Here in England, the rise in anti Semitism is not discouraged by the leader of the opposition Labour party. Perhaps he wants to gain power at any price, and reckons that there are more votes among disaffected Muslims than among the Jewish community.
It is well known that many cradle Catholics, and to a lesser extent Church of England protestants, are taught anti Semitism from birth, although many are ignorant that their favourite god, Jesus, was actually a Jewish man. Many do not know that their favourite food shops and favourite entertainers are Jewish, and do not know that their favourite gadgets are designed by Jewish men and women. They do not know that many advances in medicine and other areas have been made by Jewish men and women. The ignorance of these anti Semites is extraordinary.
Anti Semitism is infantile. There is a very obvious gleefulness among those Labour supporters who display their anti Semitism, behaviour which is very like that of naughty infants of 3 to 5 years old, who are learning how to bully.
But anti Semitism spreads, in part, from a deeper cause: that of wanting to do what is right in the eyes of the herd. This comes from what is an almost pre-human fear: the individual does not want to be outside the herd, and wants to be acceptable to and accepted by the herd. This again is infantile.
Anti Semitism is backward looking. It seems that the anti Semites are determined to show us how horrible human life has been. They have not recovered from the ancient traumas, and constantly want to remind us of the effects of those traumas. And as we know, the process of anti Semitism may start gleefully but quickly degenerates into gross barbarism.
The Jewish people are forward-looking. It was Jewish men who formulated and wrote down the laws by which we are able to live peacefully. Sigmund Freud was Jewish and made great strides in understanding human psychology, and George Frankl, who of course was also Jewish, made even greater advances in understanding. It is the Jewish people who have, to a very great extent, made it possible for humanity to develop and to progress.
Anti Semitism 2
George Frankl worked to free the libido, the loving energy. The libido is more than the sex drive. The libido is joie de vivre, the happiness of being alive. It has expression in sexual love; it is also singing and dancing as and when you want. It is the thrill of joy and the serenity of peaceful being. It is love. The libido freed is what life really is.
Anti Semitism has become part of an ancient ritual of the repression of the libido. In earlier times, before there was a specific Jewish people, others would be targetted as scapegoats; it is still true now, that any individual or group who seems different might be subject to mistreatment. We may observe that any individual or group who seems in some way better might be regarded with suspicion, or worse, by fearful people.
It would be easy to dismiss bullying in all its forms as coming from jealousy, but that would be a mistake, unless jealousy comes out of fear. It is fear, the ancient fear of offending the goddess, the matriarchs, that lies behind the bullying. Too many human beings are still, unconsciously, very afraid the arousing the fury of the ancient goddess, the matriarchs. Too many human beings are still trapped in the effect of the ancient trauma which dictates, ‘We must not offend the matriarchs. We must be good, we must be careful, we must do as we are told to be safe.’ And what we are told to do is to repress the libido.
According to Wikipedia, the first anti Semitic writing appears in the work of an Egyptian priest, Manetho, from the 3rd century BCE. It seems likely that Manetho was a priest as a pantheist he believed in many gods. One thousand years earlier, the pharaoh Akhenaten had instituted a form monotheism in Egypt; his new religion collapsed after his death. We may recognise that monotheism would be despised by a powerful pantheistic priest like Manetho, and we may speculate that he was fearful of the Jewish monotheism.
Akhenaten’s monotheism involved worshipping the sun. The idea of the one Jewish God is quite different: we cannot see God, but see him in all creation: we cannot see God separate from all his creation. We may well understand that a pantheist priest like Manetho would be angry and upset by such an idea of God.
This Jewish idea of the one loving God we cannot even see is extremely powerful. Frankl told me, and I have mentioned here earlier, this idea allows us to focus: the human mind is able to focus on the one idea.
Another reason Manetho would have be angered by and afraid of Judaism, is that there are no priests between a Jewish man or woman and God. There are Rabbis, and Rabbis are teachers, specifically of the Torah. The Rabbi may be instructive, helpful and supportive, but he or she does not and cannot stand between the man or woman and God. In Judaism, one may go direct to God without any intermediaries.
