Chapter 6: War as Righteous Rape and Purification
"War! It meant a purification,
a liberation...and an extraordinary sense of hope"
|
-Thomas Mann
|
Happy people don't start wars. They
don't need "purifying" or "liberation," and
their everyday lives are already full of hope and meaning, so they
don't need a war to save them from anything.
What sort of strange emotional disorder
is it that war cleanses, liberates and saves people from? And how
can killing, raping and torturing people be acts that purify and
restore hope in life? Obviously war is a serious psychopathological
condition, a recurring human behavior pattern whose motives and
causes have yet to be examined on any but the most superficial levels
of analysis.
STANDARD THEORIES OF CAUSATION OF WAR
All standard theories of war deny that it is an emotional disorder
at all.1 War, unlike individual violence, is usually
seen solely as a response to events outside the individual.
Nations that start wars are not considered emotionally disturbed--they
are either considered as rational or they are "evil,"
a religious category. Although homicide and suicide are now studied
as clinical disorders,2 war, unfortunately, is not.
Most historians of war have given up
in advance any attempt to understand its causes, claiming "it
is simply not the historian's business to give explanations."3
Genocide, in particular, appears outside the universe of research
into motivations, since if one tries to understand Holocaust perpetrators,
one is said to "give up one's right to blame them." At
best, historians avoid the psychodynamics of the perpetrators of
wars entirely, saying, "Leave motivation to the psychologists."4
The standard explanations given for
war by political scientists and anthropologists equally avoid clinical
understanding. Instead, they break down war causes into three general
categories:
1.Instincts and Other Tautologies:
The most popular cause of war is that it is a result of a human
instinct for destruction. From Clausewitz's "instinctive
hostility"5 and Freud's "instinct for hatred
and aggression"6 down to biologists' statements
that war is "macho male sexual selection" that "accelerates
cultural evolution,"7 none of them notice that
simply assuming an instinct for war without any neurobiological,
genetic evidence at all is wholly tautological, saying no more
than "the group's desire for war is caused by the individual's
desire for war." Since tribes and states spend more of their
time at peace than at war, one must also then posit an "instinct
for peace," which, through group cooperation, should favor
survival even more. One can proliferate tautological instincts
at will, but only evidence counts. Unfortunately, all tests for
the heritability for violence have failed completely.8
The best study of instinct theories concludes: "Human warfare,
and indeed killing, are too rare to be the product of a drive
that needs to be satisfied. There is no drive or instinct that
builds up, gives rise to aggression, is satiated upon release,
and then builds up again...Furthermore, humans also have a genetic
inheritance shared with fellow primates for peacemaking, and that
propensity must also be factored into the equation."9
Tautological explanations proliferate
in the field of war studies. Historians are particularly prone
to claiming that the reason a lot of people do something is because
they all are just following each other, a perfect tautology. War
is often said, for instance, to be caused by "ideology"
or by "the culture of militarism" of this or that state10
or by "a marked tendency for the military to prepare offensive
military plans."11 But saying war is caused by
an arms race is about as meaningful as saying homicide is caused
by someone buying a gun. What one expects when asking for the
motivation for homicide is not how the perpetrator got the weapon
but the internal development of his psyche plus the events leading
up to the violent act. Besides, empirically most states start
wars without an arms buildup. Germany in 1913-1914, for instance,
spent less on her military than France and Russia,12
yet began WWI because she felt insecure with a smaller army than
other countries and felt paranoid about being attacked.
Yet another common tautological reason
for wars is that they are "preventive." Bismarck put
that reason in its place when he was urged to start a preventive
war by saying it was "as irrational as committing suicide
because one was afraid to die."13 America even
today continues to have a "first strike nuclear deterrence"
preventive war policy that is based on the causing of 600 million
deaths as "acceptable."14 Just as meaningless
are all the theories of war being caused by "lack of collective
security," or "the anarchic nature of the state system"
or similar systems theories. The lack of instruments to prevent
wars is a symptom not a cause; presumably if one could discover
the underlying causes of war and reduce their power, states would
then set up international systems of settling differences and
of providing collective security. As Holsti puts it, "To
argue that we have war because of systems structures is analogous
to an argument that we have automobile accidents because we have
highways."15 One must not reify groups; only individuals
have motives.
2. Greed as a Motive for War:
War is usually claimed to be purely plunder by social scientists:
"War is defined as stealing en masse what other men own."16
Yet we would never accept greed as a real motive from a man who
murders his family after taking out life insurance on them, nor
would we accept the excuse of greed from a man who raped and murdered
women and then took some of their jewelry. Even thieves turn out
to have deeper motives than greed. As James Gilligan, a prison
psychiatrist who has spent his life analyzing the lives of criminals,
puts it, "Some people think armed robbers commit their crimes
in order to get money. But when you sit down and talk with people
who repeatedly commit such crimes, what you hear is, 'I never
got so much respect before in my life as I did when I first pointed
a gun at somebody.'"17
That anyone should imagine that hundreds
of millions of people can enthusiastically engage in mutual mass
butchery over minor pieces of territory is so patently ludicrous
that it is a wonder anyone could ever have taken it seriously;
yet this what historians and political scientists still ask us
to believe. The entire "rational decisions" school of
war theorists, all of whom claim utility as the ultimate motive
for war, run up against the extensive empirical research done
on hundreds of wars in recent years that consistently shows that
wars are destructive not rational, that wars cost even winners
more than they gain, that those who begin wars usually lose them
and that leaders who go to war historically never actually calculate
before they do so whether the gains will exceed the costs.18
Zinnes summarizes the results of all this testing of war as a
rational activity motivated by materialistic gain as follows:
"After thirty years of empirical research, in which we have
devoted an enormous amount of time to collecting, measuring and
summarizing observations about nation-state behavior, we cannot
find any patterns" that show any relationship at all between
war frequency and economics, population density or any other material
condition of states.19 Otterbein even shows that cross-culturally
there is "no influence on war of economic or ecological factors;"
even tribal warfare destroys far more than it gains, and tribes
rarely even pretend they are going to war to gain territory.20
Rummel concurs, finding from his huge historical database that
a country's propensity to go to war is unrelated to its economic
development, its technological abilities or even its military
capabilities.21
The costs of wars have repeatedly
been demonstrated to be far in excess of any gains that could
be hoped for.22 In Vietnam, it cost America hundreds
of thousands of dollars to kill each enemy soldier; the world
even today spends trillions of dollars a year to fight wars and
maintain military forces, far in excess of anything that could
be gained by war. In fact, wars are so self-destructive that when
a nation goes to war the people must at some level realize that
they are engaging on a truly suicidal venture. Often, a careful
examination of the actual historical decision process reveals
explicitly suicidal imagery. As just one example from many, when
Tojo called together the Japanese leadership to decide whether
or not to attack Pearl Harbor, he went around the table and asked
each minister to tell what he thought would happen if they attacked
the U.S. Each one forecast decisive defeat. It was so obvious
that an attack would be suicidal for Japan that Tojo ended up
saying, "There are times when we must have the courage to
do extraordinary things--like jumping, with eyes closed, off the
veranda of the Kiyomizu Temple."23 The Kiyomizu
Temple was well known to all present as the place in Kyoto where
people committed suicide.
3. Stress Theories of War:
Even those theories of war that allow that it is wholly irrational
end up blaming economic stress as the cause of the irrationality.
"Hard times make people feel threatened and frustrated,"
so they go to war from the emotional stress of economic downturns.
Most leaders who try to promote peace cite the stress theory:
"By eliminating the economic dissatisfaction that breeds
war we might have a chance for lasting peace" (Sumner Hull)
or "Freedom from fear is eternally linked with freedom from
want" (Franklin Roosevelt).24 Marxist theorists
in particular believe wars break out because of capitalist economic
downturns. In particular, most theorists believe WWII was caused
by stresses of the economic Depression.
The problem with these stress theories
is that empirically wars usually occur during economic upswings,
not during depressions. Wars not only occur far more frequently
after prosperous periods, but are longer and bigger after prosperity,
"six to twenty times bigger as indicated by battle fatalities."25
Macfie finds "the outbreak of wars has avoided years of heaviest
unemployment...excessive expansions are required to germinate
the seeds of war."26 In Europe since 1815, no
great-power wars have been started during a depression.27
WWI broke out after 40 years of growth of real incomes for workers
(80 percent higher for Germans),28 and even WWII broke
out several years after Germany had regained and surpassed pre-Depression
levels of production--the supposed cause, economic distress, having
disappeared by 1939. Wars are in fact prosperity-reducing
rituals. They are responses to what we have earlier termed growth
panic--responses to progress and prosperity, not to depletion.
What is depleted when nations decide to go to war is their emotional
not their economic resources.
By examining only the sociogenic and
not the psychogenic sources of war, major theorists to date have
been disappointed by the total lack of results of their research.
David Singer concludes that the study of war has failed to "achieve
any significant theoretical breakthrough" and is saddened by
the fact that no one has found any "compelling explanation"
for war.29 Bruce Bueno de Mesquita admits that "we
know little more about the general sources of international conflict
today than was known to Thucydides...[perhaps] scientific explanations
of such conflicts are not possible."30 Such extreme
pessimism is understandable. Clausewitz's dicta that war is an extension
of political policy has been fully discredited, and all the usual
reasons for wars --for territory, for revenge, to obtain sacrificial
prisoners, to obtain coups, as God's will, to stop dominoes
from falling--turn out to be only rationalizations.31
But the failure to find valid motives for wars only applies to sociogenic
theories, ones that carefully avoid the psychological model of human
violence that has proved so fruitful in the study of the causes
of homicide and suicide. We will first turn to the results of the
recent clinical studies of individual violence before we propose
our psychogenic theory of war.
THE CLINICAL STUDY OF HUMAN VIOLENCE
Because those societies which have the harshest child-rearing practices
have been shown to produce low-esteem adults who have the highest
incidence of murder, suicide and war,32 the study of
human violence can most fruitfully begin with examining the findings
of clinicians who have closely interviewed murderers and determined
their motives.
Most of what we usually believe about
interpersonal violence is unconfirmed by statistics. Homicide is
not regularly higher in big cities; cross-cultural studies find
there is "no significant associations between community size
and homicide or assault."33 Nor do men assault their
spouses more often than women do; studies in various countries show
"wives hit their husbands at least as often as husbands hit
their wives,"34 although men do more damage with
their assaults.35 When war is counted as violence, men
constitute at least 75 percent of the victims of lethal physical
violence in the United States, and die from two to five times as
often from personal violence as women do world-wide.36
Mothers are not more often gentle while fathers mainly do the hitting
of children; in fact, American mothers today abuse their children
nearly twice as much as fathers.37
Both statistically and clinically,
researchers have found violent adults have only one thing in common:
poor childrearing.38 Studies of homicidal youths, for
instance, found 90 percent could be documented as coming from severely
emotional, physical or sexually abusive families.39 James
Gilligan summarizes his decades of interviewing murderers:
In the course of my work with the
most violent men in maximum-security settings, not a day goes
by that I do not hear reports--often confirmed by independent
sources--of how these men were victimized during childhood. Physical
violence, neglect, abandonment, rejection, sexual exploitation
and violation occurred on a scale so extreme, so bizarre, and
so frequent that one cannot fail to see that the men who occupy
the extreme end of the continuum of violent behavior in adulthood
occupied an extreme end of the continuum of violent child abuse
earlier in life....As children, these men were shot, axed, scalded,
beaten, strangled, tortured, drugged, starved, suffocated, set
on fire, thrown out of windows, raped, or prostituted by mothers
who were their "pimps"...
The cause of adult violence, says Gilligan,
is a "collapse of self-esteem" triggered by an incident
in which the murderer imagines himself or herself to be humiliated
and shamed, resorting in what he calls a "logic of shame, a
form of magical thinking that says, ‘If I kill this person
in this way, I will kill shame--I will be able to protect myself
from being exposed and vulnerable to and potentially overwhelmed
by the feeling of shame.'"41 Gilligan points out
that shame is at the root of mass violence too, pointing out that
"Hitler came to power on the campaign promise to undo ‘the
shame of Versailles'--and clearly that promise, and the sensitivity
to shame from which it derived its power, struck a responsive chord
in the German people as a whole."42 Though criminologists
report that in homicides "the most common altercation was of
relatively trivial origin: insult, curse, jostling, etc.,"43
these shaming events turn childhood traumas into current rage, what
Katz terms "righteously enraged slaughter,"44
producing a "tremendous rush [that is] almost orgasmic"
for the murderer45 as they avenge all their past hurts
and humiliations. "All violence," says Gilligan, "is
an attempt to achieve justice."46 As we shall shortly
see, this includes mass violence as well, which also involves imagining
one achieves justice through violent, righteous vengeance for earlier
wrongs.
THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF VIOLENCE
People start wars when something changes in their brains, neurotransmitters,
hormones and cellular neuropeptide systems.47 This "something"
is the result of a developmental process that begins before birth
and is turned into a capacity for violence during childhood. Contrary
to the views of Freud and Piaget, children are actually quite empathic
toward others from birth if treated well. Neonates cry in response
to the crying of another baby; "even 6-month-olds...responded
to distressed peers with actions such as leaning toward, gesturing
toward, touching or otherwise contacting the peer."48
Babies who are treated well can be quite generous with their love,
gently touching and patting other babies and even their mothers
when they notice they look sad.
But the majority of children throughout
history--particularly boys, who are physically and emotionally abused
more than girls--feel so helpless and afraid that they grow up in
what has been called a "culture of cruelty,"49
where they graduated from violent families to form gangs and try
to dominate and hurt each other in order to be perpetrators rather
than victims, thereby preparing themselves for cooperating in the
violence of war. In one study, for instance, Lewis and Pincus report
"a significantly greater proportion of very violent children
demonstrated...paranoid symptomology [and] believed that someone
was going to hurt them...constantly feeling the need to carry weapons
such as guns and metal pipes for their own protection..."50
The more violent children, Lewis reports, "had been physically
abused by mothers, fathers, stepparents, other relatives and ‘friends'
of the family. The degree of abuse to which they were subjected
was often extraordinary. One parent broke her son's legs with a
broom; another broke his fingers and his sister's arm; another chained
and burned his son; and yet another threw his son downstairs...Several
children witnessed their fathers, stepfathers, or mothers' boyfriends
slash their mothers with knives. They saw their siblings tortured
with cigarette butts, chained to beds, and thrown into walls."51
Severe neglect and emotional abuse have been shown to be equivalent
to and often worse than physical abuse in producing lasting traumatic
effects upon children.52
The neurobiological affects of trauma
upon children have been extensively studied. As we have discussed
earlier, serotonin levels are reduced by trauma, and are found in
reduced levels in adult antisocial personalities, because the lower
level of their inhibiting ability allows less control over impulsivity
and therefore higher rates of violence.53 External stress
also increases corticosterone production, decreasing the effectiveness
of the hippocampal system which evaluates the emotional meaning
of incoming stimuli.54 Psychopathic personalities have
been found to be "actually slower to respond emotionally than
the rest of us...Even when they're just sitting around, antisocial
individuals are more low-key than the average person" because
their noradrenergic behavioral inhibition systems were crippled
due to excessive early neglect, traumas and over control by caretakers.55
Very early maternal neglect in particular produces an undersized
orbitofrontal cortex--the brain region behind the eyes that allows
one to reflect on one's emotions and to empathize with the feelings
of others--resulting in such a diminished self and such a low capacity
for empathy that the baby grows up literally unable to feel guilt
about hurting others.56 Thus swaddled babies abandoned
to cribs in dark rooms--as most children were in history--who totally
miss the mother's gaze and loving interaction in their early years
are programmed for later impulse disorders, psychopathic personalities
and the need for killing in war, simply because they never have
developed what today we consider "normal-sized" orbitofrontal
cortexes through sustained eye contact and mutual play with the
mother. As Shore puts it:
The orbitofrontal cortex functionally
mediates the capacity to empathize with the feelings of others
and to reflect on internal emotional states, one's own and others'....The
socioaffective stimulation produced by the mother's face facilitates
the experience-dependent growth...children deprived of early visual
sensory stimulation...frequently show impairments in representational
and affective functions that are responsible for severe emotional
problems.57
Lesions of the orbitofrontal cortex
produce unregulated aggression and dramatic mood state alterations
in both humans and other animals because "unmodulated rage
represents a hyperactivation of the...dopaminergic system [and]
impulsive acting out episodes ]of] narcissistic rage."58
Children neglected and abused in early months "manifest pathological
self-importance, or narcissism, displayed as...grandiosity, recklessness...insecurity
and emotional shallowness [plus] the inability to feel ordinary
human empathy and affection for others and the perpetrating of repeated
antisocial acts."59 Thus the slow evolution of childrearing
results in a slow historical increase in size in the average orbitofrontal
cortex and more balanced serotonin, dopamine and other hormonal
levels, resulting in a steady reduction of grandiosity, paranoia
and uncontrolled rage and a diminishing historical rates of infanticide,
homicide, suicide and war deaths.
DISSOCIATION OF THE TWO BRAINS
One of the most important findings of Athens from his lifetime of
interviewing of violent criminals is that before they kill they
consult "phantom communities" who approve of their violent
acts as revenges for past humiliations.60 These phantom
communities are, of course, identical to the "social alters"
I have discussed previously, where dissociated violent selves and
internalized harmful caretakers are kept and engaged in dialogues
that influence our deepest emotions and approve of our most violent
behavior. Athens determined that violence didn't just follow trauma;
it required a further "belligerency stage of violentization"
during which the brutalized subject resolves in consultation with
his inner phantoms, his alters, that he or she has had enough, that
violence is sometimes necessary if one isn't to remain a victim
one's whole life and that he or she will now use physical violence
for those who unduly provoke or humiliate him or her. These alters
are often actual inner voices telling the criminal what to do, so
that
their decisions to act violently
followed from a dialogue with their phantom communities--the "voices"
were their phantom companions coming in exceptionally loud and
clear....Lews...corroborated Athens's finding that the self incorporates
phantom companions when she examined Arthur Shawcross, the Rochester,
New York, so-called serial killer who murdered prostitutes. "Arthur
Shawcross also experienced dissociative states," Lewis reports.
