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Child abuse Day of Wrath (book) Literature Psychohistory

Inland

Yesterday the image of The Fair Race still enjoyed the privilege of being up on the sidebar. Today I put Day of Wrath in its place and I would like to explain my reasons.

I did not write The Fair Race, I only chose the essays that appear between its covers. The Fair Race is for normies. It opens with an essay on how the founding myth of the post-WW2 West—the defamation of Germany—is lethal to the Aryan race. That essay, together with the review of Hellstorm that is also collected there, could perfectly be the first two stones for the normie to start crossing the psychological Rubicon. In The Fair Race there are many other essays by several authors that could be considered as the rest of the path stones that help the uninitiated to finish crossing the river.

Day of Wrath, on the other hand, describes the land on the other side of the Rubicon. Unlike The Fair Race, I wrote all the essays in Day of Wrath; most of them published in my two books in Spanish, and translated into English for Day of Wrath.

The typical normie needs the stones to be able to cross the river. I needed them myself. The normie would be frightened if we drove him to the other side without the proper preparation.

This uninitiated may need to listen to the proponents of Alt-Lite, who do not focus on racial issues, before moving on to the stone of race realism. But the latter consists of bare scientific facts that the normie will assimilate at some time, and he will want to know a meta-perspective that encompasses such facts; let’s say, the intellectual product of some pundits of the Alt-Right. Eventually it will be necessary to continue crossing the river and run into the Jewish question and White Nationalism. But White Nationalism is still a stone inside the dangerous waters. Only a few become familiar with the beach on dry land on the other side of the river, National Socialism. But the Third Reich was murdered almost in its origins by Anglo-Saxon traitors, and there is hardly anyone in the world who has explored the inland beyond the beach, on the other side of the Rubicon.

Day of Wrath explores these new lands. It is a text that carries the philosophy of Himmler and Pierce to its ultimate consequences. If one sees the images that I chose for the two books, The Fair Race and Day of Wrath, he will perceive that only by expelling non-whites from the continent (that the white god Quetzalcoatl has just discovered) it will be possible for nymphs as ethereal as the one painted by Parrish almost one hundred years ago, to flourish. In other words, the exterminationist ideology must come first, then the fourteen words will have a chance to be fulfilled: something that those who are stepping on the path stones cannot see.

For reasons that I do not understand, today I received the last edition of Day of Wrath by FedEx when I requested it by ordinary mail. As can be seen if we compare it with the image of the sidebar, only my initials appear in the November 2018 edition. It is a book about which only one review has been written. The review was very negative and I rebutted it (here). But the criticism had a valid point: my old version was riddled with syntax errors. I had to run a grammar correction program to correct them since English is not my mother tongue.

The corrected edition that came to me today, with its new glossy cover, looks better than the previous edition, distributed by Amazon. Compared to the racial issue, Day of Wrath addresses the greatest of taboos. As one German disciple of Alice Miller, whose father had an important position in the Third Reich, said, the subject of the psychic ravages caused by abusive parents ‘is the most potent taboo of mankind’.

On the other hand, racism was not a taboo for the white man. From the ancient Egyptians who put up signs so that negroes did not pass beyond certain latitudes, the Spartans so proud of their Nordic heritage and the Roman patricians, as well as the Visigoths who burned at the stake those who miscegenated in Hispania, until the first decades of the 20th century when eugenics was openly taught in the US, racism only became taboo since the Anglo-Saxons betrayed our dear Führer.

Yes, only for the new generations has racism become a taboo. But what has never been discussed before, until our times, is the horrific way in which parents have been treating their children—something that is still taboo today, as no one wants to see that those who become schizophrenic were driven mad by their own parents. (See e.g., the series on psychiatry that I’ve been reproducing every Friday.)

That is the central theme of Day of Wrath, combined with what I’ve said to bring Pierce’s exterminationism out from the mere novelesque genre: a great excursion, already inland, after we reach the other side of the river.

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

Day of Wrath, 18

What is redeemable in psychohistory?

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

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

What Julie told Ark next is more substantial:

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

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

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

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

Categories
Ancient Greece Bible Child abuse Day of Wrath (book) Infanticide Lloyd deMause Psychohistory Wikipedia

Day of Wrath, 15

A bitter discussion


A quick way to show the Aristotelian phase where present-day history, anthropology and sociology are stuck is by quoting excerpts from a heated debate about psychohistory. To make the reading easier I will omit the use of ellipsis even between long unquoted paragraphs. The complete debate can be read in the Wikipedia archive of the article “Early infanticidal childrearing.” Since the original text is a raw discussion I slightly corrected the syntax. The following is a 2002 debate that came about the subsequent year when Wikipedia was launched, the multi-language encyclopedia edited by volunteers. To simplify the discussion I will also change the names and pennames used by various academics that discussed with a psychohistorian who edited Wikipedia under the penname of “Ark.” The fascinating polemic initiated with the subject of the tribes of Papua New Guinea.

Academic 1: Does this “model” [psychohistory] reflect actual facts? Increased mortality after weaning is common in non-Neolithic cultures as well; it’s a consequence of inadequate nutrition, not of parental desire.
Ark: You’re wrong there. “Inadequate nutrition” isn’t some random fact of reality. It’s a consequence of feeding pap to children, and not having the empathy necessary to understand that crying means the baby is hungry. These are both psychological problems of the parents, since feeding pap is a response to the fear of breastfeeding.
Academic 1: So PNG [Papua New Guinea] children were better off in the more “primitive” culture, and exposure to an “advanced” society has increased sexual abuse of children.

Notice how this is similar to Miguel León Portilla’s preposterous claim that, by becoming exposed the Mexicas to a more advanced society, they abused their own women.

Ark: Yeah right. The myth of the “noble savage” rears its ugly head again. The reproductive rate is proportional to the ignorance and poverty of the population. So the more ignorant and poor the population, the more they will fuck. What’s generally the case is that birthrate is inversely proportional to female education. The PNG have a very high reproductive rate. The PNG have a very high rate of infanticide, child suicide. So now you know why I think that “noble savage” is just complete bullshit.
There are a bunch of known facts which everyone agrees on. Ninety-nine percent of modern people will put a very specific interpretation on those facts. That interpretation is that primitives are pedophilic, incestuous child molesters. This isn’t something which is cooked up by deMause’s model.
Academic 2: I am unimpressed by your hysterical claim that 99 percent of our society would agree with this. My claim is that people in different cultures describe things differently. The issue for me is, what do Marquesans, or Yolngu, or Gimi, or whomever, think it is? An article that makes claims about a particular society must care what members of that society claim is going on.
Ark: The interpretation of child abuse in the case of infants is acultural. Infants do not have culture so are incapable of “interpreting” anything through a cultural filter. And yet again, you persist in ignoring the child’s point of view, as if the rationalization of the child abuser mattered to them. You’re promoting a very specific POV [point of view], the one of the child molester, and don’t seem to care at all about the POV of the infant. Only anthropologists care about how the members of the primitive culture rationalize their behaviors. Anthropologists are just very bizarre people, and about as relevant to most people’s view of what constitutes child molestation as experts in the paranormal. The relevant experts in the area are developmental psychologists. There is a substantial faction that regards any kind of sexual activity with children to be inherently abusive. They would reject the anthropologists’ claims that cultural attitudes are at all relevant to the matter. They would rather emphasize the universality and uniformity of children’s emotional needs. At the center of this faction are the likes of Alice Miller. There is another faction that traces its lineage all the way to Freud. When possible, it denies that child abuse exists. When it can’t do that it denies that it is traumatic. And when it can’t do that, it denies that it is inherently traumatic.
Academic 3: The purpose of anthropology is to describe culture, not judge it. If an anthropologist judges a culture under study, the ability to describe a culture objectively and explain how it is perceived by its members is lost.
Ark: Anthropologists widely report that primitives do not see their practices as abusive or sexual. I have no hesitation agreeing with that. But then, neither do typical pedophiles see their practices as abusive either. So the basic idea is to completely steal the psychology and child-rearing of non-Western cultures (contemporary and historical) away from anthropologists. If that happens, then theories about these phenomena will be held to different standards than theories in anthropology. Anthropologists are trained to ignore that tool.
Academic 3: Ah, so you’re an opponent of cultural relativism. I don’t consider North European values to be “more advanced,” just different. There’s a difference between considering a set of values to be more amenable to one’s conscience and labeling one set of values as “more advanced” than another. That’s like implying that a Papuan is dumber than a European just because his culture doesn’t use electricity. Anthropologists do regularly debate how much they can or should interfere when they disagree strongly with the values of a culture under study. Ethically, all we can do is present viable options and allow individuals to make their own choices and suffer the consequences of those choices.
Ark: But Papuans are dumber than Europeans because they don’t use electricity.☺ You just have to ask “why do we use electricity?” We use it because we have a high population density and a high technological level. Why is that? Because we are culturally evolved. Why is that? Because at some point a couple of millennia ago, our ancestors decided to stop murdering their children and start evolving culturally. Of course, that only proves the Papuans are dumb, not that we’re smart; we’re just the product of a long line of smarter mothers.
Academic 3: What you are proposing is a form of genocide: systematically destroying a culture simply because you consider that culture to be primitive and immoral. If lip piercing, or trauma to the brain leads to successful adult lives, is that not sufficient justification for continuing the practice? You sound to me as if you are a “moral absolutist.” I’d hazard a guess that you believe everyone should live under the same moral code.
Ark: Just because I’m a moral absolutist doesn’t mean I think I have a perfect access to moral truth. It does mean that I have a far, far better understanding of basic moral truths than people who beat or sexually abuse kids. We could emphasize that anthropologists don’t really try to understand their subjects’ psyche. It’s not moral assumptions which differ between societies. It’s the capacity for empathy and rationality.
Academic 3: The anthropologist in me, on the other hand, still bemoans yet another drop added to the overflowing bucket of human cultures is forever lost.
Ark: The primitive cultures are a failure. We should let them die.
Academic 4: Good—as long as we all understand that psychohistory has nothing to do with history and is not even accepted by all schools of psychology. I think that there’s a real problem here in that the entire concept as titled [“Early infanticidal childrearing”] makes no sense. The title implies that these cultures intentionally endanger and kill their children: something that makes no sense for peoples who want to survive and which, if these cultures still exist after thousands of years, is clearly misleading.
Ark: I’ve chosen to take extreme offense at what you’ve said, e.g., “psychohistory has nothing to do with history,” and will treat you like a hostile. I really wish I didn’t have to deal with people who say stupid things. For example, things that amount to “every human being is rational and since it’s not rational to kill children…” This negates the overwhelming evidence that infanticide occurs. Never mind such truly stupid statements like “preliterate hunter-gatherer tribes are those most concerned with basic survival.” Oh really, I guess that explains why they never developed any technology in order to guarantee their survival (never mind such annoying facts like beliefs in reincarnation, animism and ancestor-worship).
Academic 5: Ark, play nice. Julie Hofmann Kemp [Academic 4] is many things, can even be abrasive sometimes, but acting “stupid” (I see you modified the “idiot” statement)? That’s over the top. She is one of the smartest people contributing to Wikipedia. This is an encyclopedia, not a soap box for new ideas. Sorry, but regurgitation of the canon of human knowledge is what we do here.
Academic 6: I disagree, Maveric [Academic 5]. One of the things that makes Wikipedia different from a standard encyclopedia is our ability to reflect new thinking. Now, the whole that deMause put together and Ark is advertising here is striking, but I think that you will find most of the individual points are not nearly as radical or contrary to current understanding as you seem to present. To begin with, there are many people who would reject cultural relativism. The first example that comes to mind are the women’s historians which have become increasingly common, but a proper search shouldn’t have trouble coming up with others. Further, the idea of the noble savage is very controversial, and one should hardly consider it some sort of canon.
With regards to infanticide per se, I personally have very little knowledge about the Paleolithic, but that deliberate murder or abandonment of infants was common among ancient civilizations like Carthage, Greece, and Rome is well-known, and I can remember a mainstream text mentioning Mohammed’s prohibitions against the then-widespread killing of children without any implication that might be controversial. In absence of further data, a backwards trendline would be all it takes to suggest that Paleolithic infanticide was very common indeed. And I can recall articles suggesting that tribal cannibalism, to take the most headline-grabbing example, was far more common than previously thought. In short, I think this position is not nearly outlandish enough to deserve such curt rejection. An informative and lasting page on this would be valuable enough.
Academic 7: Note that the definition of rape and molestation vary among cultures.
Ark: Rape and molestation do vary among cultures. This is bad. Cultural relativism is crap, believed only by idiots, ignoramuses, anthropologists and historians. The Convention on the Rights of the Child explicitly rejects cultural relativism. Cultural relativists are merely denying human rights. (On a moral level, they are still violating human rights.) Anthropology and history have achieved nothing, or close to nothing. The reason anthropology and history are fucked is because they reject psychology and that is the only possible explanation for both culture and history.
For psychological reasons, anthropologists have been butchering psych-heavy data; on the whole, the data is irretrievably corrupt and needs to be junked. Psychohistory is independent of both history and psychology and is at war with both. As the new kid on the bloc it’s going to get attacked as “simply not recognized by most historians and psychologists.” But psychohistory actually gets results. There is no rational argument against psychohistory’s methods. Conservatism is not a rational argument. And as noted above, there are plenty of arguments against both history and anthropology (i.e., they deny psychology’s influence even in psychological phenomena). Like cartography or natural history, anthropology and history aren’t sciences per se. Cartography was never anything more than an engineering enterprise (though it did give rise to plate tectonics) and when the time came, natural history gave way to evolutionary biology. Similarly, anthropology and history should give way to psychohistory wherever the latter is interested in taking over.
Academic 2: To those who promote the myth of the brutal savage, I point out that westerners have often characterized non-Western practices as stupid, unhealthy, or wrong in part out of their own ignorance, and in part to justify colonial oppression.
Ark: The brutal savage isn’t a myth. I do not mean by it that we aren’t savages. That is a notion you rightly reject because any article attacking modern people as savages will be destroyed. What I do claim is that modern societies are less savage than societies in the past. That’s most certainly not a myth. And to argue otherwise is to promote the noble savage myth. If you have an absolute standard of morality, there is no choice other than the brutal savage or the noble savage (as long as you don’t redefine rape and murder as non-violent behaviors, which by now I don’t trust you not to do). Whether deliberately or unwittingly, you have been promoting the noble savage myth. To recap: Primitives, in relation to modern people can be either: 1. equally savage (obviously untrue) 2. differently savage (cultural relativism) 3. less savage (noble savage) 4. more savage (brutal savage). So rejecting options #2 and #3 leaves one only with #4. There is no maneuvering room for anyone to weasel around.
Academic 3: And this is where you and I differ. I generally contend that all present-day cultures are essentially “differently savage.”

