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Catholic Church Jesus Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Roman Catholic popes

Christianity’s Criminal History, 93

Below, an abridged translation from the second volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.

 
As the historical-critical exegesis of the Bible teaches us, Jesus—the apocalyptic man who, totally within the tradition of the Jewish prophets, waits for the immediate end: the irruption of the ‘God’s imperial rule’, and thereby makes a complete mistake (one of the most solid results of exegetical investigation)—certainly did not want to found any Church or institute priests, bishops, patriarchs and popes.

As late as the middle of the 2nd century, the Roman Christian community had about thirty thousand members and 155 clerics. None knew anything about the appointment of Peter, nor about his stay and martyrdom in Rome.

 
The list of fabricated Roman bishops

The oldest list of Roman bishops was provided by the father of the Church, Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon, in his work Adversus Haereses, roughly between the years 180 and 185. The original Greek text is not preserved; only a complete Latin copy of the 3rd century or 4th, if not the 5th. Literature about it is hardly noticeable, the text is ‘spoiled’ in a manifest way. What remains a mystery is the origin of the list. Ireneus wrote down a little more than the names.

And nowhere is there talk of a primacy of Peter! By the end of the 2nd century Peter was not yet counted in Rome among the bishops. And in the 4th century it is affirmed that he was pope for twenty-five years! Bishop Eusebius, a historian of little confidence, even guilty of falsification of documents, transmitted in his time the succession of Roman bishops.

Eusebius ‘perfected’ also the list of Alexandrian bishops, very similar to that of the Romans. The same with the Antioquian list, associating an Olympiad with each one of the bishops Cornelius, Eros and Theophilus. In the list of bishops of Jerusalem he also worked with artificial computations, not having ‘practically any written news’ of the years in which they were in office. Later, Bishop Epiphanius made an exact dating comparing it with that of the emperors.

Around the year 354, the Catalogus Liberianus (Liberian Catalogue), a relation of popes that goes from Peter to Liberius, indicating dates in days and months, was continued and ‘completed’, as indicated by the Catholic Gelmi, who immediately added: ‘All these data have no historical value’.

The Liber Pontificalis (Book of the Popes), the official book of the popes, the oldest list of the Roman bishops, contains ‘a great abundance of falsified or legendary material’, which the author ‘completes by new findings’ (Caspar). In short, it carries so many fabrications that until the 6th century it has hardly any historical value, not naming Peter, but a certain Linus, as the first bishop of the city. Thereafter Linus is in second place and Peter in the first.

In the end a ‘position of Peter’ is constructed (Karrer) and becomes ‘papacy’. ‘Like a seed’, writes the Jesuit Hans Grotz in a poetic way, ‘Peter fell on the Roman earth’. And then many others fell, as is still happening today. Little by little all the ‘successors’ of Peter could be counted, as has been said, with the year in which they acceded to the papacy and the date of their death, apparently in an uninterrupted succession. (Editor’s Note: Deschner’s books have no illustrations but see the image that I chose for this post: part of a poster of the purported bishops of Rome from St. Peter to Pope Francis under the heading ‘I Sommi Pontefici Romani’. The poster is so large that, already unfolded, I had to hang it on a wall to photograph it.)

However, over time the list of Roman bishops was modified, perfected, completed in such a way that, in a table compiled by five Byzantine chroniclers, of the first twenty-eight bishops of Rome only in four places do the figures agree in all columns. Indeed, the final editor of the text, perhaps Pope Gregory I, seems to have expanded the list of names to include twelve saints, in parallel with the twelve apostles. In any case, the list of Roman bishops of the first two centuries is as unreliable as that of the list of the Alexandrians or Antiochenes, and ‘in the first decades it is pure arbitrariness’ (Heussi).

Note of the Ed.: Fabricated list of popes. Starting at the left,
St. Peter. Note the noblest faces the artist used for these
non-existent popes to make the faithful believe that the first
popes were not only saints, but also holy men of the white race.

The invention of a series of traditional names and tables, partly constructed, artificially filling the gaps, existed long before the appearance of Christianity and its lists of bishops falsified from the beginning. It is comparable to the Old Testament genealogies, which through a succession of names without empty gaps, guaranteed participation in the divine promises; especially the list of high priests after the exile, as a list of rulers of Israel.

Furthermore, the ancient pastors of Rome were not considered in any way ‘popes’. For a long time they had ‘no other title than that of the other bishops’ (Bihimeyer, Catholic). Whereas in the East, patriarchs, bishops and abbots were long known as ‘popes’ (pappas, papa, father), this designation appears in Rome for the first time on a tombstone from the time of Liberius (papacy 352-366).

At the end of the 5th century, the notion acquired a naturalisation certificate in the West, where the Roman bishops used the word ‘pope’ to call themselves, along with other bishops, although they did not do so regularly until the end of the 8th century. And until the second millennium the word ‘pope’ does not become an exclusive privilege for the bishops of Rome.

The first to refer to Mt, 16, 18, is, of course, the despotic Stephen I (papacy 354-357). With his hierarchical-monarchical conception of the Church, rather than episcopal and collegial, it is to a certain extent the first pope.