"At these times he would hear his mother in his head, berating
him and the women he was seeing. No one was good enough for Arty.
They should die."61
These dissociated social alters, it
turns out, are concentrated in only one side of the brain, in one
hemisphere, a different one in each of us. Frederic Schiffer explains
how his studies of dual-brain psychology led him to ask his psychiatric
patients to look through special glasses, one pair of which had
only the left side of the left eye uncovered (reaching only the
right hemisphere), the other only the right side of the right eye
(reaching only the left hemisphere), so that the patient would transmit
information only to one half of the brain at a time.62
He found that one hemisphere looked at the world with extreme anxiety
and the other saw things more maturely:
One patient, a Vietnam veteran,
whom I had diagnosed with a severe posttraumatic stress disorder,
looked out of one side and developed an expression of intense
apprehension as he looked at a large plant in my office. "It
looks like the jungle," he said with some alarm. I asked
him to look out the other side, and he said, "No, it's a
nice-looking plant."
Schiffer finds he can help patients
by having them analyze the emotional attitudes of the traumatized
hemisphere, since "the troubled side is often like a traumatized
person who hasn't been able to move beyond the trauma, even when
removed from it, because he continues to expect retraumatization."63
Schiffer and others have done extensive work on dual-brain psychology,
including putting one hemisphere to sleep with sodium amytal and
finding the patient well-adjusted and pleasant, while putting the
other side to sleep made him belligerent.64 He also showed
that children who were admitted to hospitals after abuse more often
showed abnormalities in brain waves of their left hemisphere and
that PTSD patients felt more distress in their left hemispheres.
Schiffer concludes:
Traumatic memories are likely closely
related to a lower brain center called the amygdala...in each
hemisphere which is inhibited by a high-level cortical center,
the orbital frontal lobe in that same hemisphere....Both the orbital
frontal cortex and the hippocampus tend to try to calm the amygdala...We
have too little information to do more than speculate about why
the left brain may be more involved in the traumatic experiences
of abused patients....Patients who have strong reactions to the
glasses apparently have two distinct parts of their mind--one
that sees the world as threatening and one that sees it as much
less so....frequently I have asked a troubled part of a person
to stop attacking the other part of him, and suddenly the person
feels remarkable relief.65
These alters which still live in the
past, seeing the world as threatening and abusive, constitute, as
Schiffer says, two separate minds, one frightened and angry, the
other denying the concerns of its partner. When the more grown-up
hemisphere moves into new freedom and new behavior, the traumatized
hemisphere reexperiences the fear and helplessness it stores from
early childhood and produces the "growth panic" I have
found lies at the root of war and other violence. This struggle
between the hemispheres is not always unconscious; more often it
is simply dissociated, with one hemisphere being unaware of the
feelings with which the other hemisphere is filled. When Rudolph
Höss, SS Kommandant at Auschwitz, says, "I have never
personally mistreated a prisoner, or even killed one. I have also
never tolerated mistreatment on the part of my subordinates,"66
he is not being disingenuous. The nontraumatized half of his brain
sincerely believes he and his subordinates never mistreated a Jew
as they were beating and torturing and murdering them by the hundreds
of thousands. His social alter in his traumatized hemisphere was
fully in control and cut off all meaning of what he was doing, which
to his non-traumatized hemisphere appeared as normal. He had two
brains which he was forced to keep separate; as he put it, "Many
a night as I stood out there on the railroad platforms, at the gas
chambers, or at the burnings, I was forced to think of my wife and
children without connecting them to what was taking place."67
This dissociation into traumatized
alters occurs more in groups because one feels more helpless
and more depersonalized in large groups,68 particularly
in the largest groups, nations, and therefore more fearful. When
we think of acting in society or even of what it is like to speak
in front of a large group, one feels more open to attack, to humiliation,
and one can more easily switch into the traumatized hemisphere.
Our first line of defense when in a social trance is to cling to
a "strong" leader or a "strong" subgroup, merge
our alters with them and join in various group activities, often
violent ones, to defend ourselves. Thus it makes sense that Freud,
Le Bon and others define the inevitable characteristics of a group
as invincibility, grandiosity, irresponsibility, impulsiveness,
suggestibility and fearfulness,69 all qualities of the
neglectful and traumatic figures stored in our social alters. Without
the laterality of the brain, neither politics nor religion can exist,
as they do not in other animals who do not have divided selves.
(In fact, the only other animals who do sometimes go to war and
murder each other senselessly are chimps and dolphins, both of which
are large-brained, lateralized creatures with the beginnings of
the ability for self-recognition.) It is only because humans have
radically lateralized hemispheres with larger impulse inhibitors--orbitalfrontal
cortexes and hippocampuses--that they are able to go to war with
one hemisphere and build Leagues of Nations with the other.
The lower the childrearing mode, the
more divided are the hemispheres. New Guinea natives can be warm
and friendly while in their more mature hemisphere and suddenly
switch into thier social alters in the other hemisphere and kill
you because they think you are bewitching them. The lower the childrearing
mode, the more traumatic the early experiences, and the more divided
the hemispheres. In tribal societies, switching into warrior alters
is a simple process: "The man or boy leaves his former self
behind and becomes something entirely different, perhaps even taking
a new name...the change usually accomplished through ritual drumming,
dancing, fasting and sexual abstinence...into a new, warriorlike
mode of being, denoted by special body paint, masks and headdresses."70
In modern societies, with a wide range of childrearing modes, "only
2 per cent of recruits kill easily, so the rest must be brought
to do so by careful military training" featuring new traumatic
experiences.71
The split mind begins to form with
early trauma, even perinatally. Fredrick Leboyer, author of Birth
Without Violence,72 once told me that babies born
with his non-traumatic techniques not only were far more calm and
happy after birth but "less one-handed," less brain-lateralized.
The two halves of the brain are even sometimes recognized in political
imagery. Hitler, for instance, often spoke of a strange "kinship"
between the Aryan and Jew (the two sides of his brain): "Has
it not struck you how the Jew is the exact opposite of the German
in every single respect, and yet is as closely akin to him as a
blood brother? ...so closely allied and yet so utterly dissimilar."73
This split mind is responsible for what is termed "the banality
of evil;" one side is banal (Winnicott's "False Self"),
the other side evil (the "Bad Boy" alter). It accounts
for how nations can joyfully choose violent leaders to take them
to suicidal wars, and yet one part of their mind can be wholly unaware
of what is happening. For example, the following is William L. Shirer's
description of sitting in the Berlin Sportpalast watching
Hitler shouting and shrieking that "he will go to war this
Saturday. Curious audience, the fifteen thousand party Bonzen
packed into the hall. They applauded his words with the usual enthusiasm.
Yet there was no war fever. The crowd was good-natured, as
if it didn't realize what his words meant."74 The
dual brain also explains how "ordinary Germans"--extremely
traumatized by "ordinary German childrearing" around 1900--could
have, during the Holocaust, "humiliated, beat and tortured
defenseless people and then shot them in the back of the neck without
the slightest hesitation [and then dissociate and] pose before their
living or dead victims, laughing into the camera {and] write home
that these snapshots and extermination anecdotes would someday be
‘extremely interesting to our children.'"75
EARLY MOTHER-CHILD INTERACTIONS AS
THE SOURCE OF HUMAN VIOLENCE
The primary sources of violent political behaviors are the concrete
mother-child interactions of one generation earlier--how mainly
the mother responded to, cared for and conveyed her feelings and
fears to her fetus, infant and young child. We have already described
in Chapter 3 how going to war is preceded by flashbacks to intrauterine,
perinatal traumas and group-fantasies of the need for national rebirth.
Here we will begin to examine the sources of human violence in early
mother-child interactions.
Videotape recordings of children's
relationships with their mothers in the preverbal period "have
been shown to remain essentially the same over time and to be duplicated
with other ‘substitute' mother figures. A child who has a
warm, affectionate relationship with the mother will relate to others
in a warm, affectionate manner, whereas a child with a guarded,
distant relationship will relate to others in a guarded, distant
manner."76 This maternal relationship is eventually
restaged in international relations in a concrete manner, being
acted out in "the sandbox of history" with nations playing
the emotional roles of the mothers and children from early life.
Mothers in history who because of their
own life experiences see their children as harmful and aggressive
have historically mainly treated them in ways that have made them
grow up as violent adults, by routinely inflicting upon them murder,
abandonment, neglect, binding, enemas, domination, beatings, sexual
assaults and emotional abuses77 that are later restaged
in wars and political behavior. Necessity was not the main source
of these cruelties toward children--wealthy parents were historically
even more overtly rejecting, giving their children to others at
birth for years for what they expected would be abusive caretaking.
Fathers have until recently usually only worsened this early traumatic
upbringing, since historically the father has almost always been
mostly absent from the child's early life --most fathers in history
spending their days in the fields or factories and their nights
in the taverns (see Chapter 7). When home, fathers have lent little
support to mothers in caretaking and emotional nurturance, requiring
that his wife "mother" him rather than his children.
Growing up, Mahler found, is built
upon basic maternal care, since "differentiation is from the
mother, not from the father."78 Therefore, women
not men have until recently for better or worse been the main sources
of care, neglect and abuse throughout history. As St. Augustine
put it, "Give me other mothers and I will give you another
world." His words have been confirmed by recent clinical studies.
What Erikson said about girls has been found to be true of all children:
"By the time a girl developmentally turns to the father, she
has normally learned the nature of an object relationship once and
for all from her mother."79 In short, mothers
are major actors in childhood history--they are perpetrators80
and not just victims, as the theory of patriarchy holds.
Most of the extremely abusive historical
childrearing practices which are detailed in the next three chapters
of this book are routine reactions to the child's daily needs and
growth process, wherein immature mothers expect their children to
give them the love they missed as a child and therefore experience
the child's independence as rejection. As one battering mother said,
"I have never felt really loved all my life. When the baby
was born, I thought he would love me, but when he cried all the
time, it meant he didn't love me, so I hit him."81
Surveys show mothers in most cultures report initial feelings of
"indifference" toward their newborn.82 In fact,
childbirth often triggers post-partum depression and feelings of
emptiness83 because it means the mother must give up
her own hopes to receive the care she missed from her own mother.84
The moment the infant needs something or turns away from her to
explore the world, it triggers her own memories of maternal rejection.
When the infant cries, the immature mother hears her mother, her
father, her siblings and her spouse screaming at her. She then "accuses
the infant of being unaffectionate, unrewarding and selfish...as
not interested in me."85 All growth and individuation
by the child is therefore experienced as rejection. This is why
social progress, prosperity and new political freedoms are so anxiety-producing.
"When the mother cannot tolerate the child's being a separate
person with her own personality and needs, and demands instead that
the child mirror her, separation becomes heavily tinged with basic
terror for the child."86 Children first experience
"growth panic" anxieties because their mother rejects,
humiliates or punishes them for their needs and for their individuation.
As adults, they then turn to paranoid and violent political behavior
during periods of growth and individuation because society threatens
to reproduce this intolerable early maternal rejection, shame or
punishment. Because these maternal interactions are so early, they
are primarily nonverbal, which means that politics has a dominantly
nonverbal quality that can only be studied by research into illustrations
rather than words--group-fantasies shown in cartoons, magazine covers
and TV images. This is why I often watch the nightly news on TV
with the sound off.87
It is likely that the centrality of
mothers in bringing up children is even responsible for the fact
that men are more violent than women and universally fight wars.
Testosterone is not the cause, as is usually imagined, since (1)
testosterone levels are actually lower in the most aggressive
boys,88 and (2) "testosterone is present in boys
and girls in roughly the same amounts before the age of ten"
and (3) although "all normal boys experience a huge surge of
testosterone in early adolescence, [they] do not all display increased
aggression...[so] testosterone does not cause aggression."89
Evidence is beginning to accumulate that it is differential treatment
of boys, especially by mothers, that is responsible for their higher
rates of violence in later life. Boys in every culture are physically
punished more often and with greater severity than girls;90
boys are more often used sexually by their mothers in their early
years than girls;91 boys are given less nurturance, are
ignored more often, are spoken to less and are coached to be more
violent than girls;92 boys are subject to over control
by humiliation and shame more often than girls;93 and
boys are more harshly disciplined for the same actions by parents
and teachers.94 Mothers also see their boys as "just
like his dad," and take revenge against them for their husband's
actions--after all, Medea killed her sons, not her daughters, to
hurt Jason for his infidelity.95 Thus although boys begin
life with no more aggression than girls, they grow up to be more
violent simply because they are less trusted and more feared by
their earliest caretakers.
Although the battlegrounds may change,
wars--whether between mother and child or between nations--are inevitably
about the basic feelings of infancy: trust, security, approval,
domination, envy, rage, threats, shame and independence.96
Since having a child revives in mothers long-dormant wishes for
the closeness that they missed from their own mothers, mothers often
envy the child each of the needs they are asked to satisfy, thinking,
"I never got that; why should my child?" Even today psychologists
find many mothers reject their infants in many ways because they
"fear bodily damage due to the child's aggressiveness."97
But before the nineteenth century mothers throughout history were
so immature that they thought their infants were so full of violence
that they would "scratch their eyes out, tear their ears off,
or break their legs" if they didn't tie them up in endless
bandages, "so as to resemble billets of wood...so the flesh
was compressed almost to gangrene."98 Therefore,
through most of history, early mother-child interactions which most
"good-enough mothers" today are capable of--centering
around mutual gazing, babbling and smiling99 --were all
missing, because mothers tightly bound their babies up at birth
and stuck them in another room, severely neglected for their first
year of their lives.100 International affairs has not
throughout history been much negotiated in a secure and peaceful
manner because infantile life was not very secure nor peaceful.
Sociologists and historians have avoided
looking for the family sources of wars and social violence. Whenever
a group produces murderers, the mother-child relationship must be
abusive and neglectful. Yet this elementary truth has not even begun
to be considered in historical research; just stating that poor
mothering lies behind wars seems blasphemous. Instead, the grossest
sort of idealizations of historical mothering proliferate. When,
for instance, studies of the sources of the extreme violence of
the Mafia turn to depictions of Sicilian mother-child relations
they inevitably come to resemble the happy, loving families out
of "The Godfather." Yet it is only when an Italian psychoanalyst,
Silvia di Lorenzo, writes a book on La Grande Madre Mafia
that her descriptions of typical Sicilian mother-child interactions
begin to give us an accurate picture of the maternal origins of
Mafia violence:
If a boy of theirs commits a slight
fault, they do not resort to simple blows, but they pursue him
on a public street and bite him on the face, the ears, and the
arms until they draw blood. In those moments even a beautiful
woman is transformed in physiognomy, she becomes purplish-red,
with blood-shot eyes, with gnashing teeth, and trembling convulsions,
and only the hastening of others, who with difficulty tear away
the victim, put an end to such savage scenes.101
Thus the conditions of early mothering
have profound affects on adult human violence. It is not surprising
that Ember and Ember found in their cross-cultural studies that
where the mother sleeps closer to the baby than to the father and
uses the baby as a substitute spouse--usually sexually--there is
more homicide and war.102 Every childrearing practice
in history is restaged in adult political behavior. Children whose
mothers swaddled them and were "not there" emotionally
could not as adults maintain object consistency and grew up paranoid,
imagining "enemies" everywhere. Children whose mothers
regularly did not feed them in a timely fashion experienced the
world as malevolently withholding. Children whose mothers rejected
them with depressive silence experienced peaceful international
periods as threatening. Children whose mothers dominated them and
who were engulfing often choose totalitarian political leaders.
Children whose mothers were so needy they describe their children
as "born selfish and demanding" and or who saw them as
"angry since birth" experienced other nations as demanding
too much or as angry "bad babies." Children whose mothers
used them as antidepressants chose manic, often violent leaders
to counter their own depression. And mothers who ridiculed and humiliated
their children whenever their activities didn't coincide with her
own were experienced in the international sphere as poison containers
of intolerable ridicule and shame--as in "the shame of Versailles."
It is not surprising, then, that violent, authoritarian political
behavior has been statistically correlated with rejecting, punitive
parenting.103 As Godwin puts it, society is an "exopsychic
structure" where adults restage the "parental purification
system" of childhood by "cleansing bad, frustrating and
abusive aspects of the parent-child relationship" in the political
arena.104 In Chapter 3 I have dealt extensively with
the evidence showing that war and social violence are preceded by
rebirth group-fantasies of cleansing and purification of "sins."
It is only the elimination of the most abusive and neglectful historical
parenting practices in some nations that have allowed them to set
up trusting, non-violent rules of political interactions and have
permitted them to achieve more or less cooperative democratic societies
and to avoid fighting wars with other democracies. Obviously international
peace will not prevail until most parents around the world trust
rather than fear their children.
THE PSYCHOGENIC THEORY OF WAR
War, then, is the act of restaging early traumas for the purpose
of maternal revenge and self purification. Wars are clinical emotional
disorders, periodic shared psychotic episodes of delusional organized
butchery intended--like homicide--to turn a severe "collapse
of self esteem" into "a rage to achieve justice."
Wars are both homicidal and suicidal--every German in 1939 who cheered
Hitler on as he promised to start an unwinnable world war against
overwhelming opposing nations knew deep down they were committing
suicide. Like all homicides and suicides, wars are reactions to
our failed search for love, magical gestures designed to ensure
love through projection into enemies, by "knocking the Terrifying
Mommy off her pedestal" and by "killing the Bad Boy self."