It is unnecessary to cite Ark’s long response. It is already answered in the previous chapter. But I would like to mention a newspaper note about an atrocity in Kismayo, at the south of Somalia. On October 27 of 2008 Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, a thirteen-year-old girl that had been raped, was accused of premarital sex by militant Islamists and condemned to die by stoning on the head. (Although hard to believe, there are people who punish the victim of rape, not the rapist: the hypothetical nightmare of my second book turned reality.) Most disturbing in the press release is that dozens of men stoned Aisha in a stadium with a thousand spectators! What better example to clear away any doubts about the relevancy of the concept of a manifestly inferior psychoclass to ours.

Academic 3: Hum, as I understand it, most casual murders recognize that their actions are considered morally “wrong.” They just don’t care.
Ark: Morality is a psychological phenomenon. It refers to a person’s capacity for empathy. It’s difficult to describe empathy since nobody has a good grip on what it means. But of course, that’s the point: if a person has no morality then they don’t have any of these emotions. Keep in mind that our very ability to accept social and technological progress at the rate we’re going is something which primitives lack. And we’ve yet to annihilate a foreign nation (as the Assyrians did) to pay for that progress. This too is a genuine advance.
Academic 4: Ark: in the interests of fairness, I went ahead and looked at the deMause article. Basically, it can be digested into one Philip Larkin poem. Big Whoop. Parents fuck up their kids. We know that. There is absolutely nothing there besides that fact that is provable. It is a mass of huge generalizations predicated on two simple ideas: violence begets violence (duh) and everything that happens is down to psychology. Yes, there are references to acts of violence by parents (particularly mothers) against children, but we don’t get to see the breadth of the studies to show what kind of population was used, etc. I stand by my statement that most historians reject psychohistory not because we feel threatened by it, but because most historians believe that human society is complex and filled with individuals who may act in particular ways for any number of reasons. Generally reductionism is not provable—merely a simplistic way for the insecure to find meaning.
Ark: You dismiss the article I cited because it doesn’t provide concrete proof against history’s “no explanations” stance. Well so fucking what? I never claimed it did. I merely claimed it crucified history as a scientific field and historians as scientists by showing that the theories historians entertain are all unbelievably idiotic. If you wanted a detailed theory and the evidence to back it up, you’d have to read half a dozen of deMause’s books on the subject. You haven’t provided a single remotely intelligent argument, satisfying yourself with irrelevancies and vague aspersions. (This is what you call “fair”?) If you stand by your statement on that basis, it just proves you’re an idiot. I dismiss you from my consideration.
Anonymous: Will someone please ban Ark? His non-stop slander, personal attacks, and foul language are damaging the Wikipedia community.
Academic 4: I would happily do so, but being a ranting troll who supports crank theories in an anti-social way isn’t enough for a ban. He is correct in his assertion that deMause’s theories deserve their own article—even if he’s amazingly rude in the way he treats others, and his insults towards me.
To that end, Ark, You haven’t convinced anyone that you’re anything but a crank who thinks he’s far more intelligent than he’s demonstrated so far.
Ark: I have a pretty good grasp on what history is and what it is not. As for psychology, you’re wrong about its scientific basis. Overall, it’s a fucked field but it’s one that has always aspired to be scientific.
As for psychohistory, it is not a fucked field. These two facts (history not being science and psychohistory being science) explain why I’m so eager to dismiss history. Why should scientists be subjected to the authority of non-scientists? The same arguments apply to anthropology, and doubly so when the psyches of primitives are concerned. Convincing people was never my goal, I’m too lazy and people are too bigoted for that. As for people thinking I’m a crank, I’m a power unto myself and I haven’t need for their approval nor favour. I’m just not interested in being the whipping boy on this subject. Fuck you all.

With this insult the psychohistorian who signed his posts under the penname of Ark left the discussion page. Perhaps with the exception of Academic 6, his opponents did not want to see that western childrearing has been less barbarous than in the rest of the world.
It was not always so. Both whites and Semites began as the others. Let us remember the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father Agamemnon, and a similar sacrifice in the Bible: after victory over the Ammonites, according to the Book of Judges, Jephthah makes a vow to sacrifice whoever came out of the doors of his house to meet him. The one who met him on his return was his only daughter…
What remained in Europe was a mere metaphor of such sacrifice. Robert Godwin hit the nail when stating that Christianity’s unconscious message is that when we murder our innocent child we murder God. “The crucifixion of Jesus is meant to be the last human sacrifice, with Jesus standing in for our own murdered innocence.”
 
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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.

Categories
Amerindians Aztecs Child abuse Day of Wrath (book) Evil Human sacrifice Incas Mayas Psychohistory Spain

Day of Wrath, 12

The return of Quetzalcoatl

If until recently westerners represented the zenith of civilization in the world, presently New Guineans and the headhunters of Munduruku in Brazil represent the nadir. The psychoclass of the poorest strata of Latin America lies at the middle of both extremes.
In contrast to most nations, Mexico City gave her name to the modern country. It was founded by the Tenochcas when a voice ordered them to establish themselves on the lake that they had arrived, “as the unembodied bicameral voices led Moses zigzagging across the Sinai desert.” It cannot be more symbolic that the Coat of Arms of Mexico, which they so much shoved under my nose at school, is an eagle perched upon a prickly pear cactus devouring a snake in one of the lake islets that the ancient Tenochcas recognized. It was an odd place to found a city, but the punishing voices had to be obeyed. We can deduce from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind that the buildings erected at the center of a community, such as the temple of Huitzilopochtli on the Texcoco Lake, were located where the guides listened the damned voices. (The etymology of the island of Mexico on the lake would be “navel of the maguey” or “of the Moon.”) If we now relate not only Jaynes to Arieti but also a passage of my first book about a patient diagnosed with schizophrenia, the puzzle starts to take shape. I have in mind a woman [Maya Abbott] that, because her parents always tried to think for her, suffered from auditory hallucinations and confessed to Laing: “I don’t think, the voices think.” Unlike this sort of psychological analyzing—God forbid!—, some historians try to make amends for the pre-Columbian Indians. More disturbing is to see a friend taking offence about our compassion. The psychoanalyst Jenny Pavisic once addressed me severely: “And who are you to condemn the sacrifices?” referring to child sacrifices in Mesoamerica.
The Tlatelolcan ceremonial show-ground and its surrounding neighborhoods have been excavated for archeological purposes. I have seen photographs of bone fragments of 41 sacrificed victims in the excavation of the terraces of the Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl temple, of which 30 were little children. Just as Pavisic, many people are capable of condemning the 1968 massacre of students in Tlatelolco, but never the child sacrifices perpetrated exactly on the same place. In April of 2007 bones were found of twenty-four sacrificed children to Tláloc in Tula, the capital of the Toltec civilization, dated 950-1150 AD according to a newspaper report that circulated the world. The children had been decapitated. If we remember that the intention was to avert an environmental crisis in that way, it should not surprise us that Mesoamerican civilizations disappeared even before the conquest. The sacrifices represented the distaff that moved the fabric of that culture, and a society as psychologically dissociated that had sacrifices on its basis was condemned to random disappearance. It is as if a civilization was composed of the self-harming women in the Colin Ross clinic and of male serial killers.
The iconic example of civilization disappearance is the abandonment by the Mesoamericans of their great cities, as is the case of the Mayas of the ninth century AD. From the climatic register, ice analysis in Greenland and mud of the subsoil of a lagoon in Maya areas it can be deduced that they suffered a serious draught. To deal with the draughts, just as their Mexica successors sacrificed the flower of their youth in face of external crises, from the bone register of about thirty sacrificed men, women and children it is deduced that the Mayas tried to appease the gods that had betrayed them. Had they arrived to the level of Aristotelian thought they would not have attempted to solve the problem by killing even more of their folk, and hardly would the draughts had been so apocalyptic for their civilization. Let us not forget that sudden desertion of the cities also occurred in Teotihuacan and Tula. Julian Jaynes comments:

I also think that the curious inhospitable sites on which Maya cities were often built and their sudden appearance and disappearance [my emphasis] can best be explained on the basis that such sites and movements were commanded by hallucinations which in certain periods could be not only irrational but downright punishing.

The whys of the periodic collapse of the Mesoamerican civilizations starts to be discerned if we consider that the demographic load of a prosperous Indian city sooner or later enters a critical phase that confronts the bicameral Diktat of the dominant theocracy. It is illustrative that when Egypt suffered a draught around 2100 B.C. absolutely all authority collapsed: the Egyptian people fled the towns and the literary sources of the time remind me the apocalyptic passages of a synoptic gospel. While Egyptologists struggle to explain the “why,” Jaynes compares it with the Maya catastrophe. The Mayas suffered a massive civilizational regression by going back to the jungle. He also compares it with the collapse of Assyria in 1700 B.C. that lasted two hundred years and that no historian quite understands. Jaynes also argues that the mystery is dissipated if we see it as a psychogenic leap. The bicameral societies are more susceptible to collapse once the gods refuse to talk; this is to say, once man overcomes his schizophrenic stage, so overwhelmed with auditory hallucinations. The collapse of the bicameral society is but the resulting chaos of the transit to consciousness. In Egypt, Assyria and other cultures of the Ancient World the birth of a schizoid psychoclass out of a schizophrenic one (Laing magnificently describes the difference between schizoid and schizophrenic in The Divided Self) represented a formidable threat for the status quo. “Disorders and social chaos had of course happened before,” writes Jaynes, “but such a premeditated mutiny and parricide of a king is impossible to imagine in the god-obedient hierarchies of the bicameral age.”
 
Political correctness
The rupture of the bicameral age resulted in the greatest collision of consciousness that a society could endure. But unlike the people in the Old World, those in the New World were incapable of carrying out such intrapsychic metamorphosis. The reading of Jaynes’ book seems to suggest that the Mesoamerican world of the sixteenth-century still was bicameralized in a way that had already been overcome at the other side of the ocean. In other words, the Mesoamericans suffered from the stagnation that in psychohistory is called psychogenic arrest.
The Amerindians got what they deserved. But presently, who condemns the ancient dwellers of the Americas? In a politically correct world it cannot be said that the infanticidal pre-Hispanics were psychologically dissociated; that the military theocracy was composed of serial killers, or that they were morally inferior to us. But the moralists were not always muzzled. In the colorful Spanish of his time, Bernal wrote a chapter, “How the Indians of all New Spain had many Sacrifices and Clumsiness that We Took Them Away and Imposed on Them the Saintly Things of Good Doctrine.” Bernal’s cheekiness does not cease to fascinate me: and it is pathetic that, half a millennium later, compared to those soldiers the historians, ethnologists and anthropologists of today have psychogenically regressed. I will illustrate it with the other pre-Hispanic empire.
Communication between Mesoamericans and the Andean people was sporadic. Just as the Mayas, the Incas deformed the craniums of the babies; some scholars believe to demarcate different ethnic groups of the Inca empire. The torments on childhood started since the first day. The newborn was washed with cold water, covered and placed in a hole made in the ground that would be used as a simple playpen. At five the child was nationalized by a theocratic state that, like the Mexica, was governed by strict hierarchies. And just as in Mesoamerica, the ritual murder of children was carried out in several Andean societies.
In November of 1999 National Geographic published an article with several photographs of mummies perfectly preserved at 6,700 meters above the sea level: the highest archaeological site of the world. Those were children that had been voluntarily given by their parents to be killed: an eight-year-old boy and two girls. “The Inca,” says the article, “obtained children from throughout the empire [for sacrifice] and rewarded their families with positions or goods.” In some cases the parents themselves accompanied the child in her journey to immolation. In conjunction with other barbaric forms of childrearing, the practice formed the bicameral minds that would be an all-too-easy prey for Pizarro (who in Spain had been a swineherd). The chroniclers wrote about those sacrifices. Nevertheless, with the perennial excuse that “Winners write history” in some Latin American circles the myth was created that the chroniclers’ stories were mythical. The discovery of the mummies by the end of the century confirmed the authenticity of the Spanish stories that the children were buried alive, or killed by a blow to the head, which is how according to the autopsy they killed one of the girls.
However, just as Bolivian nationalists such as Pavisic angrily ask “And who are you to condemn the sacrifices?,” the National Geographic article is a disgrace. The author, Johan Reinhard, is afraid to judge the parents and the society that produced them. He idealizes them in the most servile way, thus betraying the memory of the children. Reinhard wrote overt falsehoods about the Amerindians, for example, “the Inca were not the brutal conquerors the Spaniards were.” He writes that on the same page in which he asserted that the Inca rewarded the parents who offered their children for sacrifice. Reinhard also wrote, euphemistically, “right after she died” referring to one of the sacrificed girls instead of the natural “right after they killed her.” And when he mentions that the chroniclers reported that others were buried alive, he hastened to add: “The Llullaillaco children, however, have benign expressions.” More offensive are the photograph headings at the beginning and the end of the article: “Go Gently” referring to the pubescent girl that was found in fetal position buried in a hole, and “Eternity Bound” referring to the sacrifice of the three children in general. And the fact that the sacrificial site was found at the top of the mountain makes Reinhard exclaim: “The conditions only increased my respect for what the Inca had accomplished.”
In the next chapter I will approach the subject of the intellectual aberration known as cultural relativism, of which Reinhard and many other academics are distinguished exponents. Suffice it to say that the ethnologists and anthropologists are a lost cause. Our only hope lies in that another generation replaces those who presently occupy academic chairs. How I wish that the younger minds learned something about psychohistory; for example, that they became interested in the greatest adventure of the world by reading the Bernal Díaz story up to the arrival of the Spaniards to Tenochtitlan.

And I must tell how in this town of Tlaxcala we found wooden houses furnished with gratins, full of Indian men and women imprisoned in them, being fed up until they were fat enough to be sacrificed and eaten. The prisons we broke open and destroyed and set free the prisoners who were in them, and these poor Indians did not dare to go to any direction, only to stay there with us and thus escape with their lives. From now on, in all the towns that we entered, the first thing our Captain ordered us was to break open these prisons and set free the prisoners.
These prisons are common throughout the land and when Cortés and all of us saw such great cruelty he was very angry with the Caciques of Tlaxcala, and they promised that from that time forth they would not eat and kill any more Indians in that way. I said of what benefit were all those promises, for as soon as we turned our heads they would commit the same cruelties. And let us leave it like that and tell how we were ordered to go to Mexico.

