dedicated to nonhumans: a tree and a bunny.
In the final chapter of Childhood’s End the metamorphosed children eliminated all forms of animal and plant life except theirs. I do not think it is necessary to go that far. In the laws of the universe there is an Aristotelian golden mean between the apocalyptic children of the end and the law of the jungle that the naked apes currently impose. The mean lies in populating the planet with an archipelago of Elysian islands. Twenty-nine-year-old Clarke beautifully described this place with his prose: the city of Lys in his first novella, Against the Fall of Night, where, in addition to the forests and some animals, an evolved form of human being is allowed—a human in which empathy prevails and the original sin is a thing of the past. But let’s get down from the heights of Clarkean science-fiction and get back to the real world.
The monastic orders brought by the Spanish crown alongside the soldiery, including some mendicant orders that protected the natives, did not represent genuine empathy. The 16th century Spain was Don Quixote, and these orders represented a counterproductive version of empathy or compassion for those who suffer. What the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Augustinians, and eventually the Jesuits did in the Americas was quixotic folly: to conceive the naturals as souls to be saved. In the islands of the Caribbean and Tasmania the Europeans would exterminate the natives but not having exterminated them in the American continent meant that, throughout the Colonial period, the natives displaced their sadism with their children (as we have seen) towards the animals. If, instead of catechizing them, they had been cornered, as the Americans did on this part of the continent, the New Spaniard psychoclass of the Americas would have reflected the Iberian psychoclass without the tinges of Mesoamerican sadism. The social engineering of the Counter-Reformation was the great culprit that a mestizo cruelty between Spanish bullfighting and the Amerindian sacrificial passion was born in this enormous part of the continent.
In this book [¿Me Ayudarás?] we will analyze the stubborn infatuation of my father for a Dominican who protected the Amerindians and who, with his jeremiads, originated the Black Legend against Spain. At the moment suffice it to say that the bases of my feelings towards humanity are already in these pages. Hojas Susurrantes was like the tunnel in which Dave suddenly found himself: a vortex of colored lights where, terrified, he traveled at great speed across vast distances of space, seeing bizarre cosmological phenomena and strange landscapes of unusual colors. But Hojas ends before the final metamorphosis: before the new Odysseus discovered himself as middle-aged in a bedroom designed in the style of Louis XVI; progressively seeing later versions of himself and, finally, a very old man lying in a bed.
My complete autobiography will explain how, due to the evil in my family and society, without extraterrestrial agency in the form of a black monolith at the foot of the bed of an agonizing centenary, I underwent an inner metamorphosis and now I return to hate humanity as much as the Star-Child.
At the beginning of our century some Amazonian tribes continue the practice as horribly as described above. With the advances in technology we can even watch videos on YouTube about such practices, like children being buried alive.
Let us remember the exclamation of Sahagún. The humble friar would have found it rather difficult to imagine that not only the ancient Mexicans, but all humanity had been seized by a passion for killing their little ones. Throughout his treatise on infanticide, Larry Milner mentioned several times that our species could have killed not millions, but billions of children since the emergence of Homo sapiens. At the beginning of his book Milner chose as the epigraph a quotation of Laila Williamson, an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History:
Infanticide has been practiced on every continent and by people on every level of cultural complexity, from hunter-gatherers to high civilizations, including our own ancestors. Rather than being an exception, then, it has been the rule.
Milner cowers in his book to avoid giving the impression that he openly condemns the parents. Before I distanced myself from deMause, in the Journal of Psychohistory of Autumn 2008 I published a critical essay-review of his treatise. My criticism aside, Milner’s words about the even more serious cowardice among other scholars is worth quoting:
As for the research into general human behavior, infanticide has been almost totally ignored. When acts of child-murder are referenced at all, they generally are passed off as some quirk or defective apparatus of an unusual place or time. Look in the index of almost all major social treatises and you will find only a rare reference to the presence of infanticide. […] Yet, the importance of understanding the reasons for infanticide is borne out by its mathematical proportions. Since man first appeared on earth about 600,000 years ago, it has been calculated that about 77 billion human babies have been born. If estimates of infanticide of 5-10 percent are true, then up to seven billion children [9 percent!] have been killed by their parents: a figure which should suffice as one of incredible importance.
Even assuming that this figure is contradicted by future studies, the anthropologist Glenn Hausfater would have agreed with Milner. In an August 1982 article of the New York Times about a conference of several specialists at the University of Cornell on animal and human infanticide, Hausfater said: “Infanticide has not received much study because it’s a repulsive subject. Many people regard it as reprehensible to even think about it…” In that same conference Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a primatologist at Harvard said that infanticide occurs in all groups of evolved primates. Given the psychological limitations of academics, it is not surprising to see that the few who are not silent on the subject argue that the primary cause is economic. But the “economic explanation” does not explain why infanticide occurred equally among both the rich and the poor, or why it had been so frequent and sometimes even more frequent in the most prosperous periods of Rome and Carthage. The same is true about those seeking explanations about the taboos, superstitions and customs of the peoples, or the stigma attached to children born out of wedlock. None of these factors explains infanticide for the simple reason that modern Western societies have had these features and refrain from practicing it. Marvin Harris’s position is typical. Harris has calculated that among Paleolithic hunters, up to 23-50 percent of infants were put to death, and postulated that female infanticide was a form of population control. His colleagues have criticized him as a typical proponent of “environmental determinism.” If environmental determinism were true, there would have to be more sacrifice and infanticide today given the demographic explosion.
It is true that Milner fails to condemn the perpetrators. But despite his flaws, outlined in my 2008 review in deMause’s journal, the information Milner collected under a single cover is so disturbing that it made me think: What is really the human species? I have no choice but to try to ponder the question by analyzing one of the most horrendous forms of infanticide practiced over the centuries.
Historical Israel
In the past, the shadow of infanticide covered the world, but the Phoenicians and their biblical ancestors, the Canaanites, performed sacrifices that turn pale the Mesoamerican sacrifices of children.
The Tophet, located in the valley of Gehenna, was a place near Jerusalem where it is believed that children were burned alive to the god Moloch Baal. Later it became synonymous with hell, and the generic name “tophet” would be transferred to the sacrificial site of the cemetery at Carthage and other Mediterranean cities like Motya, Tharros and Hadrumetum, where bones have been found of Carthaginian and Phoenician children.
According to a traditional reading of the Bible, stories of sacrifice by the Hebrews were relapses of the chosen people to pagan customs. Recent studies, such as Jon Levenson’s The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity have suggested that the ancient Hebrews did not differ much from the neighboring towns but that they were typical examples of the Semitic peoples of Canaan. The cult of Yahweh was only gradually imposed in a group while the cult of Baal was still part of the fabric of the Hebrew-Canaanite culture. Such religion had not been a syncretistic custom that the most purist Hebrews rejected from their “neighbor” Canaanites: it was part of their roots. For Israel Finkelstein, an Israeli archaeologist and academic, the writing of the book of Deuteronomy in the reign of Josiah was a milestone in the development and invention of Judaism. Josiah represents what I call one of the psychogenic mutants who firmly rejected the infanticidal psychoclass of their own people. Never mind that he and his aides had rewritten their nation’s past by idealizing the epic of Israel. More important is that they make Yahweh say—who led the captivity of his people by the Assyrians—that it was a punishment for their idolatry: which includes the burning of children. The book of Josiah’s scribes even promotes to conquer other peoples that, like the Hebrews, carried out such practices. “The nations whom you go in to dispossess,” says the Deuteronomy, “they even burn their sons and their daughters in the fire to their gods.” (12: 29-31). “When you come into the land that the Lord is giving you, you shall not learn to follow the abominable practices of those nations. There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering.” (18: 9-10).
This emergence, or jump to a higher psychoclass from the infanticidal, is also attested in other books of the Hebrew Bible. “The men from Babylon made Succoth Benoth, the men from Cuthah made Nergal, and the men from Hamath made Ashima; the Avvites made Nibhaz and Tartak, and the Sepharvites burned their children in the fire as sacrifices to Adrammelech and Anammelech, the gods of Sepharvaim” (2 Kings: 17: 30-31). There were kings of Judah who committed these outrages with their children too. In the 8th century B.C. the thriving king Ahaz “even sacrificed his son in the fire, following the detestable ways of the nations the Lord had driven out before the Israelites” (2 Kings 16: 1-3). Manasseh, one of the most successful kings of Judah, “burnt his son in sacrifice” (21:6). The sacrificial site also flourished under Amon, the son of Manasseh. Fortunately it was destroyed during the reign of Josiah. Josiah also destroyed the sacrificial site of the Valley of Ben Hinnom “so no one could use it to sacrifice his son or daughter in the fire to Molech” (23:10). Such destructions are like the destruction of Mesoamerican temples by the Spaniards, and for identical reasons.