As Kernberg puts its, violence occurs only when "the world
seems to be split between those who side with the traumatizing object
and those who support the patient's wishes for a revengeful campaign
against the traumatizing object."105 Thus the early
crisis in maternal love, which had been internalized during childhood
in Terrifying Mommy and Bad Boy alters, is resolved by acting out
on the historical stage the revenge against the Terrifying Mommy
and by the wiping out of the Bad Boy self.
1. War as Righteous Rape--Revenge
Against the Terrifying Mommy: Enemy nations in wars are often
pictured as women (see Chapter 3), witches, even placental beasts.
When they are seen as women, enemies are there to be pushed around,
not eliminated, since even when raging against a bad mommy the
hurt child knows he needs her desperately. This is why Hitler
kept hoping to manipulate Mother England into being friendly.
And it is why he didn't destroy Paris when he marched into La
Belle France. Nations to the west of Germany were mainly seen
as mommies to be revenged against, to be "knocked off their
pedestals" but not to be eliminated. "France...was not
marked for subjugation but rather for a secondary role in the
Nazi scheme [and] Hitler was always keen on reaching some settlement
with the British...[therefore] the German army fighting in the
west was given strict orders to conduct itself according to the
rules of war."106 The same group-fantasy of war
as righteous rape was voiced by Germans in 1914, when they
imagined that "only if we are able to hurt England badly
will she really leave us unmolested, perhaps even become a ‘friend.'"107
2. War as Purification--Killing
Off the Bad Boy Self: Enemy nations are also imagined as Bad
Boys, disobedient, disgusting, violent, sexual--everything one
was accused of as a child by one's caretakers. If the Bad Boy
self can be killed off entirely, "finally mommy will love
me." This is why Hitler vowed to wipe out the "bad"
nations to the east and settle "good Germans" in their
place. Poles, Russians, Jews, every nation east of Germany were
projected with Bad Boy imagery: "Slavs were considered subhumans,
to be either murdered...or starved to death."108
Moscow, Hitler promised, would be leveled and turned into a reservoir,
and Jews would be totally eliminated. In addition, WWII would
be a suicidal mission for millions of Germans, thus killing off
the "Bad Boy" part of themselves, the most vital, growing,
independent self. Then the "good German" self that remained
would be purified and would finally be loved by mommy,
the Motherland.
It is not surprising that in early
societies bloodthirsty War Goddesses ruled over battlefields, since
wars are all about resolving the crisis between Terrifying Mommies
and Bad Boys. Leaders are delegated the task of being sacrificial
priests. Even simple societies go to war to win the love of mommy;
in the Yanomamo war ritual myth, the culture hero Child of Water
goes to war and slays enemies to "end chaos" and "do
what his mother desires and thereby win her approval."109
The role of the father in war is quite different: it is to provide
the violence needed to rape and revenge the Terrifying Mommy and
to punish and wipe out the Bad Baby. Hitler carried a dog whip everywhere
he went, the same whip he and millions of German children were beaten
with by their fathers.110 Oddly enough, nations don't
go to war as revenge against bad fathers--the drama is earlier than
that. Even though children are terribly frightened by their father's
violence in the family, the goal in starting wars isn't finally
to take revenge against the father, but to "kill the shame,"
to purify the self and to force mother to love you--to organize
men into Fatherlands so they can conquer Motherlands.
Nations switch into their dissociated
traumatized hemispheres after periods of peace and prosperity because
the individuation challenges of social progress means separating
from mommy, a dangerous act in adulthood if it was not allowed by
the mother in childhood. Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others, noticed
the growth panic that went along with prosperity and progress when
he wondered in his journal why Americans felt such a "strange
melancholy in the midst of abundance."111 Increases
in freedom and prosperity for people who have been abused as children
lead first to fears of separation and then to a clinging to the
early abusive mommy, even to merging with her. But to merge with
a mommy means losing one's masculinity--it means becoming a woman--therefore
long periods of peace mean castration. Thus Kant's dicta that wars
are necessary because "prolonged peace favors...effeminacy"
parallels Machiavelli's claim that war exists to purge nations of
effeminato, the "daily accretion of poisonous matter
[caused by women's] conspiracy to ‘poison'...manhood"
and John Adams' query to Jefferson, "Will you tell me how to
prevent luxury from producing effeminacy, intoxication, extravagance,
vice and folly?"112 In fact, in groups where they
do not have effective war rituals available when people experience
severe ego disintegration, people often go amok--a dissociative
state where people suddenly kill people in wild, uncontrolled sprees,
as often occurs in the otherwise placid Balinese.113
Even chimpanzees "go amok" when given food supplies
by humans and "engage in episodes of apparently unprovoked
explosive...behavior...as though they had entered an ASC [Alternate
State of Consciousness]...to discharge an inner state of tension...similar
to human dissociative behaviours..."114 Prosperity
appears to be anxiety-producing even in non-human primates, switching
them into their more violent, dissociated hemispheres. Chimpanzees
who are not artificially fed by anthropologists live in "peaceful,
open groups without signs of any dominance hierarchy, enforced territoriality
or single leaders."115
Prosperity leads to starting wars most
often in societies where the economic advances of a minority, a
more advanced psychoclass, outrun the childrearing evolution of
the majority, producing in the less advanced psychoclasses extreme
anxieties about changes that require individuation. Thus the most
destructive wars have occurred in the twentieth century when there
is a rapid "leap into modernity" by nations whose average
childrearing lagged badly behind their social and economic progress--so
that they tried to run modern capitalist systems with crippled human
capital--while the most peaceful periods (for instance, Europe's
"century of peace" from 1815 to 1914)116 occurred
while the childrearing of most Western European nations was most
rapidly evolving and could keep up with the individuation challenges
of modernity.117
WAR AND GROUP-FANTASY CYCLES
In Chapter 4 evidence was presented that wars most often occur after
leaders have been in office for some time and are seen as weakening
in their ability to be in control of national group-fantasies. Thus,
the longer the leader is in office, the more likely he will be to
take the nation to war. This is confirmed in the case of the United
States, where no president has gone to war during his first year,
his "strong" phase; where smaller wars sometimes begin
in the second and third year of office, as the president weakens;
and where its three most destructive wars--the Civil War and the
two World Wars, with their hundreds of thousands of American battle
fatalities--occurred at the end of 45, 48 and 103 months of the
terms of Buchanan, Wilson and FDR, after their group-fantasy strength
had collapsed.
Much empirical work has been done on
the historical study of war cycles.118 A cycle of about
25 years in the level of violence for most nations in recent centuries
has been determined,119 as though each new generation
must be thrown into the mouth of Moloch as a purification sacrifice.
There has also been considerable work done on economic cycles and
their close relationship to war cycles,120 with the finding
that "wars between great powers occur during periods of economic
expansion, while stagnation hinders their outbreak [so that] after
1815 no wars have been started during a depression."121
Furthermore, "fatalities follow the pattern of [economic] upswings
and downswings perfectly...the average annual fatality rate was...21
times higher on upswings than downswings."122 Thus,
although wars have been confirmed to be the results of prosperity,
it is because no psychological analysis has ever been attempted
that scholars have had to admit, "We do not understand the
causal dynamics of the long wave...encompassing political and economic
elements."123 In the remainder of this chapter we
will present a psychogenic theory of group-fantasy cycles that will
explain this periodic alternation between economic depressions and
wars.
In the chart below, four American group-fantasy
cycles have been drawn for the past two centuries of American history,
each consisting of four phases: (1) Innovative, (2) Depressed, (3)
Manic and (4) War. At the bottom of the chart are listed the major
depressions and wars, which coincide with the second and fourth
phases of group-fantasy. In the middle of the chart is drawn Klingberg's
extrovert-introvert Foreign Policy Mood Curve, which he compiled
by counting such foreign policy indices
6:1 American Group-Fantasy Cycles
as the proportion of presidential speeches
given over to positive action needed in world affairs.124
As can be seen, there is a close correlation between Klingberg's
mood index stages and my independently-derived group-fantasy phases.
An outline of the four group-fantasy
phases is shown below. Empirical verification follows on each point
in the outline, stressing American and other national group-fantasies
and its resulting political and economic behavior. Then the four
phases are followed in detail at the end of the chapter for German
childrearing around 1900 and its restaging in the four phases of
group-fantasy from the Weimar Republic to World War II and the Holocaust.
Group-Fantasy Phases
1. Innovative Phase:
A new psychoclass comes of age after
the previous war, a minority of the cohort born two to three decades
earlier and raised with more evolved childrearing modes. This new
psychoclass introduces new inventions, new social and economic arrangements
and new freedoms for women and minorities, producing an "Era
of Good Feelings," a "Gilded Age" that for a few
years is tolerated even by the earlier psychoclasses. By the end
of the Innovative Phase, however, the challenges produced by progress
and individuation begin to make everything seem to be "getting
out of control" as wishes surface into consciousness that threaten
to revive early maternal rejection and punishment. In addition,
as women, children and minorities get new freedoms, older psychoclasses
find they cannot be used as much as they previously had been as
poison containers who can be punished for one's sins. Purity Crusades
begin, anti-modernity movements demanding that new sexual and other
freedoms be ended to reduce the anxieties of the nation's growth
panic and "turn back the clock" to more controlled times
and social arrangements.
2. Depressed Phase:
The older psychoclasses become depressed
because of their new individuation challenges, expecting punishment
for them, and produce an economic depression by withdrawing money
from circulation, by raising interest rates, by reducing consumption,
by limiting trade and by making all the other surplus-reducing motivated
"mistakes" in fiscal policies that are so familiar in
economic history. Economic depressions are motivated internal sacrifices
which often kill more people than wars do.125 Cartoons
prior to and during depressions often show sinful, greedy people
being sacrificed on altars,126 and the depressed nation
becomes paralyzed politically, unable to take action to reverse
the economic downturn. Just as depressed individuals experience
little conscious anger--feeling they "deserve to be punished"--so
too nations in depressions are characterized by "introverted"
foreign policy moods, start fewer military expeditions and are less
concerned with foreign affairs. The feeling during depressions is
"I should be killed" for my wishes rather than "I
want to kill others." Depressions are economic anorexias, where
people starve themselves to avoid being eaten up by the Dragon Mother,
the maternal vulture of infancy. The nation begins to look for a
Phallic Leader with whom they can merge and regain their failed
potency and who can protect them against their growing delusional
fears of a persecutory mommy.
3. Manic Phase:
As eventual economic recovery threatens
fresh anxiety, manic economic, social and military activity builds
up as a defense against depressive anxieties, as the nation engages
in speculative investment, credit explosions, foreign belligerence,
military buildups and other grandiose, hypergenital attempts to
demonstrate omnipotent control of symbolic love supplies. Apocalyptic
group-fantasies of a world full of evil and a God who is furious
and about to end it all proliferate, producing severe growth panics
such as the American "Great Awakenings" that occurred
in manic periods prior to wars. Continued prosperity leads to a
search for poison containers, both internal (minorities, criminals,
children) and external (foreign enemies), who can be punished in
national Purity Crusades as Bad Boys who embody the nation's sinful
greed. Maternal engulfment fears increase as grandiose defenses
and memories of being a helpless baby return, so people imagine
their nations as "pitiful, helpless giants," with gigantic
needs, but helpless to satisfy them. As paranoid delusional enemies
seem to surround the nation, sacrificial rebirth group-fantasies
appear, complete with devouring placental sea monsters, picturing
violence as the only antidote to growing fears of disintegration
of self.127
4. War Phase:
When another nation is found that agrees
to provide the humiliation episode needed as a casus belli,
a tremendous relief is felt of "Aha! I knew the enemy
was real and not just in my head." The group-psychotic insight
that diabolical enemies are strangling and poisoning one's nation
forces a final complete switch into the social trance wherein group-fantasy
becomes reality, goals disappear and violent action becomes irresistible
as early traumas are restaged.128 The neurotransmitters,
hormones and neuropeptides of the nation change dramatically, in
the same manner as the neurochemistry of individuals changes as
they move toward violence.129 War provides the opportunity
for both righteous rape and purification. The righteous rape
can be described as both maternal (Mother England) and homosexual
(the soldiers)--in fact, war is overwhelmingly a homosexual perversion,
since men leave their female partners and go abroad and stick things
into other men's bodies. The purification accomplishes the
sacrifice of the Bad Boy self, both through the suicidal part of
war, killing the nation's own youth as sacrifice of soldiers, and
the homicidal part, killing the enemy, each representing Bad Boy
selves that must be wiped out so the mommy-nation can finally love
the "real" self.
Thus wars and depressions can be seen
as classically occurring in cycles similar to individual manic-depressive
cycles of violence, only stretched out into periods of approximately
one full generation in length. Each of the first three American
group-fantasy cycles in the chart above is approximately 50 years
long and ends with two wars, first usually a "nice little war"
as a sort of trial balloon and then a full-fledged war that produces
the rebirth of national virility. This pattern was partially broken
after WWII--when improving childrearing reduced the size of both
economic downturns and wars--and since when there has been a shorter
cycle of group-fantasies, wars and recessions (see discussion at
the end of this chapter). Although most Western nations in the past
three centuries have had the same "four wars a century"
pattern as the United States, whether they also have followed the
same four-stage group-fantasy cycle has yet to be investigated.130
THE INNOVATIVE PHASE: PROGRESS AND
PURITY CRUSADES
The central force for change in economic life is the result of earlier
changes in childrearing among a minority of the society. The usual
causal chain of modernization theory--that more prosperity means
more money for improving childrearing--is simply backward, both
because empirically childrearing change always precedes economic
change131 and because the richest families traditionally
have not given more to their children, they have routinely sent
them out at birth to abusive caretakers. Those children whose parents
actually bring them up themselves and try to surpass traditional
childcare practices grow up as a new, innovative psychoclass that
tries the new social and economic ventures which soon appear dangerous
to the earlier psychoclasses.
The innovative phases in the chart
of American group-fantasies above are familiar to every student
of American history as periods of unparalleled growth and technological
invention. They contain the early growth of steamboats, railroads
and telegraphs; the two phases of the nineteenth-century Industrial
Revolution with its rapid industrialization and immigration; the
Second Industrial Revolution after World War I; and even the computer
revolution produced by the Spock generation.132 These
were times when not only was national income soaring and work hours
dropping, but "there was a tacit or explicit consensus between
employers and labour organizations to keep labour demands within
limits that did not eat into the profits, and the future prospects
of profits high enough to justify the huge investments without which
the spectacular growth of Golden Age labour productivity could not
have taken place."133 Thus investment in children
paid off in investment in productivity.
During these innovative phases, governments
manage to work out various formal and informal rules to settle international
disagreements. Since peace is not just an absence of war and involves
establishing intergovernmental organizations and conferences to
resolve disputes, nations that are not in an emotional state of
collapsed self-esteem have regularly found ways even without an
overarching international government to break stalemates and settle
their disagreements without violence.134 Whether by bilateral
agreement or through the restraints of peace conferences, innovative
psychoclasses have demonstrated that there are many ways--such as
buffer states, compensation and concerts of power--whereby issues
can be resolved outside of power politics that lead to wars.
Each of these innovative phases also
were periods of women's rights, the best-known of which in America
were the early nineteenth-century groups pressing for women's education,
jobs, new divorce laws and property rights; the post-Civil War Woman's
Sufferage Movement; the post-WWI women's rights movement; and the
post-Vietnam War feminist movement. The earlier psychoclasses--both
men and women--reacted to these freedoms for "the new women"
with extreme horror.135 Just as the economic advances
of early modern Europe resulted in a million women killed as witches,
the progress of the modern innovative periods engendered fears of
the femme fatale phallic females136 --a restaging
of the early Terrifying Mothers--who were "strongly passionate
and...endowed with strong animal natures"137 --who
produced "sexual anarchy" where "men became women
[and] women became men."138 Ever since Cato wailed
in 195 B.C., after a few Roman women sought to repeal a law that
forbade them from wearing multicolored dresses, that "women
have become so powerful that our independence has been lost in our
own homes and is now being trampled and stamped underfoot in public,"139
innovative periods in history have produced anti-women Purity Crusades
designed to reverse social progress and return to more familiar
repressive times.140
Purity Crusades have, of course, centered
on sexual morality, whether they combated Noyes' "free love"
debates before the Civil War or Margaret Sanger's birth control
ideas in the 1920s.141 They include "moral reform"
crusades against prostitution, against pornography, against alcohol--against
everything that represented unfulfilled wishes, including even bicycle
seats, that "might cause women's moral downfall."142
Even the reduction of the work week--the Saturday Half-Holiday Act
of 1887-- was opposed as likely to cause the masses to turn to "dancing,
carousing, low behavior, rioting, shooting, and murder."143
Children's rights were opposed because any relaxation of punitive
childrearing would inevitably lead to "running wild, blatant
disobedience...masturbation and insanity"144 and
since children are "made monsters in life by indulgence in
infancy" if given the slightest independence wouth would go
"directly to the grog shop, the gambling house or the
brothel."145 Cars for women were opposed because
they could be turned into "houses of prostitution on wheels."146
And whenever the Purity Crusade began, it usually continued right
into the next war, which borrowed its language and moral fervor,
so that it seemed the war itself was a purification of the nation.
Thus purity reformers of the 1850s, reacting to the feminism of
the time, began a crusade against sex between Southern white men
and black women, objecting to slavery not so much on behalf of the
rights of the slaves but in order "to protect the sexual purity
of America." In the words of purity crusaders, "The Southern
states are one Great Sodom...a vast brothel" which only a war
between the North and the South could clean up.147 Thus,
too, World War I was said to have been needed to be fought "to
save men from moral decay [from homosexuality]"148
and the Vietnam War was accompanied by a fantasy that, according
to Time's special issue on "SEX IN THE U.S.," found a
dangerous "demise of Puritanism" in America due to "Freudian
psychology" that had made "America one big Orgone Box
[of] pornography."149 Eventually, all Purity Crusades
move abroad and punish our desires in living enemies.