The indigenistas are dishonest people. In the book Toltecayotl Miguel León Portilla accepts that indigenous families usually abuse contemporary Indian women. But in that book León Portilla blames, incredibly, the Conquest for the current abuses by the male Indian to the female Indian. He then writes that “the situation of the pre-Hispanic Nahua woman highly differed from his condition today,” and to support his claim a few pages later he quotes a passage from those Nahua homiletics that León Portilla is so fond: “The little girl: little creature, little lovebird, oh so little, so tender, so well fed…” But in the same Toltecayotl chapter León Portilla also published an illustration of the Codex Telleriano-Remensis of a Mexica housewife that looks anything but happy. In absolute contrast to León Portilla, the Anonymous Conqueror wrote that there were no people in the world who had women in less esteem than the Mesoamericans. And in his most recent book, The Origins of War in Child Abuse, deMause wrote: “Aztec females were treated even worse than Islamic females.” It is indeed preposterous that the Spanish soldiers of the sixteenth century manifested better empathy for the victims of that culture than the scholars of today. But to understand the mestizo León Portilla it is pertinent to note that in Apologética Historia, written at the middle of the sixteenth century, Las Casas praised the Indian reprimands of parents to their children by calling them “sane, prudent and rational.” Las Casas even located such poisonous pedagogy above the teachings of Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras and even Aristotle.
The most recent treatise about the encounter between the Spanish and Mexican empires is Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés and the Fall of Old Mexico by Hugh Thomas. It catches the attention that, as a typical bienpensant, in the preface’s first paragraph Thomas candidly talks about the members of the two cultures without realizing that they belong to very distinct psychoclasses. On the next page Thomas writes about “compassion” as one of the virtues of the Mexica in spite of the fact that on the next line he sates that even the babies in arms were made to cry with brutality before sacrificing them! As to the treatment of women Thomas writes, dishonestly, that their position was at lest as comparable to the female Europeans of that age, although we perfectly know that European women were not deceived to be sacrificed, decapitated and skinned punctually according to rituals of the Aztec calendar. And the women who would not be sacrificed were not allowed to wear sandals, unlike their husbands. In the codexes the Indian females appear generally on their knees while the males are on sitting facilities (This reminds me that when visiting Chiapas in his youth, it shocked my father that Indian women wore obscure clothing: their humblest figures could not contrast more with the very colorful garments of the male Indians.) And we must remember the Indian costume of selling, and even giving as presents, their daughters. The same Malinali, later called equivocally Marina or “La Malinche,” Cortés’ right hand, had been sold by her mother to some traders from Xicallanco, who in turn had sold her to some Mayas who sold her to some Chontales, who offered her as a present to Cortés. Thomas even takes as historical the words of the chronicler in regard to Xicoténcatl II’s delegation when, after Xicoténcatl’s people suffered crushing defeats, he went into the Spanish camp with words that portray the treatment of the Indian woman by their own: “And if you want sacrifices, take these four women that you may sacrifice, and you can eat their flesh and their hearts. Since we don’t know how you do it we have not sacrificed them before you.” The study of Salvador de Madariaga about the conquest, published under the title Hernán Cortés (Macmillan, NY, 1941), precedes half a century Thomas’ study. Without the ominous clouds of cultural relativism that cover the skies of our times, in Madariaga’s study it is valid to advance value judgments.
Fortunately, not all of our contemporaries live under a clouded sky. In 2003 El País Semanal published a translation of an article by Matthias Schulz that described as “demonic” and “brutal” the Mesoamerican practice of human sacrifice. Schulz also called the Mexicas “bloodthirsty.” The politically-correct Mexican indigenistas rendered their garments. In July of that year the farthest leftist of the Mexican newspapers, La Jornada, jointly published a response. Eduardo Matos-Moctezuma blurted out that “mentalities such as Schulz’s are the ones who lend themselves, because of their closed mind, to slaughtering.” But Matos-Moctezuma did not deny the historicity of the Indians slaughtering their own folks. Professor María Alba Pastor, also quoted in La Jornada, offered an absolutely psychotic and dishonest explanation for the sacrifices: “Perhaps they were a reaction to the Conquest.” For Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Talking about cannibalism, Yólotl González, author of a book on Mesoamerican sacrifices, was not left behind: “Thus they gave a practical use to the dead bodies.” Take note that González does not deny the historicity of cannibalism. Her nonsense consists in her interpretation. The historian Guillermo Tovar manifested that Schulz’s text was “a Taliban Occidentalism, deprecating and oblivious of other traditions.” Mónica Villar, the director of Arqueología Mexicana, criticized what she called “disinformation” referring to Schulz’s statement that “no peoples had practiced human sacrifices in such dimensions.” Nevertheless, when the next issue of Arqueología Mexicana came out, the journal’s scholars did not refute Schulz. León Portilla responded with his favorite argument: that the Christianity that the Spaniards brought also had as its basis the sacrifice of a son, Jesus Christ. The veteran indigenista ignored the fact that precisely such theology represented a deflection from the filicide drive to a symbolic sublimation of it; and that the Roman Christian emperors and the Church’s fathers fought to banish the late forms of infanticide in the Early Middle Ages with the same zeal that conservatives fight abortion today. DeMause has profusely written on this transition and it is unnecessary to elaborate his ideas here. This is something so obvious that, in contrast to the sophisticated indigenistas, any child could understand: in Christendom parents did not sacrifice and cannibalize their children, and León Portilla’s argument is gross sophistry.
While Jacques Soustelle’s panegyric of the ancient Mexicans is stunning from the lyrical viewpoint, a closer reading of Daily Life of the Aztecs reveals its trappings. Soustelle wants us to believe that the lowest social strata of the Mexica civilization was represented by the slave, who according to him was highly more privileged than the European slave. The fallacy of his presentation consists in the fact that the Mexica slave could be sold and sacrificed. In the Tlatelolco market, the largest market of the Americas, slaves were sold tied by the neck to big sticks (as in the film Apocalypto). Moreover: the slave was not actually at the bottom of the social strata. Down there were the captives who, whether fatten for consumption or not, awaited their turn on the sacrificial stone.
But moralists like Schulz are not alone. In his post-scriptum to The Labyrinth of Solitude Octavio Paz wrote these words that I translate now:

Like those torture wheels that appear in Sade’s novels, the Aztec year was a circle of eighteenth months soaked wet with blood; eighteenth ways to die by being killed by arrows or by immersion in water or by cutting the throat or by flaying […]. On which religious and social aberration could a city of the beauty of Mexico-Tenochtitlan be the theater of water, stone and sky for a hallucinating funeral ballet? And for which obfuscation of the spirit nobody among us—I don’t have in mind the outworn nationalists but the scholars, the historians, the artists and the poets—want to see and accept that the Aztec World is one of the aberrations in history?

Bernal talks even more directly than Paz, more rosy-cheeked I would dare to say. The sacrifices he simply labels as “wicked things,” “great cruelties,” and the self-harming, “clumsiness.” The original Spanish prose is delicious when Bernal writes, for example, that Mesoamericans “had the habit of sacrificing their foreheads and the ears, tongues and lips, breasts and arms and their fleshy parts, and the legs and even their natural parts,” the genitals. Conversely, when Hugh Thomas mentions the cannibalism he does it cautiously, as if he does not want to cause any offence. Yet, the erudite and refined Sahagún, considered by León Portilla the first ethnologist of history, concurs with the soldier, as we saw with his exclamation (there are other exclamations of this sort in his encyclopedic work).
 
The feathered serpent
If the pre-Hispanic world was an aberration, as Paz says, that does not demerit their findings in mathematics and astronomy.
Although Quetzalcoatl harmed his leg and sprinkled blood out of his penis, he was the most humanitarian of the gods in the pre-Columbian pantheon. He never offered human blood to the gods. According to the legend, Tezcatlipoca counteracted Quetzalcoatl’s influence and regained social control by means of the dark side of the force, thus reestablishing the sacrifices in the great Toltec city. Quetzalcoatl fled away toward the East, from which the ulterior legend emerged that he would return from the Orient.
In 1978 I went once more to live some months to the house of my grandmother [this is related to my first book]: a very numinous and even happy stage that I would like to recount in another place. I became wrapped in Jung’s Man and his Symbols and some nights I walked to the park called Parque Hundido, which contains exact replicas of pre-Hispanic statuary. One night, alone and immersed in my thoughts as always during my adolescence, the pair of enormous replicas of feathered serpents at the park’s entrance caught my attention. It stroke me as an extraordinary intuition or divination from the collective unconscious, the fact that long before paleontology pre-Hispanics could have bequeathed us the perfect symbol of the missing link between the reptile and the bird. The two great feathered serpents of stone that I contemplated that fresh night in the park, way taller than me, were the same symbol of the caduceus: two serpents that long for their wings. Quetzal is feather in Nahua, and cóatl serpent, feathered serpent: symbol par excellence of transcendence. However hard I struggled those days to transcend myself it was impossible to arrive to my present psychogenic state, even though the unconscious drive was formidable.
That night I did not understand how come the symbol of quetzal-cóatl could be so clairvoyant, so accurate to describe human emergency in such an oneiric and perceptive way. Now, exactly thirty years later, I ask myself: Hadn’t the Europeans existed how long would have taken these people to give up their practices and pass on to a later form of infanticide (say, the exposure in Rome)?

The legend of Quetzalcoatl, that in its latest incarnation appears as a god of white skin, makes me think that the very first feathers for a psychogenic leap were already present in the New World before the arrival of the white man.
 
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The objective of the book is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering. If life allows, next time I will reproduce another chapter. Those interested in obtaining a copy of Day of Wrath may visit: this artcle.

Categories
Aztecs Child abuse Day of Wrath (book) Human sacrifice Psychohistory

Day of Wrath, 11

An encounter of psychoclasses

Julian Jaynes wrote:

I have endeavored in these two chapters to examine the record of a huge time span to reveal the plausibility that man and his early civilizations had a profoundly different mentality from our own, that in fact men an women were not conscious as we are, were not responsible for their actions, and therefore cannot be given credit or blame for anything that was done over these vast millennia of time.

In his book Jaynes complains that the translators of the texts of the Ancient World color their translations with abstract words absolutely incompressible for the bicameral mentality of other times. Personally, once I realized that psychoclasses exist, the Hollywood movies that retroproject our modern psyche onto epic adventures of the historical past look rather silly, as if man had always been the same.
The indigenistas talk wonders of the Mexica herbalist medicine in spite of the fact that it was impregnated with paleologic thinking. Most of the cures were oriented to expel the evil spirits. If the ailment was “the cold disease,” offerings were performed on the particular mount that aroused special devotion. The diagnosis did not rely on empirical observation, but on divination; and if a god had sent the disease offerings to that deity had to be performed. As Silvano Arieti wrote, his schizophrenic patients interpreted everything that occurred as wished by external agents. Far more disturbing was the propensity of Mesoamericans to perform trepanations to let the evil spirits go. The record of this practice on trepanated skulls is an Indian skull with five large holes.
Most interesting is the first act coming from a frightened Moctezuma when learning about the arriving of strangers: he dispatched a delegation offering fresh human flesh to them. When the Spaniards still were in the Veracruz shore, Moctezuma’s representatives visited Cortés; killed the captives they had brought with them, and began to prepare their bodies for a cannibal feast. The Spanish did not believe what they had before their eyes. “When they saw it, it made them feel sick, they spit out, they rubbed their eyes,” wrote Bernal Díaz. It is true that in a disobedient plot Cortés ordered to cut the feet’s fingers of the pilot Gonzalo de Umbría. The Spanish captain was capable of attacking a village of unarmed Tlaxcallans and commiting a massacre, as well as amputating the right hands of the Indian spies. He ordered the killing of defenseless men, women and children during the siege of Tenochtitlan, “one of the most shameful scenes that the life of that man registers,” wrote his biographer Salvador de Madariaga. It is also true that he ordered that Qualpopoca and his sons be burned alive for having killed a rearguard of Spaniards. He even ordered the hanging of two of his own, and in another plot where he feared for his life he hanged Cuauhtémoc himself. But Cortés did not indulge himself in self-harming practices. Nor did he sacrifice children. Compared to the Amerindians, the rustic soldiers belonged to a completely new dimension of the evolution of the human psyche, as distinct from the infanticidal psychoclass as a butterfly from the worm.
Those who, through history and prehistory, have belonged to the infanticidal psychoclass invariably get schizophrenized: be Indians, Caucasians, Africans or Orientals. A noise coming from Nature or an animal that passes on the way is interpreted as an omen. For these people there is no individuation, free will in the broadest sense, and much less cognition or Aristotelian thought process. In the case of the Mexicas, destiny was determined by the birth date and escaped the will of the individual. The psychic climate was charged of pessimism and threatened with annihilation. The Amerindians protected themselves by making offerings to their demonic gods. When Mesoamericans felt threatened by something they punctually offered blood and hearts as an attempt to placate what, in fact, were their inner demons.
In Cempoala, writes Bernal Díaz, frightened by the bearded teules (a corrupted word from teteuh, gods) that came from the East, “each day they sacrificed in front of us three or four or five Indians.” When Cortés begins his resolute advance to the great Mexican capital Moctezuma fell seized with panic. “And they sacrificed each day two boys so that [the gods] answered what to do with us.” When they arrived to Cholula “we knew that [Moctezuma] was shut away with his devotions and sacrifices for two days, together with ten principal papas [high priests].” A little after that page there appears something unbelievable in Bernal’s story. The response of the high priests was that the emperor should “let us in.”
Take note that, analogously to the magical thinking of pre-Hispanic medicine, the emperor or Huey Tlatoani did not think in Aristotelian logic. It is true that, just as Ahuítzotl, before becoming monarch Moctezuma had been high priest. But he also had been a successful general. Despite of it, in the crucial year of his reign he did not ask advice from his military chiefs but from his priests, and what is worse: he let the Spanish enter knowing that they had just perpetrated the massacre of Cholula; the city being plundered by the Spanish allies, the Tlaxcallans, and the temple of Huitzilopochtli burnt for two days, in addition that Cortés ordered the destruction of all effigies of worship. Tenochtitlan was not Cholula. Located as the only lacustrine city of the continent, it was well protected. The Mexicas could easily have lifted the bridges that led to the empire’s capital. Instead, they let enter not a mere Cortés delegation, but the captain along with all of his army (including the horses, never seen before)!
If this is not suicidal magical thinking coming from bicameral minds, what is it? The conquest of America is the chapter of history that catches the attention as no other conquest of the history of mankind. Although Carthage suffered a similar fate of Tenochtitlan, the Romans had to fight through three very costly Punic wars throughout 120 years before razing the city. It took Cortés a tiny fraction of that time to do the feat: he initiated his campaign in 1519 and by 1521 he had taken the double city of Tlatelolco-Tenochtitlan. Jaynes’ observation quoted above about Pizarro, “How could an empire whose armies had triumphed over the civilizations of half a continent be captured by a small band of 150 Spaniards in the early evening of November 16, 1532?” may be said about Cortés too.
“Never did a captain with such a small army perform such a feat, nor achieved so many victories or hold a grip of such a great empire,” commented the chronicler Francisco López de Gómara. If there is something apparent in Bernal’s story it is that the captain wanted to bring to an end the practice of sacrifice in each town he passed through in route to Tenochtitlan. A semi-Indian friend of mine who has read the chroniclers commented that the historicity of their stories is way above the excuse that, mantra-like, we have heard a thousand times from other Mexicans: “Winners write history.” What actually happened is that the Tlaxcallans hated the Mexicas, who through a century had been raiding them to obtain captives for the sacrifice. Had the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan been popular in the so-called Aztec Empire the Spanish would have been repelled in Mexico. A pitiful sensation produces in the reader an illustration of the book by Diego Durán with humble Indians carrying, on their bended backs, the backpacks of the newcomers in their advance to Tenochtitlan while a Spaniard appears comfortably on his horse. The same can be said of another illustration of Indians building brigantines that would be decisively used in the battle of the Lake Texcoco. Obviously, the conquest of Mexico was also a civil war.
As implied above, my father feels an excessive admiration for the Indian world. On several occasions he has argued that the fact that the poetry of Nezahualcóyotl, the most refined representative of the Nahua culture, is so humane that it refutes the vision of the culture as barbaric. But poetry is no reliable standard. The basic, fundamental principle in psychohistory has childrearing as the relevant factor, and from this point of view even the refined monarch of Texcoco was a barbarian.
In a courtier intrigue Nezahualcóyotl consented using garrote to execute his favorite son, the prince Tetzauhpilzintli. The Nahua characters were seized with fratricide fits. Moctezuma I (not the one who received Cortés) ordered the killing of his brother and something similar did Nezahualcóyotl’s heir, Nezahualpilli: who also used capital punishment with his first born son and heir. Soustelle says that this family tragedy was one of the causes of the fall of the Mexican empire since the blood brothers that rose to the throne flipped to the Spanish side. But Soustelle’s blindness about what he has in front of his nose is amazing. Like León Portilla, for Soustelle “there is no doubt that the Mexicans loved their children very much.” But that is not love. Nezahualcóyotl’s mourning after letting his son be killed reminds me the “Pietà” of my first book, my mother, who suffered for seeing me in wretched conditions when she did nothing but escalate her abusive behavior against me. More disturbing is that some upper-class Mexicas delivered their little children to the Tláloc priests to be sacrificed. This piece of data demonstrates that motivation was more than mere economics, as rich people are not desperate for money.