Ezekiel, taken into exile to Babylon preached there to his people. He angrily chided them: “And you took your sons and daughters whom you bore to me and sacrificed them as food to the idols. Was your prostitution not enough? You slaughtered my children and made them pass through the fire” (Ezekiel 16: 20-21). The prophet tells us that from the times when his people wandered in the desert they burned their children, adding: “When you offer your gifts—making your sons pass through the fire—you continue to defile yourselves with all your idols to this day. Am I to let you inquire of me, O house of Israel? As surely as I live, declares the Lord, I will not let you inquire of me” (20:31). Other passages in Ezekiel that complain about his people’s sins appear in 20: 23-26 and 23: 37-39. A secular though Jung-inspired way of seeing God is to conceive it as how the ego of an individual’s superficial consciousness relates to the core of his own psyche: the Self. In Ezekiel’s next diatribe against his people (16: 35-38) I can hear his inner daimon, the “lord” of the man Ezekiel:
Therefore, you prostitute, hear the word of the Lord! This is what the Lord says: Because you poured out your lust and exposed your nakedness in your promiscuity with your lovers, and because of all your detestable idols, and because you gave them your children’s blood in sacrifice, therefore I am going to gather all your lovers, with whom you found pleasure, those you loved as well as those you hated. I will gather them against you from all around and will strip you in front of them, and they will see all your nakedness. I will sentence you to the punishment of women who commit adultery and who shed blood; I will bring upon you the blood vengeance of my wrath and jealous anger.
When a “prophet” (an individual who has made a leap to a higher psychoclass) maligned his inferiors, he received insults. Isaiah (57: 4-5) wrote:
Whom are you mocking? At whom do you sneer and stick out your tongue? Are you not a brood of rebels, the offspring of liars? You burn with lust among the oaks and under every spreading tree; you sacrifice your children in the ravines and under the overhanging crags.
The very psalmist complained that people sacrificed their children to idols. But what exactly were these sacrificial rites? The spoken tradition of what was to be collected in biblical texts centuries later complained that Solomon “built a high place for Chemosh, the detestable god of Moab, and for Molech, the detestable god of the Ammonites,” and that his wives made offerings to these gods (1 Kings 11: 7-8). And even from the third book of the Torah we read the commandment: “Do not give any of your children to be passed through the fire to Molech, for you must not profane the name of your God.” (Leviticus 18:21). A couple of pages later (20: 2-5) it says:
Say to the Israelites: “Any Israelite or any alien living in Israel who sacrifices any of his children to Molech must be put to death. The people of the community are to stone him. I will set my face against that man and I will cut him off from his people; for by giving his children to Molech he has defiled my sanctuary and profaned my holy name. If the people of the community close their eyes when that man gives one of his children to Molech and they fail to put him to death, I will set my face against that man and his family and will cut off from their people both him and all who follow him in prostituting themselves to Molech.”
Despite these admonitions, the influential anthropologist James Frazer interpreted some biblical passages as indicating that the god of the early Hebrews, unlike the emergent god quoted above, required sacrifices of children. After all, “God” is but the projection of the Jungian Self from a human being at a given stage of the human theodicy. Unlike Milner, a Christian frightened by the idea, I do not see it impossible that the ancient Hebrews had emerged from the infanticidal psychoclass to a more emergent one. In “The Dying God,” part three of The Golden Bough, Frazer draws our attention to these verses of Exodus (22: 29-30):
Do not hold back offerings from your granaries or your vats. You must give me the firstborn of your sons. Do the same with your cattle and your sheep. Let them stay with their mothers for seven days, but give them to me on the eighth day.
A similar passage can be read in Numbers (18: 14-15), and the following one (3: 11-13) seems especially revealing:
The Lord also said to Moses, “I have taken the Levites from among the Israelites in place of the first male offspring of every Israelite woman. The Levites are mine, for all the firstborn are mine. When I struck down all the firstborn in Egypt, I set apart for myself every firstborn in Israel, whether man or animal. They are to be mine. I am the Lord.”
The psychohistorian Howard Stein, who has written scholarly articles on Judaism since the mid-1970s, concludes in an article of 2009 that the gathered information suggests a particular interpretation. According to Stein, the substrate of fear for the slaughter “helps to explain the valency that the High Holiday have for millions of Jews worldwide,” presumably echoes of very ancient happenings: actual sacrifices by the Hebrews.
In contrast to what the evangelicals were taught in Sunday school as children, Moses did not write the Torah—it was not written before the Persian period. In fact, the most sacred book of the Jews includes four different sources. Since the 17th-century thinkers such as Spinoza and Hobbes had researched the origins of the Pentateuch, and the consensus of contemporary studies is that the final edition is dated by the 5th century B.C. (the biblical Moses, assuming he existed, would have lived in the 13th century B.C.). Taking into account the contradictions and inconsistencies in the Bible—for example, Isaiah, who belonged to a much more evolved psychoclass, even abhorred animal sacrifice—it should not surprise us that the first chapter of Leviticus consists only of animal sacrifices. The “Lord” called them holocausts to be offered at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting. After killing, skinning and butchering the poor animal, the priest incinerates everything on the altar “as a burnt offering to the Lord; it is a pleasing aroma, a special gift presented to the Lord.” A phrase that is repeated three times in that first chapter, it also appears in subsequent chapters and reminds me those words by Cortés to Charles V about the Mesoamerican sacrifices (“They take many girls and boys and even adults, and in the presence of these idols they open their chests while they are still alive and take out their hearts and entrails and burn them before the idols, offering the smoke as the sacrifice.”) In the book of Exodus (34:20) even the emerging transition of child sacrifice to lamb sacrifice can be guessed in some passages, what gave rise to the legend of Abraham:
For the first foal of a donkey, they should give a lamb or a goat instead of the ass, but if you do not give, you break the neck of the donkey. You must also give an offering instead of each eldest child. And no one is to appear before me empty-handed.
Compared with other infanticidal peoples the projection of the demanding father had been identical, but the emergency to a less dissociated layer of the human psyche is clearly visible. As noted by Jaynes, the Bible is a treasure to keep track of the greatest psychogenic change in history. The Hebrews sacrificed their children just as other peoples, but eventually they would leave behind the barbaric practice.
After captivity in the comparatively more civilized Babylon in 586 B.C., the Jews abandoned their practices. In his book King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice: Biblical Distortions of Historical Realities, published in 2004, Francesca Stavrakopoulou argues that child sacrifice was part of the worship of Yahweh, and that the practice was condemned only after the exile. Like their Christian successors, the Jews had sublimated their filicidal impulses in the Passover ritual. Each year they celebrate the liberation of their people and remember how Yahweh killed the firstborn Egyptians: legendary resonance of the habit of killing one’s eldest son.
But the biblical Moloch (in Hebrew without vowels, mlk), represented as a human figure with a bull’s head was not only a Canaanite god. It also was a god of the descendants of the Canaanites, the Phoenicians. The founding myth of Moloch was similar to that of many other religions: sacrifices were compensation for a catastrophe from the beginning of time. Above I said that Plutarch, Tertullian, Orosius, Philo, Cleitarchus and Diodorus Siculus mentioned the practice of the burning children to Moloch in Carthage, but refrained from wielding the most disturbing details. Diodorus says that every child who was placed in the outstretched hands of Moloch fell through the open mouth of the heated bronze statue, into the fire. When at the beginning of the 3rd century B.C. Agathocles defeated Carthage the Carthaginians began to burn their children in a huge sacrifice as a tactical “defense” before the enemy. The sources mention three hundred incinerated children. If I had made a career as a film director, I would feel obliged to visually show humanity its infamous past by filming the huge bronze statue, heated red-hot while the Greek troops besieged the city, gobbling child after child: who would be sliding to the bottom of the flaming chimney. In addition to Carthage, the worship of Moloch, whose ritual was held outdoors, was widespread in other Phoenician cities. He was widely worshiped in the Middle East and in the Punic cultures of the time, including several Semitic peoples and as far as the Etruscans. Various sacrificial tophets have been found in North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, Malta, outside Tyre and at a temple of Amman.