THE DEPRESSED PHASE: THE DRAGON MOTHER
AND THE PHALLIC LEADER
The task of controlling growth panic by depressions is given during
the modern period mainly to central banks, which first flood the
nation with low interest liquidity to encourage overinvestment,
excess borrowing, inflation and stock market bubbles, and then,
when the expansion becomes too sinful for the national psyche, reverse
the monetary expansion by increasing interest rates and reducing
liquidity ("Taking away the punch bowl when the party gets
going.")150 Depressions come because really people
become depressed, reducing their spending and investment,
and feel hopeless. Depressions are, as Keynes said, "a
crises of sentiment...a collapse of confidence."151
The task of government, according to Keynes, was to recognize that
demand (desire) is subject to irrational contractions which had
to be offset through fiscal and monetary manipulations--rather like
a psychiatrist prescribing medications to change serotonin levels.
Yet neither Keynes nor any other economist asked why people periodically
become depressed and reduce their activities.
In fact, nations enter into depressions
because they feel persecuted for their prosperity and individuation
by what Jungians have termed the "Dragon Mother"--the
needy, "devouring mother of infancy...who cannot let her children
go because she needs them for her own psychic survival."152
Weston has found anorexics in particular are dominated by fantasies
of persecution by the Dragon Mother, who "gives her child the
impossible task of filling her ‘limitless void''' so the child
fears being "eaten alive."153 To prevent this,
when these children grow up and try to individuate, they refuse
to eat so they won't have any flesh on them for the Dragon Mother
to devour. Economic depressions evidence similar group-fantasies
of devouring mommies; they are "economic anorexias" where
nations inflict economic wounds upon themselves to limit consumption,
become "all bones" and not tempt the devouring Dragon
Mother. Banks, in particular, are often pictured as greedy dragons.
For instance, President Jackson imagined the Bank of the United
States was what he called the "Mother Bank" that by issuing
paper money was a "bad mother dominating her children"
who had to be stopped before the nation was eaten up, and so conducted
a "kill the Great Monster" campaign that would "strangle
the many-headed hydra" and kill it.154 Needless
to say, his success in "crushing the Mother Bank dragon"
led to an economic downturn.
That depressions purposefully punish
families is rarely acknowledged. In the depression beginning in
1873, for instance, produced by "a decade of speculative excess
and overinvestment,"155 there was "20 percent
unemployed, 40 percent worked for only six or seven months a year,
and only 20 percent worked regularly."156 Depressions
have killed hundreds of thousands of women and children, a sacrifice
of Bad Children greater than many wars. Yet depressions are still
seen as "beneficial purges" of the economic bloodstream;
as the Treasury Secretary said in 1929 as the Federal Reserve helped
push the world into depression, "It will purge the rottenness
out of the system."157 Depressions are indeed blood
purges, only sacrificial, similar to the practice of the Aztecs
sacrificing humans and regularly drawing blood from their thighs
and genitals to "feed" the goddess to prevent her from
becoming angry with them for their sinful prosperity.158
Thus William K. Joseph's study of cartoons and ads during 1929 found
they were "full of strong, wealthy women, but the men were
pictured as puny, neurotic, and insignificant."159
That depressions--like anorexia and
like all blood sacrifices--are self-inflicted wounds and not just
the results of "mysteriously wrongheaded monetary policies"160
is still not admitted by most economists. The end of prosperity
comes "with a sense of relief."161 Even the
"mistakes" by authorities that lead to a downturn are
unconsciously motivated: for instance, the "mistake" of
the Federal Reserve in 1925 in lowering interest rates and igniting
the stock market bubble, followed by the "mistake" of
their overly restrictive monetary policy after 1929 that reduced
the stock of money by a third and turned the downturn into a severe
depression, plus the "mistaken" higher tariffs of the
Hoover administration and the "mistaken" budget-balancing
of the Roosevelt administration,162 all were determined
by the nation's sacrificial group-fantasy of a devouring Dragon
Mother who needed to be placated.
One of the best defenses against fears
of maternal engulfment is merging with a Phallic Leader to restore
potency. Anzieu found small groups regularly searched for a narcissistic,
aggressive leader when they felt that "everything is crumbling"
in the group.163 Parin found the Anyi tribe he studied,
where the mothering was neglectful and incestuous, produced men
who feared being "poisoned, devoured and castrated by women"
and who chose exceptionally violent leaders because they felt that
"the preoedipal mother is more dangerous than the oedipal father,"
and merging with a "strong and severe father" saved them
from feeling castrated.164 And Blum found that when nations
choose "hypnotic-like surrender to the leader," they overcome
"infantile helplessness and weakness, childhood traumata, child
abuse and neglect and feelings of being unloved [through] an escalation
to war [whereby] the sacrifice of the sons in battle by their oedipal
fathers and a ‘macho' defense against femininity are powerful
dynamics."165
The initial task of the Phallic Leader
is to "make real" the growing paranoia of the nation:
It is as if a therapist said to the
paranoid-schizoid patient, "You really are being persecuted.
Let me help you by naming your persecutors...you and your true
friends can fight the persecutors and praise each other's righteousness,
which will help you realize that the source of aggression and
evil is out there, in the real world. And you thought it was all
in your head!"166
The most effective Phallic Leaders
have been found to be "narcissistic personalities who are characterized
by intense self-involvement [whose] interpersonal relations are
frequently marked by a lack of empathy, [who] oscillate between
feelings of grandiosity and omnipotence...and feelings of inferiority
and low self-esteem [and who] are particularly susceptible to feelings
of shame and humiliation."167 Only narcissistic
leaders who from early childhood have felt shamed and humiliated
could, like Richard Nixon, lead wars that had no other purpose than
to avoid accepting "a national humiliation [that would] destroy
our country's confidence in itself."168 The deep
well of loneliness created in them by the emotional distancing of
their mothers is usually worsened by the absence of their fathers,
which has been found by Broude to result in hypermasculinity and
violence.169 The loneliness leads them to volunteer as
delegates to lead large masses of people out of their depression
through "macho" politics. Conquering women and conquering
nations are one for the Phallic Leader.170 It is no coincidence
that virtually all of America's wartime presidents were adulterers
or compulsive womanizers.171 Conquest is the political
function of the Phallic Leader. As Hitler put it, "The crowd
is a woman...after a speech I feel as if I had a sexual release."172
Dominance and violence restores and purifies the self. As Hitler
said after the Röhm massacre, "So! Now I have taken a
bath, and feel clean as a new-born babe again."173
Thus a Phallic Leader wards off the
humiliations of maternal abuse and neglect by political violence.
Lyndon Johnson, for instance, remembers his engulfing mother's withdrawal
of affection whenever he failed to do as she wished, "walking
around the house pretending I was dead [and] refusing to speak or
even look at [me]."174 As a result, he had a recurring
dream that a stampede of cattle--a symbol of maternal engulfment175
--was coming toward him while he was paralyzed in a chair, and that
he cried out for his mother, but no one came.176 His
fear of helplessness and humiliation returned just before Vietnam,
when, he said, "I felt that I was being chased on all sides
by a giant stampede coming at me...the American people were stampeding
me to do something about Vietnam...I deserved something more than
being left alone in the middle of the plain, chased by stampedes
on every side."177 According to his biographer,
he "avoided at all costs the threat to his self-esteem that...public
humiliation might entail"178 and started the war.
The war restored his and the nation's masculinity: "unzipping
his fly, [Johnson] pulled out his penis and asked the reporters
(according to one who was there), ‘Has Ho Chi Minh got anything
to match that?'"179 The war castrated the "enemy,"
not Johnson: "I didn't just screw Ho Chi Minh. I cut his pecker
off."180 Those who opposed the war were women: "[They
have] to squat to piss."181 Going to war meant not
being a woman, not being overwhelmed by mommy.
Merging with a Phallic Leader involves
switching into the dissociated hemisphere and entering into the
social trance. Atlas has shown that political trances derive their
power not from any magical "charismatic" qualities of
the leader but from the correlation between adult hypnotizability
and abusive childrearing.182 The Phallic Leader, like
a shaman, is adept at entering into trance states himself--Hitler
often called himself "a sleepwalker." Political meetings
are easily seen as altered states of consciousness. A journalist
reports getting "caught in a mob of ten thousand hysterics
who jammed the moat in front of Hitler's hotel shouting, ‘We
want our Führer!' I was a little shocked at the faces, especially
those of the women...They reminded me of the crazed expressions
I saw once in the back country of Louisiana on the faces of some
Holy Rollers...They looked up at him as if he were a Messiah, their
faces transformed."183 Switching into their social
alter gave them a shot of dopaminergic power, exactly the same as
taking amphetamines, that made them feel merged with both the Phallic
Leader and the group, the nation, the Volk. Fichte described
this merging as he felt it take hold of him:
When I thought of the Volk
and saw it, and when the great feeling of it gripped me, ...when
a great crowd moves before me, when a band of warriors passes
before me with flowing banners...I feel the indestructible life,
the eternal spirit, and the eternal God...I am immediately freed
from all sins. I am no longer a single suffering man, I am one
with the Volk...184
Because nations continue to live in
both their hemispheres as they go to war, they must both prepare
for war by maneuvering an enemy into a pose where they can be righteously
attacked, and at the same time provide deniability that their nation
is really responsible for the war. Leaders might recognize, as Theodore
Roosevelt wrote to a friend in 1897, that "In strict confidence...I
should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one."185
But Phallic Leaders usually find ways to invent "unprovoked
attacks," from Wilson's lies about the sinking of the Lusitania
and LBJ's lies about the attack in the Gulf of Tonkin to Hitler's
lies about an attack by Polish forces. One of the most complex lies
that carefully provoked an attack that was then pretended to be
a surprise was that of President Franklin Roosevelt's year-long
actions to get Japan to attack Pearl Harbor. Stinnett's voluminously-documented
book, Day of Deceit, demonstrates that in October of 1940
FDR secretly began to carry out a series of eight actions that forced
the hawks among the Japanese government to go to war with the U.S.,
embargoing trade, "tightening the noose" on their economy
and deploying American warships on "pop-up" cruises within
the territorial waters of Japan, then purposely leaving the U.S.
fleet unprotected at Hawaii and hiding the fact that Japanese codes
had been broken so that the attack would be a "surprise."186
If FDR hadn't provoked his unnecesary war with Japan, American military
strength would have been fully available for fighting Germany years
earlier, and the Holocaust may not have been as disasterous.
A typical case of provoking an enemy
can be shown for the actions of John F. Kennedy in the Cuban Missile
Crisis, which we earlier187 examined briefly. JFK's childhood was
typically abusive, dominated by his mother's emotional distancing
of him--"She was never there when we really needed her...[She]
never really held me and hugged me. Never."--and her brutality,
battering John with "hairbrushes, coat hangers, belts and shoes
[and] once slapping young Bobby's face so viciously that she punctured
his eardrum and split his lip."188 The result in JFK was a
phallic-narcissistic personality focused on conquering women in
"daily assignations and a lifetime of venereal disease [and]
a steady diet of mood-altering drugs."189 Claiming a mythical
"missile gap" with the Russians, Kennedy was elected President
to "get America moving again" after the peaceful Eisenhower
Fifties, and soon authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba over
the objections of most experts who said it would fail, telling his
aides he "wasn't going to be ‘chicken.'"190 The
resulting failure was taken by him as a personal humiliation, for
which he needed revenge. He authorized Operation Mongoose, various
assassination attempts against Castro, including using the Mafia,
but success evaded him.191
By 1962, Kennedy decided to regain
his potency by invading Cuba with U.S. forces. He told the military
to prepare for a U.S. invasion of the island and asked his staff
to formulate a pretext that would give an appearance of a Cuban
attack on a U.S. airline that would justify it.192 But
war with a small neighbor would not be enough; Kennedy moved to
make certain the Russians would be involved in the war. On January
31, 1962, he asked Khrushchev's son-in-law, Aleksei Adzhubei, to
meet with him and, in order to humiliate the Russians as he felt
humiliated, told him he was preparing to attack Cuba like Russia
attacked Hungary: "If I run for re-election and the Cuban question
remains as it is," he said, "we will have to do something"
about Cuba. Kennedy told a startled Adzhubei, "I called Allen
Dulles into my office [after the Bay of Pigs] and dressed him down.
I told him: ‘You should learn a lesson from the Russians.
When they had difficulties in Hungary, they liquidated the conflict
in three days [by sending in troops.]'" Adzhubei repeated this
to Khrushchev, who told Soviet diplomats: "An attack on Cuba
is being prepared. And the only way to save Cuba is to put missiles
there."
In April 1962, 40,000 American troops
began practicing invading Cuba in North Carolina,193
and by October 6, 1962, thousands of American troops were positioned
for invasion, along with plans and equipment, prepared to invade
on October 20, 1962, using the Bahamas as an invasion base camp.
But on October 16, 1962, the CIA took clear U-2 photos that told
them Russian nuclear missiles were in Cuba. Kennedy told no one
of his own bellicose actions and threats, instead declaring the
Russian move wholly unprovoked. Despite the fact that 100 million
Americans lay in the range of the Russian missiles--and despite
the opinion of his staff that they made no military difference at
all because nuclear missiles on Russian submarines had long been
stationed a few miles off Cuba--Kennedy instituted a naval embargo
and prepared for a full-scale attack on Cuba, risking a nuclear
World War III. Saying "If Khrushchev wants to rub my nose in
the dirt, it's all over"194 and "we must not
look to the world as if we were backing down,"195
Kennedy fully expected war. When his staff told him there were diplomatic
means which could be used to remove the missiles, he replied, "The
object is not to stop offensive weapons, because the offensive weapons
are already there, as much as it is to have a showdown with the
Russians of one kind or another."196 Since Kennedy
had already publicly declared the U.S. was "prepared to use
nuclear weapons at the start" of any war,197 Kennedy's
embargo and invasion would mean nuclear war if the Russians didn't
accept the humiliation and back down, "one hell of a gamble,"
as Kennedy put it.198 Luckily for mankind, Khrushchev
backed down, was removed from office because of the humiliation
and America was rescued from its self-inflicted humiliations. For
his role in hiding the real cause of the near-apocalyptic actions,
President Kennedy remains universally seen as one of America's greatest
Presidents...because he "kept his head" during the Cuban
Missile Crisis.
THE MANIC PHASE: EGO DISINTEGRATION
AND PARANOIA
Nations engage in manic economic and political projects for the
same reasons newly successful rock stars go to all-night parties
and take drugs--to get a "dopamine rush" that counters
the depression and guilt about their success. Political paranoia
and slow ego disintegration are now seen in conspiratorial group-fantasies,
fears of femininity and imaginary humiliations by other nations.
These are countered in the economic sphere by manic overinvestment,
risky ventures, excess money supply growth, soaring debt and stock
market speculations, and in the political sphere by jingoistic nationalism,
expansionist ventures, military buildups and belligerent, insulting
foreign affair behavior. As in drug addiction, each dopamine rush
leaves a dopamine hangover that requires an even larger manic activity
to overcome the resulting depression. Purity Crusades multiply as
anti-modern and anti-child (Bad Boy) movements. Fears of "becoming
feminine" (desires to merge with mommy) are countered by persecution
of homosexuals. A search for external enemies results from the growing
ego disintegration, as grandiosity fails and Poison Alerts and sacrificial
group-fantasies proliferate.
In America, these paranoid fears of
apocalyptic punishment for success have taken the form of revivalist
Great Awakenings, which occurred at the end of long period of peace:
the First after 24 years of peace (1714-38) under the Georges, the
Second after 30 years of peace (1815-45) under Madison and Monroe,
and the Third after 31 years of peace (1866-97) following the Civil
War. These apocalyptic fantasies of fears of how furious God (Mommy)
was because of mankind's sinfulness merge into the war movements
that follow. The American Revolution has been said to have been
"caused by a pandemic of persecutory delusions" featuring
"a fear of effeminacy"199 and a fantasy of
"Mother England persecuting her children."200
Similarly, beginning with the Annus Mirabilis of 1858, daily
gatherings of thousands of people in spontaneous prayer meetings
took place, where people fell down, saw visions and went out and
destroyed their goods in preparation for the end of the world.201
This apocalyptic mood lasted and merged with the "cleansing
in the fires of war" that would "purge the virus"
of the nation in Civil War bloodshed that was "sacramental,
erotic, mystical, and strangely gratifying."202
All these apocalyptic group-fantasies were caused by the growth
panic of a period of prosperity--exactly the opposite cause from
Barkun's theory of millenarian movements being produced by "deprivation"
and "natural catastrophes."203
Perhaps the classic era of paranoid
fears leading to apocalyptic group-fantasies as punishment for prosperity
is the period before World War I--when the world growth rate jumped
to over five percent, and when Europe appeared to be going clinically
paranoid from "the decadence of the times [when] no more rank,
titles, or race [meant] all is mixed, confused, and blurred [and]
the end of the world seemed nigh."204 Prosperity
and the beginnings of liberal reforms produced widespread growth
panic that decried "the decline of religiosity, the disintegration
of the patriarchal family, and the decline of respect for authority."205
Fears of "becoming feminine" proliferated, along with
campaigns against homosexuals. Goethe's Werther (Goethe: "Anything
in the world can be endured, except a series of wonderful days")206
was revived during the late nineteenth century as thousands of Germans
committed suicide during their rising prosperity, climaxed eventually
by all of Europe going to war and committing suicide. At the end
of the nineteenth century, books like The World's End Soon
pictured the degeneration and apocalyptic demise of Europe and feminine
blood-sucking vampires derived from representations of the New Woman
as an "oversexed wife who threatened her husband's life with
her insatiable erotic demands"207 flooded the popular
literature. Artists featured vampires devouring helpless men,208
and invented modern art as "a pervasive vision of Fragmentation"
showing "everything disintegrated into parts...whirlpools [that]
led into the void."209 H. G. Wells wrote a book
in 1913, The World Set Free, that predicted an apocalyptic
war using radioactive "atomic bombs" that would nearly
destroy the world and lead to the eternal peace.210 Objective
journalists wondered if "Europe was about to become a gigantic
madhouse."211 Nations felt they had to defend themselves
against their growing paranoid delusions. "That the English
are merely waiting for a chance to fall upon us is clear,"
declared the German Chancellor.212 Only starting a "preventive
war" could save the nation.213 "I believe a
war to be unavoidable and the sooner the better," said the
German Chief of Staff.214 Europe was swept up in "a
terrible readiness, indeed a thirst, for what Yeats was to call
the ‘blood-dimmed tide'...fascinated by the prospect of a
purging fire."215 Going to war would prevent engulfment
by the Terrifying Mommy, would avoid effeminacy and restore potency,
and would purge the national arteries with a good bloodletting that
would purge the polluting prosperity,216 teach the Terrifying
Mommy enemy a lesson and sacrifice the sinful Bad Boy so mommy would
finally love the Good Boy self who remained.