Not even Augustine, so fond of Rome but sometimes oscillating delicately among the pope and his African brothers, defends papal primacy. That is why Vatican I, of 1870, even reproached his ‘erroneous opinions’ (pravae sententiae) to the famous father of the Church. Sumus christiani, non petriani, ‘We are Christians, not Petrians’, Augustine had affirmed.

Similarly, like the bishops and fathers of the Church, the ancient councils did not recognise the primacy of law of Rome.

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Antichrist (book) Friedrich Nietzsche Immanuel Kant Philosophy

The Antichrist § 10

Germans understand me immediately when I say that philosophy has been corrupted by theologian blood…

What German philosophy really is—an underhanded theology…

Why were Germans so convinced that Kant marked a change for the better? The theologian instinct of the German scholar had guessed just what was possible again: a hidden path to the old ideal lay open…

Kant’s success is just a theologian success: Kant, like Luther, like Leibniz, was one more drag on an already precarious German sense of integrity —

Categories
Catholic Church Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) St Paul

Christianity’s Criminal History, 92

Fourth century glass mosaic of St. Peter,
located at the Catacombs of Saint Thecla.

 

Below, an abridged translation from the second volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.

The story of the discovery of Peter’s tomb

According to an ancient tradition, the tomb of the ‘prince of the apostles’ is on the Appian Way, and according to another version, under the church of St. Peter. It seems that in the middle of the 2nd century this tomb was already sought.

Around the year 200 the Roman presbyter Gaius believed he knew where Peter’s tomb was, ‘in the Vatican’, and Paul’s tomb, ‘on the way to Ostia’. And since Constantine it has been venerated—and visited—the presumed tomb of Peter in St. Peter’s church.

However, its historical authenticity has not been proven; simply, in the Constantinian era there was a belief that they had found Peter’s tomb. But this belief did not prove anything more in those times than today. What was found under the church of St. Peter (in whose vicinity was the Phrygianum, the sanctuary of the goddess Cybele) was a large number of pagan tombs: in the last excavations no less than twenty-two mausoleums and two open crypts.

Between 1940 and 1949 the archaeologist Enrico Josi, the architect Bruno Apolloni-Ghetti, the Jesuit Antonio Ferrua and another Jesuit, Engelbert Kirschbaum, excavated under the dome of St. Peter. The management was given to the prelate Kaas, who was then director of the centre.

The results of various critical researchers—Adriano Prandi, Armin von Gerkan, Theodor Klauser, A. M. Schneider, and others—ended up extracting from the Jesuits the confession that the (Catholic) report of the excavations was not ‘free of errors’. There were ‘defects in the description’. They spoke of ‘greater or lesser contradictions’ and mention that errare humanum est (to err is human) ‘which, unfortunately, continues to be fulfilled’. But the decisive thing is that they want to ‘believe’. In no way has criticism ‘caused them to falter’. Finally, Engelbert Kirschbaum records the following:

Has Peter’s tomb been found? We reply: the tropaion of the middle of the 2nd century has been found. However, the corresponding tomb of the apostle has not been ‘found’ in the same sense, but it has been demonstrated: that is, by means of a whole series of clues, its existence has been deduced, although there are no longer ‘material parts’ of this original tomb.

Ergo, the grave has been there, but it’s gone! ‘Fantasy would like to imagine how the corpse of the first pope rested on earth’, Kirschbaum writes, and assumes that Peter’s bones were removed from its tomb in the year 258—naturally, without the slightest demonstration.

When Venerando Correnti, a well-known anthropologist, studied the legs of the vecchio robusto (old robust), the presumed bones of Peter, he identified them as the remains of three individuals, among them with ‘almost total certainty’ (quasi ciertamente) those of an elderly woman of about seventy years old. However, on June 26, 1968, Pope Paul VI announced in his address on the occasion of a general audience: ‘The relics of St. Peter have been identified in a way that we can consider as convincing’.

In fact, any identification among the pile of buried remains was, both at the beginning and after two thousand years, impossible even if Peter was there. Erich Caspar has rightly pointed out, with a good dose of prudence, ‘that the existing doubts will never be eliminated’.

Within this same context, Johannes Haller has recalled, also rightly, the scepticism regarding the authenticity of the Schiller and Bach skulls, although the distance in time is much smaller and the conditions much better. Likewise, Armin von Gerkan writes that, even if Peter’s tomb were discovered with inscriptions that would attest to it—which is not the case—that would prove nothing ‘since that inhumation would come from the Constantinian era, and it is very possible it was a fiction’.

Norbert Brox, who in 1983 knows ‘with all certainty’ that Peter has been in Rome, confesses that the role that Peter played in the community of that city is unknown. ‘It is ruled out that he was its bishop’. The author of the First Epistle of Peter (the ‘apostle of Jesus Christ’ in ‘Babylon’, that is, Rome) did not present himself as bishop but, according to the Protestant theologian Felix Christ, ‘as a preacher and above all as an ‘elder’. Also for the Catholic Blank, Peter was not, ‘in all probability the first bishop of Rome’, and naturally not the founder of the Roman community.