In our own time, the Christians, except Unitarians, believe in three gods which they call the Trinity. This idea caused me acute distress when I was christened at the age of 4: I had already been introduced to the idea of one God and I could not understand the idea of three gods, and I was so confused by it that I became ill. I still cannot understand the idea of three gods, and it is on that account that I have never been a Christian - though as a child I had to say I was. The three-gods-in-one distracts the focus: one cannot, or I cannot, focus on three separate identies. And, of course, the priests (and saints) intervene between the individual and God. This is also the case in Islam.
I am not Jewish. I do not profess any religion. I am agnostic, I cannot say definitely that God does exist, and I cannot say definitely that God does not exist. But I received my education from Jewish men and women, and I understand the idea of the one loving God; I understand the idea of and need for focus.
Anti Semitism 3
Frankl’s proof: human nature is fundamentally good; all babies are born good and loving.
To again recap the early phylogenic traumas: (a) at the equivalent of two years old, our ancestors suffered a maturation delay; (b) at the equivalent of three years, our ancestors enjoyed a period of exhilaration and we may understand that the maturation delay ended; (c) at the equivalent of 3 and a half years old, our ancestors suffered an intense trauma which caused them great fear and caused them to be very angry. We may speculate there was a further maturation delay as a consequence of this event;
It is here, in this phase (c) of human evolution, that we may look for the origins of anti Semitism and the other acutely perverse behaviours.
We must remember that infants feel very strongly. At the equivalent of our 3 1/2 years old our ancestors had endured maturation delay, had rapturously been freed from that restriction and felt on top of the world, and then suddenly were plunged into a new disaster. They experienced terror, a feeling of helplessness and a helpless rage.
There are so many questions that we cannot answer. For instance, when did our ancestors develop word language? A child of two years old now may well be able to hold a quite adult conversation, but we teach language to our infants. If our ancestors at the equivalent of two had developed word language, surely they would have protested at their condition in words, but our two year old infants yell in protest, without using any words. It seems unlikely, therefore that our ancestors had developed words at that stage.
When did our ancestors develop deities? When did they begin to project their feelings outwards, away from themselves and onto the Other, or ‘the others’? Was it a rapid or gradual process? It is probably not important to know exactly; but it is important to recognise that their terror, rage and feeling of helplessness gripped them and held them, made them vulnerable to hysteria; and it is important to recognise that we are still vulnerable.
I am so grateful that in the recent general election the people of this country roundly rejected anti Semitism.
Anti Semitism 4
The Jewish idea of the one God is genius. It is a revolution in one idea. It is a revolution in morality and in thinking. Why, then is this idea of the one God rejected by so many people who also are or identify as monotheists?
There are differences between the Judaic God and the Islamic God, but Muslims do believe in one God. There are anti Semitic passages in the Koran, and there is clearly anti Semitism among some Muslims. Authorities attribute this Islamic anti Semitism to various causes.
The great majority of Christians are polytheists: they believe in the Trinity, of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, or the Mystery of the three gods in one.
Christians worship the image of the tortured Christ, and in almost all churches is a crucifix, showing Jesus hanging on the cross in perpetual torment, bleeding and suffering; in the sacrament of the eucharist, the Christian priest turns wafers of bread into the body of Christ, and turns wine into the blood of Christ, which the congregation then eat and drink: Christ is the eternal sacrificial victim.
Judaism abolished human sacrifice several thousand years ago when God told Abraham not to sacrifice Isaac. There is no such practice as the eucharist in Islam.
In ancient times, since the last ice age, there was human sacrifice. There are many legends in which the beautiful young man is sacrificed, his blood is spilled to make the earth fruitful. We may recognise that practice continues, metaphorically, in Christianity, and considering the tragic case of Raif Badawi, actually in countries where Sharia law is harsh and dominant.
We may speculate that this human sacrifice originated in the late matriarchy during the last ice age, when the matriarchs were desperate to appease what they believe was the angry goddess. We may understand that the male was sacrificed to satisfy what they saw as her voracious fury. We may recognise that the wife of Noah was motivated to escape, to protect her sons from the insanity of the matriarchs.