Terracotta urns containing the cremated remains of children, discovered in 1817, have been photographed numerous times. However, since the late 1980s some Italian teachers began to question the historicity of the accounts of classical writers. Tunisian nationalists took advantage, including the president whose palace near the suburban sea is very close the ruins of the ancient city of Carthage. The Tunisian tourist guides even make foreigners believe that the Carthaginians did not perform sacrifices (something similar to what some ignorant Mexican tourist guides do in Chiapas). Traditional historians argue that the fact that the remains are from very young children suggests sacrifice, not cremation by natural death as alleged by the revisionists. The sacrificial interpretation of Carthage is also suggested by the fact that, along with the children, there are charred remains of lambs (remember the biblical quote that an evolved Yahweh says that the slaughter of sheep was a barter for the firstborn). This suggests that some Carthaginians replaced animals in the sacrificial rite: data inconsistent with the revisionist theory that the tophet was a normal cemetery. Furthermore, the word mlk (Moloch) appears in many stelae as a dedication to this god. If they were simple burials, it would not make sense to find those stelae dedicated to the fire god: common graves are not inscribed as offerings to the gods. Finally, although classical writers were staunch enemies of the Carthaginians, historical violence is exerted by rejecting all their testimonies, from Alexander’s time to the Common Era. The revisionism on Carthage has been a phenomenon that is not part of new archaeological discoveries, or newly discovered ancient texts. The revisionists simply put into question the veracity of the accounts of classical writers, and they try to rationalize the archaeological data by stressing our credulity to the breaking point. Brian Garnand, of the University of Chicago, concluded in his monograph on the Phoenician sacrifice that “the distinguished scholars of the ridimensionamento [revisionism] have not proven their case.”
However, I must say that the revisionists do not bother me. What I cannot tolerate are those subjects who, while accepting the reality of the Carthaginian sacrifice, idealize it. On September 1, 1987 an article in the New York Times, “Relics of Carthage Show Brutality Amid the Good Life” contains this nefarious phrase: “Some scholars assert, the practice of infanticide helped produce Carthage’s great wealth and its flowering of artistic achievement.” The memory of these sacrificed children has not really been vindicated even by present-day standards.
The Carthaginian tophet is the largest cemetery of humans, actually of boys and girls, ever discovered. After the Third Punic War Rome forced the Carthaginians to learn Latin, just as the Spanish imposed their language on the conquered Mexicans. Personally, what most alarms me is that there is evidence in the tophets of remains of tens of thousands of children sacrificed by fire over so many centuries. I cannot tremble more in imagining what would have been of our civilization had the Semitic Hannibal reached Rome.
Lately I’ve had contact with a child that a couple of days ago has turned six years old and who loves his mother very much. I confess that to imagine what a Carthaginian boy of the same age would have felt when his dear papa handed him over to the imposing bronze statue with a Bull’s head; to imagine what he would have felt for such treachery as he writhed with infinite pain in the fired oven, moved me to write this last chapter. Although my parents did not physically kill me (only shattered my soul), every time I come across stories about sacrificed firstborns, it’s hard not to touch my inner fiber.
In the final book of this work I will return to my autobiography, and we will see if after this type of findings humanity has the right to exist.
___________ 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 time I will reproduce the final chapter. Day of Wrath will be available again through Amazon Books.
Wikipedia has the problem that many of its editors and administrators are either white traitors to the West or Jews like those of deMause’s journal. Although some scholars contribute to editing it, there is always an anti-westerner who censures the passages opposing the anti-white zeitgeist. For example, regarding the articles on infanticide I edited in 2008, a couple of Australian administrators from the English Wikipedia abused their powers. Not only did they eliminate most of the section on Australia within the article “Infanticide.” They went so far as to erase, from that online encyclopedia, an entire article that another editor had started. This last article focused on expanding the subject of the infanticide committed by aboriginal Australians. (Part of what was censored by Wikipedia is covered in this chapter, in the section on Australia.) Almost a decade later I learned that, since the 1970s, it has been a common practice in that continent to censor studies on infanticide, insofar as the aborigines have been idealized. Rewriting the history of the natives by vaporizing, in Stalin’s style, part of the collective memory of a nation misinforms visitors to the encyclopedia. But not all Wikipedia editors have behaved like that pair of administrators, so zealous in idealizing the natives in their country. In the archived Wikipedia talk page of Psychohistory, Loren Cobb said:
In my view, the psychohistory of Lloyd deMause is indeed a notable approach to history, in the sense in which Wikipedia uses the term “notability.” I am not personally involved in psychohistory—I am a mathematical sociologist—but here are some thoughts for your consideration.
Psychohistory as put forth by deMause and his many followers attempts to explain the pattern of changes in the incidence of child abuse in history. This is a perfectly respectable and non-fringe domain of scientific research. They argue that the incidence was much higher in the past, and that there has been an irregular history of improvement. This is a hypothesis that could just as easily have been framed by an epidemiologist as a psychologist. DeMause proposes a theory that society has gone through a series of stages in its treatment and discipline of children.
Again, this is well within the bounds of social science. None of these questions are pseudoscientific. Even the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, a bastion of scientific epidemiology, is interested in these kinds of hypotheses.1
I exchanged a few e-mails with Cobb, who like me is very critical of the psychoanalytic tail in deMausean legacy, and his position piqued my interest.
This chapter summarizes the data collected in the first exhaustive study on infanticide: a book by Larry Milner, Hardness of Heart, published in the last year of the 20th century. That so many researchers have produced astronomical figures on the extent of infanticide moves me to think that Milner’s initiative to devote ten years of his life researching the topic should be undertaken by others. Only then can we be sure if such large numbers are accurate.
Joseph Birdsell believes in infanticide rates of 15-50 percent of the total number of births in prehistoric times.2 Laila Williamson estimated a lower rate ranging from 15-20 percent.3 Both believe that high rates of infanticide persisted until the development of agriculture.4 Some comparative anthropologists have estimated that 50 percent of female newborn babies were killed by their parents in the Paleolithic.5 These figures appear over and over in the research of other scholars.
Paleolithic and Neolithic
Decapitated skeletons of hominid children have been found with evidence of cannibalism. Neanderthal man performed ritual sacrifices of children. As shown in the bas-reliefs of a Laussel cave, a menstruating goddess is appeased only by the sacrifice of infants.6
Marvin Harris, the creator of the anthropological movement called cultural materialism, estimated that in the Stone Age up to 23-50 percent of newborns were put to death. However, Harris conceived a rational explanation. In his book Cannibals and Kings: Origins of Cultures, published in 1977, he says that the goal was to preserve the population growth to 0.001 percent. This explanation of more “civilized” cavemen than us has not been taken seriously among other scholars. But the renowned geneticist James Neel surpasses him. Through a retroactive model to study the customs of contemporary Yanomami Indians he estimated that in prehistoric times the infanticidal rate was 15-20 percent. However, Neel wrote: “I find it increasingly difficult to see in the recent reproductive history of the civilized world a greater respect for the quality of human existence than was manifested by our remote ‘primitive’ ancestors.” Ark would have scoffed at this claim. The fact that Neel published such praise for the infanticidal cavemen in Science,7 one of the most prestigious scientific journals, shows the levels of psychogenic regression that we suffer in our times.
Ancient World
As we have seen, the sacrifice of children was much more common in the Ancient World than in present times. Three thousand bones of young children, with evidence of sacrificial rituals, have been found in Sardinia. Infants were offered to the Babylonian goddess Ishtar. Pelasgians offered a sacrifice of every tenth child during difficult times. Syrians sacrificed children to Jupiter and Juno. Many remains of children have been found in Gezer excavations with signs of sacrifice. Child skeletons with the marks of sacrifice have been found also in Egypt dating 950-720 B.C. In Carthage “[child] sacrifice in the ancient world reached its infamous zenith.”8 Besides the Carthaginians, other Phoenicians, and the Canaanites, Moabites and Sepharvites offered their first-born as a sacrifice to their gods.
Carthage. Charred bones of thousands of infants have been found in Carthaginian archaeological sites in modern times. One such area harbored as many as 20,000 burial urns. It is estimated that child sacrifice was practiced for centuries in the region. Plutarch (ca. 46-120 AD) mentions the practice, as do Tertullian, Orosius, Diodorus Siculus and Philo. The Hebrew Bible also mentions what appears to be child sacrifice practiced at a place called the Tophet (from the Hebrew taph or toph, to burn) by the Canaanites, ancestors of the Carthaginians, and by some Israelites. Writing in the 3rd century B.C., Kleitarchos, one of the historians of Alexander the Great, described that the infants rolled into the flaming pit. Diodorus Siculus wrote that babies were roasted to death inside the burning pit of the god Baal Hamon, a bronze statue.9
Greece and Rome. In the Persian mythology of Zoroastrianism, at birth some children are devoured by their parents: a fable reminiscent of Cronus. Rhea hid Zeus and presented a stone wrapped in strips, which Cronus took as a swaddled baby and ate it. Cronus represents the archaic Hellas.
The historical Greeks considered barbarous the practice of adult and child sacrifice.10 It is interesting to note how conquerors like Alexander are diminished under the new psychohistorical perspective. If we give credence to the assertion that Thebes, the largest city in the region of Boeotia, had lower rates of exposure than other Greek cities, its destruction by Alexander was a fatal blow to the advanced psychoclass in Greece. A few centuries later, between 150 and 50 B.C. an Alexandrian Jew wrote Wisdom of Solomon, which contains a diatribe against the Canaanites whom he calls perpetrators of “ruthless murders of their children.” (Note how the biblical classics, the 16th-century chroniclers, and the 19th-century anthropologists wield value judgments, something banned in an academy under the shadow of Franz Boas.)