Even for Rudolf Pesch, so faithful to the opposite line, there was no ‘such beginnings’, no episcopate in Rome. Neither Peter nor Paul—‘neither of the two apostles has had a direct’ successor ‘in a Roman bishopric’. However, at the end of his study, this Catholic declares that the papal primacy is ‘the Catholic primacy of Peter united to the succession of the apostles in the office of bishop, at the service of the faith of the Church, One and Holy’. This is the factum theologicum.

In plan English, hiding a fact to obtain what would not otherwise be achieved.

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Catholic Church Christendom Claudius Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) New Testament St Paul Suetonius Theology

Christianity’s Criminal History, 91

Below, an abridged translation from the second volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.

 
There is no evidence of Peter’s stay and death in Rome

Nor was he ever the bishop of Rome. It is an absurd idea, but it is the basis of a whole doctrine that the popes and their theologians literally put on the roof. There is no definitive proof, even that he was ever in Rome.

The Christian community of Rome was founded neither by Peter nor by Paul or the ‘blessed founding apostles’ (in the 6th century, Archbishop Dorotheus of Thessalonica attributed a double bishopric to them), but by unknown Judeo-Christians. Already then, between these and the Jews there were so serious disturbances that Emperor Claudius, in the middle of the 1st century, ordered the expulsion of Jews and Christians, among whom no differences were made: Judaeos, impulsore Chresto, assidue tumultuantes [Claudius] Roma expulit (‘Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, [Claudius] expelled them from Rome’—Suetonius).

Peter’s stay in Rome has never been demonstrated, although today, in the era of ecumenism and the approximation of Christian churches, even many Protestant scholars assume it. But assumptions are no demonstration. Even when according to legends full of fantasy, Peter suffered martyrdom in Rome and was crucified as his Lord and Saviour, although, out of a desire for humility, with his head down…

In reality, there is not a single solid proof about that. Not even Paul, who would be the one who founded the Roman community with Peter, and who writes his last epistles from Rome (although he never cites his adversary, Peter, in them) knows anything about it. Nor is there any data about it in the history of the apostles, the synoptic Gospels. Likewise, Clement’s important first Epistle, from the end of the 1st century, knows nothing of the history of ‘You are Peter’ or of another appointment by Jesus, nor of any decisive role of this apostle. Clement limits himself to reporting with imprecise words about his martyrdom. In short, throughout the 1st century there is silence in this regard, as well as in the 2nd century.

The oldest ‘witness’ of Peter’s stay in Rome, Dionysius of Corinth, is suspect. First, because his testimony comes from the year 170 approximately. Secondly, because this bishop is very far from Rome. And thirdly, because he affirms that Peter and Paul not only found together the Church of Rome but also that of Corinth: an aspect that contradicts Paul’s own testimony. Does a guarantor of this type deserve more confidence about the Roman tradition?

But those who doubt this, or even deny it, ‘only raise an infamous monument to their ignorance and fanaticism’ (Gröner, Catholic). But is not precisely the other way around? Is not fanaticism more frequent among the faithful than among the sceptics? And also ignorance? Don’t religions, Catholicism and the papacy live on it? Don’t their dogmas overflow in the irrational and supernatural, in logical absurdities? Do they fear nothing more than authentic criticism? Haven’t they instituted a strict censorship, the index, the ecclesiastical authorisation to be able to print, the anti-modernist oath and the bonfire?

Catholics need Peter’s visit, they need the corresponding activity of this man in Rome, who will head as ‘founder apostle’ the list of Roman bishops, the chain of his ‘successors’. In this theory the ‘apostolic’ tradition and the primacy of the pope are largely based.

They affirm therefore, especially in popular writings, that the presence of Peter in Rome ‘has been demonstrated by historical research beyond all doubt’ (F.J. Koch); ‘it is a result of the investigation confirmed in a general way’ (Kösters, Jesuit); it is ‘totally incontestable’ (Franzen); it is attested in ‘all the ancient Christian world’ (Schuck); there is ‘no’ news of antiquity ‘as sure as this’ (Kuhn), which does not make any more certain the image that Peter has ‘set up his episcopal chair, his seat, in Rome’ (Specht / Bauer).

In 1982, for the Catholic Pesch ‘there is no longer any doubt’ that Peter died martyred in Rome under Nero. (However, the martyred bishop Ignatius does not say anything about it in the 2nd century.) Pesch considers it unquestionable. But neither he nor anyone else provides any proof. For him it is only ‘an attractive idea to assume that Peter left for Rome’.

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Julian (novel) Literature

Julian, 39

Julian presiding at a conference of Sectarians
(Edward Armitage, 1875)

 
On 1 January 355 a warrant was issued for my arrest. But by then I had joined a religious order at Nicomedia. I am sure that at first none of the monks knew who I was, for I had come to them with head shaved and I looked like any other novice, Oribasius also protected me. When the imperial messenger arrived at Pergamon to arrest me, Oribasius said that I had gone to Constantinople.

I was a monk for six weeks. I found the life surprisingly pleasant. I enjoyed the austerity and the mild physical labour. The monks themselves were not very inspiring. I suppose some must have had the religious sense but the majority were simply vagrants who had tired of the road and its discomforts. They treated the monastery as though it were some sort of hostel rather than a place to serve the One God. Yet they were easy to get along with, and had it not been for the Galilean rituals I could have been quite happy.