WAR PHASE: RIGHTEOUS RAPE OF MOTHER
SUBSTITUTES Even though wars are supposed to be fought between men,
they have equally affected women and children. In most wars, more
civilians are killed than soldiers, and, according to UNICEF, "in
the wars fought since World War II 90 percent of all victims are
found in the civilian population, a large share of them women and
children."217 In our imaginations, however, wars
are mainly about women and children. Divine wars were always
fought for a goddess of war, from Ishtar to Teshub, almost always
mothers of the war heroes,218 "crying to be fed...human
blood."219 Even the Hebrew Lord counsels Moses to
"kill every male among the little ones and kill every woman
that hath known man by lying with him. But all the virgin girls
keep alive for yourselves [to rape]."220 Yanomamo
war raids might kill a few men in raids, but would abduct all enemy
women and rape them.221 Child murder and rape were the
center of ancient war. The Greeks often used to rape all virgin
girls and boys in wars and often trod all children of a city to
death under the feet of oxen or covered them with pitch and burned
them alive.222 As van Creveld puts it, "During most
of history, the opportunity to engage in wholesale rape was not
just among the rewards of successful war but, from the soldier's
point of view, one of the cardinal objectives for which he fought."223
Socarides describes the function of
sexual sadism as
Forces and extracts love; destroys
the threatening body of the mother rather than be destroyed by
her discharges, aggressive impulses that threaten annihilation
of the self even to the point of sexual murder; achieves temporary
freedom from fear of the engulfing mother...reassures against
and lessens castration fear; cancels out separation anxiety.224
Clinical studies of rapists find it
a result of extreme childhood neglect and abuse, continuous shaming
and humiliation--and often even of actual sexual abuse as a child.225
The rapist's fantasies center around control and dominance, and
the actual rape is often triggered by "flashbacks" to
earlier humiliations that had to be restaged in sexual violence,
where "my life would flash in front of my mind...so I went
out looking for a victim."226 Rape is a "pseudosexual
act," first done for violence and revenge, then sexualized:
"I wanted to knock the woman off her pedestal, and I felt rape
was the worst thing I could do to her," said one serial rapist.227
Much of the time the rapist cannot even orgasm, but this doesn't
matter because he has defiled, degraded and humiliated the woman:
"After the assault I felt relieved. I felt I had gotten even.
There was no sexual satisfaction; in fact, I felt a little disgusted."228
Sex may be the weapon, but revenge is the motive.
Rape fantasies are extremely widespread;
in America, a third of all men regularly fantasize about raping
women during masturbation or intercourse,229 while in
a country like Yugoslavia--where earlier historical childrearing
practices are still prevalent in the zadruga so that the
rape of children is routine--adult male rape fantasies are so strong
that rape is a common, everyday part of life even in peacetime.230
Before wars, humiliation group-fantasies proliferate, as nations
spend more and more time trading gratuitous insults, complaining
about being humiliated and pushed around by others, and worrying
about not receiving the recognition due them,231 all
flashbacks to early shame and neglect. The unrequited love for the
mother is reexperienced in "rejected overtures" with other
nations. Hitler, for instance, clearly explained his reasons for
starting WWII as arising out of rejected maternal love:
I have repeatedly offered England
our friendship, and if necessary closest co-operation. Love, however,
is not a one-sided affair, but must be responded to by the other
side....I do not want to conquer her. I want to come to terms
with her. I want to force her to accept my friendship...232
The war that began as rape to win
love ended as rape to win love. When the war was nearly over, sitting
in his bunker in 1945, Hitler justified his rape of Europe as necessary
because, he said,
It could not be conquered by charm
and persuasiveness. I had to rape it in order to have it.233
In a world full of humiliating, rejecting,
provocative motherlands, neighboring countries seem to be "just
asking to be raped." Group-fantasies of wanting to "explode
into her" to "penetrate her life" and avenge her
for "turning down our overtures" in order to "knock
her off her throne" and "teach her a lesson she won't
forget" begin to be expressed in diplomacy, political cartoons
and in the media.234 Hypermasculinity begins to
infect the nation's mood with the need for "standing tall"
and "displaying our firmness" with a "stiffening
of the national will." Newspapers headline rape fantasies to
goad leaders into war; as the British tabloids screamed out before
the Falkland invasion, "STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA." Cartoons
begin showing barbarian men in neighboring nations about to rape
men's wives.236 Leaders begin to express projections
of rape in meetings, as when Lyndon Johnson excitedly asked before
expanding the war in Vietnam, "how many times do I let a fiend
rape my wife?"237
Finally, when the group-fantasies
peak and action to "get some respect" is irresistible,
war begins as "righteous rape" against any enemy that
can be imagined to be a convenient humiliating mommy. War, gang
rape and degradation of women merge into one. For instance, the
Serbian attacks on its neighbors that followed the overt rape cartoons
like the one above had "the degradation and molestation of
women central to the conquest...women of sixty and girls under twelve
being gang-raped, often in front of their relatives [while men]
pushed bottle necks into our sex, even shattered, broken bottles...guns
too...[as men screamed] ‘I'll fuck your mother, all your mothers.'"238
Wars usually begin as group-fantasies of mother-rape, revenges for
earlier neglect and domination, righteous violence that will "teach
her a lesson."
WAR PHASE: PURIFICATION OF BAD BOY
SELF
But while war is seen as an way to avenge maternal mistreatment,
it is also a merging with the Terrifying Mommy to wipe out the Bad
Boy self whose fault it must be that mommy wasn't loving. The purification
of mankind through the sacrifice of children to an avenging goddess
was, of course, the practice of ancient societies like Carthage,
where tens of thousands of jars have been found with charred bones
of sacrificed children along with inscriptions saying they had been
killed by their parents to cleanse their sinfulness.239
The symbol of the warrior in Aztec society was a bleeding fetal
war-god standing at the placental center of the city whose blood
streamed out into the four quarters of the universe, feeding every
citizens of the state.240 In every war, young men march
off essentially to commit suicide as heroic acts of sacrifice, "losing
ourselves [in] ecstasy because we are conscious of a power outside
us with which we can merge."241 As one soldiers
wrote during WWI, "Sacrificing oneself is a joy, the greatest
joy...Never before has such a powerful desire for death and passion
for sacrifice seized mankind."242 The Bad Boy self
must die for the Good Boy self to be loved; therefore, blood must
flow to renew the sinful nation: "The souls of nations are
drinking renewal from the blood of the fallen
soldiers."243 Soldiers may sent back to their mothers
dead, but they are wrapped in "living flags," maternal
symbols, as though they had been reborn into new swaddling-clothes
with a new chance to be loved.244 A soldier "dies
peacefully. He who has a Motherland dies in comfort...in her, like
a baby falling asleep..."245
The ecstatic relief once war begins
is felt because it is the revanche supréme for early
abuse and because it promises to cleanse the self of sinfulness.
However convinced people are as they begin wars that the "enemy"
is outside themselves, they are in fact fighting alters inside
themselves--raping Terrifying Mommies and killing Bad Boy selves.
Nations "descend into visions of purgations and redemption"
in a "holy war [to] cleanse our souls of the dross of selfish
pettiness."246 War is "the highest happiness
that ordinary men can find,"247 a "purifying
thunderstorm"248 that provides a chance to be "born
again"249 a "triumph of righteousness"250
and a "magical restoration of potency."251
"It is a joy to be alive," rejoiced a German paper in
1914.252 "The heather is on fire. I never before
knew what a popular excitement can be," wrote an American as
the Civil War began, describing jubilant crowds "with flushed
faces, wild eyes, screaming mouths."253 At last,
one could take revenge against the Terrifying Mommy, kill the Bad
Boy self, be reborn and finally become pure and lovable, all in
one splendid act of mass butchery.
THE CAUSES OF WORLD WAR II AND THE
HOLOCAUST
Historians and political scientists have proposed any number of
causes for WWII and the Holocaust.254 Unfortunately,
detailed research has disproved every one of them. Goldhagen's claim
that ordinary Germans had long held "exterminationist"
antisemitic views255 has been disproved by careful historical
studies that showed Germany was "a safe haven in late-nineteenth-century
Europe [where] when German Jews looked toward France, they saw the
startling antisemitism unleashed by the Dreyfus Affair and when
they looked eastward, they saw pogroms and thousands of Jews fleeing
toward Germany's safer political climate."256 The
reason "why so many Jews failed to leave Germany [was] they
really couldn't believe that this Germany, which they loved [and]
felt gratitude toward" would ever harm them.257
In fact, earlier antisemitic movements in Germany were tiny, and
"most historians believe that the Nazis had no deep roots in
German history and that antisemitism in Germany was not essentially
different from that of some other nations..."258
Careful studies of Nazi party members have even found that most
were not antisemitic when they joined; "most people were drawn
to antisemitism because they were drawn to Nazism, not the other
way around."259 Kershaw's recent careful studies
conclude "that antisemitism was not a major factor in attracting
support for Hitler..."260 As we shall shortly detail,
what made Germans antisemitic was the anxieties of the manic period
after the Great Depression had ended, later in the 1930s after Hitler
gained power, and were not due some mysterious German gene for eliminationist
politics.
All the other explanations for WWII
and the Holocaust have been similarly disproved by recent historical
research. Klaus Fischer's "no Hitler, no Holocaust,"261
along with all the other studies blaming German violence on "obedience"
to Hitler's "hypnotic eyes"262 have been thrown
out by the dozens of studies of the spontaneous, gratuitous violence
engaged in by average Germans even when they could have easily opted
out. "Only following orders" is simply a no longer considered
a serious motivation for the war and genocide. What is, however,
most widely accepted is that Germans were "under stress,"
voted Nazi and then turned to violence because of the Great Depression.
Numerous detailed studies of Nazi membership
all disprove this "economic stress" argument. The "model
Nazi party member" joined before the Depression, "his
economic status was secure, for not once did he have to change his
occupation, job, or residence, nor was he ever unemployed."263
"The only group affected [by the Depression] were the workers...Yet
paradoxically the workers remained steadfast in support of the [democratic]
status quo while the middle class, only marginally hurt by the economic
constriction, turned to revolution."264 Most workers
did not vote for the Nazis and of those who did, who "believed
in Hitler the magician," most soon felt disappointed.265
Hitler, in fact, admitted "economics was not very important
to him [and] very few Germans had any information about what his
economic program actually was."266 Germans who became
violent Nazis came primarily from authoritarian middle-class backgrounds,
not from poverty; indeed, "those who grew up in poverty showed
the least prejudice" in Merkl's study of Nazi stormtroopers.267
The "stress" that triggered the war and genocide may have
been related to economics, but it in fact came from renewed prosperity
in the late 1930s, not to the economic collapse of 1929.
There is one psychological study based
upon a developmental event in the early lives of Germans that is
given some credulity by historians: the "Nazi Youth Cohort"
thesis of Peter Loewenberg. This study claims that "the rapid
political ascendance of the Nazi party (NSDAP) in the period from
1928 to 1933 was marked by a particularly strong support from youth"
who were deprived of food during the 1917-1919 Allied embargo.268
Citing low German birth weights and excess infant mortality during
the period, Loewenberg feels this "single traumatic event"
accounts for "the influx of German youth to the ranks of National
Socialism, the political decline of the Weimar Republic, and the
Nazi seizure of power."269 The problem with this
thesis is the figures don't add up. While Loewenberg cites the census
of 1933 as showing 31 percent of Germans were "youthful,"
these figures in fact were for those 18 to 30 years of age.270
Children born in 1917-18 were actually only 11-12 years of age in
1929 when the Nazis received their most uncoerced votes. Even those
up to 5 years of age during the embargo years would still be from
12-17 in 1929, too young to join the Nazi party. And in fact most
German youth didn't join the Hitler Youth, which managed to attract
only one percent of the young people belonging to religious and
political youth organizations in 1932.271 Therefore,
the WWI famine, however severe, cannot be a main cause of the Nazi
takeover,272 since the average age of membership of the
Nazi party was in fact over 31 years.273
THE SOURCES OF WWII AND THE HOLOCAUST
IN GERMAN CHILDREARING
If German childrearing practices are not considered as the cause
of German mass violence, there is no way to avoid Goldhagen's conclusion
that the war and the Holocaust must be due to "something monstrously
Germanic...at bottom unexplainable [and not] a product of human
decisions."274 But if German childhood around 1900
is recognized as a totalitarian nightmare of murder, neglect, battering
and torture of innocent, helpless human beings, then the restaging
of this nightmare four decades later in the Holocaust and war can
be understood as explanatory.
Historians have avoided researching
German childrearing at the end of the nineteenth century. The few
that have begun to do the research have found German childhood uniformly
more brutal than French and British childhood. A comparison by Maynes
of 90 German and French autobiographies of late nineteenth-century
working class childhoods found German far more brutal and unloving,
with the typical memory of home being that "No bright moment,
no sunbeam, no hint of a comfortable home where motherly love and
care could shape my childhood was ever known to me."275
In contrast, "French workers' autobiographies tell somewhat
different childhood tales. To be sure, there are a few French accounts
of childhoods marked by cruelty, neglect, and exploitation."276
Yet "much more common are stories of surprisingly sentimental
home loves and warm relationships with mothers (and often fathers),
even in the face of material deprivation."277 Maynes
found unrelenting child labor, sexual molestation and beatings at
home and at school were consistently worse in the German accounts.
Most of the research into primary sources
on the history of German childrearing has been done by psychohistorians
connected with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für psychohistorische
Forschung, the German branch of The Institute for Psychohistory.278
The two main studies covering nineteenth-century German childrearing
were those published in The Journal of Psychohistory by Aurel
Ende and Raffael Scheck; both found uniform cruelty and neglect
in their detailed review of 154 German autobiographies studied.
Child battering was so common in German families that Scheck concludes,
"There is virtually no autobiography which doesn't tell something
about violence against children and almost no author who has not
been beaten as a child."279 And Ende's massive study
concludes that "nowhere in Western Europe are the needs of
children so fatally neglected as in Germany," where "infant
mortality, corporal punishment, cruelties against children, the
exploitation of working children and the teacher-pupil relationship"
were so brutal that he feels he has to apologize "for not dealing
with the ‘brighter side' of German childhood because it turns
out that there is no ‘bright side.'"280
Visitors to German homes at the end
of the nineteenth century also found that in general "one feels
sorry for these little German children; they must work so hard and
seem to lack that exuberance of life, spirits, and childish glee
that make American children harder to train but leave them the memory
of a happy childhood."281 In particular, visitors
noted the German preference for boys and their maltreatment of girls.
Whereas in France and England beginning in the eighteenth century
there was "an increasing appreciation of girl children,"
with parents often openly expressing their preference of having
a girl,282 in Germany even at the end of the nineteenth
century girls were resented and uniformly neglected: "From
childhood on, the lives these women led were exceedingly harsh...dominated
by memories of paternal brutality or negligence...drunkenness and
violence was a routine part of life [including] a father's incestuous
advances...[and] abuse with sexual overtones at the hands of her
mother...beatings and other forms of violent punishment."283
Germany in general was historically far behind the rest of Western
Europe in the education of girls and in woman's rights, so that
innovative mothers and hopeful daughters were found far less than
in other countries.284
German family maxims described the
lack of love of mothers toward their children, saying tenderness
was "generally not part of the mother's character...Just as
she kept her children...short on food and clothing, she also was
short on fondling and tenderness...[feeling] the children should...regard
themselves as useless weeds and be grateful that they were tolerated."285
Children were expected to give love to their parents, not the parents
to their children: "We always appeared trembling before our
parents, hoping that our official kiss of their hands would be accepted..."286
One boy reported his mother once dropped a word of praise, saying
to someone that "He is good and well-liked," so that the
boy remembered it all his life "because the words were totally
new sounds to my ear."287 But kind words were rare
in German homes, so most Germans remembered "no tender word,
no caresses, only fear"288 and childhood was "joyless,"
"so immeasurably sad that you could not fathom it."289
Yet this hatred of children in German families was not something
that they felt guilty about. German parents endlessly impressed
upon the children their pride in their family atmosphere of hatred.
"I don't want to be loved," said one typical father, "I
want to be feared!"290 Another father summed
up his feelings about family discipline as follows:
It is good to hate. To hate is strong,
manly. It makes the blood flow. It makes one alert. It is necessary
for keeping up the fighting instincts. To love is feebleness.
It enervates. You see all the nations that talk of love as the
keynote of life are weak, degenerate. Germany is the most powerful
nation in the world because she hates. When you hate, you eat
well, sleep well, work well, fight well.291
GERMAN INFANTICIDE, WETNURSING AND
SWADDLING OF INFANTS
Since German fathers at the end of the nineteenth century spent
little time at home, childrearing was overwhelmingly the job of
the mother: "The care and training of the children are almost
entirely in her hands for the first five years."292
The mother especially ruled the nursery and kitchen, where the children
spent their time, and "she may actually exclude men from these
restricted areas"293 when they were at home. Thus,
although most studies of the treatment of infants and young children
in Germany stress the admitted brutality and authoritarianism of
fathers, the real lives of young German children in the past centered
more on their murder, rejection, neglect, tying up and beating by
their mothers and other women.