The above image of the chronicler Diego Durán, which shows the tláloques, is in the Library of Madrid. Note the child in the water with the chest opened.
From a considerable distance the Spanish soldiers saw how their companions were sacrificed at the top of the pyramid of Tenochtitlan, whose heads would later be found impaled in a tzompantli together with the decapitated heads of the captured horses. When I mentioned for the first time the tzompantlis I omitted to say that they were structures on parallel crossbeams. Through holes on the temples, the stakes supported the enormous files of decapitated human heads, one after another. (Only in Tenochtitlan there were seven tzompantlis; the Spaniards had seen a tzompantli in Cempoala, not very far from the Veracruz shore, and some time after in their journey another one in Zautla, which also contained femurs and other parts of human bodies.) Bernal Díaz writes: “In that state of affairs, very frightened and wounded, we did not know about Cortés or Sandoval, nor of their armies, if they had been killed and broken down [chopped into pieces], as the Mexicans told us when they threw into our camp the five heads they grasped by the hair and beards.” The demoralized soldiers wanted to flee to Cuba after the battle of La Noche Triste, when most of the Spaniards died: a great defeat for the Spanish arms on Mexican soil.
I the middle of a skirmish the Indians captured Cortés himself, but they did not kill him. When taking him over to be sacrificed their men rescued him. From the military viewpoint, this magical thinking of not killing the fallen captain but attempting to take him to the pyramid was a gross blunder: Cortés would be the man who harangued the Spanish not to flee to Cuba after the catastrophic Noche Triste. Thereafter, with the Tlaxcallan support, the war turned over and the Mexica capital was lost. Cuauhtémoc, the last Huey Tlatoani rejected the peace proposals that, day after day, Cortés offered the Mexicas. (Cuauhtémoc had been the same noble who led the signal to stone Moctezuma after the massacre ordered by Pedro de Alvarado, inspired by the massacre of Cholula ordered by Cortés.)
It is not my intention to vituperate the Mexicans of my childhood. As I revealed in my previous book, the memories of Mexico City’s beautiful neighborhoods where I lived in the 1960s, before the city disintegrated, still feed my deepest nostalgias. Nor is it my intention to vituperate the ancient Mexicans. As I have also said, the psychoclass of the Mexicas was far more evolved than the Chichimeca: the Nomads from the north who still ate raw meat because they could not use fire; could not build houses, and lived in the caves. The Amerindian hunter-gatherers were in a more dissociated state of mind than the inhabitants of the big cities, like the refined Nahuas. And taking into account the inconceivable sadism of the Mayas with the prisoners, undistinguishable from that of the cruelest serial killers of today I have not the slightest doubt that, even though the pictographic form of Mexica writing before the syllabic Mayan represents a technical regression, the psychoclass of the ancient Mexicans marks a psychogenic advance compared to their southern neighbors.
Gotten to this point I must confess that it is painful to read almost anything related to Moctezuma. And it is painful in spite of the fact that Bernal Díaz says that the Huey Tlatoani himself shared the cannibalism of his age. “I heard them say that they used to cook for him the flesh of small boys,” and on the same page it can be read that “our captain reprimanded him the sacrifice and the eating of human flesh, and Moctezuma ordered that that delicatessen be not cooked for him anymore.” Despite of his culinary habits, the reading of the Bernaldine pages is painful because we can see a very human Moctezuma. Both Bernal Díaz and Cortés were fond of Moctezuma; and his candid, fearful and superstitious personality moves the reader to sympathize with him too. It is very difficult not to feel a particular affection for Moctezuma. It is true that before Cortés and the Spanish the Huey Tlatoani behaved like a güey (a Mexicanism that when I was a boy meant stupid). Today’s Mexicans are not as güeyes as the Mexicas. But even after almost five hundred years it is a disturbing experience to discover how the historical Moctezuma behaved.
Before the Spanish expedition reached Tenochtitlan, the most powerful man of the empire had clung to his papas of long, tangled and gluey hair with blood scabs. We can imagine the mental state of those who, time after time, stuck their hand in living bodies digging through the vital organ. They had ash-colored faces because they too had to bleed themselves once a day. When Moctezuma fell seized with panic as the alien expedition was in route to the empire’s capital, besides the priests he also consulted fortune-tellers and sorcerers. Once the Spaniards arrived it is disturbing to learn how these men, who represented a more integrated psychoclass, took over the empire from Moctezuma: like an adult snatching the ice cream from a little boy, who had been a magnificent host for Cortés and his enormous military escort.
The common people were as psychologically dissociated as their governor. During the long period of time that goes from the Moctezuma kidnapping by Cortés to the massacre perpetrated by Alvarado, with the exception of Cacama and a few nobles the Mexicans did not rebel against the invasion. They did not even react when Cortés ordered that Qualpopoca, his sons and fifteen chiefs be burned alive at the stake, humiliating the emperor who, with chains, had to witness the execution in the plaza of the Great Pyramid. Moctezuma was even taught to learn, in Latin, prayers like Our Father and the Hail Mary. Cortés left temporarily Tenochtitlan to stop Pánfilo Narváez in Cempoala. Narváez arrived from Cuba with a great army; he wanted to place Cortés under arrest and liberate Moctezuma. Only the massacre of Mexico where the blond Alvarado (nicknamed Tonatiuh, the sun) slaughtered the flower of the Mexican aristocracy during the “Aztec Easter” made the Mexicas wake up. Their long lethargy reminds me an eighteenth-century observation by a Jesuit that Amerindians were grownup children, “bambini with beards.”
Unlike the Peruvians, who constantly clean the great statue of Pizarro—who behaved worse with Atahualpa than Cortés with Moctezuma—, in half a century of living in the Mexican capital I have not seen a single statue of Cortés, his Indian wife, or Moctezuma. So deep did the trauma of the conquest impregnate the Mexicans’ psyche that its tail can be felt half a millennium later. It is true that, after the Alvarado massacre, what had been a sort of picaresque conquering story turned into an apparent infamy, although Salvador de Madariaga qualifies the Nahua vision of the conquest by pointing out that Alvarado “was right in thinking that there existed a conspiracy” from the Mexica to attack the Spaniards after the holyday. On the other hand, through a sense of black humor even a dark-skinned Mexican has dared to see the cruelties committed by his ancestors. In An Autobiography the Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco wrote:

According to them [the indigenistas] the Conquest ought not to have taken place as it did. Instead of sending cruel and ambitious captains, Spain should have sent a great delegation of ethnologists, anthropologists, archeologists, civil engineers […]. Very tactfully it might have been suggested to great Moctezuma that he should establish democracy for the lower orders, while preserving the privileges of aristocracy, thus pleasing everyone. In this way the three abhorrent centuries of Colonial Period could have been side-stepped, and the Great Teocalli would still be standing, though thoroughly disinfected to keep the blood of sacrifices from going bad, and to enable us to turn it into blood pudding—in a factory standing where, for want of it, the National Pawnshop inadequately serves.

History did not occur that way. The soldiers razed Tenochtitlan and a clergy coming out directly from the Counter-Reformation and the Reconquista took care of the statues and the codexes. A melancholic Mexica poem says: “Our lifestyle, our city, is lost and dead.” The infamous pyramid that enclosed the remains of the boy whose photo I included way above was blown up with 500 barrels of powder. Conversely, in the sarcastic scenario by Orozco, in the world’s most beautiful city the tourists would utter wonders when escalating the Teocalli to see the great Uichilobos without any knowledge of the sacrificed child and his remains, still enclosed under the rock, dozens of meters below their feet.
After the fall of Tenochtitlan Bernal Díaz tells us that “land, lagoon and bargekennings were full of dead bodies, and it stank so much that there was no man who could endure it.” In contrast to the Manichaeism of contemporary Mexicans, whether hispanophiles or indigenistas, Martin Brown drew some irreverent cartoons published in Terry Deary’s pamphlet The Angry Aztecs. One of them illustrates the stone blocks of the recently destroyed city: colored stones of the temples that would be used for the construction of the Christian buildings. In Brown’s cartoon there is a dialogue between two pubescent Nahuas, a boy and a girl sitting in the great city on ruins:
Boy: The Aztecs killed my mum.
Girl: The Spanish killed mine.
Boy: I wonder who is deader?
But Brown omitted the crux: Moctezuma and his folk ate the kids of that age, something that the Spaniards never did. What destroys the mind to the point of making an entire continent inhabited by easy-to-conquer güeyes is to carry the burden, in the innermost corner of the soul, that our beloved totatzin sacrificed one of our siblings; or that this happened in the families of friends and acquaintances and that nobody condemned it. Using the language of my previous book, since the sacrifices were part of the social tissue nobody counted with an “enlightened witness,” let alone a “helping witness” when the poisonous pedagogy was being inculcated. Let us remember the ethnologic study of the twentieth century about the New Guinea tribes. The children avoided their parents when they ate one of their little siblings. The rates of child suicide among such peoples, a more disturbed society than the Mexica, were very high.
The Spanish destruction may be compared in some way to the destruction by king Josiah in 641 B.C. according to II Chronicles 34, about which Jaynes comments that had it not occurred more archaeological evidence of the ancient Hebrews’ speaking idols could have been found. Though objectionable for the standards of our time, such measures of cultural extermination were necessary during the attempts of the superior psychoclass to eliminate the sacrifices: be them sacrifices of children to Baal or to Tláloc.
 
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The objective of the book is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering.
If life allows, next time I will reproduce another chapter. Those interested in obtaining a copy of Day of Wrath may visit: this artcle.

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

September 2016 interview


This original canvas signed by Antonio Zucchi (1726-1795) is a landscape in Flemish style, now very near from the desk where I work for this blog.
My friend Jake F. interviewed me last year. These are his words: “The below text is of a scripted interview I was to conduct with C.T. of The West’s Darkest Hour. Due to unforeseen circumstances we could not record. However, Cesar graciously offered to allow this interview to be published on The Right Stuff”.
 