In The Histories Polybius was already complaining in the 2nd century B.C. that parents severely inhibited reproduction, and by the 1st century there were several thinkers who spoke out against the exposure of babies. Epictetus wondered “A sheep does not abandon its own offspring, nor a wolf; and yet does a man abandon his?” In the Preface we saw that in the same century Philo was the first philosopher to speak out against exposure.11
“The greatest respect is owed to a child,” wrote Juvenal, born in 55 AD. His contemporary Josephus, a Romanized Jew, also condemned exposure. And in Heroides, an elegiac poem that he wrote before his exile, Ovid asked, “What did the child commit, in so few hours of life?” However, two centuries after Augustus, in times of Constantine Rome struggled with a decreased population due to exposure. The legend of Romulus and Remus is also revealing: two brothers had been exposed to die but a she-wolf saved them. Romulus forced the Romans to bring up all males and the first female and forbade killing them after a certain age. As Rhea saving his son Zeus, this legend portrays the psychogenic landmark of classical culture compared with other cultures of the Ancient World. But even so, exposure was practiced. A letter from a Roman citizen to his wife, dating from 1 B.C., demonstrates the casual nature with which infanticide was often viewed:
Know that I am still in Alexandria. […] I ask and beg you to take good care of our baby son, and as soon as I received payment I shall send it up to you. If you are delivered, if it is a boy, keep it, if a girl, discard it.12
In some periods of Roman history it was traditional for a newborn to be brought to the pater familias, the family patriarch, who would then decide whether the child was to be kept and raised, or left to death by exposure. The Twelve Tablets of Roman law obliged him to put to death a child that was visibly deformed. Infanticide became a capital offense in Roman law in 374 AD but offenders were rarely if ever prosecuted.13
Hebrew people. Although the Bible says many Hebrews sacrificed their children to pagan gods, Judaism prohibits infanticide (I will approach the subject of the recent studies on the Israelites in the last chapter). Tacitus recorded that the Jews “regard it as a crime to kill any late-born children.”14 Josephus, whose works give an important insight into first-century Judaism, wrote that God “forbids women to cause abortion of what is begotten, or to destroy it afterward.”15
Pagan European tribes. John Boswell believed that in ancient Germanic tribes unwanted children were exposed, usually in the forest. “It was the custom of the pagans that if they wanted to kill a son or daughter, they would be killed before they had been given any food.”16 In the most influential archeological book of the 19th century, Prehistoric Times, John Lubbock invented the terms Paleolithic and Neolithic. He described that burnt bones indicated the practice of child sacrifice in pagan Britain.17
The Christian Era
Something goes completely unnoticed for the modern mind. In a world plagued by sacrifices like the Old World, the innocent son has to die ordered by his father: a well-known practice. It is impossible to understand the psychoclass that gave rise to Christianity by overlooking this reality converted into a powerful symbol. This is true despite, as I have stated in the previous pages, that forms of upbringing should have suffered, in general terms, a regression throughout the Middle Ages. The Teachings of the Apostles or Didache said: “You shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is born.”18The Epistle of Barnabas stated an identical command.19 So widely accepted was this teaching in Christendom that apologists Tertullian, Athenagoras, Minucius Felix, Justin Martyr and Lactantius also maintained that exposing a baby to death was a wicked act. In 318 AD Constantine considered infanticide a crime but reinstated the practice of selling one’s own children. The West took its time to consider criminal the late forms of infanticide. The author of the Codex Theodosianus complained in 322 AD:
We have learned that in provinces where there are shortages of food and lack of livelihood, parents are selling or pledging their children. Such an ignominious act is repugnant to our customs.
Towards 340 AD Lactantius argued that strangling newborns was sinful. Already within the historical period known as Christendom, infanticide was not officially banned in Roman criminal law until 374 AD when Valentinian I mandated to rear all children (exposing babies, especially girls, was still common). However, both exposure and child abandonment continued in Europe.
Middle Ages. The practice was so entrenched, as well as the sale of children, that it had been futile to decree the abolition of such customs. Until 500 AD it could not be said that a baby’s life was secure. The Council of Constantinople declared that infanticide was a homicide, and in 589 AD the Third Council of Toledo took measures against the Spanish custom of killing their own children.20 Whereas theologians and clerics preached to spare their lives, newborn abandonment continued as registered in both the literature record and in legal documents.21 More archaic forms of infanticide, such as sacrifice, were practiced by the Gauls, Celts and the Irish. “They would kill their piteous wretched offspring with much wailing and peril, to pour their blood around Crom Cruaich,” a deity of pre-Christian Ireland.22 Unlike other European regions, in the Middle Ages the German mother had the right to expose the newborn.23 In Gotland, Sweden, children were also sacrificed.24 According to William Langer, exposure in the Middle Ages “was practiced on a gigantic scale with absolute impunity, noticed by writers with most frigid indifference.”25 By the end of the 12th century, notes Richard Trexler, Roman women threw their newborns into the Tiber River even in daylight.26 In Russia, peasants sacrificed their sons and daughters to the pagan god Perun. Some residents of rural areas got rid of their babies by throwing them to the hogs. In Medieval Russia secular laws did not deal with what, for the church, was a crime.27 The Svans killed the newborn females by filling their mouths with hot ashes. In Kamchatka, babies were killed and thrown to wild dogs.28
The darkness of Europe would begin to fade in the 12th century. As explained above, the “little Renaissance” of that century reminds me the famous series of Kenneth Clark, the first of its kind that showed us the personal view of an intellectual in a television series. Other cultures would be arrested in their ways of treatment of women and children.
China and Japan. The American explorer George Kennan noted that among the Koryaks, a Mongoloid people of north-eastern Siberia, infanticide was still common in the 19th century. One of the twins was always sacrificed.29 Since the 17th century Jesuit missionaries had found thousands of babies, mostly women, abandoned on the streets of China. Marco Polo, the famed explorer, saw newborns exposed in Manzi.30 China’s society promoted gendercide. The philosopher Han Fei Tzu, a member of the ruling aristocracy of the 3rd century B.C., who developed a school of law, wrote: “As to children, a father and mother when they produce a boy congratulate one another, but when they produce a girl they put it to death.”31 Among the Hakka people, and in Yunnan, Anhwei, Szechwan, Jiangxi and Fukien a method of killing the baby was to put her into a bucket of cold water, which was called “baby water.” 32 Even before feudal Japan infanticide was performed. The common slang for infanticide was mabiki which means to pull plants from an overcrowded garden. It has been estimated that 40 percent of newborn babies were killed in Kyushu.33 A typical method in Japan was smothering through wet paper on the baby’s mouth and nose.34Mabiki persisted in the 19th and early 20th centuries.35
India and Pakistan. Female infanticide of newborn girls was systematic in feudatory Rajputs in India. According to Firishta (approx. 1560-1620), as soon as a female child was born she was holding “in one hand, and a knife in the other, that any person who wanted a wife might take her now, otherwise she was immediately put to death.”36 The practice of female infanticide was also common among the inhabitants of Kutch, Kehtri, Nagar, Gujarat, Miazed, Kalowries and also among the Sind in Pakistan.37 It was not uncommon that parents threw a child to the crocodiles in the Ganges River as a sacrificial offering. The British colonists were unable to outlaw the custom until the beginnings of the 19th century.38
Arabia and Islam. Female infanticide was common all over Arabia during pre-Islamic Arabia, especially by burying alive the newborn female.39 Later it would be explicitly prohibited by the Koran: “And do not kill your children for fear of poverty; We give them sustenance and yourselves too; Surely to kill them is a great wrong.”40 However, in spite of this emergent psychoclass, if compared with their infanticidal neighbors of the Arabian peninsula, the forms of childcare and the treatment of women in Islam would be stagnant for centuries.
Tribes
Infanticide in tribal societies was, and in some tribes still is, more frequent than infanticide in both Western and Eastern civilizations.