I don’t suppose I shall ever know how I was discovered. Perhaps one of the monks recognized me or perhaps the secret agents in checking the rolls of the various monasteries for new arrivals had grown suspicious. No matter how it was done, it was done swiftly and efficiently. I was in the kitchen of the monastery, helping the baker to fire his oven, when a detachment of household troops came clattering in. Their commander saluted me. “The most noble Julian is to accompany us to Milan, by order of the Augustus.”

I made no protest. The monks stared in silence as I was taken from them and marched through the cold streets of Nicomedia to the imperial palace. Here I was received by the city prefect. He was nervous. Under similar circumstances five years earlier, Gallus had been ordered to Milan and he had been made Caesar of the East. The same fate might befall me. It was hard for an official to know how to behave.

“Naturally, we regret these security precautions.” The prefect indicated the guards. “But you will understand that the Grand Chamberlain’s office was, as always, most specific. No details were omitted.”

I was polite and non-committal. I was also somewhat cheered to learn that my military escort was to be commanded by Victor, the same officer I had met at Macellum.

Victor was apologetic. “I don’t enjoy this duty. I hope you realize that.”

“Neither do I.”

Victor frowned. “I particularly dislike taking a priest from a monastery.”

“I am not exactly a priest.”

“Even so, you were prepared to take orders. No one has the right to keep a man from God, not even the Emperor.” Victor is a devout Galilean; at that time he was convinced that I was also one. I said nothing to disabuse him.

The next day we set out for Constantinople. Though I was treated like a prince, not a prisoner, I took it as a bad omen that we were to follow the same overland route to Italy that Gallus had taken a few months before.

As we were leaving Nicomedia, I noticed a head on a pike. I hardly glanced at it, since there is almost always the head of some felon or other on display at the main gate of every town.

“I am sorry,” said Victor suddenly. “But we were ordered to use this gate.”

“Sorry for what?”

“To lead you past your brother’s head.”

“Gallus?” I turned clear round in my saddle and looked again at the head. The face had been so mutilated that the features were unrecognizable, but there was no mistaking the blond hair, matted though it was with dirt and blood.

“The Emperor has had it displayed in every city in the East.” I shut my eyes, on the verge of nausea.

“Your brother had many good qualities,” said Victor. “It was a pity.” Ever since, I have respected Victor. In those days when secret agents were everywhere and no man was safe, it took courage to say something good of a man executed for treason. Victor was equally outspoken in my defence. It was his view that the two charges made against me by the Grand Chamberlain’s office were not serious (that I had left Macellum without permission; that I had met Gallus in Constantinople when he was already accused of treason). Of the first charge I was innocent. The Grand Chamberlain himself had written Bishop George, giving me permission to go wherever I chose in the East. I had wisely kept a copy of this letter. As for the second charge, I had been summoned to Constantinople by the then reigning Caesar of the East. How could I refuse my lawful lord? “You have nothing to fear,” said Victor. But I was not optimistic.

Since I was travelling as a prince, I was greeted at each city by the local dignitaries. Concerned as I was about my own fate, I was still able to take some pleasure in seeing new things. I was particularly pleased when Victor allowed me to visit Ilios, a modern city near the ruins of ancient Troy.

At Ilios I was taken round by the local bishop. At first my heart sank: a Galilean bishop was the last sort of person who would be interested in showing me the temples of the true gods. But to my surprise, Bishop Pegasius was an ardent Hellenist. In fact, he was the one who was surprised when I asked him if we might visit the temples of Hector and Achilles.

“But of course. Nothing would give me greater pleasure. But I am surprised that you are interested in old monuments.”

“I am a child of Homer.”

“So is every educated man. But we are also Christians. Your piety is well known to us even here.” I could not be sure if he was being ironic or not. My friendship with Maximus was general knowledge and a good many Galileans were suspicious of me. On the other hand, my arrest in a monastery had given rise to a whole new legend: the priest-prince. In this role, I explained to the bishop that it was merely as a student of Homer that I wanted to see the famous temples our ancestors had built to those gods (false gods!) and heroes who had fought in this haunted place.

Pegasius took me first to the small temple which contains the famous bronze statue of Hector, said to be done from life. In the unroofed courtyard which surrounds the temple there also stands a colossal statue of Achilles, facing Hector in effigy as in life. To my astonishment, the altars in the courtyard were smouldering with sacrifice, while the statue of Hector shone from a recent anointing.

I turned to the Bishop. “What do these fires mean? Do the people still worship Hector?”

Pegasius was bland. “Of course they do. After all, it would be unnatural not to worship our brave men in the same way that we worship the martyrs who also lived here.”

“I’m not sure it is the same thing,” I said primly.

“Well, at least we have managed to preserve many beautiful works of art.” Then Pegasius proceeded to show me the temples of Athena and Achilles, both in perfect repair. I noted too, that whenever he passed the image of an old god, he did not hiss and make the sign of the cross the way most Galileans do, fearing contamination.

Pegasius proved to be a marvellous guide to Troy. I was particularly moved when he showed me the sarcophagus of Achilles. “There he lies, the fierce Achilles.” He tapped the ancient marble. “A hero and a giant—actually, a giant. Some years ago we opened the tomb and found the bones of a man seven feet tall, and where his heel had been there was the head of an arrow.”