Jake: Hello, and welcome to Manifest Destiny! This is Jake and I’ll be your host today. I have the privilege of bringing you a rare interview with C.T. of The West’s Darkest Hour. What Cesar brings to the table is rare combination of principled fearsomeness and refined sensibility. This interview will serve as an exposition and clarification of his thought for an unfamiliar audience. Questions and answers were composed in advance for purposes of clarity. As always, thank you for listening and enjoy.
Cesar, please give us a brief overview of your background and journey to your present ideological positions. Which books, authors, films, and music inspired you?
Cesar: Thanks for having me here, Jake. I’ll answer straight to the point.
Both of my parents were artists but since my middle teens they became abusive as hell, and I was the target of this abusive madness, which of course destroyed my young life. I explain the tragedy in two books, Hojas Susurrantes and the one I’ve just finished, Exterminio. Both comprise almost half a million words and soon I’ll start the third of the trilogy. As a matter of fact, my sister died this year. In my latest book I claim that her death was probably related to the trauma we endured in our teens.
With my books, I believe, I’m starting a new literary genre. If I manage to finish the third one I will be the first writer in history who analyzes his extremely abusive family in a million-word trilogy.
As to which books and films inspired me, I’d say that 2001: A Space Odyssey exerted a major influence since I watched it in 1968. I was 10 years old then. It was before the abuse at home. After my family became so destructive, Childhood’s End by Arthur Clarke made a huge impact in my life. Still later, the books of Alice Miller helped me to understand my evil family.
With regard to music, since I was a small child I listened to Mussorgski and Stravinsky. Mussorgski’s Dawn over the Moscow River was my first love. Later I discovered Beethoven.
Jake: You seem to be heavily influenced by psychohistory. Could you briefly define it for our audience? What insights have you gleaned from it? What faults have you found with it?
Cesar: This is my interpretation of psychohistory: Most adult children of extremely abusive parents become mad. Really mad I mean: like the magical thinking of the tribes since prehistoric times. And there are cultures that are far more abusive than others.
Psychohistory is a term used by the American Lloyd deMause to research child abuse through recorded history. The meta-perspective provided by psychohistory helped me to contextualize what happened in my family. The problem with deMause is that he’s a rabid liberal, some would even argue that he’s a Jew, like Alice Miller. In the only chapter of my trilogy that has been translated to English I try to Aryanize psychohistory away from deMause’s crazy liberalism.
Jake: You make incisive criticisms of psychiatry as a pseudoscientific field which often fails to draw upon or selectively draws upon neurological research. How specifically is it wounding our people? How deeply do such wounds go?
Cesar: Curiously, Kevin MacDonald used to teach child psycho-pathology in the university before his recent retirement. I don’t know if MacDonald knows that psychiatry is an “iatrogenic” profession, which means that psychiatric drugs often cause a much more serious mental condition for the client than the original distress or disorder.
For instance, there are international studies that show that people in third world countries, with few resources to purchase so-called anti-psychotics, fare much better for those diagnosed with schizophrenia. In other words, so-called anti-psychotics are iatrogenic: they only worsen the original disorder. My blog contains scholarly references to support this claim, but it is something you won’t ever hear in the media, not even in the outlets of white nationalism.
One of the things that I find exasperating while trying to communicate with white nationalists is that, in addition to the pseudoscientific racial and gender studies, there are other pseudosciences. Psychiatry is one of them. Nationalists are completely clueless of the fact that this pseudo-medical profession has as much scientific basis as the study of UFOs.
Let me expand a bit on this.
Those plugged in the Matrix believe that schizophrenia is the product of a chemical imbalance. Unplugged dissidents know that mental disorders are not a biomedical condition. A computer analogy is helpful here. Imagine a technician who doesn’t believe in the existence of computer viruses in the software. This guy always tries to fix computers by messing with the hardware. That’s exactly what psychiatrists do: they are in denial of the existence of the “software” in the human mind, so to speak. So they treat every mental disorder as a brain disorder. For psychiatrists, biology is destiny. Trauma does not exist, or is irrelevant. Only the genes matter.
But psychiatry cannot demonstrate any biological marker, genetic, chemical imbalance or otherwise, in any of the major psychiatric disorders. That’s why neurology, which is real science, is separated in the universities from psychiatry, which is not a science but a big, big business.
Also, all pseudosciences present their central concepts as unfalsifiable hypotheses, that is, hypotheses that cannot be refuted through the scientific method. What most people ignore is that psychiatry also presents its main concept, mental illness, as an unfalsifiable hypothesis. This is explained in detail in one of my scholarly articles.
Jake: You’ve written extensively on child abuse and its racial implications. Chiefly, that non-Whites are much more likely to abuse their offspring and much more likely to do it in horrific ways. Besides obvious things (like removing Judeo-liberal media or moving to a Whiter area) what advice would you have for racially conscious White parents?
Cesar: If you have in mind abusive parents, you cannot educate them. They are simply unconscious of their abuse. In my latest book for example I have published my mother’s entire diary. It is shocking to see that throughout her diary, mostly about the 1970s, she had no clue whatsoever that she was driving her children mad.
In an ethnostate it would be possible that the child finds a window of escape from abusive families through the Hitler Youth. But even in an Aryan ethnostate would-be parents should be taught not to abuse their kids. Together with the Hitler Youth, education for young couples that are about to marry is the only way that occurs to me that children won’t be abused in the future.
Jake: In the past, you have discussed a collapse scenario as presenting the best or only chance Whites will have to exercise the Fourteen Words freely. What if the collapse never comes? What do you think about the collapse as a mythical trope for “fringe” political movements or causes?
Cesar: I have referred to psychiatry as a pseudoscience that the average white nationalist is unaware of. But there are other pseudosciences taught at the academia that nationalists also ignore. Another example is Keynesian economics, that presently influences not only the academia but the Federal Reserve and the banking system.
You cannot have a thriving economy by means of the current system of huge debt and huge spending. The United States has a debt of almost 20 trillion and if the Fed starts Quantitative Easing 4 it will dwarf the previous QEs combined. QE, of course, is newspeak for inflation: expanding the currency supply, the paper dollars. Sooner or later the dollar will hyperinflate because of this astronomic expansion of the currency supply.
Those economists who reject the crazy paradigm that rules the financial world predict that the crash will happen in this decade. And this means something like the depression of 1929. But unlike 1929 there are millions of Negroes out there, especially in the big cities. After the financial accident they’ll chimp out, and contribute beautifully to the collapse of the System. By the way, have you seen the Jew-movie Imperium?
There is a movie character, the one that “Harry Potter” betrayed, hehe.☺ Well, with his group this character tries to produce what he calls “The Event”, which supposedly would awaken whites, a big act of terrorism.
In real life this is not necessary. The Event is coming nevertheless. And not from racists like us, but from the blunders of the Fed and the international monetary policies.
If by December 31 of 2020 the crash has not happened I will recognize I was wrong. But what if I am right? Because if I am right you should start obtaining coins of silver, and if you can afford it, coins of gold. Even the commercials of Fox News are advertizing this.
Jake: Nordicism is a particularly loaded term. Who exactly are the Nordic peoples? Are they a distinct sub race located only in certain White countries? Do they form the upper crust in every White society? Or are they something else entirely?
Cesar: In my opinion white nationalism or Altright, however you want to call it, is fake. The real thing is National Socialism. Unlike the Nazis people in the Altright are like the republicans: they have granted amnesty to millions of non-whites from Mediterranean Europe. The Germans of the 1930s knew better: the standard for whiteness is the Nordic type.
A pundit from Barcelona in Spain has developed a new racial classification that clarifies this matter. He basically says that the European race is divided in three primordial races: the European Nordid White (“White Nordid”), the Nordid Central Asian Redhead (“Red Nordid”), and the Near Eastern Armenid. The white race is actually a mixture of two or more races.
So we cannot say, “This person is a pure white” but “This person has a mixture of A, B and C races in such proportions.” With terms like Aryan we designate a mixture between White Nordid and Red Nordid and its mild crossing with non-white Armenids or Mongolids—usually people of Germanic and Slavic origin.
While the ideal white is a White Nordid with a Red Nordid, we cannot say that those whites who have some Armenid or Mongolid genes are non-whites. However, we could say they are non-whites if they contain a few drops of Congid blood, that is, Negro genes; or substantial Armenid or Mongolid blood.
In the new racial classification the phenotype is more important than genetic studies. Therefore, based on phenotype we can say that many of us Meds are not properly white. Some of them are, yes. I’ve seen girls as beautiful and Aryan in Spain as in the Nordish countries. But not in the proportion I’ve seen such women even in Texas. Many Meds are mudbloods, something that the Germans knew very well. So well in fact that inter-marriage between the mudbloods and the Nazis was discouraged.
Since this is a scientific subject, I recommend those who want to understand nordicism to study carefully the most scholarly article in my blog. It’s under the title Gens alba conservanda est, which is Latin for “the white race must be preserved”. Alas, most white nationalists are anti-nordicists. They are still under the grip of the egalitarian ideology that has destroyed the West. Most of them sincerely believe that all whites are created equal.
I would recommend they read William Pierce’s only non-fiction book, Who We Are, to grasp my point. Pierce was not a white nationalist. Like the Nazis he was the real thing. The biggest surprise that the reader will find in his book is that the founding stock of the ancient Greeks and Romans was Nordish, real whites.
Jake: Much like Dr. William Pierce, you postulate a Witches’ Brew (essentially a convergence of catastrophic trends) theory of factors leading to the gradual and sometimes rapid extermination of our race. What ranks near the top that most of our people are missing? Conversely, what are we greatly overestimating?
Cesar: For those who accept the premises of Who We Are it is clear that the main enemy of whites are whites themselves, especially the civilizational decadence that comes from wealth-over-race policies.
I have lived in Mexico more than half a century. Latin-America is very similar to Mexico if you visit the countries to the south of Mexico. What the Spaniards and the Portuguese did in the Americas, mixing their blood since the 16th century, was the product of greed, of lust for gold. It was also the result of the universalist creed of the Catholic Church, which considered the Amerindian women as “souls” to be “saved”.
The Iberians that conquered the continent also brought the Inquisition, which persecuted crypto-Jews. But even in Judenfrei New Spain these two factors, economic greed and universalist Christianity, destroyed the gene pool of the Spanish.
White nationalists ignore the history down the south of the US because it breaks their little narrative. Their narrative is that Jewry is the main factor of white decline. The fact is that there are other major factors beside Jewry that nationalists are ignoring. Christianity is one of them as demonstrated in the history of Judenfrei Spain and New Spain.
Jake: On a related note, you’ve produced a volume of writing on different strains of Counter-Semitism. Could you go into more detail on this taxonomy of Counter-Semitism?
Cesar: The Jewish problem is one the most serious problems of the West. For centuries and even millennia Jews have been a hostile minority in the West. There’s no question about it. Just see how they lobbied for a century to open the gates of non-white immigration into the United States. Just see the role they played in the Holocaust on non-Jews committed by the Bolshevik Jews. Just see who controls the anti-white media and how the kikes have been trying to prevent that whites wake up.
The problem itself shouts for a final solution of some sort. This is an aspect I don’t differ much from white nationalists. We both try to find radical solutions to the problem. We agree on the medicine.
But we disagree on the diagnosis. For me it’s clear that the Aryan problem caused the Jewish problem, and not vice versa. Perhaps the best analogy would be to see the Aryan problem as an HIV virus, and the Jewish problem as an AIDS-related infection like pneumonia. Kill off the bacteria if you want. I won’t complain about Alex Linder’s solution. But if you don’t eliminate the virus, you may still have a Judenfrei society that commits racial suicide, as happened here in Latin America.
It is simply untrue, as Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer recently wrote, that “physically removing the Jews will solve every other problem”. No. Our ancestors removed the Jews from New Spain and just look at the mess that Mexico is today: those ancestors still committed ethnic suicide, and on a continental scale!
Jake: From your research, what are the strengths and weaknesses of Nietzsche’s thought in general and in to furthering the Fourteen Words?
Cesar: No Nazi tract that I know mentions Nietzsche, but Hitler sort of admired him. Before Nietzsche lost his mind in January of 1889 his concept on the “revaluation of all values” was very handy. I use it a lot in my anti-Christian trolling. I’ll talk about this later in the interview.
Jake: Blake asks: In your writing, you refer to temples and priests of the Fourteen Words. Please expand upon these concepts. What would be the vocation and training of such a priesthood?
Cesar: Here we must recall what my Spanish friend Manu Rodríguez told me: We need to create the Aryan community, an ecclesia, which by the way we never had. Ecclesia, you know, was the principal assembly of ancient Athens.
The Aryan ecclesias need to thrive in our towns and cities, Manu told me. Our “priests”, for lack of a better word, won’t be experts in theology but in history, anthropology and Indo-European cultures. A priest of the 14 words must teach the Western tradition to his young pupils.
Nowadays, without money to build temples like those in Greece and Rome, we can only organize barbecue gatherings like those of my favorite character in the movie Imperium, hehe.☺
Jake: Your upcoming work From St Francis to Himmler has piqued my interest. Based upon the title alone, it is reminiscent of William Gayley Simpson’s journey from being an itinerant Franciscan to a fanatical Aryan racialist. To what extent are you familiar with his work Which Way Western Man? What is it actually about if not your own voyage?
Cesar: I have not read Simpson’s journey but From St Francis to Himmler will be the third and last volume of my autobiographical trilogy.
Francis is the most beloved saint for many Catholics. When I was abused by my father, who admired St Francis, as a defense mechanism I developed a sort of piety inspired in this Italian saint. After the abuse, the doctrine of eternal damnation, that I internalized from my father, destroyed my image of a benign God. The spiritual odyssey from my adolescent piety, to Himmler’s exterminationism, will be the axis of my last book. It is exactly that: an odyssey; the story of a long, long night of my soul.
Jake: For you, White Nationalism was merely a stepping stone to a much sterner and more disciplined National Socialism. Many American White Nationalists enjoy National Socialist iconography and pageantry, as well. What is the line of demarcation between these two ideologies? Is White Nationalism even an ideology or could it more accurately be described as a sentiment? How can American Whites steeped in republican, individualist beliefs adapt to a more “collective” or duty-oriented belief system? What about National Socialism is non-essential or merely adapted to Germanic norms? Finally, which National Socialist texts are American White Nationalists missing or refusing to read?
Cesar: Instead of responding question by question let me say that the line of demarcation is what George Lincoln Rockwell did: he formed a fascist party. White nationalists don’t do anything of the sort! If Rockwell had not been assassinated, radicals like Dylann Roof would have found a warm home and a healthier way to channel their hatred.
Individualist Americans will radically change, and I mean radically, when the convergence of catastrophes is already under way: something that will happen in the second half of the century. I refer to the tectonic-plate, apocalyptic convergence between energy devolution and a political crisis in the West. That collision will create a real mountain.
If “Our race is our nation” then, theoretically National Socialism is doable among Anglo-Saxons, not only among Germanics. Rockwell saw this clearly and he was right.
The most important book to awake whites is the one that Tom Goodrich wrote: Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany. I believe that any honest white liberal who reads it will break, in his mind, the media narrative about the Second World War. Once you nuke the media narrative, I would recommend a Nazi textbook for young readers, Faith and Action by Helmut Stellrecht. It is available online.
Jake: Blake asks: Many White Nationalists advocate the creation of an ethno-state or ethno-states for White-Aryans to seek refuge in. They often fail to mention whether this goal is their highest aim or merely a tactical one. Assuming White-Aryans had the capability to do with the Earth as they wish, what should they do? You’ve been called quite a few names for suggesting that Earth should be made a Whites-only planet. How do you respond to this?
Cesar: I don’t remember the names I was called. Perhaps I missed those threads? In the book that I’ve just finished, Extermination, I explain why the human race is a failed species. Most of them deserve extermination, save the most beautiful Aryans with good heart for nature, the children and the animals.
Extermination is a subject that has only been partially explored in fiction, at the end of The Turner Diaries. It is time to speak out in the genre of non-fiction, as I just did with my latest book, which will be available in Spanish this month or the next one.
I had said that I was inaugurating a new literary genre. But I omitted to mention that, if completed, my trilogy goes well beyond such autobiographical genre into a philosophical system. From this point of view, exterminationism is more than an odd subject: it is what we may call the Significant A of the coming Overman. But let’s change the conversation to a more “normal” subject.
Jake: Rock music is controversial within racialist spheres. You take an uncompromising stance against it for a host of reasons. Two that come to mind are its negro roots and repetitive notes. But, rock has been so heavily appropriated by Whites that even negroes flee from it now. At what point does White ownership (in terms of content; we know Jews dominate the music industry) erase a genre’s origins? Is this even possible? Are there any healthy modern White music genres? Many would defend folk and electronic music as the latest resurgence of authentic White culture in music. Do you agree? Finally, which classical composers or performers would you suggest to a modern White wishing to expand his or her tastes?
Cesar: Folk music is OK but not what the Nazis called “degenerate music”. Even nationalists have been unable to recognize that such music is used by the System to degrade the spirit of whites, to control them. A passage from 1984, written before the birth of rock, was prophetic. The music in the totalitarian world, Orwell says: “had a savage, barking rhythm which could not exactly be called music, but resembled the beating of a drum… The proles had taken a fancy to it.” Of course, the people of the Altright would be degenerate proles from the Nazi point of view: they listen so-called Retro-wave music.
As to which classical composers, I’d recommend starting with Walt Disney’s 1959 movie Sleeping Beauty. Its soundtrack contains a masterful edition of the music of Tchaikovsky’s ballet. But the trick is not adding classical music to your repertoire. The trick is subtracting degenerate music from what you listen.
I have always compared degenerate music with degenerate sex. A guy just cannot have a healthy marriage with a lovely wife and children and, at the same time, indulging himself in escapades in gay bars. The degenerate side of both sexual lifestyles and music tastes must be completely cut off from our way of life.
Jake: On several occasions you’ve described the Sublimis Deus papal bull as the original sin committed in South America. Could you give us some background on this proclamation? Was it a logical extension of Christian doctrine or an aberration?
Cesar: It was an expansion of the Church’s universalism, where all races can enter the church. “Catholic” in fact means universal. But the original sin was not the Pope’s bull. The original sin of the Spanish and the Portuguese was, as I said, the lust for gold and silver in Mexico and Peru. The Catholic bull that allowed Iberian whites to marry the brown natives was a very serious, mortal sin; but not the original one.
Jake: Lately, the phrase “Pathological Altruism” has been used to describe a weakness of the White-Aryan psyche. Is this valid and sufficient? Do you agree with Dr. Sunic and Pierre Krebs that a universal Christian memeplex is the source of our vulnerability, instead?
Cesar: I don’t know much of Krebs but Sunic is quite smart. He does not only blame Christianity as a more elemental factor of white decline than Jewry; he actually says that capitalism is the main factor.
I believe he’s right. And I must add that Americans love Mammon too much to purge the Jews! Once more, the Aryan problem has created the Jewish problem. Pro-whites must read Who We Are to contextualize historically the claim that wealth-over-race policies is suicidal, even when no Jews are present. March of the Titans by Arthur Kemp also reaches the same conclusion.
Jake: Blake asks: How do we as a race combat our predisposition to choose wealth over a sound society? Alain de Benoist notes that critics of immigration must also critique capitalism lest they contradict themselves. What must be done to slay Mammon once and for all? Or, at the very least, restrain him?
Cesar: Mammon will die in this century of natural death. I not only believe that the financial collapse is coming this decade. I also believe in peak oil and energy devolution later in this century. Once oil is depleted, corporate capitalism can no longer be the economic paradigm for whites, especially after the racial wars change bourgeois whites into blond-beast warriors.
The paradigm of the future lies in farming. Using an image of the penultimate chapter of The Lord of the Rings, I would say that the new paradigm lies in a return to the bucolic Shire. By the way, that very important chapter, “The scouring of the Shire”, was not filmed in Peter Jackson’s version of The Lord of the Rings. In the book, which I read, the war at the Shire actually happens after the One Ring has been destroyed. The ring is metaphor for gold…
Jake: What are your thoughts on the so-called manosphere? How should Aryans approach courtship in a day and age where it’s too early to procure Sabine women yet too late to find a young woman that isn’t a pod person? On a related note, how should White-Aryans answer the homosexual question?
Cesar: A lot of what is said in the manosphere is true. I’ve started to elaborate a guide for the priests of the fourteen words. He should not discuss with Jews, non-whites or women. He should even try to avoid talking with white Pod women.
Recently I discovered a YouTube blogger, Turd Flinging Monkey. I was shocked to learn about scientific facts that concern all white males that I didn’t find in the more formal writing of Roger Devlin. Yes: Turd Flinging Monkey is an anti-racist, clueless blogger about the Jewish question. But there’s something in his manospheric rants that merits scrutiny. After I finish the corrections of my book I’ll see all of his videos.
Courtship is impossible for the moment except if you move to an Amish or Mennonite community. So what can we do before the collapse of the rule of law, a rule that prevents Aryans from abducting and raping the Sabine women? The blogger Turd Flinging Monkey simply recommends masturbation. Well, well…☺ I prefer to be a workaholic to avoid thinking in sex.
As to homosexuality, it is a pity that some open homos in the Altright are not ashamed of talking publicly about their degeneracy, as if it was normal. Shame on them.
Jake: Unlike most pro-Whites, you stand by Heinrich Himmler with few reservations. What can we learn from him? How does he stand in relation to more “mystical” figures on the Right like Spengler or Yockey?
Cesar: I know almost nothing of Spengler except that he refused to support Nazi ideas of racial superiority. Yockey was a great essayist but the style he chose for his famous book, the very one which gave the name to the recent film Imperium, is too philosophical for my taste.
What I like of Himmler is that he volunteered to do the dirty job, extermination. I identify with Uncle Heinrich because, like him, I don’t look Aryan. But when he visited a specific town in Norway he admired them so much because of the purity of the Aryan breed there.
I believe that later in this century, when the demographic bubble pops as a result of energy devolution, Himmler-like exterminationism should become the religion of the Blonde Beast. Only the best should survive. I envision throughout the Earth the beauty that Hitler and Himmler saw in specific Nordish towns, a return to the Shire so to speak after the death of capitalism.
Here comes handy Nietzsche’s concept about the transvaluation of all values. Remember that I call atheists “Neo-Christians”. When millions of adolescent whites change their T-shirts from Che Guevara to Himmler, you will know that the race is already saved. I can only hope that my books will help young whites to revaluate their fucking values.
Jake: Are pro-Whites approaching the subject of Holocaust revisionism correctly or incorrectly? How should it be approached and why?
Cesar: Incorrectly. One must start with the Holocaust committed by the Allied forces. I sincerely believe that any nationalist who has not read the abridged edition of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and Tom Goodrich’s Hellstorm is a historical fool.
It is not only that after the Second World War the Germans were dishonestly demonized. The biggest secret of our times is that the astronomic crimes of the Allied forces dwarf what the Germans did. What the United States and the Soviet Union did in times of peace was more monstrous than the crimes attributed to the Germans in times of war—precisely because the Allied Holocaust was perpetrated in times of peace! I am talking about the crimes committed by Eisenhower and the Soviets from 1945 to 1947. Most people are unaware of this Holocaust. I would dare to say that if whites do not atone for the genocide perpetrated on the German people they will go extinct.
The root problem of white decline is Christian meta-ethics, what I have been calling “Christian axiology”. National Socialism revaluates such meta-ethics back to the mores of the ancient Greeks and Romans. This cannot happen as long as whites are Christians and neo-Christian atheists.
When the Aryan race reaches maturity, probably in the next century, the calendar must be changed from Jesus to Hitler. Anno Domini will start with the Fuhrer’s birthday, not with the crucified rabbi. White nationalists are incapable to reach this level of priesthood today because they are part of the problem as well as part of the solution.
Jake: Looking North, what are your thoughts on Donald Trump and the Alt-Right? What advice do you have for the average Alt-Rightist? What ideological pitfalls should he avoid that we haven’t already discussed?
Cesar: Alt-rightists might have their 15-minute fame after Trump wins. But when things get really nasty after the dollar collapses the proles will look after more masculine voices, those filled with hatred. Real hate I mean. Not the VDARE, American Renaissance or the Radix Journal types but The Daily Stormer, Neonazi types.
Jake: What is it like being a White or Aryan Man in Mexico? What has been lost in Mexico’s de-Europeanization process? Can the average “race-neutral” or un-awakened American White fathom what a majority colored country is like day in and day out? More broadly, what do we have to lose that we don’t know we have to lose?
Cesar: Recently Donald Trump visited my own town, Mexico City. But Latin America, not only Mexico, is too far gone. Nothing can be done here down the South. You guys have half a century of polluting your blood but there are still millions of pure whites in North America. Here down the south these guys have half a millennium of mestization, and in 500 years no intellectual voice has ever been raised against this genocide of Iberian whites! I can speak volumes on the subject but a single anecdote will be enough.
Recently, a meeting was organized by my former classmates of the Madrid School in Mexico that graduated forty years ago. This was a school founded by those who fled from Francisco Franco after the civil war. Two of my whitest schoolmates, blond and very handsome four decades ago, married mestizo women and formed mestizo families. I was shocked! Presently the young students of the Madrid school, who used to be mostly white in my teens, have become brownish. The second generation! Almost all white Latin Americans have already become Body Snatched Pods. Even Argentina and Uruguay are gone.
In the US you at least have Fox News. In Spanish-speaking countries, Spain included, there’s not even one media outlet that sides Donald Trump. Nothing! What remains of Iberian whites are like Jeb Bush: they’re happily marrying dwarf Latinas. Our only hope is that a tough ethnostate is formed at the North and then proceeds to conquer so-called Latin America.
Jake: Where can our listeners find your work online? Where can they purchase your books? What parting message do you have for our listeners?
Cesar: They can google “chechar” (that is, c-h-e-c-h-a-r) and “WordPress” and they’ll hit a blog, “The West’s Darkest Hour”. My books are linked at the top of my blog.
My parting word is simple: I am not a white nationalist. I am a guy to the right of Himmler. Only one of my books is in English, Day of Wrath that I dedicated to you. Since it will take some time for the rest of my books to be translated to English, read instead William Pierce’s books and see for yourselves how an American also rejected Christian ethics.