Though we do not talk of the goddess, though billions are or believe themselves to be monotheists who worship the male God, the angry goddess is rooted in our unconscious. The excesses of the late matriarchy are added to the earlier phylogenic traumas, and the angry goddess is not forgotten: though we have buried the memories deep in the unconscious, she continually threatens to break through, and many people unconsciously are still desperate to appease her.
The one God does not appease the angry goddess; he abolished human sacrifice. We may speculate that it is this which terrifies and infuriates unstable people. In times of crisis, such people become are vulnerable to hysteria. In a national crisis, they unite behind a leader who promises them redemption; a very obvious example of this is the events of the continuing crisis in Germany after the first world war. Hitler promised the German people the world, that they would be the dominant force in a Reich which would last for 1,000 years.
His early life was marked by the death of children. He was the fourth of six children; three of his siblings died in infancy; his younger brother died at the age of six. Hitler also had two older half siblings. He was a small boy in a large family of vulnerable children.
There is a lot of comment about the difficult relationship between the boy and his father. In any child’s life, it is the mother who occupies the dominant role: even when she seems to be weak, even when her husband is abusive, the mother is the most important and powerful person in any child’s life. The child learns from whatever the mother does or does not do. The child learns even from her absence.
Hitler was disturbed. We may also recognise that he was very ambitious; having made his large promises he felt that he must give them what they wanted. And we must bear in mind that especially in times of difficulty, adult human beings often regress and respond to crisis as infants do: with fear and anger.
Hitler suffered ontogenic trauma in his infancy and later childhood. Any person who suffers personal trauma in early life, is more vulnerable to psychological distress and even perverse behaviours in later life. It is as if a layer of assurance, or reassurance was ripped away; or we may say, that human beings provide themselves with a veil of forgetfulness, the repression of bad memories, and that veil is torn: the bad phylogenic and ontogenic memories threaten constantly to break through into consciousness; the dark threatens to overwhelm the light, and such an individual might be very vulnerable to fear and anger.
From his behaviour in later life, we recognise that Hitler was possessed by the fear of the angry goddess. He tried to demonstrate her power of vengeance in his hideous camps, and he tried to appease her fury with the millions, including six million Jewish people, whom he murdered.
But the angry goddess is a myth. And the idea of the one God has far greater power.
Anti Semitism 5
I don’t want to write about it. I don’t want to think about it. But if we don’t acknowledge it, face it, we will not be able to understand it. And we will never be free of it, free of the pit.
Just people; fundamentally good, born good and loving. The father a bully, a man of his time, a macho man, expected to be tough, required to be insensitive, as he was taught. Emotionally out of his depth.
The mother severely depressed; having lost three babies, she sees herself as, and is perhaps seen as a failure; this one must survive; desperately anxious; clutching and clinging; very ambitious; he must succeed, to vindicate her, to clear her of blame.
The baby, naturally good and loving. But no love for him; no reciprocation of his love for her, for them. And we may speculate that something happened in his infancy, a harsh shock in the desperate bleakness of that family.
A child is not merely an extension of his parents, to mirror them. The baby is born with his or her own unique identify, The Myself, a personality which naturally demands recognition. But there was no recognition here.
We may speculate that the pit opened to the infant’s senses; that he experienced through his entire being the terror.
The terror is lovelessness, an emotional state which seems to be unique to humans. The other creatures endured the same conditions of trauma which we suffered, but they still love, they are still inside the shelter of the natural world. They do not torture their infants. We have taken the traumas personally, have not been able to overcome the sense that we caused the natural disasters.
We humans have run away from love; we’re frightened that our love is harmful; people are afraid to show love; afraid to show vulnerability; afraid of mockery. Mothers are frightened that their love will harm their babies; are afraid that other women will punish them for loving their babies. We are terrified of love, and without love the pit constantly threatens us, and we are terrified of the pit.
That man and his gang showed us the pit; they demonstrated the pit. He promised his people the world and they fell for the fantasy. He whipped them up into hysteria, ordinary people, just people, all classes, the workers, the educated, all fundamentally good, all born good and loving. And they helped build his pit; they built it for him. The third reich used an army of bureaucrats to tap the phones and mails; armies to make the weapons and armies to fight the war, to win the world. An army of guards for his camps.