It was awesome to be so close to the legendary past. Pegasius could see that I was impressed. Despite all efforts to the contrary, I am transparent as water. “Those were great days,” he said softly.

“They will come again,” I blurted out.

“I pray that you are right,” said the bishop of Ilios. Today this same Pegasius is my high priest of Cappadocia. He was never a Galilean though he pretended to be one, thinking that by rising to a position of importance among that depraved sect he would be able to preserve the temples of our ancestors. Now he revels in his freedom.

Priscus: And now he revels in life at the Persian court, where, according to gossip, he is a convert to Persian sun worship. Julian took up with the oddest people.

Categories
Free speech / Free press Holocaust

Ye shall know the truth…

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Autobiography Catholic Church Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Michelangelo New Testament St Paul

Christianity’s Criminal History, 90

Editor’s Note: The following section comes from the second volume of Deschner’s work (pic left). In the previous instances I had been using the third one but the order I have chosen for this site tries to follow, more or less, the order of what I hope will be the first volume in English of this abridged version of Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.

The envy that I feel for most Westerners is absolute. I was born in the Middle Ages in the sense that, unlike the vast majority of Christians, I got religion inculcated through the hardest psychic blows. A Christian today does not have the remotest idea of what Catholic education was like in other times. Living in Spain, for example, a woman told me that she knew ‘older people’ who feared the idea of eternal damnation: something that younger generations of Christians have been completely spared.

The number of times I heard my Catholic father quote a specific verse from the gospels, ‘Peter: you are a rock, and on this rock I will build my Church!’ (emphasis in my father’s voice) was such, and it made such a dent in my young mentality, that I cannot help feeling great liberation when a non-Christian scholar, like Deschner, debunks those apocryphal verses.

Christianity not only irreparably damaged my life. It is likely that it has irreparably damaged the white race, on which this religion was imposed. Only the outcome of history will show if the white man will get rid of his ethnosuicidal tendencies: a psychic malware programmed, in large part, by the religion that destroyed my life.

Also raised as a Catholic, Deschner wrote:

 

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Neither Jesus instituted the papacy nor Peter was bishop of Rome

The Catholic Church bases the foundation of the papacy, and of itself, in the Matthew passage: ‘You are Peter, and on this rock [petrus] I will build my Church’ (Mt 16:18).

In huge golden mosaic letters these words appear, the most discussed of the Bible, in the dome of St. Peter built by Michelangelo. But they are missing in three of the four Gospels, especially in Mark, the oldest of the evangelists. In fact, Jesus never uttered them. This is today ‘the certain outcome of biblical exegesis’ (Brox).

In spite of this, the Catholic Church continues to maintain its ‘divine foundation’. It has no choice: the Church has affirmed it for two thousand years. However, not a few of its theologians capitulate now. Many of them, following with delay the steps of quite conservative Protestants, have developed a language that ‘scientifically’ makes them preserve half the face and allows them not to lose everything before their superiors. They paraphrase the lack of authenticity of the ‘foundational words of the Church’ in the following way: Matthew does not refer to it historically but he composes it theologically. Or they claim the ‘rock’ is a commandment uttered after the ‘resurrection’. The Catholics with fewer detours explain the ‘promise of Peter’ as a later interpolation, simply as an invention of the evangelists.

However, perhaps Peter had a kind of primacy, a certain leading role. But perhaps only temporarily and in certain areas, not, of course, after the ‘council of the apostles’. Paul, who opposes Peter ‘in his face’ in Antioch, insults him by calling him a hypocrite and, in an open manner, questions his demands. Elsewhere in the ‘Holy Scriptures’ there are also ‘anti-Petrine’ tendencies. And that Peter retained his primacy, if he had one, even if it was only an invention of the ‘Petrist party’, does not appear anywhere in the New Testament. Nothing is said.

However, even in the case—which must be excluded for many reasons—that the ‘primacy words’ came from Jesus, the Church could not explain how they were transmitted from Peter to the ‘popes’, since they not only apply to the apostle but also to his ‘successors in office’. Neither the Bible nor any other historical source indicates that Peter appointed his successor.

More than one Catholic ‘sees himself in trouble when trying to explain from a historical and critical point of view the strength of the biblical foundations for the papacy’ (Stockmeier). The most courageous theologians admit that ‘there is nothing’ of a succession of Peter (De Vries), which ‘in the New Testament cannot be seen anywhere’ (Schnackenburg). In effect, the theologian Josef Blank asks himself how primitive Christianity understood this sentence. Did it mean Rome or the primacy of the Roman bishop as successor to the Apostle Peter? ‘The answer is, plain and simple: No!’

Apologetics is based on indications from Jesus to Peter: that he should catch men, that he takes the keys to the kingdom of heaven; that all that he unites or desires on earth will be united or disunited in heaven and finally: ‘Strengthen your brothers’, ‘Feed my flock’. However, many other Gospel or New Testament parallels show that the five dispositions of Jesus were not linked in principle to Peter. And above all, of a successor, even of a superior of the Roman community as director of a global Church, it is not spoken at all in any early Christian text.