Categories
Day of Wrath (book) Psychiatry Psychohistory Psychology

Day of Wrath, 6

Silvano Arieti and schizophrenia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Ancient Greece Bible Day of Wrath (book) Homer Oracle of Delphi Philosophy of history Pre-Columbian America Psychohistory Psychology

Day of Wrath, 5

Julian Jaynes and the bicameral mind


In recent decades several historians without any link to the deMausean school have written about thirty books on histories of childhood. I will mention only a couple of those published in 2005: When Children Became People by Odd Magne Bakke and Growing Up: The History of Childhood in a Global Context by Peter Stearns. DeMause has iteratively complained that books of this sort are presented to history students as if childrearing in the past had been as benign as Western childrearing in our times. Stearns for example is author and editor of more than forty books, but he attempts to absolve the parents by claiming that infanticide had an economic motivation; when it is well documented that in some periods infanticide was more common in well-off families.
Psychogenesis is the process of the evolution of empathy, and, therefore, of childrearing forms in an innovative group of human beings. In a particular individual it is an evolution of the architecture of his or her mentality, including the cognition of how the world is perceived. A “quantum leap” in “psychoclasses” depends on the parents’ breaking away from the abusive patterns in which they were educated; for example, stop killing their children: a prehistoric and historic practice that deMause calls “early infanticidal childrearing.”
A fascinating essay by Julian Jaynes throws light on how, by the end of the second millennium before our era, a huge alteration occurred in human mentality. In 1976 Jaynes published The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Jaynes calls “breakdown” the transit of bicameral mind—two chambers or brain hemispheres—to modern consciousness. The transit is relatively recent, and it represents a healing process from a divided self into a more unified or integrated one. Jaynes describes how society developed from a psychological structure based upon obedience to the god’s voices, to the subjective consciousness of present-day man. Like deMause’s psychohistory, Jaynes’ model caused many of his readers to see mankind from a new perspective. He elaborated a meta-narrative purporting to connect the loose pieces of previously unconnected fields—history, anthropology, ancient texts, psychiatry, language, poetry, neurology, religion, Hebrew and Greek studies, the art of ancestral societies, archaeological temples and cuneiform writing—to construct an enormous jigsaw puzzle.
Jaynes asked the bold question of whether the voices that people of the Ancient World heard could have been real, a common phenomenon in the hallucinated voices of present-day schizophrenics. He postulated that, in a specific lapse of history a metamorphosis of consciousness occurred from one level to another; that our present state of consciousness emerged a hundred or two hundred generations ago, and that previously human behavior derived from hearing voices in a world plagued with shamanism, magical thinking, animism and schizoidism.
In the Ancient World man had a bipartite personality: his mind was broken, bicameralized, schizophrenized. “Before the second millennium B.C., everyone was schizophrenic,” Jaynes claims about those who heard voices of advice or guides attributed to dead chiefs, parents or known personages. “Often it is in times of stress when a parent’s comforting voice may be heard.” It seems that this psychic structure of a divided or bicameral self went back to cavemen. Later in the first cities, the period that deMause calls “late infanticidal childrearing” (Jaynes never mentions deMause or psychohistory), the voices were attributed to deities. “The preposterous hypothesis we have come to is that at one time human nature was split in two, an executive part called god, and a follower part called man. Neither was conscious. This is almost incomprehensible to us.” Preconscious humans did not have an ego like ours; rational thought would spring up in a late stage of history, especially in Greece. However, orthodox Hellenists usually do not ask themselves why, for a millennium, many Greeks relied on instructions coming from a group of auditory hallucinating women in Delphi. To explain similar cultural phenomena, Jaynes lays emphasis upon the role that voices played in the identities, costumes and group interactions; and concludes that the high civilizations of Egypt, the Middle East, Homeric Greece and Mesoamerica were developed by a primitive unconscious.
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind describes the theodicy in which, three thousand years ago, subjectivity and the ego flourished. For the common man consciousness is the state of awareness of the mind; say, the conscious state at walking. Jaynes uses the term in a more restricted way: consciousness as the subjective universe, the self-analyzing or self-conscious mind; the “I,” the will and morality of an individual, as well as the development of the linear concept of time (which used to be cyclic to the archaic mind, perhaps due to the observation of the stations of the year). The man who left behind his bicameral thinking developed a more robust sense of the self, and Jaynes finds narrative evidence of this acting self in the literary record. He examines Amos, the voice of the oldest Old Testament text and compares it with the Ecclesiastes, the most recent one. Likewise, Jaynes scrutinizes the Iliad looking for tracks of a subjective self, and finds nothing. The Homeric heroes did what Athena or Apollo told them; they literally heard their gods’ voices as the prophets listened to Yahweh’s. Their psyches did not display brightness of their own yet. (If we remember the metaphor of my first book, the mentality of ancient man was similar to what astronomers call a “maroon dwarf”: a failed star like Jupiter, not a sun with enough mass to cause nuclear fusion so that it could shine on its own.) Matters change with the texts of Odysseus’ adventures, and even more with the philosophers of the Ionian islands and of Athens. At last the individual had accumulated enough egocentric mass to explode and to shine by itself. Jaynes believes that it was not until the Greek civilization that the cataclysm that represented the psychogenic fusion consolidated itself.
By Solon’s times it may be said that the modern self, as we understand it, had finally exploded. The loquacious gods, including the Hebraic Yahweh, became silent never to speak again but through the bicameral prophets. After the breakdown of divine authority, with the gods virtually silenced in the times of the Deuteronomy, the Judean priests and governors embarked upon a frenetic project to register the legends and stories of the voices that, in times of yore, had guided them. It was no longer necessary to hallucinate sayings that the god had spoken: man himself was the standard upon which considerations, decisions, and behaviors on the world rested. In the dawning of history man had subserviently obeyed his gods, but when the voice of consciousness appears, rebelliousness, dissidence, and even heresy are possible.
Through his book, which may be called a treatise of psycho-archeology, Jaynes follows the track of how subjective consciousness emerged. His ambitious goal is to explain the birth of consciousness, and hence the origin of our civilization. Once the former “maroon dwarfs” achieve luminescence in a group of individuals’ selves, not only religious dissent comes about, but regicide, the pursuit of personal richness and, finally, individual autonomy. This evolution continues its course even today. Paradoxically, when the West reaches the stage that deMause calls “helping mode” in child-rearing, it entails ill-fated consequences such as Caucasian demographic dilution and the subsequent Islamization of Europe (as we will see).
Although Jaynes speculates that the breakdown of the bicameral mind could have been caused by crises in the environment, by ignoring deMause he does not present the specific mechanism that gave rise to the transition. Due to the foundational taboo of human species, explained by Alice Miller in my previous book and by Colin Ross in this one, Jaynes did not explore the decisive role played by the modes of childrearing. This blindness permeates The Origin of Consciousness to the point of giving credibility to the claims of biological psychiatry; for example, Jaynes believes in the genetic basis of schizophrenia, a pseudoscientific hypothesis, as shown in my previous essay. However, his thesis on bicameralism caused his 1976 essay to be repeatedly reprinted, including the 1993 Penguin Books edition and another edition with a 1990 afterword that is still in print.
In the bicameral kingdoms the hallucinated voices of ancient men were culturally accepted as part of the social fabric. But a psychogenic leap forward gives as much power to the new psychoclass as the Australopithecus character of 2001: A Space Odyssey grabbing a bone. “How could an empire whose armies had triumphed over the civilizations of half a continent be captured by a small band of 150 Spaniards in the early evening of November 16, 1532?” The conquest of the Inca Empire was one of a handful of military confrontations between the two states of consciousness. A deMausean interpretation would lead us to think that it was a clash between the infanticidal psychoclass and an intermediate state of ambivalent and intrusive modes of childrearing. The Spaniards were clearly up the scale of “psychogenic leaps” compared to the Incas.
This reading of history is diametrically opposed to Bartolomé de Las Casas, who in his Apologética Historia claimed that in some moral aspects the Amerindians were superior to the Spanish and even to Greeks and Romans. Today’s Western self-hatred had its precursor in Las Casas, who flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In identical fashion, in the 21st century it is irritating to see in educational TV programs an American in Peru saying that the Incas of the times of the Conquest “were much smarter than the Spanish.” The truth is that the Incas did not even know how to use the wheel and lacked written language. They literally heard their statues speak to them and their bicameral mind handicapped them before the more robust psyche of the Europeans: something like an Australopithecus clan clashing with another without bones in their hands. The Spaniards were, certainly, very religious; but not to the point of using magical thinking in their warfare stratagems. According to a 16th-century Spaniard, “the unhappy dupes believed the idols spoke to them and so sacrificed to it birds, dogs, their own blood and even men” (this quotation refers to Mesoamericans, the subject-matter of the next section). The Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa believes that his ancestors were defeated due to a pragmatic and basically modern European mentality in contrast to the magical thinking of the natives; and the Mexican Carlos Fuentes wrote that the conquest of the American continent was a great triumph of the scientific hypothesis over the indigenous physical perception.
Jaynes overemphasizes that the prophets of the Old Testament literally heard Yahweh’s voice. Because the minds in the Ancient World, like present-day schizoid personalities, were swarmed with sources of hallucination, humans still lacked an inner space for retrospection and introspection. Bible scholars have debated at length about what could have caused the loss of prophecy gifts in the Hebrew people after the Babylonian exile. I would say that the elimination of the sacrificial practice of infants meant a leap toward a superior psychoclass, with the consequent overcoming of the schizoid or bicameral personality.
But going back to Jaynes: Formerly terrestrial and loquacious, the later mute gods were transported to a heaven, making room for human divination: the consultation of human beings that (for having been raised by more regressive parents I may infer) still heard the fateful voices. Even though the divine voices made themselves unnecessary for the new kind of human, praying continued to a god who was incapable, centuries ago, of communicating through divine voices.