Africa. In this continent newborns were killed because of fear that they were an evil omen or because they were considered unlucky. Twins were usually put to death in Arebo; as well as by the Nama Hottentots of South West Africa; in the Lake Victoria Nyanza region; by the Tswana in Portuguese East Africa; among the Ilso and Ibo people of Nigeria; and by the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert.41 The Kikuyu, Kenya’s most populous ethnic group, practiced ritual killing of twins.42 Lucien Lévy-Brühl noted that, as a result of fearing a drought, if a baby was born feet first in British East Africa, she or he was smothered.43 The Tswana people did the same since they feared the newborn would bring ill fortune to the parents.44 Similarly, William Sumner noted that the Vadshagga killed children whose upper incisors came first.45 If a mother died in childbirth among the Ibo people of Nigeria, the newborn was buried alive. It suffered a similar fate if the father died.46 In The Child in Primitive Society, Nathan Miller wrote in the 1920s that among the Kuni tribe every mother had killed at least one of her children.47 Child sacrifice was practiced as late as 1929 in Zimbabwe, where a daughter of the tribal chief used to be sacrificed as a petition of rain.48
Oceania and the Pacific Islands. Infanticide among the autochthon people in the Oceania islands is widespread. In some areas of the Fiji islands up to 50 percent of newborn infants were killed.49 In the 19th-century Ugi, in the Solomon Islands almost 75 percent of the indigenous children had been brought from adjoining tribes due to the high incidence rate of infanticide, a unique feature of these tribal societies.50 In another Solomon island, San Cristóbal, the firstborn was considered ahubweu and often buried alive.51 As a rationale for their behavior, some parents in British New Guinea complained: “Girls […] don’t become warriors, and they don’t stay to look for us in our old age.”52
Australia. According to Bronislaw Malinowski, who wrote a book on indigenous Australians in the early 1960s, “infanticide is practiced among all Australian natives.”53 The practice has been reported in Tasmania, Western Australia, Central Australia, South Australia, in the Northern Territory, Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. Anthropologist Géza Róheim wrote:
When the Yumu, Pindupi, Ngali, or Nambutji were hungry, they ate small children with neither ceremonial nor animistic motives. Among the southern tribes, the Matuntara, Mularatara, or Pitjentara, every second child was eaten in the belief that the strength of the first child would be doubled by such a procedure.54
Family units usually consisted of three children. Brough Smyth, a 19th century researcher, estimated that in Victoria about 30 percent of the births resulted in infanticide.55 Mildred Dickeman concurs that the figure is accurate in other Australia tribes as a result of a surplus of the birthrate.56 Cannibalism was observed in Victoria at the beginning of the 20th century. The Wotjo tribe, as well as the tribes of the lower Murray River, sometimes killed a newborn to feed an older sibling.57 Thomas Robert Malthus said that, in the New South Wales region when the mother died sucking infants were buried alive with her.58 In the Darling River region, infanticide was practiced “by a blow on the back of the head, by strangling with a rope, or chocking with sand.”59 In Queensland a tribal woman only could have children after the age of thirty. Otherwise babies would be killed.60 The Australian Aranda tribes in the Northern Territory used the method of choking the newborn with coal, sand or kill her with a stick.61 According to James George Frazer, in the Beltana tribes in South Australia it was customary to kill the first-born.62 Twins were always killed by the Arrernte in central Australia.63 In the Luritcha tribe occasional cannibalism of young children occurred.64 Aram Yengoyan calculated that, in Western Australia, the Pitjandjara people killed 19 percent of their newborns.65 In the 19th century the native Tasmanians were exterminated by the colonists, who regarded them as a degenerate race. Richard H. Davies (fl. 1830s-1887), a brother of Archdeacon Davies, wrote that Tasmanian “females have been known to desert their infants for the sake of suckling the puppies,” which were later used for hunting.66 Like other tribal Australians, when the mother died the child was buried as well.67
Polynesia. In ancient Polynesian societies infanticide was fairly common.68 Families were supposed to rear no more than two children. Writing about the natives Raymond Firth noted: “If another child is born, it is buried in the earth and covered with stones.”69 In Hawaii infanticide was a socially sanctioned practice before the Christian missions.70 Infanticidal methods included strangling the children or, more frequently, burying them alive.71 Infanticide was quite intense in Tahiti.72 Methods included suffocation, neck breaking and strangulation.73
North America. Infanticide and child sacrifice was practiced in the New World at times when in Western Europe it had been largely abandoned. There is no agreement about the actual estimates of the frequency of newborn female infanticide in the Eskimo population. Carmel Schrire mentions diverse studies ranging from 15-50 percent to 80 percent.74 Polar Eskimos killed the child by throwing him or her into the sea.75 There is even a legend in Eskimo folklore, “The Unwanted Child,” where a mother throws her child into the fjord. The Yukon and the Mahlemuit tribes of Alaska exposed the female newborns by stuffing their mouths with grass before leaving them to die.76 In Arctic Canada the Eskimos exposed their babies on the ice and left them to die.77 Female Eskimo infanticide disappeared in the 1930s and 1940s after contact with the Western cultures of the South.78 The Handbook of North American Indians reports infanticide and cannibalism among the Dene Indians and those of the Mackenzie Mountains.79 In the Eastern Shoshone there was a scarcity of Indian women as a result of female infanticide.80 For the Maidu Native Americans in the United States twins were so dangerous that they not only killed them, but the mother as well.81 In the region known today as southern Texas, the Mariame Indians practiced infanticide of females on a large scale. Wives had to be obtained from neighboring groups.82
South American tribes. Although data of infanticides among the indigenous people in South America is not as abundant as data from North America, the estimates seem to be similar. The Tapirapé indigenous people of Brazil allowed no more than three children per woman, and no more than two had to be of the same sex. If the rule was broken infanticide was practiced.83 The people in the Bororo tribe killed all the newborns that did not appear healthy enough. Infanticide is also documented in the case of the Korubo people in the Amazon.84
While Capacocha sacrifice was practiced in the Peruvian large cities, child sacrifice in the pre-Columbian tribes of the region is less documented. However, even today studies on the Aymara Indians reveal high incidences of mortality among the newborn, especially female deaths, suggesting infanticide.85 Infanticide among the Chaco in Paraguay was estimated as high as 50 percent of all newborns in that tribe, who were usually buried.86 The infanticidal custom had such roots among the Ayoreo in Bolivia and Paraguay that it persisted until the late 20th century.87
Conclusion
As can be gathered from the above data, it is possible to support psychohistory’s cornerstone, the idea of an infanticidal psychoclass, with sources other than those used by deMause. The main criticism of historian Julie Hofmann Kemp to the deMausean model has, therefore, been solved.
References
1 Loren Cobb signs under a penname in Wikipedia. His post appeared in the talk page of Psychohistory (03:41, April 3, 2008).
2 Birdsell, Joseph, B. (1986), “Some predictions for the Pleistocene based on equilibrium systems among recent hunter-gatherers,” in Richard Lee and Irven DeVore, Man the Hunter, Aldine Publishing Co., p. 239.
3 Williamson, Laila (1978), “Infanticide: an anthropological analysis,” in Kohl, Marvin, Infanticide and the Value of Life, New York: Prometheus Books, pp. 61-75.
4 Milner, Larry S. (2000). Hardness of Heart / Hardness of Life: The Stain of Human Infanticide. Lanham/New York/Oxford: University Press of America, p. 19.
5 Hoffer, Peter, N.E.H. Hull (1981). Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and America, 1558-1803. New York University Press, p. 3.
6 Simons, E. L. (1989). “Human origins.” Science, 245: p. 1344.
7 Neel, James. (1970). “Lessons from a ‘primitive’ people.” Science, 1: p. 816.
8 Milner: Hardness of Heart (op. cit.) p. 324.
9 Brown, Shelby (1991). Late Carthaginian Child Sacrifice and Sacrificial Monuments in their Mediterranean Context. Sheffield Academic Press, pp. 22s. See also: Stager, Lawrence, Samuel R. Wolff (1984). “Child sacrifice at Carthage—religious rite or population control?” Biblical Archaeology Review 10: pp. 31-51.
10 Hughes, Dennis D. (1991). Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece. Routledge, p. 187.
11 Philo (1950). The Special Laws. Harvard University Press, Vol. VII, pp. 117s, 551, 549.
12 Naphtali, Lewis, ed. (1985), “Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 744,” Life in Egypt Under Roman Rule, Oxford University Press, p. 54.
13 Radville, Samuel X. (1974), “A history of child abuse and infanticide,” in Steinmetz, Suzanne K. and Murray A. Strauss, Violence in the Family, New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., pp. 173-179.
14 Tacitus (1931). The Histories. London: William Heinemann, Vol. II, p. 183.
15 Josephus (1976). The Works of Flavius Josephus, “Against Apion.” Cambridge: Harvard University Press, II.25, p. 597.
16 John Boswell (1988). The Kindness of Strangers. New York: Vintage Books, p. 211.
17 Lubbock, John (1865). Pre-historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages. London: Williams and Norgate, p. 176.
18 Robinson, J. Armitage (translator) (1920), “Didache,” Barnabas, Hermar and the Didache, Vol. D.ii.2c, New York: The MacMillan Co., p. 112.
19 Ibid., Epistle of Barnabas, xix. 5d.
20 Radbill, Samuel X. (1974), “A history of child abuse and infanticide,” in Steinmetz, Suzanne K. and Murray A. Straus, Violence in the Family, New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., pp. 173-179.