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Psychiatry

View from the tower

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Child abuse Pseudoscience Psychiatry

From the Great Confinement of Louis XIV of France to a Chemical Gulag (part 5)

Faced with a multi-billion dollar business that has subtly bought the doctors, universities and the media, it is virtually impossible for the civil society to see what is happening. Just as in Heinroth’s time political actions were covered up in medical garb when the ideals of the Revolution were in the air, after the rebellion of the 1960s psychiatry reacted by covering itself more and more with the clothes of hard science, the paradigm of our days. In 1999 Professor Leonard Duhl of the University of California defined mental illness and poverty in the most perfect sense of the ideologists of the Great Confinement of the 17th century: ‘the inability to command events that affect one’s life’.[31]

The consolidation and enlargement of the psychiatric power continues in the 21st century. The tenfold increase in the use of neuroleptics in minors since the mid-1990s to the first five years of the new century, which is done with the publicity stunt that they are ‘at risk’, shows the cynicism of this marketing design.

Heinroth was a great visionary. He foresaw that drugs could be the prisons of the future. Although the neuroleptics had not been invented, Heinroth already spoke of ‘pharmaceutical means of restriction’ and ‘restrictive surgical means’, anticipating the lobotomy that Moniz would develop a century later.

Since the regulations that would define the policies of the psychiatrists were enacted in the 19th century, the expansion of the chemical Gulag meant that long-term involuntary hospitalization changed to long-term voluntary (or involuntary) drug addiction. Psychiatrists, of course, would say things differently. They say that in the treatment of mental illnesses the most outstanding event of the 20th century was the capability to synthesise these substances in laboratories. But this is one of the allegations of scientific progress that, analysed closely, is discovered fallacious.

In psychopharmacology there are no biographies of John, Peter or Mary when they are prescribed neuroleptics, neither when they are prescribed antidepressants, when stimulants are prescribed, or when tranquilizers are prescribed. There are no people in biological psychiatry, or biologicistic psychiatry as I prefer to call it, only biochemical radicals that have to be normalized by other chemical substances. In an age that seeks easy solutions to the problems of the world, it is not necessary to delve into the past. Just calculate the dose of ‘happy pills’, be it Prozac or any other.

This also happens with the abuse of illegal drugs and the only difference is that the psychotropic drugs are legal. Approximately thirty million people have taken Prozac (fluoxetine), a drug that Newsweek has advertised with cover articles. The situation points more and more to the scenes of Brave New World of Aldous Huxley where, at the request of the State, every citizen consumed the drug called soma.

(First edition in the United Kingdom of Huxley’s famous novel.) In the medical profession the environmental factors that prick our souls have disappeared from the map. If the philosophy of the biologicistic psychiatrists is right, all our passions, traumas and conflicts, loves and fears, are not the result of our desires in conflict with the external world, but of the swings of small polypeptides in our bodies that are transformed into despair.

In the preface to some editions of the DSM it is said that the future will completely erase the ‘unfortunate’ distinction between the popular concept of mental disorder and physical illness. On January 1, 1990, California became the first American state to accept the main dogma in psychiatry: that mental disorders are, in reality, diseases originating in brain dysfunctions. For example, it is claimed that a high dopamine causes madness, and a low serotonin, depression. (This reminds me that for Benjamin Rush, the father of American psychiatry, insanity was caused by low blood circulation in the head.) But in real neurological science the dopamine and serotonin claims have been debunked.[32]

Bioreductionist psychiatry is anything that sees supposed biological abnormalities in the body rather traumatic events in the family or the environment. It is like studying trauma not as a reaction to an outrageous act, say, the incestuous rape of Dora [mentioned in the online book], but rather studying the temporal lobe of the raped girl, where the treatment is headed. The drugs, or the hammer of the electroshock, are the result of the medical axiom: ‘He who only knows how to use the hammer treats all things as if they were nails’.

I am not caricaturising the profession. In November 2002 I had a long discussion with Dr. Miguel Pérez de la Mora, an experimental cell physiology physician of the Department of Biophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and director of the Mexican Academy of Sciences. In the discussion with Pérez de la Mora I was struck by the fact that, when I mentioned the mental state of the inmates in the concentration camps, my contender immediately jumped to the subject of the amygdala and the anxiety that he studied in his laboratory: an anxiety understood in a strictly biological way.

In our surreal discussion, I took a long time to make the obvious point to the doctor: that the cause of the mental stress of the inmates were the brutalities in the camps. But even granted this point Pérez de la Mora added—without laboratory tests—that only those inmates in the fields who presumably had a genetic predisposition could have been the ones who became upset. For this neurologist and his colleagues, the concentration camps were a mere ‘trigger mechanism’ for the disorder of a prisoner whose biology, presumably, was already defective!

I must clarify the concept of ‘trigger mechanism’ of a supposed latent mental disorder.

This is one of the main mantras of the psychiatrist, and exemplifies what I have called bioreductionism. For the bioreductionist, the human rights and psychological trauma are located in the background, and the only thing that matters is the genome project and the search for the ‘gene’ responsible for the disorder (or another strictly biological line).