For a child to be unloved, to have no support from either parent or from anyone, to have no recognition for his or her own loving self, that is to be in pain, in torment. To love becomes painful. Then banish love; follow their example; obey the teaching of his elders. Destroy love. Is that what he decided to do? destroy love and there is no pain? Destroy love and be acceptable to them, his parents? Destroy love within himself and be furiously angry.
We get so much wrong in our determination not to love. People say that children are strong. This is untrue in every way except physically. Emotionally, morally, psychologically, children are extremely vulnerable. We get so much wrong.
Anti Semitism 6
But he did have choice.
The child must obey the mother, but the man had choice. His parents were wretches, but he was exposed to the good influence: there was Eduard Bloch, the young physician who attended his mother, to whom Hitler was very grateful; there was Hugo Bloch, who was Hitler’s commanding officer in the first world war and who recommended Hitler receive the iron cross. Both these men were Jewish. There must have been others of good will in his early life. He was intelligent, he was strong willed, and no one forced him into barbarism. He denied the free will of all the millions he murdered, but he had choice. He chose his way and stubbornly stuck to his path.
It is literally sickening, and I am not strong enough or clever enough to fully understand what turned an ordinary boy, a fundamentally good human being, into such a vile man, who himself did such evil and allowed such evil to be done.
————--
I now choose to continue thinking about the magnificent idea of the one God.
Anti Semitism 7
Since that first break from instinct when our ancestors developed the capacity to tell lies, we humans have stubbornly followed the wrong path. Our nature is fundamentally good and loving, our instincts are fundamentally good, but we’ve obstinately and continuously crushed our innate goodness, until now we have the world in a state near to ecological collapse. I am ashamed to be human.
And what of God? In the idea of the one God, that God is the Libido, the Life Force, the Energy that is the world and the universe beyond; ever changing and changeless; always craetive; that which the animals all know and recognise instinctively, and only we humans have been afraid to recognise.
Anti Semitism 8
Well, I must do this to the best of my ability.
Little children do not think of themselves as little. I speculate that the new born baby feels enormous, as big as the universe, and feels no disconnect between itself and the universe. This sense gradually lessens, until at about 4 years old we begin to sense that we may not be so big after all.
When I was a small child, sometime between the Dionysian phase of glory, and the phylogenic breakthrough at three and a half years old, let us estimate 3 years and 3 months old, and I still experienced myself as very large, I sat on the floor playing with my teddies, and the old rabbit and elephant, all my toys who were all the people in the world, who were all naturally good, and I had put my arm around them to protect them from Hitler; and then he came and wanted to come in with the rest, but I wouldn’t let him; I told him I was very sorry but he couldn’t come in to play with the good people because he was very bad and I would not let him hurt them. And I remember this clearly and have always remembered it.
It seems to me that I had made a decision, a conscious choice, from the information which I had received from the people around me. Of course, all human beings are unique individuals (which is true of all living things, everything unique within its kind) but we all undergo the same phylogenic experiences, and I speculate that all, or many individual infants make their conscious choices at 3 years and 3 months old: at 2 years old we have learnt to lie, which allows us to deceive, but also to create and to choose; at 3 we have experienced the giddy joys of being on top of the world; at three and a half we experience rage and terror, when we see all our certainties ripped away. And between these latter two phylogenic experiences, we build on our certainties, make our choices, conscious decisions, because we are very large and capable of doing whatever we have reason to believe is right.
Then Hitler, with his angry, brutish, perhaps brutal, indifferent father, and his mother, depressed, what conscious choice would he make? His mother was a devout Roman Catholic, and the boy would have gone to church with her, seen the crucifix with the tormented Jesus writhing in perpetual agony, and her adoration of this image. The boy would learn that the Jews murdered Jesus, and believed it because he was told it was true; and if it weren’t for the Jews, everything would be better, and he believed it all. I speculate that he made his conscious decision based on all this information: he was big and strong, he would make all the Jews go away, then everyone would be happy, his mother would be happy, and maybe she would love her son. But his decision was based on a lie.
These early decisions are as it were moral pillars of our being; they become part of the individual’s moral being and inform his or her later actions.