Infanticide and infant mortality rates
at the end of the nineteenth century were much higher in Germany
and Austria than in England, France, Italy and Scandinavia.294
Newborn were not considered in most areas as fully human since they
not thought to have a soul until they were six weeks old, and so
could be "killed in a kind of late abortion."295
Women giving birth often "had their babies in the privy, and
treated the birth as an evacuation, an everyday event, and...carried
on with their work."296 Births which were "experienced
as a bowel movement made it possible for the women [to] kill their
children in a very crude way, by smashing their heads [like] poultry
and small animals..."297 Mothers who killed their
newborn babies were observed by others as being without remorse,
"full of indifference, coldness and callousness [and gave]
the impression of a general impoverishment of feeling" toward
her child.298 Even if the infant was allowed to live,
it could easily be neglected and not fed enough, and it would be
made to "go straight to heaven." Infant mortality rates
in Germany ranged from 21 percent in Prussia to an astonishing 58
percent in Bavaria during the latter part of the nineteenth century,299
the figures in the south--the highest in Europe--being due to their
practice of not breastfeeding,300 since hand-fed babies
died at a rate three times that of breast-fed babies.301
The best figures for overall German infanticide at the end of the
century were 20 percent, half again higher than France and England.302
Nineteenth-century doctors condemned
the practice of German mothers refusing to breastfeed their babies,
saying the pap made of flour and water or milk was "usually
so thick that it has to be forced into the child and only becomes
digestible when mixed with saliva and stomach fluids. At its worst
it is curdled and sour."303 Infants were so commonly
hungry that "those poor worms get their mouths stuffed with
a dirty rag containing chewed bread so that they cannot scream."304
Ende reports that for centuries "One rarely encounters a German
infant who is fully breastfed...Everywhere they got their mouths
stuffed with Zulp, a small linen bag filled with bread...Swaddled
babies could hardly get rid of these often dirty rags."305
Mothers who could afford it sent their newborn to wetnurses--commonly
called Engelmacherin, "angelmakers," because they
were so negligent toward the children. The mothers complained, "Do
you think I am a farmer's daughter, that I should bother myself
with little children? That a woman of my age and standing should
allow her very strength to be sucked dry by children?"306
While English gentry began to nurse their infants themselves during
the seventeenth century, the mothering revolution had not yet really
reached Germany by the end of the nineteenth century.307
Visitors who wrote books on German home life reported, "It
is extremely rare for a German lady to nourish her own child,"308
and "It would have been very astonishing indeed if a well-to-do
mother had suggested suckling her own baby."309
Almost all mothers who refused to breast-feed could have done so
if they "seriously wanted to," according to a 1905 German
medical conference.310 Those who did not gave "completely
trivial reasons," such as "because it is messy,"
because they "didn't want to ruin their figures" or because
breastfeeding was "inconvenient.311 Even after their
children returned from wetnurse, "noble ladies showed not the
slightest interest in their offspring"312 and turned
them over to nursemaids, governesses and tutors. The result was
that parents were often strangers to their children. When one German
father asked his child whom he loves the most and the child replied,
"Hanne [his nurse]," the father objected, "No! You
must love your parents more." "But it is not true!"
the child replied. The father promptly beat him.313
Mothers and other caretakers of newborn
German babies were so frightened of them that they tied them up
tightly for from six to nine months and strapped them into a crib
in a room with curtains drawn to keep out the lurking evils.314
Two centuries after swaddling had disappeared in England and America,
two British visitors described it as routine throughout Germany:
A German baby is a piteous object;
it is pinioned and bound up like a mummy in yards of bandages...it
is never bathed...Its head is never touched with soap and water
until it is eight or ten months old, when the fine skull cap of
encrusted dirt which it has by that time obtained is removed...315
In Germany, babies are loathsome,
foetid things...offensive to the last degree with the excreta
that are kept bound up within their swaddling clothes...the heads
of the poor things are never washed, and are like the rind of
Stilton cheese...316
When the children were finally removed
from their swaddling bands after six to twelve months, other restraint
devices such as corsets with steel stays and backboards continued
their tied-up condition to assure the parents they were still in
complete control.317 The result of all this early restraint
was the same production of later violence in children as that obtained
by experimenters physically restraining rats and monkeys--marked
by depletions of serotonin, increases in norepinephrine levels and
massive increases in terror, rage and eventually actual violence.318
The fear of one's own children was
so widespread in German families that for centuries autobiographies
told of a tradition of abandonment of children by their parents
to anyone who would take them, using the most flimsy of excuses.319
Children were given away and even sometimes sold320 to
relatives, neighbors, courts, priests, foundling homes, schools,
friends, strangers, "traveling scholars" (to be used as
beggars)--anyone who would take them--so that for much of history
only a minority of German children lived their entire childhoods
under their family roof. Children were reported to be sent away
to others as servants or as apprentices, "for disciplinary
reasons," "to be drilled for hard work," "to
keep them from idleness," because of a "domestic quarrel,"
"because it cried as a baby," "because his uncle
was childless," etc.321 Scheck notes from his study
of autobiographies, "When their parents came to take them home,
their children usually didn't recognize them any more."322
Peasants gave away their children so regularly that the only ones
who were guaranteed to be kept were the first-born boys--to get
the inheritance--and one of the daughters--who was sometimes crippled
in order to prevent her from marrying and force her to stay permanently
as a cheap helper in the parental household.323 After
two children, it was said that "the parental attitude to later
offspring noticeably deteriorated [so that] a farmer would rather
lose a young child than a calf."324
Those children who were kept by their
parents were considered, in Luther's words, "obnoxious with
their crapping, eating, and screaming,"325 beings
who "don't know anything, they aren't capable of doing anything,
they don't perform anything...[and are] inferior to adults"326
and are therefore are only useless eaters327 until
they began to work. "When little children die, it's not often
that you have a lot of grief [but] if an older child dies, who would
soon be able to go off to work...everybody is upset--it's already
cost so much work and trouble, now it's all been for nothing."328
As "useless eaters" children were mainly resented: "...rarely
could we eat a piece of bread without hearing father's comment that
we did not merit it."329 The children grew up feeling
that "my mother was fond of society and did not trouble much
about me" (Bismarck) or "[my mother] did not conduce to
evolve that tender sweetness and solicitude which are usually associated
with motherhood. I hardly ever recollect her having fondled me.
Indeed, demonstrations of affection were not common in our family"
(Wagner).330 It is not surprising, therefore, with such
a drastic lack of maternal love that historically outsiders complained
that German mothers routinely abandoned their children, "paid
less attention to their children than cows,"331
and observed that "mothers leave their small children or babies
at home alone and go off shopping; or parents go visiting in the
evening, leaving the small children at home by themselves..."332
BEATING, TERRORIZING AND SEXUALLY MOLESTING
GERMAN CHILDREN Although little children can be made less threatening
by being given away, tied up or ignored, as they grow older they
must be forced to conform to parental images of them as poison containers
by beating and terrorizing them. German parents throughout history
have been known as the most violent batterers in Europe,333
particularly toward their boys,334 seconding Luther's
opinion that "I would rather have a dead son than a disobedient
one."335 Since mothers continued to be the main
caretakers of the young children, the mother was far more often
the main beater than the father.336 Scheck and Ende found
brutal beating in virtually all autobiographies at the end of the
nineteenth century; Hävernick found that 89 percent were beaten
at the beginning of the twentieth century, over half of these with
canes, whips or sticks.337 More recent surveys of report
75 percent of German adults say they had suffered from violence
from their parents during their childhood, although hitting with
instruments was falling from earlier periods.338
Battering babies sometimes begins in
the womb. Violence against pregnant women has always been prevalent
throughout human history, and since even today pregnant women are
assaulted between 21 percent to 30 percent by their partners,339
this suggests that many fetuses were probably physically abused
at the end of the nineteenth century, even without considering the
effects of widespread maternal alcoholism in Germany. The physical
assaults resumed as soon as the little child was out of swaddling
bands, whenever they cry for anything. The widely-followed Dr. Schreber
says the earlier one begins beatings the better: "One must
look at the moods of the little ones which are announced by screaming
without reason and crying...[inflicting] bodily admonishments consistently
repeated until the child calms down or falls asleep. Such a procedure
is necessary only once or at most twice and--one is master
of the child forever. From now on a glance, a word, a single
threatening gesture, is sufficient to rule the child."340
Schreber was overly optimistic and, like other German parents, continued
to be threatened by imagined disobedience from his children, and
so the beatings continued. Every independent move of children was
seen as done, says Krüger, "with the intent of defying
you;" it is "a declaration of war against you" which
you must "whip him well till he cries so: Oh no, Papa, oh no!"341
These are not just spankings; they are whippings, like Hitler's
daily whippings of sometimes over 200 strokes with a cane or a hippopotamus
whip, which sometimes put him into a coma.342 Parents
were often described as being in a "righteous rage" during
the beatings343 and the children often lost consciousness.344
"At school we were beaten until our skin smoked. At home, the
instrument for punishment was a dog-whip...My father, while beating,
more and more worked himself into a rage. I lost consciousness from
his beatings several times."345
Klöden writes that the motto
of German parents at the end of the nineteenth century was simple:
"Children can never get enough beatings."346
Although few German parents from the past would today escape being
thrown in jail for their batterings, children at the end of the
nineteenth century found little protection from society, since their
own word and even physical evidence of severe abuse counted for
nothing. Ende's survey describes typical court cases where a neighbor
would alert police to "a three-year-old girl [whose] body was
covered with welts. Lips, nose and gums were open wounds. The body
showed numerous festering sores. The child had been placed on a
red-hot, iron stove--two wounds on the buttocks were festering,"
but the court let the parent go free.347 Ende describes
routine beating, kicking, strangling, making children eat excrement,
etc., saying, "The cases I have presented are not the most
extreme; they are typical of the vast literature on German families."348
The result was that German childhood suicides were three to five
times higher than in other Western European countries at the end
of the nineteenth century,349 fear of beatings by parents
being the reason most often cited by the children for their suicide
attempts.350 Few people cared about the reason for the
suicides, since "suicidal children were thought to be spineless
creatures, spoiled by indulgent parents...Newspapers wrote: ‘A
boy who commits suicide because of a box on the ears has earned
his fate; he deserved to be ruined.'351" There simply
was no one around to sympathize with battered children in Germany.
Even the small feminist movement in Germany failed to speak out
for the rights of children, declaring motherhood "oppressive,"352
even though feminists in misogynous Germany in any case soon became
"a symbol of disorder, decadence and physical and psychological
disease."353
Although these constant beatings quickly
produced compliant, obedient children, parental projections into
them made continuous overcontrol appear necessary. German children
were "often locked in a dark room or a closet or fastened to
a table leg,"354 were "hardened" by washing
them with ice-cold water before breakfast,355 and were
tightly tied up in various corsets, steel collars and torturous
back-support devices with steel stays and tight laces to hold them
in controlled positions all day long.356 Children were
not only controlled by being frightened by endless ghost stories
where they were threatened with being carried away by horrible figures.357
The parents actually "dressed up in terrifying costumes [as]
the so-called Knecht Ruprecht, made their faces black and pretended
to be a messenger of God who would punish children for their sins."358
At Christmas they dressed as Pelznickel, "armed with a rod
and a large chain...If they have been bad children, he will use
his rod; if good, he will bring them nuts..."359
Petschauer remembers being threatened by a "hairy monster [that]
chased me under the living room table, chains clanking, hoofs stomping,
appearing it wanted to drag me off in its carrying basket, the Korb."360
Scheck sums up the effects of these terrifying devices: "Most
children had been so deeply frightened that their ‘demons
of childhood' persecuted them at night and in feverish dreams for
their whole lives."361
Toilet training was an early, violent
battle-ground for parental control over the infant. Since "babies
and young children won't obey, don't want to do what grownups want
them to do but instead test them, resist them, and tyrannize them
[and since] they are impure, unclean and messy,"362
toilet training begins at around six months of age, long before
the infant has sphincter control. The training is done by regular
use of enemas and by hitting the infant: "The
baby cannot walk yet [Nana] spanks the baby. Hard. ‘ He is
a dirty, dirty Hansi-baby,' she says, as she spanks. ‘He made
pooh-pooh last night! Dirty Hansi!' Nana slaps the little red buttocks."
Traditional German obsession with children's feces is well known;
both Dundes and von Zglinicki have written entire books on the subject.363
The enema in particular was used as a frightening domination device,
a fetish-object often wielded by the mother or nurse in daily rituals
that resembled sexual assaults on the anus, sometimes including
tying the child up in leather straps as though the mother were a
dominatrix, inserting the two-foot-long enema tube over and over
again as punishment for "accidents."364 There
were special enema stores that German children would be taken to
in order to be "fitted" for their proper size of enemas.
The ritual "stab in the back" was a central fear of German
children well into the twentieth century, and they learned "never
to speak of it, but always to think about it."365
The punitive atmosphere of the German
home was so total that one can convincingly say that totalitarianism
in the family led directly to totalitarianism in politics. Children
were personal slaves of their parents, catering to their every need,
waiting on them, tying to fulfill their every whim, even if only
to be poison containers for their moods. Many accounts of the time
describe a similar tense home atmosphere:
When the father came in from work,
the children were expected to be at home. Neighbours...would warn...'[Your
father's] coming! We ran like a flash, opened up and were inside
in time!' The children would bring him his slippers, help him
off with his coat, lay the table or just retreat in silence to
a corner of the room...Right away we got punished, whack, a clip
round the ear or something...'You take off my shoes; you go and
get water; you fill my pipe for me and you fetch my books!' And
we had to jump to it, he wouldn't have stood for it if we hadn't
all done just as we were told...we had to kneel, one by the one
window, another by the other...we would kneel with our heads against
the wall...we had to stay there for two hours..."366
German children were also used by parents
and servants as sexual objects from an early age.367
German doctors often said "nursemaids and other servants carry
out all sorts of sexual acts on the children entrusted to their
care, sometimes merely in order to quiet the children, sometimes
‘for fun.'"368 Even Freud said he was seduced
by his nurse and by his father,369 and said "nursemaids,
governesses and domestic servants [were often] guilty of [grave
sexual] abuses" and that "nurses put crying children to
sleep by stroking their genitals."370 Children were
used like a comfort blanket: "If the father goes away on a
journey, the little son can come to sleep in mother's bed. As soon
as father returns, the boy is banished to his cot" next to
the parents' bed, where he will continue to observe their intercourse.371
These incestuous assaults were regular enough to be remembered rather
than repressed in the autobiographies of the period.372
In poorer families, of course, "it was unheard of for children
to have their own beds,"373 but even in wealthy
families parents bring their children to bed with them. After using
them sexually, they then would threaten to punish the child for
their sexuality. "Little Hans," for instance, reported
he regularly was masturbated by his mother, "coaxed [Freud's
footnote: ‘caressed'] with his Mummy [Freud's footnote: ‘meaning
his penis.']," but then told she would "send for Dr. A.
to cut off your widdler" if he touched his penis.374
It is no wonder that Freud reported that his patients "regularly
charge their mothers with seducing them,"375 but
not because "they had been cleansed by their mothers"
as he claimed but because they had in fact been used sexually by
them. They then impose various punishments and anti-masturbation
devices such as penis-rings, metal cages with spikes and plaster
casts to prevent erections while sleeping in order to punish the
child for the incestuous acts of the parent.376
As children left their families in
pedophile-prone nineteenth-century Germany, they were again raped
at school, as servants, on the streets and at work. The majority
of prostitutes were minors, often starting their careers as young
as age seven, with parents often living off the prostitution of
their daughters.377 Virgins were particularly valuable,
since "a superstition prevails...that venereal diseases may
be cured by means of sexual intercourse with a virgin."378
Bloch thought seducing children was "very widespread"
because "timidity and impotence on the part of adult men, rendering
intercourse with adult women difficult" led to their commonly
raping children.379 Rape by employers of servants was
widespread, but since no one wanted illegitimate children, the servant
girl was expected to kill any offspring.380 Girls leaving
school at thirteen regularly told tales of sexual assault at the
hands of factory employers and managers or by bosses in the office.381
And both boys and girls were open to rape in schools, by teachers
as well as older students--there were even "free schools"
known for pederastic use of young boys that espoused "pedagogical
Eros" concepts that were popular in the period.382
Even the daily beatings so commonly
reported at schools had overtones of sexual assault--after all,
the German schoolmaster who boasted he had given "911,527 strokes
with the stick, 124,000 lashes with the whip, 136,715 slaps with
the hand and 1,115,800 boxes on the ear"383 was
engaged in a severe sexual compulsion, not a disciplinary act. One
can easily sense the sexual excitement behind the claim that teachers
must "know how to love with the cane,"384 in
schools that werereal torture-chambers for
children and young people. All day long the hazel-rod, the ruler...and
the cowhide reign, or they fly around in the class-room to warn
the sluggish ones and the chatter-boxes or to call them to step
out. Then, they were given a sound thrashing. How inventive were
some school tyrants concerning their punishments...There is rarely
a morning on which we do not see servants or even parents in the
streets, dragging violently to school boys who cry at the top of
their voices.385
THE INNOVATIVE PHASE: WEIMAR GERMANY
AND THE FORBIDDEN LEAP INTO MODERNITY
A small minority of Germans at the turn of the century, however,
had more modern, less brutal childrearing, and it was these who
in every economic class managed to provide the new psychoclass that
supported the democratic and economic reforms of the Weimar Republic.