The specialty of Pérez de la Mora is studying anxiety disorders in the laboratories of the UNAM, and during our discussion he confessed that the firm that manufactures the psychiatric drug Valium had financed his research. I pointed to Pérez de la Mora that a research financed by the same drug companies produces results with a clear biological bias. The eminent scientist told me that researchers rarely sell themselves to companies.

The reality is that the way that the pharmaceutical multinationals buy the scientists is infinitely subtler than direct bribery. Roche, which manufactures Valium, simply finances professionals who postulate biological hypotheses, and no other. Never Roche or the competition would give us a penny to those who investigate psychological trauma. Our line of research is a proposal that requires social engineering and changes in the nuclear family to avoid mistreatment of the children. But in our world nobody wants to finance the researcher who puts the parents in the dock.

For example, no institution funded the research to write this online book. On the other hand, the medical model promotes the drugging of the abused child without changing the parental mistreatment that caused the mental distress in the first place. Only in this way does the field enjoy the approval of society. If the anxiety that Perez de la Mora studies, or panic, depression, addictions, phobias, mania, obsessions and compulsions are the result of an abnormal biology, the human and existential content that has caused these experiences becomes irrelevant.

The thinking of our time is being confined to a one-dimensional world as far as mental health is concerned. Bioreductionism, the ideology of the medical doctors with blinders that do not want to see the social sides, is a doctrine whose conceptual frame is quite simple: determinism and reductionism (‘Your biology is your destiny’). But as psychiatrists present this doctrine to us with all its scientific sophistication, the matter apparently is complicated. The following Szaszian analogy illustrates how simple, at the bottom, biopsychiatry is.

The primitive witch-doctor, who tried to understand Nature in human terms, treated objects as agents: a position known as animism. The modern witch-doctor, who tries to understand the subjectivity of man in terms of Nature, treats agents as objects: a position known as bioreductionism. Primitive man has been demystified in our scientific era. Who will demystify psychiatry doctors?

There is a small group of thinkers who can do it: those who know how to distinguish between good and bogus science.

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[31] Leonard Duhl, quoted in Szasz: Pharmacracy, p. 95.

[32] See Valenstein, Blaming the Brain.

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Child abuse Evil Psychiatry

From the Great Confinement of Louis XIV of France to a Chemical Gulag (part 4)

From pesticides to antipsychotics

May 1954 is a memorable date for psychiatrists. For the first time, a neuroleptic (popularly known as ‘antipsychotic’) was marketed, chlorpromazine, commercially named Thorazine in the United States and Largactil in some European countries, which revolutionised treatment in the profession.

The first generation of phenothiazines from which chlorpromazine emerged had been used for pesticide purposes in agriculture. In addition, experiments were known to induce catalepsy in animals.

The neuroleptic was a chemical intentionally designed as a neurotoxin, but millions of Thorazine prescriptions were prescribed in the United States. Under the effects of chlorpromazine, patients now could be ‘moved about like puppets’, and the first psychiatrist who experimented in the United States with this neuroleptic said that it ‘may prove to be a pharmacological substitute for lobotomy’.[23] The campaign to sell Thorazine to the American society was so fierce that the same professionals called ‘Thorazine assault troops’ the propagandists of the company that manufactured them.[24]

This was the first massive incursion in the world of public relations carried out by a pharmaceutical company in a market that previously was very small: institutional psychiatry. In its first year of marketing, Smith, Klein & French obtained 75 million dollars with that drug. The rest, as they say, is history.[25]

In 1955, Time magazine called the professionals who opposed chlorpromazine ‘ivory tower critics’. Gregory Zilboorg, the same psychiatrist who held the authors of the medieval Malleus Maleficarum in high esteem, said that the public was being deceived and that the drug only served to control the inpatient. Another doctor raised his voice and said that chlorpromazine was more dangerous than heroin and cocaine. But the publicity muffled all internal dissidence.

By the mid-1960s more than ten thousand medical articles had been written about chlorpromazine. There were television campaigns that omitted any mention of the Parkinsonian-like effects of the drug, and the magazines were paid substantial sums if they advertised in their main articles the miraculous chemical. Time, Fortune and the New York Times were some of these prostitutes of the pharmaceutical corporations.

The use of neuroleptics soon was considered cutting-edge among psychiatric treatments, triumphing over the induced commas with insulin, electroshock and lobotomy. In the 1960s the revolution of this miraculous alchemy, from pesticides to antipsychotics, was consummated and the mindset of the public had been implanted with the message that they were ‘anti-psychotic’ medicines: an idea that persists today.

By 1970, nineteen million prescriptions for neuroleptics had been prescribed, and not just for people who were disturbed. Some juvenile delinquents and rebellious teenagers who were given the neuroleptic called it ‘zombie juice’, but the professionals counterattacked by introducing the euphemism ‘major tranquilizers’.