Anti Semitism 9
Memory is an extraordinary faculty. There is individual memory, collective memory, race, species memory, and it is all there, all events, all kept in the memory. Though we so often repress important memories, we all have knowledge of everything that has happened.
George Frankl occasionally talked about Jesus. He said that there is a tradition of miracle workers among the Jewish people; he said that Jesus was physically strong and had learnt techniques of hypnotism including auto hypnosis while he was in Egypt.
On another occasion, Frankl talked about the crucifixion, saying that the Jews could not have caused Pilate to murder Jesus: Jesus was a Rabbi and they simply would not have demanded his murder. Frankl also pointed out that the name Barabbas means ‘son of God’ by which all Jewish men might be identified, so that when the people called out for Barabbas to be saved they were asking for Jesus to be released.
Frankl then went on to say that there is evidence that in Roman times friends and family could pay money, a bribe to the soldiers, for the release of prisoners, and that the friends of Jesus did so. Frankl conjectured that Jesus went to Alexandria, lived out his life there, changing his name to Philo.
This puts a very different light on the crucifixion and surrounding events. We may speculate that Judas raised the bribe money, and the bribe was paid to the soldiers; Jesus was arrested, tried and crucified; the bribed soldier puts his spear into the righthand side of Jesus’ torso, thus not killing him; Joseph of Arimathea goes to Pilate to request the body, who is surprised to be told that Jesus is already dead; Joseph places Jesus into the tomb, where Jesus is nursed back to health; on the third day, Jesus leaves the tomb, and tells his overjoyed friends not to touch him - noli me tangere - a fervent embrace would have caused him pain. Jesus leaves Jerusalem.
He is alive, his friends have saved him. But it must be kept secret from the authorities. In the Roman empire, the Romans recruited soldiers from areas they had conquered. It was possible to bribe a common soldier, who was probably not a Roman by birth; but if the Romans, the governing conquerors, had known that Jesus had escaped the death penalty, they would have searched him out and killed him.
It was therefore necessary to construct a myth around the re-appearance of Jesus among his friends, and others such as Saul (Paul) who met him on the road to Damascus. There was a lot of mystical thinking at that time, which would help in the myth making; people were ready to believe that their beloved Jesus was re-incarnated.
So, there was a secret, a strongly kept secret, which grew into both a myth and a taboo: what had actually occurred must be kept a secret, it was too dangerous to allow the truth of events to be revealed.
And those Christians who claim that ‘the Jews murdered Jesus’ have got it exactly the wrong way around: it was the Jews who saved Jesus.
Anti Semitism 10
George Frankl once told us that Jewish men and woman bought the land which is now modern Israel; poor people put pennies into collection boxes on shop counters, the wealthy bought land individually or contributed funds. The Jewish people bought the land from those who held ownership, all legally and above board. There has of course been discussion among Jewish people as to whether there should be a Jewish homeland, there is always discussion on important issues, and there is a Jewish homeland, legally constituted, completely valid, and deserving of respect and acceptance.
Many anti Zionists insist that they are not anti Semitic, but believe that the Jewish people should not have a homeland. Perhaps the anti Zionists look back nostalgically to the old days of empire building, when nations believed that might was right, and raved across the world invading other countries, usually violently, destroying, raping and pillaging, stealing the land that didn’t belong to them, making slaves of the inhabitants whom they didn’t kill, imposing new laws. The Mughal Empire, the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, the German Empire, and so many more throughout history.
The Nazi empire. Hitler promised the German people Lebensraum, living space. So the Nazis raved across Europe to give the German people more space; the German people fell for it, and millions of individuals in those countries, perhaps as many as 20,000,000 people, non combatants, civilian Russian, Jewish, Romany, Czech, Slovak, Polish, French and many other nationals died, were murdered, to give the Germans more space.
Do the anti Zionists think that is a better way of gaining land than peaceably buying the land?
Frankl also told us that the Arabs from whom the land was bought said that they would ‘push the Jews into the sea’.
Writing about anti Semitism makes me ill. The anti Semites seem so stupid, so self righteous, and often seem to enjoy the hatred that they feel for the Jewish people, and I don’t understand it at all.