The entire succession of [Old Testament] works becomes majestically and wonderfully the birth pangs of our subjective consciousness. No other literature has recorded this absolutely important event at such length or with such fullness. Chinese literature jumps into subjectivity in the teaching of Confucius with little before it. Indian hurtles from the bicameral Veda into the ultra subjective Upanishads. Greek literature, like a series of steppingstones from The Iliad to the Odyssey and across the broken fragments of Sappho and Solon toward Plato, is the next best record, but still too incomplete. And Egypt is relatively silent.

Jaynes’ book is dense, closely argued, and despite its beautiful prose often boring. But the chapter on the Hebrew people titled “The Moral Consciousness of the Khabiru” is must reading. If he is right, it was not until the fifth century before the Common Era when the bicameral mind began to be seen as the incapacitating disorder that is presently labeled as psychosis. In contrast to the mystic psychohistorian Robert Godwin, I am closer to Jaynes in that one of the most persistent residues of bicameralism is our religious heritage.
Jaynes, who died in 1997, may be the proverbial author of a single book, but many people continue to read The Origin of Consciousness. Tor Norretranders, a popular author on scientific subjects, expanded the bicameral hypothesis in a book published a year after Jaynes died, The User Illusion, and he cites more recent investigations than those collected by Jaynes.
 
Popperian falsifiability
Despite the book’s popularity and the fact that Jaynes taught in Princeton University and did archaeological work, his colleagues did not pay him much attention. Many academics reject theories that have been presented through literary books. It is understandable that a book with such lyric passages has been ignored by the dry science taught in the psychology departments; by neurobiologists, and by evolutionary theorists. Jaynes, basically a humanist, had not presented his theory in a scientific or falsifiable format.
Adepts of social sciences grant such authority to the hard sciences that, when they run across a text that emphasizes the humanities, they want to see everything translated to the language of science. They do this in spite of the fact that, in the reign of subjectivity, hard sciences are incapable of producing something truly significant. Notwithstanding this scientific demand, I concede that if we humanists make claims that could be interpreted as scientific hypotheses, it doesn’t hurt to present them in such a way that they may be refuted, if per chance they are wrong. Consequently, I must make it very clear that the trauma model is falsifiable.
For instance, it occurs to me that, if the model is correct, in the Israeli kibbutz children cannot be easily schizophrenized. The cause of this would be, naturally, that in the kibbutz they are put farther away from potentially schizophrenogenic parents than the children in nuclear families. Something similar could be said about Jaynes’ ideas. His hypothesis can be presented in falsifiable form always provided that the presentation is done through a deMausean interpretation of it, as we will see almost by the end of this book.
Once it is conceded that even humanists who venture into foreign lands can present their theories in falsifiable form, I must point out that very few academics, including psychologists, are willing to delve into the darkest chambers of the human psyche. To them it is disturbing that prehistoric man, and a good deal of the historic man including their ancestors, had behaved as marionettes of hallucinated voices or nonexistent gods. Jaynes’ ideas represent a serious challenge to history as it is officially understood and even more to religion, anthropology, and psychiatry. He seems to postulate that a scant connectivity of the two brain hemispheres produced voices, and that the changes in consciousness caused the brain to become more interconnected through the corpus callosum. In case I have interpreted him correctly, I am afraid it is not possible to run tomographs on those who died millennia ago to compare, say, the brain of the bicameral pythoness against the brain of the intellectual Solon. Let’s ignore this non-falsifiable aspect and focus on hypotheses that may be advanced by epidemiologists in the field of social sciences. Studying the changes of incidence patterns of child mistreatment through history or contemporary cultures is a perfectly falsifiable scientific approach.
In the book reviews of The Origin of Consciousness available on the internet it can be gathered that the experience of many readers was as electrifying as a midnight ray that allowed them to see, albeit for a split second, the human reality. If the ultimate test for any theory is to explain the most data in the simplest way, we should not ignore the psychohistories of Jaynes and deMause. If they are right, the explanatory power of an unified model would help us understand part of the human mystery, especially religion and psychosis.
 
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The objective of the book is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering. If life allows, next time I will publish here the section on schizophrenia theorist Silvano Arieti. Those interested in obtaining a copy of Day of Wrath can request it: here.

Categories
Child abuse Day of Wrath (book) Lloyd deMause Psychohistory Psychology

Day of Wrath, 4

The history of childhood and its Newton


John Bowlby advanced the fundamentals for understanding attachment; Colin Ross did the same for mental disorders in human beings, and I will keep his class in mind to explain psychohistory.
But Ross is a physician, not an historian. In the following pages I will show the deeper reasons why parents have abused their children since time immemorial. The perspective to our past will open up in the widest possible way: a framework of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years of what has occurred in my family and in all other families of the human and pre-human species. My autobiography will disappear and it will only reappear in my next book, not without having shown first the psychogenic theory of history.
Lloyd deMause (pronounced de-Moss), born in 1931, studied political sciences in the University of Columbia. After his university studies he borrowed money to establish a publishing house that consumed ten years of his life before again taking up his research work. While Freud, Reich, Fromm and others had written some speculative essays on history on the basis of psychoanalysis, such essays may be considered the Aristotelian phase of which today is understood as psychohistory. In 1958, the year in which I was born, Erik Erikson published a book about the young Luther in which he mentioned the surging of a new research field that he called “psycho-history” (not be confused with the science-fiction novels of Isaac Asimov). After a decade, in 1968, deMause presented a sketch of his theory to an analytical association where, unlike Freud and his epigones, he focused psychohistory into the diverse forms of childrearing. After the West abandoned colonialism, and endured for its behavior an absurd handover to other nations and ethnic groups, it became a taboo to focus in the dark side of non-Western cultures. By choosing a frowned-upon research area in academia deMause had to make an intellectual career independently. The drive of his research was always what the children must have felt in the most diverse cultures of the world. As we saw, the mammal, and even more the primate, are so at the mercy of their parents that the specific forms of childrearing cannot be dodged if we are to understand mental disorders. But it is precisely this subject matter, the forms of childrearing and infantile abuse, what conventional historians ignore. In his essay “The independence of psychohistory” deMause tells us that history qua history describes what has happened, not why, and he adds that history and psychohistory are distinct fields of investigation.

Whole great chunks of written history are of little value to the psychohistorian, while other vast areas which have been much neglected by historians suddenly expand from the periphery to the center of the psychohistorian’s conceptual world.

DeMause does not care that he has been accused of ignoring the economy, the sociology and the use of statistics. “The usual accusation that psychohistory ‘reduces everything to psychology’ is philosophically meaningless—of course psychohistory is reductionist in this sense, since all it studies is historical motivations.” The statements by deMause that I like the most are those in which he says something I had been maintaining for many years before reading them, when I told myself in soliloquies that, if we have to be objective to understand exact sciences like physics, only by introducing subjectivity we could understand the humanities:

Indeed, most of what is in history books is stark, raving mad—the maddest of all being the historian’s belief that it is sane. For some time now, I often cry when I watch the evening news, read newspapers, or study history books, a reaction I was trained to suppress in every school I attended for 25 years. In fact, it is because we so often switch into our social alters when we try to study history that we cannot understand it—our real emotions are dissociated. Those who are able to remain outside the social trance are the individuals whose personal insights are beyond those of their neighbors.
Psychohistory is a science in which the researcher’s feelings are as much or even more a part of his research equipment than his eyes or his hands. Weighing of complex motives can only be accomplished by identification with human actors. The usual suppression of all feeling preached and followed by most “science” simply cripples a psychohistorian as badly as it would cripple a biologist to be forbidden the use of a microscope. The emotional development of a psychohistorian is therefore as much a topic for discussion as his or her intellectual development.
I no longer believe that most traditional historians are emotionally equipped.

DeMause adds that, when he talks with a typical scholar who only uses his intellect, he runs into a stare of total incomprehension. “My listener usually is in another world of discourse.”
The publication of The History of Childhood in 1974 marks the turning point in the field that deMause created. Putting aside the idealizations of previous historians, the book examines for the first time the history of Western childhood. But the daring exposé of an entire rosary of brutalities on childhood, like the ones mentioned in the preface of this book, moved Basic Books to break the contract it held with deMause to publish The History of Childhood. The process by which from here on contemporary psychohistory was born is fascinating. In this section I will recycle and comment on some passages of one of the articles by deMause, “On Writing Childhood History,” published in 1988, a recapitulation of fifteen years of work in the history of childhood.
DeMause had taken courses at a psychoanalytic institute and put to the test the Freudian idea that civilization, so loaded with morals, was onerous for modern children; and that in ancient times they had lived in an Eden without the ogre of the superego. The evidence showed him exactly the opposite, and he disclosed his discrepancies by criticizing the anthropologist Géza Róheim:

I discovered I simply could make no sense at all of what Róheim and others were saying. This was particularly true about childhood. Róheim wrote, for instance, that the Australian aborigines he observed were excellent parents, even though they ate every other child, out of what they called “baby hunger” [the mothers also said that their children were “demons”], and forced their other children to eat parts of their siblings. This “doesn’t seem to have affected the personality development” of the surviving children, Róheim said, and in fact, he concluded, these were really “good mothers [who] eat their own children.”

Most anthropologists did not object to Róheim’s extraordinary conclusions. In his article deMause called our attention to a very distinct reading by Arthur Hippler on Australian aboriginals. DeMause had already consolidated his publishing house, and in the Journal of Psychological Anthropology he published an article in which Hippler, who had also directly observed the aboriginals, wrote:

The care of children under six months of age can be described as hostile, aggressive and careless; it is often routinely brutal. Infanticide was often practiced. The baby is offered the breast often when he does not wish it and is nearly choked with milk. The mother is often substantially verbally abusive to the child as he gets older, using epithets such as “you shit,” “vagina to you.” Care is expressed through shouts, or not at all, when it is not accompanied by slaps and threats. I never observed a single adult Yolngu caretaker of any age or sex walking a toddler around, showing him the world, explaining things to him and empathizing with his needs. The world is described to the child as dangerous and hostile, full of demons, though in reality the real dangers are from his caretakers. The mother sexually stimulates the child at this age. Penis and vagina are caressed to pacify the child, and clearly the action arouses the mother.

Keeping in mind what Ross said in the case of the second girl, we can imagine the transfusion of evil that these infants, children of filicidal cannibals, would have internalized; and how could this have affected their mental health. I believe it is appropriate to continue quoting excerpts from the deMause article: it is very instructive to understand psychohistory and how it contrasts with the postulates of anthropologists and ethnologists. Once the observations by Hippler were published, an enraged defender of Róheim responded:

I am indeed much more sympathetic to Róheim’s accounts, precisely because he does not rush to the conclusion that deMause does. Australian Aboriginal culture survived very well, thank you, very much for tens of thousands of years before it was devastated by Western interference. If that isn’t adaptive, what is?