At the end of March 2001 in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, the prescription number of so-called ‘anti-psychotics’ was estimated in 43 million. In the case of children and adolescents, one study showed that between 1987 and 1996 the number of children who were given the drug had doubled. Between 1996 and 2000 the figure multiplied to reach the figure of one in fifty, although the most important age group was between 5 and 9 years old.[26]

The propaganda through which multinational drug companies infect civil society about the ‘need’ to take these neurotoxins is performed through campaigns of ‘education’ to medical visitors and counsellors of schools and parents. Joe Sharkey, a financial journalist and author of Bedlam: Greed, Profiteering and Fraud in a Mental Health System Gone Crazy, has reported that by the end of the 1980s, 25 percent of the earnings paid by health insurance went to the pockets of those who work in the area of mental health, largely due to the psychiatric treatment of these rebellious adolescents.[27]

Furthermore, since the 1970s these professionals entered into a frank association with the drug companies. The consortium between psychiatrists and Big Pharma (pharmaceutical multinationals) is so brazen that all psychiatric conferences are financed by these corporations, and in some medical centres all laboratory research is also financed by multinationals. These companies also fund psychiatric journals. In addition, a study of eight hundred articles by some of the most prestigious scientific journals that do not specialise in psychiatry (Science, Nature, Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Medicine) found that 34 percent of the authors had financial interests with the Big Pharma.

The pharmaceutical industry is the largest sponsor of psychiatric research in the United States, including research in universities and medical schools. It is estimated that in 1994 alone it spent one and a half billion dollars in academic research.[28] Some people have used the expression ‘Is academic medicine for sale?’ to describe this situation.

This is fundamental to understand why I say that psychiatrists, despite their impeccable medical credentials, enact a biased science. It is clear that the sponsorship that these companies provide results in biologicistic and pro-drug bias in research. The editors of specialised journals are very cautious when publishing articles by professionals who criticise biological psychiatry, especially if they question the effectiveness of psychotropic drugs or if they mention the terrible effects of drugs, such as tardive dyskinesia and dystonia produced by the so-called ‘antipsychotic’, symptoms which doctors euphemistically call ‘extrapyramidal symptoms’.

Drug companies spend huge sums on advertisements that appear in specialised journals, and the publishers are not willing to offend their sponsors with articles that denounce the epidemics of drug-induced tardive dyskinesia, on the threat that the companies will withdraw the advertising. The economic dependence of the journals with these companies leads not only to discretion, but many authors resort to self-censorship. As some mental health professionals say, the pharmaceutical industry owns the data obtained in the clinical tests it subsidizes and decides which studies should be published; chooses the authors, writes the articles and even the reviews to interpret the data.[29]

On the other hand, it is natural for new professionals in medical research to choose the area of the most promising future, that which is generously financed by the drug companies. That is where the funds for their careers are found. There is a whole book on the subject, How the Pharmaceutical Industry Bankrolled the Unholy Marriage Between Science and Business of Linda Marsa, and this trend is much more evident in psychiatry. In a psychiatric journal there is less guarantee of scientific accuracy than in other specialised journals. In the profession it is no longer heard, as it used to be in the 1950s and 1960s, that abusive parents drive their children mad. The economic interests to hide this reality are enormous.

For example, in the mid-1990s a pharmaceutical market analyst claimed that the US $1 billion market for neuroleptics could grow to 4.5 billion a year. In May 2001, a report by the Wall Street Journal evaluated the neuroleptic market at 5 billion dollars a year, five hundred percent growth in five years.

The total sales of neuroleptics in the United States in 2000 was 2.5 billion dollars, and international sales reached 6 billion dollars that same year. Only the neuroleptic Zyprexa gave Eli Lilly $ 1 billion in profits in 1998 (the incorrectly referred to as ‘antipsychotics’ are even used in veterinary!). In 1999/2000, the United States led the Western consumption of neuroleptics with 65 percent, followed by Europe with 22 percent and Latin America with 2.5 percent. (I am not counting Russia, Asia or Africa). Given that there are many people who want to control others in prisons, asylums, insane hospitals, correctional facilities for minors and even at home, the growth of market demand for these terrible drugs is comprehensible.[30]

These figures are key to understanding the psychiatry of our days: a chemical Gulag.
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[23] Heinz Lehmann, quoted in ibid., p. 144.

[24] These words from the pharmaceutical company Smith, Kline & French appear in Loren Mosher: ‘Soteria and other alternatives to acute psychiatric hospitalization’ in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (1999, 187), that I read on the internet.

[25] Loren Mosher, Richard Gosden & Sharon Beder, ‘Las empresas farmacéuticas y la esquizofrenia’ en Modelos de locura, pp. 141s.

[26] These figures appear in Modelos de locura, pages 124s.

[27] Sharkey: Bedlam, p. 4. Sharkey’s book takes as a central theme the unjustified hospitalisations set up by psychiatrists, especially children and adolescents, to get as much money as possible from the insurance companies of their parents.

[28] This information appears in Valenstein: Blaming the Brain, pp. 199 & 187.

[29] Modelos de locura, p. 144.

[30] See Whitaker: Mad in America, and Valenstein: Blaming the Brain, chapter 6. See also Richard Gosden and Sharon Beder: ‘Pharmaceutical industry agenda setting in mental health policies’ in Ethical Human Science and Services (Autumn/Winter 2000). I wrote this piece fifteen years ago and have not checked the latest stats in scholarly journals. However, I keep watching Robert Whitaker’s updated videos in YouTube. Nothing in recent years has moved me to change my mind.

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