21 John Boswell (1984). “Exposition and oblation: the abandonment of children and the ancient and medieval family.” American Historical Review 89: pp. 10-33.
22 Dorson, Richard (1968). Peasant Customs and Savage Myths: Selections from the British Folklorists. University of Chicago Press, p. 351.
23 Westrup, C.W. (1944). Introduction to Roman Law. Oxford University Press, p. 249.
24 Turville-Petre, Gabriel (1964). Myth and Religion of the North: The Religion of Ancient Scandinavia. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, p. 253.
25 Langer, William L. (1974). “Infanticide: a historical survey.” History of Childhood Quarterly, 1, pp. 353-366.
26 Trexler, Richard (1973). “Infanticide in Florence: new sources and first results.” History of Childhood Quarterly, 1: p. 99.
27 Ransel, David (1988). Mothers of Misery. Princeton University Press, pp. 10-12.
28 McLennan: Studies in Ancient History (op. cit.), pp. 105s.
29 Kennan, George (1986 [originally published in 1871]). Tent Life in Siberia. New York: Gibbs Smith.
30 Polo, Marco (1965). The Travels. Middlesex: Penguin Books, p. 174.
31 Yu-Lan, Fung (1952). A History of Chinese Philosophy. Princeton University Press, p. 327.
32 Yao, Esther S. Lee (1983). Chinese Women: Past and Present. Mesquite: Ide House, p. 75.
33 Kushe, Helga and Peter Singer (1985). Should the Baby Live? Oxford University Press, p. 106.
34 Shiono, Hiroshi and Atoyo Maya, Noriko Tabata, Masataka Fujiwara, Junich Azumi and Mashahiko Morita (1986). “Medico-legal aspects of infanticide in Hokkaido District, Japan.” American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, 7: p. 104.
35 Vaux, Kenneth (1989). Birth Ethics. New York: Crossroad, p. 12.
36 Westermarck, Edward (1968). A Short History of Marriage. New York: Humanities Press, Vol. III, p. 162.
37 Panigrahi, Lalita (1972). British Social Policy and Female Infanticide in India. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, p. 18.
38 Davies, Nigel (1981). Human Sacrifice. New York: William Morrow & Co, p. 18.
39 Milner: Hardness of Heart, (op. cit.), p. 59. See also: Smith, William Robertson (1903). Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia. London: Adam & Charles Block, p. 293.
40 The Koran, XVII:31. See also LXXXI:8-9, XVI:60-62, XVII:42 and XLII:48.
41 Milner: Hardness of Heart (op. cit.) pp. 160s.
42 LeVine, Sarah and Robert LeVine (1981), “Child abuse and neglect in Sub-Saharan Africa,” in Korbin, Jill, Child Abuse and Neglect, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 39.
43 Lévy-Brühl, Lucien (1923). Primitive Mentality. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., p. 150.
44 Schapera, I.A. (1955). A Handbook of Tswana Law and Custom. Oxford University Press, p. 261.
45 Sumner, William (1956 [originally published in 1906). Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals. Oxford University Press, p. 274.
46 Basden, G.T. (1996). Niger Ibos. New York: Barnes & Noble, pp. 180-184, 262s.
47 Miller, Nathan (1928). The Child in Primitive Society. New York: Bretano’s, p. 37.
48 Davies: Human Sacrifice (op. cit.), p. 143.
49 McLennan, J.F. (1886). Studies in Ancient History, The Second Series. New York: MacMillan & Co., Ltd., pp. 90s.
50 Guppy, H.B. (1887). The Solomon Islands and Their Natives. London: Swan Sonnenschein, p. 42.
51 Frazer, J.G. (1935). The Golden Bough. New York: MacMillan Co., pp. 332s.
52 Langness, L.L. (1984), “Child abuse and cultural values: the case of New Guinea,” in Korbin, Jill, Child Abuse and Neglect: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 15.
53 Malinowski, Bronislaw (1963). The Family Among the Australian Aborigines. New York: Scocken Books, p. 235.
54 Róheim, Géza (1962). “The Western tribes of Central Australia: childhood.” The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, 2: p. 200.
55 Smyth, Brough (1878). The Aborigines of Australia. London: John Ferres, p. 52.
56 Dickeman, Mildred (1975). “Demographic consequences of infanticide in man.” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 6: p. 121.
57 Howitt, A.W. (1904). The Native Tribes of South-East Australia. MacMillan & Co., Ltd., pp. 749s.
58 Malthus, Thomas Robert (1963). On Population. New York: The Modern Library, I.III, p. 170.
59 Bonney, Frederic (1884). “On some customs of the aborigines of the River Darling.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 13: p. 125.
60 Cowlishaw, Gillian (1978). “Infanticide in aboriginal Australia.” Oceania, 48: p. 267.
61 Murdock, G.P. (1971). Our Primitive Contemporaries. New York: Macmillan, p. 34.
62 Frazer, James George (1963). The Dying God. New York: Macmillan, p. 180.
63 Murdock: Our Primitive Contemporaries (op. cit.), p. 34.
64 Spencer, Baldwin, F.J. Gillen (1904). The Northern Tribes of Central Australia. London: MacMillan & Co., p. 475.
65 Yengoyan, Aram (1972). “Biological and demographic components in aboriginal Australian socio-economic organization.” Oceania, 43: p. 88.
66 Roth, H. Ling (1899). The Aborigines of Tasmania. Halifax: King & Sons, pp. 162s.
67 Murdock: Our Primitive Contemporaries (op. cit.), p. 7.
68 Ritchie, Jane and James Ritchie (1979). Growing Up in Polynesia. Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, p. 39.
69 Firth, Raymond (1983). Primitive Polynesian Economy. London: Routledge, p. 44.
70 Dibble, Sheldon (1839). History and General Views of the Sandwich Islands Mission. New York: Taylor & Dodd, p. 123.
71 Handy, E.S. and Mary Kawena Pukui (1958). The Polynesian Family System in Ka-’U, Hawaii. New Plymouth, New Zealand: Avery Press, p. 327.
72 Ritchie: Growing Up in Polynesia (op. cit.), p. 189.
73 Oliver, Douglas (1974). Ancient Tahitan Society. Honolulu: University Press of Hawii, Vol. I, p. 425.
74 Schrire, Carmel and William Lee Steiger (1974). “A matter of life and death: an investigation into the practice of female infanticide in the Artic.” Man: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society, 9: p. 162.
75 Fridtjof, Nansen (1894). Eskimo Life. London: Longmans, Green & Co., p. 152.
76 Garber, Clark (1947). “Eskimo Infanticide.” Scientific monthly, 64: p. 98.
77 Langer: “Infanticide: a historical survey” (op. cit.), p. 354.
78 Balikci, Asen (1984), “Netslik,” in Damas, David, Handbook of North American Indians (Arctic), Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, p. 427.
79 Savishinsky, Joel and Hiroko Sue Hara (1981), “Hare,” in Helm, June, Handbook of North American Indians (Subarctic). Smithsonian Institution, p. 322. See also: Gillespie, Beryl (1981), “Mountain Indians,” in Helm, June, Handbook of North American Indians (Subarctic). Smithsonian Institution, p. 331.
80 Shimkin, Demitri, B. (1986), “Eastern Shoshone,” in D’Azevedo, Warren L., Handbook of North American Indians (Great Basin). Smithsonian Institution, p. 330.
81 Riddell, Francis (1978), “Maidu and Konkow,” in Heizer, Robert F., Handbook of North American Indians (California). Smithsonian Institution, p. 381.
82 Campbell, T.N. (1983), “Coahuitlecans and their neighbors,” in Ortiz, Alonso, Handbook of North American Indians (Southwest). Smithsonian Institution, p. 352.
83 Johnson, Orna (1981), “The socioeconomic context of child abuse and neglect in native South America,” in Korbin, Jill, Child Abuse and Neglect, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 63.
84 Cotlow, Lewis (1971). The Twilight of the Primitive. New York: Macmillan, p. 65.
85 de Meer, Kees, Roland Bergman and John S. Kushner (1993). “Socio-cultural determinations of child mortality in Southern Peru: including some methodological considerations.” Social Science and Medicine, 36: pp. 323, 328.
86 Hastings, James (1955). Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. NY: Scribner’s Sons, Vol. I, p. 6.
87 Bugos, Paul E. and Lorraine M. McCarthy (1984), “Ayoreo infanticide: a case study,” in Hausfater, Glenn and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Infanticide, Comparative and Evolutionary Perspectives, New York: Aldine, p. 510.
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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 time I will reproduce the penultimate chapter. Day of Wrath will be available again in printed form.
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.
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, the spiritual guide of the Church of the West, was born on November 13, 354 in Thagaste (now Souk-Ahras, Algeria), of petit-bourgeois parents. His mother, Monica, of strict Christian formation, educated her son in Christian thought, although she did not baptise him.