Anti Semitism 11
We must stop blaming each other; pointing the finger of blame, ‘he started it’, ‘it’s her fault’, ‘they did it’, ‘I never done it, miss, he done it. It’s him, it’s her, it’s them…’ like little children in the nursery playground. But when adults play that game, children get killed.
I started writing this work over Christmas 2008, when the Arab/Israeli conflict flared up and there were reports of children dying, Jewish children and Arab children. It must stop. We must stop murdering children. We must stop blaming each other and we must stop killing children.
We must stop the bullying in families, workplaces and communities, and between tribes and nations; it is everywhere and has roots which go back millions of years. And is the product of a nameless, formless fear. We are not afraid of death, though we think we are. We are afraid of that ancient fear, we feel threatened by it and are afraid.
We are often told, and perhaps believe, that there are two responses to danger: fight or flight. But there are more responses: to freeze; to hide in plain sight or behind camouflage. But with the nameless fear which paralyses our senses, it is necessary to face the danger, to turn and face it, to observe it, to analyse and understand it. And when we study it closely, we will recognise it for what it is, and it will fade away. That is our responsibility to ourselves, our children and the planet.
Anti Semitism 12
It is very difficult not to blame the Nazis. We have the law to do that for us, for which I am very grateful.
I urge you to read East West Street, a marvellous book written by Philippe Sands. Towards the end of the book, Sands writes that all the senior Nazis tried at a joint trial in Nuremberg pleaded not guilty of their atrocious crimes. Did they really believe that they were innocent?
So we see that the law has limitations: very many criminals feel that they are innocent, all criminals have or feel they have justification for their crimes; and even though the criminals are tried, found guilty and punished, crimes are still committed.
We here must not lay blame. We must leave that to the courts. We must continue to try and understand that split in the human psyche.
We may recognise that the mind of the boy Hitler was filled with fairy tales, the handsome prince who kills the dragon. We may also recognise that he identified himself with Siegfried, the Germanic hero who kills the dragon and struggles through many adventures. Siegfried is clever, he is is conspiratorial and deceitful in his quest for love. And, very significantly, Siegfried has a cloak of invisibility.
To the world around, the boy was rather privileged: he was fed, clothed, housed and schooled, and many children around the world even today have far fewer material benefits. He had both his parents, but we may recognise that his father was a self-obsessed bully, and that his mother was a self-obsessed depressive. We may recognise that they had little affection for each other or for their child. He was lonely, and comforted himself with the dream of being the handsome prince who killed the dragon.
We must remember that for the child, that is all children, the mother is naturally the supreme power; it is a given in nature; for the child, what happens does so from her will; in the child’s understanding, whatever takes place in and around the family, comes from her.
His mother was a devout Roman Catholic, and we may recognise that she supplied the dragon to his imagination in the shape if ‘the Jews’. The prevalent culture in that time and place was anti Semitic, and the general view supported his mother and her church. We may understand that the boy had never knowingly met any Jewish people, knew nothing about them, but accepted the common view. In that culture the Jewish people were ‘monstered’.
The mother gave birth once a year, one child each year in 1885, 1886 and 1887; then a two year gap before Adolf’ birth in 1889; then a five year gap before Edmund in 1894, and a two year gap before the last child, Paula in 1896. This spacing of births may be significant, and we may speculate that in those five years between Adolf and Edmund, there was one or more miscarriage or still birth; any such event would have terrified the boy. We do know that when he was 11 years old, his younger brother died, and we may well understand that the boy then certainly became terrified of his mother. In the child’s understanding, the mother as the supreme power, had caused the younger brother’s death. The three infant siblings who died before he was born had been shadows, perhaps not good enough for her, and he had survived because he was good enough; but the younger brother had now died and in his understanding, it must be the mother who had caused this death as she must have caused the earlier infant deaths. The boy now felt extremely vulnerable: she might annihilate him; she would turn his penis to stone and it would crumble away. At her will, he would be nothing. And his father, his natural ally, was no help and gave him no support. The boy had no support in this crisis: the God he was presented with was suffering helplessly on the cross; he had no one he could confide in or appeal to.