During the Weimar period, these advanced Germans were able to borrow
more advanced social and economic models from other more democratic
nations nearby, creating even larger a gap between the majority
of Germans brought up in medieval childrearing ways and the needs
of modern capitalism and democratic forms of government. This advanced
minority did not mainly come from the wealthier economic classes;
wealthy mothers regularly sent their newborn out to peasants who
had reputations as being totally without feeling for the infants
for whom they were supposed to care. The new psychoclass German
children can be found in the historical record in exceptional autobiographies
and diaries, more in the north than the south--where as we have
seen the mothers didn't even breastfeed--more in the middle classes
than in the wealthy, more urban than rural, and more in certain
ethnic groups, particularly the Jews.
That German Jewish families "constituted
one of the most spectacular social leaps in European history [and]
produced some of the most fiercely independent minds" in Germany386
is a little-understood cause of their persecution during the Holocaust,
since a nation afraid of independence naturally chooses the most
independent people in their population as scapegoats for their fear
of freedom. Jews in Germany were far more literate (even the women)
than others since medieval times, when most populations were nearly
totally illiterate. Jewish families, smaller and more urban than
other German families and far less authoritarian,387
almost always nursed their own children, so that in 1907, for instance,
in the south "44 percent of the children of Christian families
died, but only 8 percent of the Jewish children."388
Two major studies of German Jewish family life confirm that it was
quite different from most of the other families around them, so
much more loving and compassionate that even after the end of WWII,
after experiencing during the Holocaust the most "severe abuse
and unimaginable stress, there were no suicides [in survivors]...the
people are neither living a greedy, me-first style of life, nor
are they seeking gain at the expense of others...389most
of their lives are marked by an active compassion for others..."
As was stressed earlier, what produces violent restaging of early
trauma isn't merely the severity of the trauma, but whether or not
the child blames himself.390
Two similar retrospective studies--one
by Dicks of Nazis and another by the Oliners of rescuers of Jews--clearly
reveal the different family backgrounds of the more advanced psychoclass
represented by rescuers. Just as Dicks found brutal, domineering
parents of Nazis who had "particularly destructive mother images,"391
the Oliners interviewed over 406 rescuers of Jews, and compared
them with 126 nonrescuers, and found that their economic class,
their religion, their education, jobs and other social characteristics
were all similar, only their childrearing was different.392
Altruistic personalities, they found, had families that showed them
more respect, more concern for fairness, more love and had less
emphasis on obedience and more on individuality. They were almost
never sent out to others to be cared for, and if they were sometimes
hit by their parents, the parents often apologized.393
Obviously, a new childrearing mode had penetrated to a minority
of Germans at the beginning of the twentieth century, in time to
produce a new innovative phase and an attempted "leap to modernity"
during the Weimar Republic.
During this decade of prosperity, "many
Germans enjoyed a temporary triumph of eros over thanatos,
experiencing a sense of liberation hitherto unknown in a land where
strong discipline and public conformity had held sway for generations."394
Universal suffrage allowed women to vote, a minority of parties
were even fairly democratic in intent, economic freedoms multiplied
and produced unaccustomed prosperity, women's rights over their
children were promoted and sexual material and even contraception
became widely available, reducing for the first time the number
of children per family to two.395 But all this political,
economic and social liberation produced terror in the average German,
terror of maternal engulfment. Democracy was seen as "a beast
of a thousand heads [that] crushes anything it cannot swallow or
engulf."396 Weimar Purity Crusades began to call
for "emancipation from emancipation" and "a restoration
of authoritarian rule."397 Anti-pornography laws
"to protect youth against literary rubbish and dirt" began
to be passed as early as 1926.398 Even women delegates
in the Reichstag opposed "the masculinization of women"
that they said was the result of women's rights, which were deemed
"un-German."399 Germany felt it needed a Phallic
Leader who would give them a national enema, a purging, a
purifying of "foreign" liberalism to "unify and cleanse"400
the body politic as their mothers and nurses had forcefully purged
them of feces and cleansed them of their desires for independence.
The myth about "the stab in the back" (the enema) being
the underlying cause of Germany's problems had deeper meaning than
the political. It was agreed that "The stab in the back [is]
a crime...the cause of our general paralysis and joylessness..."401
What was needed, it was said, was something to "remove the
Verstopfung [constipation]" that was obstructing German
culture.402 Germans complained throughout the Weimar
period about "the stab in the back" they had received
at the end of WWI, and said about the Versailles Treaty "always
think about it, never speak of it," both phrases really referring
to their enema assaults as children. The more prosperous Weimar
became, the more growth panic Germans experienced--as shown in the
increase in murder and manslaughter rates during the later Weimar
years.403 Thus it was that Germany--the nation that during
the 1920s enjoyed higher standards of living than any other in Europe
--404began its search for a violent, purging dictator
long before the Depression began, the supposed cause of the dictatorship.
THE DEPRESSIVE PHASE: CHOOSING THE
PHALLIC LEADER
Careful studies of the rise of Nazism conclude that the Depression
came after, not before, the death of Weimar democracy and that "the
decay of parliamentary government preceded the Nazi rise."405
Nor did the Versailles Treaty and Allied demands for reparations
cause them, since "German borrowing from abroad always far
exceeded her reparation payments."406 Nor, as we
have documented, was antisemitism the cause of the rise of the Nazis.
Not only was earlier German antisemitism milder than many other
European nations,407 "in the decisive electoral
campaigns of 1930 and 1932...anti-Semitic agitation proved, if anything,
more of a hindrance, so...leadership consciously played it down."408
Most Germans were "relatively indifferent towards the Jewish
Question,"409 and "the vast majority of the
general population did not clamor or press for anti-Semitic measures
[even by] the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938..."410
The call for a dictatorship, in fact,
came before it began to center on Hitler, first in films and other
cultural material (Kracauer calls Weimar culture "a procession
of tyrants")411 and then in the Reichstag. The middle
classes--"hardly touched by the depression"412
--and the wealthy--"the richer the precinct the higher the
Nazi vote"413 --were the main sources of the over
two-thirds of all delegates who voted Hitler dictator. Women in
fact voted for Hitler in even greater proporations than men.414
The ecstatic enthusiasm of the jubilant masses of people who celebrated
their Phallic Leader came directly from his promises of a violent
Purity Crusade that would end what Hitler called the "poisoning
hothouse of sexual conceptions and stimulants [and the] suffocating
perfume of our modern eroticism [which is] the personification of
incest"415 --all three images suggesting flashbacks
to the sexually engulfing mommy of the family bed. Even during the
Depression, Germans said, "We are somebody again!"416
only because of their delusional merger with their Phallic Leader.
Economics, political forms, antisemitism--all played second fiddle
in the Nazi propaganda to Hitler's "ranting about prostitution
and moral decadence."417 What made Germans say about
Hitler's dictatorship, "The Joy inside me was impossible to
describe,"418 was his violent Purity Crusade, a
dopamine rush that warded off engulfment by the Terrifying Mother--using
his hatred of his own mother that can be glimpsed in his saying
about a frightening painting of Medusa he kept on his walls: "Those
eyes! They are the eyes of my mother!"419
THE MANIC PHASE: BEGINNING THE KILLING
OF "USELESS EATERS"
The Depression was relatively short in Germany. Since economic downturns
are caused by motivated "mistakes" in restricting liquidity,
Hitler performed what was called an "economic miracle"
simply by reversing the "mistakes" of late Weimar economic
policies, so that by the end of 1936 Germany surpassed the highest
levels of GNP achieved during the 1920s.420 It was only
as the manic phase was well under way that Germany really felt their
growth panic and completed their merger with the Fatherland and
the promised violence of the Phallic Leader. Protected against growing
body disintegration anxieties by fetishistic Nazi leather boots
and uniforms, Germans could accomplish the "purification"
of their nation by "stopping the creeping poison" exuded
by Terrifying Mommies and Bad Boy selves, at home and abroad. One
must say "Halt!" to freedom to be loved by mommy: after
all, the "Heil Hitler!" salute, with arm stiffly outstretched
and palm out, is a universal symbol of "Halt." Germans
who as children were made to kneel silently against the wall for
hours encountered American swing music as adults, wanted to dance,
but still were under their internal parents' injunction to "Halt!"
So Nazi soldiers halted all swing dancing in Germany and sent those
who danced to swing music to concentration camps.421
Only if Germans could stop being individuals living in freedom could
they go back and live as "one family" in the "joyful
rapture" of one Volk, cleansed of sinfulness. Only if
they were slaves to totalitarian Nazi whims could they restage their
slavery to their parents in the totalitarian family of their childhoods;
thus, even the chains of swaddling bands were embedded in the Nazi
dicta: "He who can do what he wants is not free...He who feels
himself without chains is not free."422 Only those
who could worship the Motherland (the swastika is an ancient symbol
of Mother Goddess worship) could feel reborn and be loved as they
always felt they deserved to be since birth. Since group-fantasies
of merging with mommy proliferated, men feared they would become
feminine, so homosexuals began to be persecuted with a vengeance.
Indeed, all of post-Depression Europe,
America and even Asia were in their manic phase in the late Thirties
and felt the need for a cleansing world war and sacrifice of scapegoats.
American antisemitism, for instance, was on the rise, a steady minority
feeling that Jews were a menace to America423 and two-thirds
indicating Jewish refugees should be kept out of the country.424
In the summer of 1939 when over a thousand German Jews arrived in
the New World, they were sent back.425 The bill to accept
20,000 Jewish children into the U.S. was received with massive opposition
because "20,000 children will soon turn into 20,000 ugly adults."426
Thirty-two nations assembled at a conference on Jewish emigration
and voted they "regretted" they could not take in more
Jews.427 When the British were approached to save Jews
in exchange for goods, they replied, "What on earth are you
thinking off...What shall I do with those million Jews? Where shall
I put them?"428 Nor was Hitler without his admirers
in other countries before the invasion. Churchill called him "an
indomitable champion [who could] restore our courage,"429
Anthony Eden said of him "without doubt the man has charm...I
rather liked him."430 Indeed, Beisel's research
into the group-fantasies of Western nations before the war concludes
that Germany was "the bad boy" of Europe who was delegated
the starting of the war by others in "the family of nations,"
just as many "bad boys" are delegated the acting out of
violence felt by others in individual families.431
Before the war broke out, however,
the killing of "bad boy" alters had begun in earnest.
The earliest death camps, in fact, were set up to kill children
who were useless eaters, the same term applied to the Germans
themselves by their parents when they were children at the turn
of the century. Long before the Holocaust of Jews began, medical
officers sent questionnaires to parents and guardians of children
in mental hospitals and homes for delinquent children, asking them
if they would give their consent to killing them. So powerful was
the unconscious group-fantasy at that time that "bad"
children were polluting the German nation that most parents and
guardians agreed to the killing of their "useless children."432
The doctors, including pediatricians, spontaneously set up a Reich
Committee "to exterminate ‘undesirable' children, which
drew up standards that read exactly like the child care manuals
at the end of the nineteenth century, asking whether the child had
been "late in being toilet trained" or had used "dirty
words" or were "slow learners;" if they were, they
were exterminated in gas chambers and crematorium ovens.433
Over 70,000 of these "useless eaters" were murdered by
doctors to "cleanse the German national body"434
before the war began.435 So proud were these doctors
of their murder of "bad children" that they actually made
a popular film of the killings, which was shown in theaters.436
At the same time, throughout Germany, "midwives and nurses
were instructed to report births of defective infants...including
‘racially undesirable' ones...Thousands were killed by injection
or deliberate starvation."437 The wiping out of
Bad Boy alters "out there" in the real world to remove
them from "inside here," in the traumatized hemisphere
of the brain, had begun. Killing millions more "Bad Boys"
in the Holocaust and World War II soon followed.
THE WAR PHASE: RAPING MOMMIES AND KILLING
BAD BOY ALTERS
Killing mommies and children was the two tasks of Germans in starting
WWII. Hitler made this clear in the speech he gave before his generals
ordering the invasion of Poland. Note the exact words he used:
Genghis Khan has sent millions of
women and children into death knowingly and with a light heart...I
have put my death's head formations in place with the command
relentlessly and without compassion to send into death many women
and children of Polish origin...438
After quoting these sentences, Fischer
says "Hitler had exclaimed that he would kill without pity
all men, women and children."439 But men were not
in fact mentioned in his quote. Hitler said women and children
must die--women as symbolic Terrifying Mothers, and children as
symbolic Bad Boys. Even all the soldiers who must die--including
the German soldiers who must die--were "youth," symbolic
Bad Boy alters, vital, growing inner selves sacrificed to Moloch.
The path to war, however, did not begin
with the killing of Bad Boy "useless eaters" to the East.
Indeed, Hitler temporarily made a Nonaggression Pact with Russia
and attempted to extend it to Poland. Germany's first task was righteous
rape, the knocking of Mother England off her pedestal and, while
still wooing her, teaching her a lesson of how she must stop humiliating
Germans by rejecting their courtship. Nazi diplomatic language dripped
of maternal imagery for the two Western nations, as when Goering
asked, "Why should France continue to tie herself to a decayed
old nation like England--a rouged old maid trying to pretend that
she is still young and vigorous."440 Hitler believed
that war would teach England a lesson and make her respect Germany,
predicting that "the end of the war will mark the beginning
of a durable friendship with England. But first we must give her
the K.O.--for only so can we live at peace with her, and the Englishman
can only respect someone who has first knocked him out."441
Mother England, after all, was a "purely Germanic nation"
who, like a good German mother, ruled over her children (colonies)
with an iron fist.442 Germany had to rape her to dominate
and really have her, but, Hitler said, "This doesn't prevent
me from admiring [the English]. They have a lot to teach us."443
Historians agree that during the 1936-38
period "Hitler assumed that Britain could be wooed or forced
into an alliance."444 When England finally said
they would defend Poland, Hitler responded by "abandoning his
courtship of England, which had rejected him"445
and proceeded with what was called "the rape of Austria,"
what Hitler called "the return of German-Austria to the great
German motherland."446 All Germans had long blamed
England and France for the ineffective "Treaty of Shame"
(Versailles)--a flashback to all their childhood memories of shame
and humiliation by their caretakers--and promised to fight the West
to "restore to each individual German his self-respect
...We are not inferior; on the contrary, we are the complete
equals of every other nation."447 Even those Germans
who were turned over to nurses by their mothers knew what Hitler
meant when he declared that "Germany would not suffer under
the tutelage of governesses,"448 i.e., England.
Nazi Blitzkreig and dive-bomber
tactics were particularly loaded with righteous rape fantasies featuring
powerful thrusts and penetration of enemy bodies, wreaking vengeance
for earlier wrongs. The war began in the East, restaging German
childhood traumas against Bad Boys in Poland, and it involved from
the start suicidal intent and the killing off of sinful Germans.
Historians admit that fighting "an unlimited war of conquest
[against] a worldwide coalition of states...was in itself an insane
undertaking"449 that was suicidal and sacrificial
from the beginning. As Hitler promised nothing but death to what
he called the "thousands and thousands of young Germans who
have come forward with the self-sacrificial resolve freely and joyfully
to make a sacrifice of their young lives,"450 German
mothers marched through the streets chanting "We have donated
a child to the Führer," Nazi soldiers felt "politically
reborn [when] filled with a pure joy I realized that what my mother
had once said was true after all--that it was a hallowed act to
give up one's life for Germany," and Hitler Youth sang, "We
are born to die for Germany."451 At no point was
mere conquest of land the goal of Germany's invasions. Hitler hated
Chamberlain for making concessions and avoiding war at Munich, telling
his soldiers later, "We want war," and saying "I
am only afraid that some Schweinehund will make a proposal
for mediation" like at Munich.452 "I did not
organize the armed forces in order not to strike...The idea of getting
out cheaply is dangerous...We must burn our boats."453
He instructed his diplomats always to demand "so much that
we can never be satisfied."454 When asked about
Poland, "What is it that you want? Danzig? The Corridor?"
the answer was, "We want war."455 The goal
was to "Act Brutally! Be harsh and remorseless!"456
While Germans marched West with visions of raping French women and
climbing the Eiffel Tower, they marched East with visions of smashing
Jewish babies heads against walls457 and turning Moscow
into "an artificial lake."458 All Bad Boy alters
to the East must be eliminated. The orders were: "Complete
destruction of Poland is the military aim. Pursue until complete
annihilation"459 and "Moscow must be destroyed
and completely wiped from the earth."460
Jewish annihilation plans only came
later, actually during the summer months of 1941 when, "convinced
that the military campaign was nearly over and victory was at hand,
an elated Hitler gave the signal to carry out [the] racial ‘cleansing'
[of the Jews.]"461 Initially, for many years, Jews
were to be resettled, part of Hitler's "grandiose program of
population transfers"462 --90 percent of which were
ethnic Germans and others and only 10 percent were Jews--a "massive
upheaval of humanity"463 that restaged upon five
million people464 the experiences of having to leave
home endured during childhood by most Germans as their parents endlessly
moved them around to wetnurses, relatives, schools and work sites.
In 1940 Hitler and Himmler had rejected the "physical extermination
of a people out of inner conviction as un-German and impossible."465
It was only by the summer of 1941, in victory and afraid of running
out of Bad Boys to kill in the East, that Hitler would approve of
"the mass murder of all European Jews...in the form of deportation
to death camps equipped with poison gas facilities"466
like those used for murdering the 70,000 German children killed
earlier. Christopher Browning correctly points to mania and success
as the source of the Holocaust when he concludes, "Hitler [only]
opted for the Final Solution in the ‘euphoria of victory'
of midsummer 1941."467 Jews were the ultimate Bad
Boys, symbols of liberalism, freedom and prosperity in the stock
market, and so finally must be totally eliminated for Germans to
return to the "pure" authoritarian family atmosphere of
1900 where only Good Boys survived.