The description that Hippler and Róheim give of this aboriginal culture seems the worst of all possible nightmares for children. But for Western anthropologists to avow condemnatory value judgments is the ultimate taboo. Some of them even accept the Freudian theory that the historical past was less repressive for childhood, and that Western civilization was a corrupter of the noble savage. But they avoid the fact that Hippler and Róheim themselves observed barbarities towards the children that would be unthinkable in the civilized world, like eating them. (Other sources that confirm the veracity of claims of filicidal cannibalism appear later.) However incredible it may seem, anthropologists and ethnologists do not condemn these cannibal mothers. Under the first commandment of the discipline, Thou Shalt Not Judge, the emotional after-effects of childrearing are ignored, such as the clearly dissociated personalities that I myself saw in the Ross clinic, and even worse kinds of dissociation.
In the academic world Róheim was not as well known as Philippe Ariès, an historian who collaborated with Foucault and an author of a classic book on the history of childhood, L’Enfant et la Vie Familiale sous l’Ancien Régime. Ariès started from the Freudian premise of the benignancy of the milieu towards children in past times. Just as with Róheim, Ariès didn’t deny the beatings, the incest and the other vexations against children described in his book. What he denied was that such treatment caused disturbances. “In other words,” deMause writes mockingly, “since everyone whipped and molested children, whipping and molesting had no effects on any child.” Ariès has been taken as an authority in the history of childhood studies. DeMause not only rejected his assumption that there were no psychological after-effects; he inverted Freud’s axiom. His working hypotheses are simple: (1) within the West the forms of childrearing were more barbarous in the past, and (2) compared to the Western world, other cultures treat their children worse. These hypotheses, which broke the tablet laws of the anthropologists, would give birth to the new discipline of psychohistory. For the academic Zeitgeist the mere talk of childhood abuse, let alone of soul murder, was against the grain of all schools of thought in history, anthropology and ethnology, which take for granted that there have been no substantial changes in parental-filial relations.
The academics could not deny the facts that fascinated deMause. As we saw above, Róheim did not deny them; in fact, he himself published them. Ariès also did not deny them. The tactic that deMause found among his colleagues was the argumentum ex silentio: without historical trace of any kind, it was taken for granted that children were treated in a way similar that in the West today. The following is a splendid paradigm of this argument. In 1963, ten years before deMause started publishing, Alan Valentine in his book Fathers and Sons, published by the University of Oklahoma, examined letters from parents to their children in past centuries. He did not find a single letter that transmitted kindness to the addressee. However, in order not to contradict the common sense that in the past the treatment a man gave his sons was not different, Valentine concluded:

Doubtless an infinite number of fathers have written letters to their sons that would warm and lift our hearts, if we only could find them. The happiest fathers leave no history, and it is the men who are not at their best with their children who are likely to write the heart-rending letters that survive.

DeMause found the fallacy of the argumentum ex silentio everywhere, even among the same colleagues who contributed articles to his seminal book, The History of Childhood. For example, when deMause made a remark to Elizabeth Wirth Marwick about these kind of letters, and also about the diaries that parents wrote, Marwick responded that only the bad left a trace in history. Most historians agreed with her. DeMause had started to study the primary sources of these materials. Marwick was only one among two hundred historians that deMause had written to for his book project, of which he worked with fifty. He claims that in all of them the argumentum ex silentio appeared at the time of reaching the conclusions to which the evidence pointed out to.
The reasons were, naturally, psychological. An Italian historian delivered to deMause the draft of a chapter that began by saying that he would not consider the subjects of infanticide and pederasty in ancient Rome. DeMause had to reject it. Other would-be contributors went further. At the beginning of this book I spoke of the torment that swaddling with tight clothes has represented for babies. John Demos, author of a book about the family in American colonists, denied that the European practice had been imported into American soil despite the evidence that deMause had collected and published (in a television history program even I saw a drawing of an Anglo-Saxon swaddled baby). As regards other kinds of abuse in American childhood, Demos used the argument that bibliographical evidence in letters, diaries, autobiographies and medical reports was irrelevant; that what mattered were the court documents.
The problem with this argument is that in colonial times there were no organizations for the protection of childhood, which originated in nineteenth century England and which have become much more visible since the 1980s. Demos did not only argue from the basis of lack of court documents against the thesis that parents abused their children more in colonial times. He also argued that “had individual children suffered severe abuse at the hands of their parents in early New England, other adults would have been disposed to respond.” Demos’ conclusions were acclaimed in his time. But just as in his argument about court documents, this last conjecture suffers from the same idealization about the past of his nation. If other adults were unwilling to respond it was simply due to the fact that in those times the social movement of infant protection had not yet arisen.
Once deMause discarded all those who argued on the basis of the argumentum ex silentio, nine historians remained. Even while the contributors were delivering their articles, some of them showed reticence about publishing all the evidence they had found. Before publication the nine contributors—ten with deMause—circulated their articles among themselves. Most of them were shocked by the first chapter written by deMause, whose initial paragraphs became famous in the history of psychohistory:

The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused. It is our task here to see how much of this childhood history can be recaptured from the evidence that remains to us.
That this pattern has not previously been noticed by historians is because serious history has long been considered a record of public not private events. Historians have concentrated so much on the noisy sandbox of history, with its fantastic castles and magnificent battles, that they have generally ignored what is going on in the homes around the playground. And where historians usually look to the sandbox battles of yesterday for the causes of those of today, we instead ask how each generation of parents and children creates those issues which are later acted out in the arena of public life.

Once the initial impression was past, some of the contributors were reluctant that their articles should appear beside the initial chapter by deMause, and, as I previously mentioned, Basic Books broke its contract. However, since deMause was already the owner of a publishing house he decided to publish it himself.
Although the contributors finally accepted that their articles would appear under a single cover, the history journal reviews were very hostile. Even a magazine like New Statesman derided deMause: “His real message is something more akin to religion than to history, and as such unassailable by unbelievers. On the other hand, his fellow-contributors to The History of Childhood have much useful historical information to offer.” Some reviewers were impressed by the body of evidence on child abuse in past centuries, but they supposed that future investigations would place such evidence on a much more benign context. “Ariès for one,” wrote deMause, “remained convinced that childhood yesterday was children’s paradise.”
The initial chapter of the book edited by deMause was titled “The Evolution of Childhood.” DeMause claims that of the published reviews on this chapter, translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish and Japanese, no reviewer challenged the evidence as such; only his conclusions. “Yet not a single reviewer in any of the six languages in which the book was published wrote about any errors in my evidence, and none presented any evidence from primary sources which contradicted any of my conclusions.” As we will see in “A Critique of Lloyd deMause” his theories are not exempt from error. Far from it! There are errors: lots of them. But these critics who rushed to judge him falsely did not see the real faults of his model. With regard to the published reviews, deMause wrote:

Since it was unlikely that I could describe the childhood of everyone who ever lived in the West for a period of over two millennia without making errors, it was extremely disappointing to me that the emotional reactions of reviewers had completely overwhelmed their critical capacities. No reviewer appeared to be interested in discussing evidence at all.

There were nonetheless magnanimous reviewers like Lawrence Stone, who in November of 1974 wrote in New York Review of Books about “the problem of how to regard so bold, so challenging, so dogmatic, so enthusiastic, so perverse, and yet so heavily documented a model.” But the majority adhered to the conventional wisdom, as did E.P. Hennock in a specialized magazine:

That men in other ages might behave quite differently from us yet be no less rational and sane, has been a basic concept amongst historians for a long time now. It does not belong to deMause’s mental universe. The normal practices of past societies are constantly explained in terms of psychoses.

Once more, the evidence as such is put aside to proclaim the conventional wisdom, which is taken for granted. In a review published in History of Education Quarterly, Daniel Calhoun wrote that deMause’s approach resembled a regression to 19th century concepts, an antiquated evolutionistic morality for Calhoun. As we will see in a later chapter in refuting Franz Boas, reality is the exact opposite: the Boasian school represented a gigantic regression compared to nineteenth-century anthropology.
At present studies of the history of childhood continue to emerge from deMause and academic historians alike; for example, the study by Colin Heywood. But it is precisely books like Heywood’s, which accept the historical evidence of abuses of childhood but differ from deMause’s conclusions, that have convinced me that deMause has found a gold vein that still has substance for much exploitation. DeMause ends his retrospective article of 1988 by pointing out that, despite the rejection by the academy, The History of Childhood, the books of Alice Miller and other popular authors who advocate the cause of the child are widely read by an important niche of society. In a nutshell, the main finding of psychohistory is that academic history fails to recognize the profound role that the love, or hate, of the parents for their children plays in the future developments of mankind.
 
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The objective of the book is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering. If life allows, next time I will publish here the section on Julian Jaynes. Those interested in obtaining a copy of Day of Wrath can request it: here.

Categories
Abortion Australia Child abuse Day of Wrath (book) India Infanticide Juvenal Lloyd deMause Psychohistory

Day of Wrath, 2

The trauma model


 
Introduction

Throughout history and prehistory children’s lives have been a nightmare about which our species is barely starting to become conscious. “Parents are the child’s most lethal enemy,” wrote Lloyd deMause, the founder of psychohistory. While paleo-anthropologists have found evidence of decapitated infants since the time of our pre-human ancestors, and while it was known that infanticide continued into the Paleolithic and the Neolithic periods, the emotional after-effects on the surviving siblings was appreciated by deMause with the publishing of The History of Childhood in 1974. As we will see in the third section substantiated by a hundred references, infanticidal parents were the rule, not the exception. Even in the so-called great civilizations the sacrifice of children was common. In Carthage urns have been found containing thousands of burned remains of children sacrificed by parents asking favors from the gods. It is believed that infants were burned alive.

Although in a far less sadistic way than in Carthage and other ancient states, and this explains the genius of the classic world, Greeks and Romans practiced infanticide in the form of exposure of newborns, especially girls. Euripides’ Ion describes the exposed infant as: “prey for birds, food for wild beasts to rend.” Philo was the first philosopher who made a clear statement against infanticide:

Some of them do the deed with their own hands; with monstrous cruelty and barbarity they stifle and throttle the first breath which the infants draw or throw them into a river or into the depths of the sea, after attaching some heavy substance to make them sink more quickly under its weight.

In some of his satires Juvenal openly criticized abortion, child abandonment, and the killing of adoptive children and stepchildren.

My first reaction in the face of such revelations was, naturally, a healthy skepticism. This moved me to purchase books about infanticide and histories of childhood not written by “psychohistorians,” but by common historians; and I started to pay special attention to certain kinds of news in the papers of which previously I scarcely gave any importance. One day in 2006 a notice caught my eye, stating that there are 32 million fewer women than men in India, and that the imbalance was caused by feticide. I recalled a photograph I had seen in the June 2003 National Geographic, showing a Bihar midwife in the rural North of India, rescuing a female baby abandoned under a bridge. Infanticide and selective abortion, particularly of girls, continue as I write this line. According to a Reproductive Rights conference in October 2007 in Hyderabad, India, statistics show that 163 million women are missing in Asia, compared to the proportion of the male population. They are the result of the exposure of babies, and especially of selective abortion facilitated by access to techniques such as prenatal testing and ultrasound imagery. These snippets of information gathered from newspapers, coupled with the scholarly treatises which I was reading, eradicated my original skepticism about the reality of infanticide.

But let’s return to psychohistory as developed by deMause. There are cultures far more barbarous than contemporary India as regards childrearing. In the recent past of the tribes of New Guinea and Australia, little brothers and sisters witnessed how parents killed one of their siblings and made the rest of the family share the cannibal feast. “They eat the head first,” wrote Géza Róheim in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology published in 1950. Gillian Gillison observed in Between Culture and Fantasy: a New Guinea Highlands Mythology, published in 1993, that the mother eats the son’s penis. And Fritz Poole wrote:

Having witnessed their parents’ mortuary anthropophagy, many of these children suddenly avoided their parents, shrieked in their presence, or expressed unusual fear of them. After such experiences, several children recounted dreams or constructed fantasies about animal-man beings with the faces or other features of particular parents who were smeared with blood and organs.

These passages are quoted in deMause’s The Emotional Life of Nations. Reading further in this work, one can also learn, as Wolfgang Lederer wrote when observing the tribes, that other primitives threw their newborns to the swine, who devoured them swiftly. Lederer also recounts that he saw one of these mothers burying her child alive:

The baby’s movements may be seen in the hole as it is suffocating and panting for breath; schoolchildren saw the movements of such a dying baby and wanted to take it out to save it. However, the mother stamped it deep in the ground and kept her foot on it…

Australian aboriginals killed approximately 30 percent of their infants, as reported by Gillian Cowlishaw in Oceania; and the first missionaries to Polynesia estimated that up to two-thirds of Polynesian children were killed by their parents. In a 2008 article I learned that infanticide continues in the islands even as of the time of reporting. Tribal women allege they have to kill their babies for fear they might become dreadful warriors as adults.

Another type of information that shocked me in deMause’s books was the frequency throughout history of the mutilation of children. Once more, my first reaction was a healthy skepticism. But I had no choice but to accept the fact that even today there are millions of girls whose genitals have been cut. The Emotional Life of Nations publishes a photograph of a panicked Cairo pubescent girl being held down by adults at the moment when her family has her mutilated. Every time I see that photo I have to turn away my head (the girl looks directly into the camera and her pain reaches me deeply). According to the French National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED), in 2007 there were between 100 and 140 million women who had had their genitals removed. The practice ranges from the partial cutting of the clitoris to the suturation of the vaginal orifice, the latter especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, some regions of the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. The INED study points out that in Ethiopia three-quarters of women have been genitally mutilated, and in Mali up to 90 percent. The practice is also carried out in Yemen, Indonesia and Malaysia.

In historic times there were a large number of eunuchs in Byzantium, and in the West mutilation was a common practice for boys. Verdun was notorious for the quantity of castrations performed, and in Naples signs hung above stores saying, “boys castrated here.” Castration was common as well in other cultures. DeMause observes that the testicles of boys between three and seven years were crushed or cut off. In China both the penis and the scrotum were cut, and in the Middle East the practice continued until recent times.

(A swaddled boy of the tribe Nez Perce, 1911.) DeMause’s books are eye-openers also about another practice that no school text of traditional anthropology had taught me: the tight swaddling of babies.

It is worth noting that historians, anthropologists, and ethnologists have been the target of fierce criticism by some psychohistorians for their failure to see the psychological after-effects brought about by such practices. Through the centuries, babies were swaddled by their mothers with swaddling clothes wrapped around their bodies, several times and tightly fastened while they screamed in their vain attempts at liberation. Before reading deMause the only thing I knew of such practice was when I as a boy saw a cartoon of a couple of Red Indians who had their baby swaddled, of which only a little head was visible crying big time, while the Indians walked on casually. Despite its being a comic strip, I remember it made a mark in my young memory because of the pity I felt for the baby boy and how I noted the parents’ indifference. This happened decades before I read Foundations of Psychohistory, wherein it is described that this practice was universal and that it goes back to our tribal ancestors. Even Alice Miller herself, the heroine of my third book of Hojas Susurrantes, was swaddled as a child. In Europe swaddling is still practiced in some rural parts of Greece. The sad spectacle of the swaddled newborns in Yugoslavia and Russia draws the visiting foreigners’ attention. Even in the city in which I was born a few friends have told me that some relatives swaddled their babies.

Those who have read my previous book would not be surprised that the man in the street has barely thought about the ravages that these practices—swaddling, mutilation, growing up knowing that mom and dad had abandoned or sacrificed a little sister—caused in the surviving siblings who witnessed it. What we have before us is the most potent taboo of the species: a lack of elemental consciousness of what parents do to their children. As we will see at the end of this book, some historians of infanticide who do not belong to the deMausean school estimate in astronomical figures the infanticide rate since the Paleolithic.

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The objective of the book is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering. If life allows, the following week I will publish here the section on trauma model researcher Colin Ross. Those interested in obtaining a copy of Day of Wrath can request it: here.