His father, Patricius, a pagan whose wife ‘served as a lord’, ‘became a believer towards the end of his temporary life’ (Augustine); he barely appears in all his work and Augustine only mentions him on the occasion of his death. Agustin had at least one brother, Navigius, and perhaps two sisters. One of them, when she was a widow, ended her life as the superior of a convent of nuns.
As a child, as a curious anecdote, Augustine did not like to study. His training began late, ended soon, and at first was overshadowed by coercion, beatings, useless protests and the laughter of adults for it, even his parents, who harassed him.
Editor’s Note:
This 15th-century painting of Niccolò di Pietro of Augustine taken to school by his mother is very deceptive. Scholars generally agree that Augustine and his family were Berbers, an ethnic group indigenous to North Africa. I find it extremely annoying and surreal how, after Christian takeover, Aryans meekly submitted their worldview to non-Aryans—and more annoying that even white nationalists continue to be blind to these facts!
Yesterday I modified my site previously called Fallen Leaves in order to start adding entries there, in which I rebut what a Mexican theologian said about the Shroud of Turin (which I will eventually translate for my shroud series in WDH). Previously, that site collected entries in English about child abuse, which was my specialty before discovering white nationalism in 2009.
I cannot avoid the idea that the mistreatments that Deschner mentions to the pubescent Augustine influenced his late theology. For example, a good part of my book ¿Me Ayudarás? is an analysis of my father’s misguided defence mechanisms—how he defended himself internally against the bullying at home and at school when he was a child. The point is that, if someone does not process these traumas, as an adult he will try to take revenge on innocents by repeating the abusive behaviour. I am sure that, had my father not been martyred as a child, he would not have launched invectives (‘To the eternal fire…’) as an adult when he spoke in the family.
I have read Augustine’s Confessions and I remember some passages in which he describes how his parents made fun of him while praying to avoid the bullying and beatings at school. I daresay that, had Augustine had an ‘accomplice witness’ as a boy, he would not have rationalised as fiercely as he did the doctrine of hell: where he put even unbaptized infants for eternal torment.
Deschner continues:
____________
At seventeen, the young man went to Carthage, rebuilt under Augustus. A rich bourgeois, Romanian, had supported the father of Augustine, who died at that time, allowing the son to carry out his studies. To tell the truth, he did not do it very hard. ‘What I liked’, admitted in his Confessions, was ‘to love and be loved’. He was seduced by ‘a wild chaos of tumultuous amorous entanglements’, he wandered ‘aimlessly through the streets of Babel’, he wallowed ‘in his mud, the same as in delicious spices and ointments’ while the Bible did not appeal to him either because of its content or its form, which seemed too simple.
Although he went to church, he went there to meet a female friend. And when he prayed, among other things he asked: ‘Give me chastity but not yet ’. He feared, indeed, that God would listen to him and ‘heal me of the disease of the carnal appetite, which I wanted to satiate rather than extirpate’. At eighteen he became a father. A concubine, who lived with him about a decade and a half, gave him a son in 372, Adeodatus (gift of God), who died in 389.
Augustine, whom on the night of Easter on April 25, 387 Ambrose baptised in Milan together with his son and his friend Alypius, was appointed in 391, despite a desperate opposition, presbyter of Hippo: a millennium-old port city, the second largest seaport in Africa. And in 395 Valerius, the old Greek bishop of the city, who spoke bad Latin, names him illegitimately, so Augustine confesses, ‘auxiliary bishop’ (coadjutor) contrary to the provisions of the Council of Nicaea, whose eighth canon prohibits the existence of two bishops in a city.
This is a postscript to my entry on Wednesday, basically a response to what has been said in the discussion thread of that post.
In the first place, when I said that only vengeance heals the soul, I referred to vengeance on grievances of which one was at the absolute mercy of the environment. A teenager can get out from an abusive school; but not from home, at least not in the third world: where there are no decently paid jobs for minors. It is a huge difference. While the teenager has the option of fleeing from a tormenting school, he cannot run away from the tormenting home.
Also, the bulling one receives in school destroys the victim’s self-esteem. The type of persistent, targeted mistreatment from father to son like what we saw in the movie Shine, destroys the mind of the victim. So we are talking about fundamentally different things.
This said, in 2011 Greg Johnson sent me, by mistake, The Columbine Pilgrim by Andy Nowicki. Then he sent me the book I had requested but did not charge me for Nowicki’s, and I actually read it. It’s not the kind of literature that I like, but I still think I should say some things.
Nowicki’s 2011 book smells like ink. The previous year, Johnson had published Michael O’Meara’s Toward the White Republic: the only one in the Johnson collection that smells like gunpowder, especially the final chapter.
That Nowicki is afraid of gunpowder is shown in the fact that, the same year he published his novella, I criticised what he said about Breivik in Johnson’s webzine. But Nowicki’s book has some good points. For me, it is literature lite, like the one I could read in a boring waiting room at an airport. Non-lite literature is the one that requires my study’s armchair and would move us to the revolution, like O’Meara’s book. In The Columbine Pilgrim we read:
My name is Tony Meander, and I am a Columbine-oholic.
What if you find yourself irresistibly drawn to a mass murder/suicide?
Tell people you’re obsessed with Columbine, and their eyes will cloud over. [page 1] Set off the H-bomb within you and incinerate all those zombies posing as humans. [page 5]
I was the kind of boy pretty girls loved to tease, because pretty teenage girls are probably the cruelest, most hateful species to walk the earth; being young, pert, and beautiful, they have all the power in the world at their disposal… [page 32]
“You want to fuck me? Listen, you pathetic retard… YOU WILL NEVER FUCK ME. NEVER!” [page 36]
They drove the poor man [Nietzsche] to insanity… Nietzsche provided a spark that Hitler was able to stoke into a flame, a flame that set all of Europe on fire, burning and cleansing the face of the earth. [page 43]
Eric and Dylan are not Christ; they are far greater than Christ! Reb and Vodka would never stop so low as to be crucified—no! Instead, they blasted their would-be crucifiers with bullets and bombs; they turned the tables on their persecutors, brought them low, made them bleed. [page 48]
Hitler, their spiritual forebear, born on April 20th himself, a century and a decade previous… [page 44]
Ask yourself this. What have I done with my life that is worthy of the example set by Eric and Dylan? [page 51]
Why did it happen? I don’t know. Nobody knows. Some things we just can’t explain. Some of course, take issue with Principal Edmund. They charge that, in fact, bullying has been endemic at Dogwood for a long time… [page 67]
Every reaction is produced by some kind of action. Don’t try to tell ME that this guy was just the Devil incarnate… [page 71]
In the climax of his slim book Nowicki wrote the following (Patricia is the same Patti Hart Byron bitch quoted above):
“You remember me, dontcha, Bernie boy?” Meander continued, mercilessly…
The shot nearly tore off the entire top part of Bernard’s head. Patricia began screaming uncontrollably, and Meander walked over and savagely punched her in the face, causing her again to fall in the floor.
“STAND UP!” Meander then ordered. [pages 93-94]
He fired into his fellow alum’s chest, killing him instantly. Patricia screamed again, and began to sob loudly, but this time Meander just ignored her. He fastidiously dusted off his jacket, spat on the corpse… [page 95]
Then he fired seven shots into his face… [page 98]
Patricia had hit particularly hard times once her teen queen days were over…
“A long time ago, you told me something. Do you remember what you told me?”
Meander’s fly was still unzipped, his genitals still hanging out.
Patricia whimpered, covered her eyes, hid her face. Meander stooped over, grabbed her hair and pulled it hard.
“You fuck me,” he told her with emphasis, “or you die…”
“Take off your dress…”
“Take everything else off…”
“You’re not as beautiful as you used to be,” he told her in an even, appraising tone.” [pages 99-101]
Both Nowicki and I were educated in the Catholic religion. But unlike me, Nowicki never broke cleanly with that institution, which Nietzsche wanted to sweep to its foundations. (And he was even more vehement against the Protestants, as his father, a parish priest, had very probably abused him.)
That’s why Nowicki is a fan of ink, not of gunpowder.
Human beings tend to idealize their parents and carry the burden of the sins of the world: Passover lambs for the unrecognized ills of the parent. This self-reproach for supposed wrongdoing is due to the perennial problem, still unresolved in our species, of the attachment to the perpetrator. The mantras the cultural relativist uses arguing with the psychohistorian is that it is unfair to judge an ancient culture with contemporary standards, or that in those times not even the sacrifice of infants was considered wicked. As Ark pointed out above, this standpoint rationalizes the perpetrator’s behavior at the expense of the victim. It is a no-brainer that it must have been as infernal for a historic boy that his father delivered him to the priests to be incinerated alive, as a parent who burns his child’s face to the point of completely disfiguring him, as we read in the most alarming paper news. In other words, psychohistory is based upon the empathy to the children of all times. The unconscious motivation of many anthropologists, on the other hand, has been to exonerate both the parents of former ages and the non-western cultures of today.