Even the notion that Germany had to
kill Poles and Jews for the acquisition of Lebensraum, or
living space, completely misses the motive for the Holocaust. Lebensraum
was a completely phony concept. It was actually a code word for
the desire to break free, to have room to live and grow, to throw
off swaddling bands and corsets, to get up from crouching against
the wall as children and to have some space to live. Conquering
foreign lands or annihilating Jews and others to expand the actual
amount of soil Germany could farm made no sense at all, because
Germany already had so much unused land that they had to import
a steady stream of foreign workers to farm it.468 Germans
ate well under Hitler. The only reality behind the popular Lebensraum
notion that the "Germanic mother could not feed her children
adequately"469 was the inability of German mothers
and wetnurses four decades earlier to empathize with and adequately
feed their infants and children.
Jews, then, were the main poison containers
for the restaging of traumatic German childrearing practices four
decades earlier. Every one of the things done to Jews in the Holocaust
can be found to have been perpetrated by parents and others to German
children at the turn of the century. The precise details of earlier
events that were reinflicted upon Jews later are astonishingly minute
and literal. Jews were, of course, murdered by the millions, just
as German children had watched their siblings murdered in infanticidal
acts earlier, using the exact same phrase for the genocide of Jews--"elimination
of useless eaters"--as parents had used earlier for their infants
and children as they murdered them at birth.470 Because
infanticide rates were so high, the majority of German children
would have witnessed the murder of newborn siblings by their mothers,
would have heard the murdered baby being called a "useless
eater," and would themselves have been called a "useless
eater" as children and so could have wondered if they might
also be murdered. One can hardly read a single Holocaust book without
having to wade through endless accounts of children buried alive
by Nazis, "children having their heads beaten in like poultry
and thrown into a smoking pit," "babies thrown from the
fourth floor and crushed on the pavements," "children's
bodies lay around, torn in half with the heads smashed in,"
"'little Jews' caught on bayonets after being thrown from upper
story windows," etc.471 Even the specific methods
German mothers had used for killing their newborn--especially smashing
the baby against a wall or throwing it into a latrine--were "a
regular occurrence"472 against Jews in concentration
camps:
When mothers succeeded in keeping their
babies with them...a German guard took the baby by its legs and
smashed it against the wall of the barracks until only a bloody
mass remained in his hands. The unfortunate mother had to take this
mass with her to the ‘bath.' Only those who saw these things
with their own eyes will believe with what delight the Germans performed
these operations. [Also] SS men used to amuse themselves by swinging
Jewish children by their legs and then flinging them to their deaths.
He who threw a Jewish child farthest won.473
Jews were also regularly tied up and
made to live in their own filth exactly as swaddled German infants
were earlier. Rarely washed, Germans had spent their early lives
covered with their own excreta, addressed by their parents simply
as "little shitter."474 In the concentration
camps, Jews were subject to what Des Pres calls a constant "excremental
assault," in which they were forced to defecate and urinate
upon each other, were often thrown into the cesspool if they were
too slow, lived in barracks "awash with urine and feces,"
walked about "knee-deep in excrement," were forced to
eat their own feces, and finally died in gas chambers "covered
all over with excrement."475 In one camp, 30,000
women not only had to use a single latrine, but in addition, "we
were permitted to use it only at certain hours of the day. We stood
in line to get into this tiny building, knee-deep in human excrement."476
Holocaust scholars, missing the childhood origins of all these gratuitous
excremental cruelties, have been puzzled by how much of the concentration
camp routine was devoted to the endless humiliations: "Why,
if they were going to kill them anyway, what was the point of all
the humiliation, why the cruelty?" Gitta Sereny asked of Franz
Stangl.477 But of course the humiliation was the point,
restaging early German childhood exactly. Hitler--himself swaddled
and left alone in his feces by his mother--had told Germans in Mein
Kampf , "If the Jews were alone in this world, they would
suffocate in dirt and filth."478 In the Holocaust
the Jews--"so much like us" (Hitler)--would suffocate
in dirt and filth, as all little, helpless German babies did all
day long at the hands of their mothers. And since the "little
shitter" German babies were also covered with lice, vermin
and rodents as they lay swaddled in their cradles, unable to move,
Jews too were called "lice, vermin and rats" as they were
locked into the concentration camps, told "This is a death
camp...You'll be eaten by lice; you'll rot in your own shit, you
filthy shitface..."479 Some guards even restaged
the rodent attacks "by inserting a tube into the victim's anus,
or into a woman's vagina, then letting a rat into the tube. The
rodent would try to get out by gnawing at the victim's internal
organs."480 Later toilet training of German children
was also restaged, often in precise detail, as by having the ghetto-latrine
supervised by a "guard with a big clock, whom the Germans dressed
comically as a rabbi and called the ‘shit-master.'"481
Every extermination camp reproduced
elements of a typical German home. Jews were not said to be there
to be murdered, they were there to be "housecleaned."482
Mommy hated her children's "dirtiness," wanted them "clean,"
so "dirty Jews" were killed so only "clean Germans"
would be left. Jews were Untermenschen (with overtones of
"little people") who were forced to crawl on the floor
naked like babies,483 and who were tied up, starved,
made to kneel for hours, doused with ice water, terrorized and beaten
just like most German children.484 The battering of Jews
in camps followed the hallowed German child-beating pattern of "being
strong" (not making the perpetrator feel guilty by crying out):
I dropped to my knees without uttering
a sound. I knew what was expected of me. I looked at the commandant
from my knees as he smiled back at me with approval. He swung
the chair at me again, striking me on the shoulder. I sprawled
on the ground, bruised and dizzy, but I still made no sound. He
raised the chair and brought it down on my head, shattering it...I
bit my tongue to stop myself making a sound...I knew that if I
made another sound, nothing could save me. ‘Very good, for
being strong. You shall be rewarded. Get some food. Tell them
I sent you...'485
The beatings and tortures were, as
is so often the case with sadism, often sexualized:
The SS camp commander stood close
to the whipping post throughout the flogging...his whole face
was already red with lascivious excitement. His hands were plunged
deep in his trouser pockets, and it was quite clear that he was
masturbating throughout...On more than thirty occasions, I myself
have witnessed SS camp commanders masturbating during floggings...486
Sexual tortures of prisoners were
legion, including pushing sticks up into boys' penises and breaking
them off, brutally massaging prostates with pieces of wood inserted
into the rectum, castrating men and removing the ovaries of women,
training dogs to attack their genitals, etc.487 Victims
were all Bad Boys and Bad Girls, needing to be punished for their
sexuality, as the German guards' parents had punished them. The
Holocaust was one gigantic, bizarre "cautionary tale,"
teaching everyone the same lessons taught to German children as
they were assaulted, so when local civilians during the Holocaust
saw Jews being clubbed to death in the street, they cheered,
"with mothers holding up their children to enjoy the spectacle
and soldiers milling around to watch the fun like a football match."488
THE HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF CHILDREARING
AND THE DECREASE IN HUMAN VIOLENCE
As the next three chapters will document, childrearing has steadily
improved historically, even if very unevenly, so if the psychogenic
theory is correct then human violence should have decreased steadily
over the past millennia. Yet the twentieth century has been widely
touted as the most violent in history and has often been compared
by anthropologists to some so-called peaceful tribes they have claimed
represent our oldest ancestors. How can childhood be the source
of human violence if violence has vastly increased while childrearing
has improved?
That twentieth century wars have been
more violent seems to be an obvious fact. Technology alone allows
us to be far more lethal than in earlier centuries, when wars causing
250,000 or more deaths were rare,489 while World War
II alone killed 15 million people in battle, and total battlefield
deaths for the twentieth century have exceeded 100 million.490
What's more, if one expands the definition of war deaths to what
Rummel terms "democide"--so that the 40 million Russian
deaths ordered by Stalin, for instance, are included--the number
of "deaths by government" in the twentieth century jumps
past 170 million.491 Surely Nordstrom is right in saying,
"This past century was the bloodiest century in human existence,"492
thus disproving the psychogenic theory of decreasing violence resulting
from improving childrearing.
Yet Nordstrom's pessimistic conclusion
is reversed if one measures the rate of violence by the likelihood
of one's dying by war and democide. With several billion people
on earth during the twentieth century, the rate of death by wars
is in fact less than two percent of the population.493
Although individual wars in the past have killed less in numbers,
they could easily wipe out many times this percentage of the population,
particularly if--as is rarely done--the battlefield deaths are increased
to include the democides of the past, when massacring civilians
in entire cities was a common practice.494 Further, what
is more relevant to the childrearing comparison is that lumping
all nations in the twentieth century together regardless of their
childhood evolution masks the fact that advanced democratic nations
like the United States, England and France have lost only a fraction
of a percentage of their populations in wars during the century.
The United States, for instance, lost 120,000 soldiers in WWI, only
.12 percent of the population, and 400,000 soldiers in WWII, only
.34 percent of the population.495 The Korean War only
lost .04 percent, the Vietnam War only .03 percent, and the Gulf
War .0003 percent of Americans. The facts are that the more advanced
the childrearing, the more democratic the society and the less percentage
lost in wars. This is why no democratic nation has ever gone to
war with another democratic nation in history.496
Anthropologists have promulgated what
Keeley calls "the myth of the peaceful savage" so effectively
that when actual deaths by war are tabulated for pre-state simple
societies one is astonished by how such a notion can continue to
be taught to students.497 Keeley documents 22 prestate
tribes with war deaths five to ten times that of contemporary democratic
nations, concluding that "what transpired before the evolution
of civilized states was often unpleasantly bellicose."498
Death rates in areas like New Guinea and South America, where there
has been less Western policing of war than in Africa and Asia, range
from an astonishing 25 to 35 percent of all adult deaths.499
The most warlike society ever described is the Waorani of the Amazon,
which produced 60 percent of all adult deaths from war raids.500
It is likely that prestate societies 10,000 years ago had similar
astronomical death rates from wars, if the number of human bones
with stone axes and arrowheads embedded in them are counted.501
The 30 percent average of adult deaths in prestate societies is
even higher than the figures of below 10 percent that early modern
wars tended to average out,502 although admittedly little
has been done to date to measure non-battlefield deaths in state
wars prior to the twentieth century. The overall historical decline
from 30 percent of adult population to under one percent for war/democide
adult deaths for democratic nations has therefore been plotted in
the graph below as a clear downward trend through history, as childrearing
improves through the ages and gradually reduces the inner need to
kill others.
6:7 The Decline of Human Violence
Besides war and democide, the graph
also shows the decline of the two other outlets for human violence:
infanticide and homicide/suicide. Infanticide is usually not counted
as murder by demographers, since they do not consider newborn as
human. But most human murders in history were in fact committed
by mothers killing their newborn. The rates of infanticide in contemporary
pre-state tribes are enormous: Australian Aborigine mothers, for
instance, killed about 50 percent of all newborn, and the first
missionaries in Polynesia estimated the two-thirds of the children
were murdered by their parents.503 Birdsell hypothesized
infanticide rates as high as 50 percent for prehistoric tribal societies,
based on high fertility rates and slow growth of populations.504
My own cross-historical study, On the Demography of Filicide,505
is based on a large number of boy-girl ratios that ran as high as
135 to 100, which showed that girls until modern times were killed
in sufficiently higher numbers than boys to have affected census
figures for children. Tribal societies also often infanticide enough
of their newborn girls at a higher rate than boys to produce childhood
sex ratios of from 140 to 100 (Yanomamö) to 159 to 100 (Polynesian),506
meaning that virtually all families killed at least one child and
most killed several, averaging perhaps half of all children born,
especially if "late infanticide" (such as letting an infant
starve to death) are counted. Since 50 percent infanticide rates
seems to be the norm around which all these studies of simple tribes
center, it is what is shown at the left of the chart.
The third outlet for human violence
is homicide/suicide--lumped together because when homicide rates
initially go down in modern times suicide rates tend for a while
to climb, suicide being somewhat more "advanced" (less
impulsive) method of personal violence than homicide. Many simple
tribes had homicide rates of up to 50 or 60 percent, causing one
anthropologist to conclude about one group, "There was not
a single grown man who had not been involved in a killing in some
way or another."507 Even so-called "peaceful"
tribes like the famous !Kung of Africa actually have "twenty
to fifty times" current modern homicide rates.508
Knauft's careful study found the Gebusi homicide rate to be sixty
times the current U.S. rate,509 with 60 percent of all
males admitting to having committed one or more homicides,510
while Steadman found the Hewa--who specialize in killing witches--had
a homicide rate of one percent of the population per year, a thousand
times the current U.S. rate.511 Most tribal homicide
rates run around ten percent of the adult population over a lifetime.
Suicide in small societies is usually higher among the women, since
they live lives of despair, often reaching 10 to 25 percent of adult
women's deaths, staying high in antiquity but declining under Christianity,
when suicide was declared to be self-murder.512 Homicide
rates in medieval and early modern history, when almost everyone
carried a knife or sword and often used them, ran about ten times
higher than today's rates of about a quarter of one percent--although
they should be adjusted upward for the number of unrecorded homicides
in the past--while suicide rates today run about a half of one percent
of adult population over a lifetime.513 Thus homicide/suicide
rates, like those of war and infanticide, have decreased steadily,
to less than one percent for most democratic nations today. Added
together, then, the rate of human violence has dropped from around
a 75 percent chance of being murdered by your fellow human beings
to around 2 percent for advanced democratic nations today, as a
result of the slow and steady improvement in childrearing over the
centuries, with the reduction of early trauma, the growth of the
hippocampal-orbitofrontal cortex network and more balanced neurotransmitters
in the human population.
WHAT WILL WARS BE LIKE DURING THE NEXT
CENTURY?
Even just two percent of six billion people is a hundred twenty
million people. Should we still expect violence to kill this many
people each generation during the next century? What's more, only
a part of the world today is democratic. Most of the world is still
"leaping into modernity," just becoming more free, democratic
and prosperous, but with their childrearing not yet modern, thus
going through the same growth panic process that Germany went through
in the middle of the twentieth century. We can therefore expect
higher rates of democide in the coming decades in the developing
countries. Yugoslavia, as an example, became democratic only recently,
and only then began expressing their growth panic through mass murdering
and raping their neighbors--much like the Nazis did--since their
childrearing was still thoroughly medieval.514 Especially
with nuclear and biological weapons proliferating, might we expect
major wars in the next century to again kill hundreds of millions
of people, despite slowly improving childrearing?
Advanced democracies today have sufficient
proportions of good parents now to be satisfied with working off
their growth panics by small wars and recessions rather than world
wars and depressions.515 Since the end of WWII, wars
have been far smaller in fatalities--at least for the democracies,
if not for their opponents--so that the sacrificial needs of nations
seem to be satisfied with only thousands or even hundreds of deaths
rather than millions, what has been termed "low-intensity wars."516
Military spending in democratic nations has dropped from around
75 percent of government spending in the late eighteenth century
to somewhere between 10 and 20 percent today.517 These
smaller wars have been more frequent and have alternated more frequently
with small recessions, so the classic 50-year manic/depressive cycle
of the previous centuries that we graphed above has been drastically
shortened, and recessions and small wars seem to substitute for
each other as sacrificial rituals rather than alternating as in
past centuries. But all this has happened mainly in developed, democratic
nations with better childrearing, so the answer to the question
about war in the next century has to be ambivalent. I am confident
that I can trust my children and their friends on the West Side
of Manhattan--who have loving, helping mode parents who come from
every ethnic and economic strata--to make a non-violent world in
the next century. But the average Chinese or African or Russian
child has still so often been brought up in an atmosphere of infanticide,
battering, sexual molestation and severe domination that they can
be forecast to need to repeat their parental holocaust on the historical
stage in the future as they experience their new freedoms, repeating
the democides of the twentieth century but with even greater destructive
weapons. Just allowing the usual slow historical evolution of childrearing
may not be enough to outweigh the escalating destructiveness of
our weapons. Therefore, the more advanced psychoclasses will
have to actually intervene in the world's families to help change
parenting and thus childhood for everyone on earth. Unless this
can be done during the twenty-first century, it seems likely that
the proliferating power of our weaponry could outrun the evolution
of our childrearing and make the coming decades even more violent
than the twentieth century has been.
A new way to change parenting, community
parenting centers, has in fact begun to be developed in a few American
communities, and their surprising success provides hope that they
can decrease human violence around the world at affordable costs.
Parenting centers not only have free classes in parenting; they
also have a staff that visits the homes of every child born in the
community weekly during their first two years of life and helps
the parents parent, teaching them what no school has ever thought
it worthwhile to teach--that you need not be afraid of your child,
that you need not hit them or use them for your needs, that you
can love and trust them to grow up and turn out better than you
did by not repeating on them the abusive parenting you once endured.
Exactly how these parenting centers work will be described in detail
in the final chapter of this book. They promise to be able to eliminate
child abuse and drastically reduce human violence around the globe,
with costs only a fraction of the $8 trillion the world has spent
on warfare since WWII.518
As an example of how global parenting
centers could work to reduce world-wide violence, consider NATO,
which was built up to "counter the Communist threat" at
the cost of over a half trillion dollars. NATO has been actually
so far used only to kill a few thousand Yugoslavs. Suppose around
fifty million dollars of the half trillion had been spent on helping
Eastern European nations have better families--sort of an Eastern
European Marshall Plan, only including helping parents directly
with parenting centers that reached into every home, showing parents
that they need not swaddle, beat and torture their children as has
been common in the Yugoslav zadruga.519 Yugoslav
children would then not have grown up to be violent youth raping
and killing others as they are doing today, but would instead be
"new Yugoslavia youth" building their nation. This new principle
of actively changing childhood can in fact be repeated around
the world—again, at a fraction of the cost of the destructive arsenal
the world today maintains.
Removing the causes of violence only
takes empathy, foresight and will, not huge resources. We are today
like a group of people standing on the banks of a river trying desperately
to save people we see drowning, but refusing to go upstream and
stop them from being thrown in. The reduction of human violence
involves prevention first of all—the removal of the source
of the illness—just like the prevention of any other human clinical
disorder. That enough of us can summon the empathy and understanding
needed to change what has long been called "our violent human nature"
is our only hope for the future of our precious world.
Citations