Anthropologists defend the validity of any culture and negate an absolute evaluation unless it is done within the standards of that culture. It was not always so. In the nineteenth century the opposite school dominated British anthropology. Anthropologists argued, in a similar vein to contemporary psychohistorians, that all societies passed through the same evolutionary process, and that non-Europeans were living fossils that could be studied to understand Europe’s past, categorizing the diverse cultures in a progressive set of values from savage, barbarian to civilized. Universal progress was postulated: a sort of unilineal set of values where religion and paleologic thought gave up ground to Aristotelian logic and rational thought, with the subsequent development of social institutions. The difference of this model with psychohistory is that these first anthropologists did not use childrearing as a parameter, but technology from the Stone Age to the modern age, passing through the Iron and Bronze Ages.
The Jewish-German immigrant Franz Boas, the “father” of American anthropology, managed to shift the paradigm. Boasian anthropology considered erroneous the premise that religion had to be defined, historically, more primitive than reason (the opposite to what Arieti says about his schizophrenic patients: that paleologic thought should be considered inferior to the Aristotelian). Boasian relativism resists universal judgments of any kind. All of the work by Boas and his disciples began as a direct opposition to the evolutionary perspective, and with time it became an orthodoxy. Although in the United States there was an attempt to revive the evolutionist ideas in the 1950s and 60s, eventually anthropologists subscribed the ideology of cultural relativism: a school that in the academy became, more than an orthodoxy, axiomatic; and its proponents, staunch supporters of non-western cultures. This relativism, with its vehement phobia to “western ethnocentrism” did not only become the most influential anthropology school originated in the United States, but the dogmatic principle of this international discipline.
In its most extreme version it even considers legitimate, say, the cutting of the clitoris in Africa. A principle that, for the popular mind, apparently originated as a tolerant attitude is being used to find excuses for intolerance. In fact, since the declarations of the anthropologist Melville Jean Herskovits by the end of the 1940s, his colleagues left the political debates of human rights. The anthropologist has great difficulties to fight for the rights of, say, the black women in South Africa. The 1996 team-work Growing Up: A Cross-cultural Encyclopedia, where dozens of anthropologists offered their studies about eighty-seven cultures, is symptomatic. Although they admit that sexual contacts between adults and children are common, including those of the incestuous mothers, they declare that it “would not constitute ‘abuse’ if in that society the behavior was not proscribed.” However, as the academic who sympathized with Ark said, not all anthropologists agree with Boas. Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban confessed that, after twenty-five years of having conducted ethnological research in Sudan, she betrayed her profession by siding those who fight against female genital cutting. She mentioned the case of a Nigerian woman who was granted asylum in the United States since her daughter would have been subjected to involuntary cutting if returning home. The compulsion to recreate on the next generation the wounds received in infancy is such that in our times genital mutilation continues. Despite their theoretical statements to the public, in practice many ethnologists, anthropologists and indigenistas still cling to the Boasian paradigm.
A single example will illustrate it. Keep in mind “A reliable source” published some pages ago. In September of 2007 the Museo del Templo Mayor, a subsidiary of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, organized a seminary in Mexico under the name “New Perspectives on Human Sacrifice Among the Mexicas.” Twenty-eight specialists were invited. According to the national press the Mexican archeologist Leonardo López Luján, who would coordinate the proceedings book of the papers (reviewed in the 2017 “A reliable source”), stated that it was advisable to distance ourselves “from the Hispanists who consider bloody and savage” the sacrificial practice. López Luján presented the paper “Huitzilopochtli and the Sacrifice of Children in Tenochtitlan’s Templo Mayor” (the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan). Among the professionals from abroad who participated were institutions such as Cambridge and the French National Center for Scientific Research. The Mexican Juan Alberto Román presented the conference, “The Role of Infants in the Mexica Sacrificial Practices,” and in a pseudo-eugenicist discourse López Luján stated: “Undernourished children [my emphasis] were sacrificed to eliminate the population that was a burden for the society.” (Cf. what Ark responded to the historian about administering pap to the child: a slow form of infanticide that suggest they were not undernourished accidentally.) Marie-Areti Hers, from the National Autonomous University of Mexico— a campus that the UNESCO declared a World Heritage Site the very week that the symposium was celebrated—, stated that human sacrifice was everything except “an exotic curiosity of backward peoples.”
I contacted Julieta Riveroll, the reporter who covered the event for Reforma and author of the article “Human Sacrifice Prejudices—Demolished.” I asked her if among the speakers of the conferences she attended someone condemned the deadly ritual. Emphatically she responded “No,” that they were “objective experts.” I mention the anecdote because that word, “objective” is the most abused word in academic circles, as we already saw in one of the answers of the academics to Ark. Let us imagine that, among the reporters of the Gulag, to keep objectivity they must refrain from condemning genocide. This does not happen: Stalin’s regime is broadly condemned. But the double standard of allowing condemnation of the white man and virtually forbidding condemning non-whites, is brazen. The month that followed the symposium, in the same Mexico City where the symposium was celebrated the police caught the serial killer José Luis Calva, the “cannibal poet” that horrified the Mexican citizenry. In one of his poems Calva wrote to one of his victims a poem worthy of the ancient Mexicans: You handed over your parts to me
Your breath, your nails and your longings.
You dressed me of you and I was your bird,
Sing your song that never quiets.
Naturally, unlike the Mexicas who did exactly the same, this man was condemned by the elites.
On the other side of the Atlantic the Europeans deform reality too. In 2008 I visited the museum and archaeological park Cueva Pintada in the town Gáldar of Gran Canaria. The screened documental in the museum denoted the purest Manichaeism. Despite recognizing the widespread infanticide of girls among the tribes, the conquerors appear as the bad guys and the inhabitants of the troglodyte settlement as the noble savages victimized by the sixteenth-century Europeans. Similarly, in another museum, El Museo Canario, the following year I looked up through an academic text the subject of infanticide of these pre-Hispanic white people (curiously, they were blonder than the Spanish but they were barely leaving behind the Neolithic stage). Just as the mentioned María Alba Pastor who saw in the Mexican sacrifices “a reaction to the Conquest,” three Spanish academics postulated that the Canary sacrifice could have been the consequence “of the ongoing military, religious and cultural aggression” inflicted by the conquerors.[1] This interpretation ignores the fact that the practice predated the arrival of the Spaniards.
Unlike these documentaries and academic papers that blame westerners for the sins of non-westerners, I will quote one of the first letters written about the practice of infanticide in the seven Canary Islands. The following description comes from Diego Gómez de Cintra, a Portuguese navigator that wrote what he saw in La Palma:
The father and the mother grab the child and put the head on a rock and take another rock and hit the child on the head shattering the skull, and thus they kill the child, his eyes and brains scattered on the soil, which is a great cruelty of the parents.
Conversely, on page 166 of the mentioned article contemporary academics side the parents by claiming, “The adoption of such an extreme measure is fully justified.”
As Terry Deary put it, “History can be horrible, but historians can sometimes be horribler.” Once the new generations break away from this immoral anthropology, the slaughtering of children will be seen, again, with due compassion as felt by the first chroniclers.
In the case of Mestizo America (and this is important to understand the organizers of the 2007 symposium), the “Latin” American anthropologists were the first ones to embrace the cause of cultural relativism. In fact, the anthropologists have influenced more the society in “Latin” America than in other societies. This is partly explained by the ethnological tradition of Bernardino de Sahagún and Bartolomé de Las Casas. In the twentieth century the study and the glorification of the Indian cultures, called indigenismo, has been the predominant framework of anthropological studies in so-called Latin America. In the particular case of Mexico, since 1917 the government was the first one to recognize the utility of anthropology. Subsequently, and working for the government, anthropologists have tried to implement their policies on the Indian population.
No doubt, deMause and Ark are right about the intellectual charlatanry that represents social anthropology.
NOTE:
[1] Julio Cuenca Sanabria, Antonio Betancor Rodríguez & Guillermo Rivero López: “La práctica del infanticidio femenino como método de control natal entre los aborígenes canarios: las evidencias arqueológicas en Cendro, Telde, Gran Canaria,” El Museo Canario, LI, 1996, p. 124. Fifty pages later the authors repeat this interpretation. In spite of the fact that the long title takes for granted that the etiology of the practice was “birth control,” the same article publishes sentences from some authors who cast doubts about the validity of that explanation.
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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.
To contextualise this series about psychiatry, see: here. Below, an abridged translation of a chapter of one of my books:
[3] John Modrow: How To Become a Schizophrenic: The Case Against Biological Psychiatry (Apollyon Press, 1996), pp. 147f. 