We may see that the boy clung to the legend of Siegfried, who was brave and clever, who was deceitful and cunning, and who had the cloak of invisibility. In his imagination, the boy put on the cloak so that he became invisible to his mother. He hid himself from what he saw as her vengeful anger. Outwardly, he was attentive and loving to her, and deceived the young Jewish doctor who attended the family. But it is very easy to deceive good men who enjoyed good relationships with their mothers. The boy’s feelings and the turmoil in his mind were invisible.
In our time children and many adults love the Harry Potter books. How wonderful to be a child who can do magic! But, I hope, most children will grow out of the need for an invisibility cloak. And I hope that most children are taught to recognise the difference between fantasy and fact.
We may recognise that the boy Hitler did not grow out of the need for Siegfried’s cloak of invisibility; and we may well speculate that he never understood the difference between fantasy and fact. This unfortunately is the case with many individuals.
Many bullies get great pleasure from tormenting their targets; I’ve seen such bullies and observed how much they love the act of bullying, theft of all kinds, deceit and the ‘monstering’ of their unfortunate target. And it is likely that because they love bullying, they truly expect that the unfortunate target loves being bullied; and it is likely that the bullies are perhaps surprised to be told that this is not the case. It seems that many Nazis very much enjoyed being bullies.
But I do not think that the adult Hitler enjoyed bullying. I think that he took pleasure in what he felt and believed was his heroic struggle. I think that he gloried in his suffering as he strove to bring his perverse vision into the world.
We may recognise these points: that the boy grew to manhood terrified of what he believed was his mother’s power to annihilate him; that he never understood the difference between fact and fantasy; that Siegfried’s cloak of invisibility gave him moral support; that he never lost his terror of his mother, and never lost the need for that cloak.
————-- Why did all those senior Nazis on trial believe that they were innocent?
The cloak of invisibility brings to mind the niqab.
Anti Semitism 13
It is the great fear, of course, The Terror, which drives people into hiding.
“We must ask why the descendants of Ishmael came to worship a God who commands them to wage war with nations and religions that do not submit to him. How did this God become and angry God, and also why did he order that women should lose their power as mothers of the nation and that they were to hide themselves before men and deny their innate desire for love and sexual pleasure and men’s desire for them? Why do they have to cover their bodies and their faces and make themselves invisible? Why do they have to hide their personalities, and indeed are harshly punished if they walk in the street unaccompanied by their males protectors, brothers, fathers or husbands? And why are they not allowed to speak to strangers but are kept under strict control by the males in their families and are subjected to punishment whenever they are seen to transgress these rules and displeasure their male relations; and, indeed, why does God expect the husband to beat his wife whenever she does not follow his orders? Why are they forbidden to enter the mosque and participate in the rituals of prayer five times a day to show their complete submission to Allah? Why do the males expect to be forgiven for their sins, while women’s sins are irredeemable? What is the eternal sinfulness of Muslim women? “We may trace this belief of women’s fundamental sin, which makes them hide not only their sexual desire but also their personality, to a trauma in primeval time, their cultural infancy.” George Frankl The Three Faces of Monotheism
It is the trauma in their cultural infancy from which humanity has never recovered. We are still hiding. And all of us hide to some extent. The niqab is an extreme example, but there is at the moment an epidemic of confusion about appearance. The way we look, the way we are perceived, is to many far more important than who we are. We try to show our innate goodness on the outside, but are very afraid that others, all those outside of ourselves, will see what we’re ‘really like’ and will judge us unkindly. What we are really like is fundamentally good, we are fundamentally good, all of us born good and loving, but something happened. Something happens to all of us.
The trauma in cultural infancy was a terrible event, and is still surrounded by a very strong taboo. It is as if we were worms on hooks, struggling to get free. But we are not worms, though we do have something in common with worms used in angling: human beings put those worms onto hooks, and it is human beings who have made ourselves we feel helpless. And it is human beings who will free us. We will free ourselves.
We must look at the ancient trauma. We must face it, and see it for what it is. There are, of course, difficulties, and the main difficulty is our inherited fear. I am frightened as I write this, which is frustrating because I know the cause of the fear is not real any more. The fear that I feel is very real, but the cause of the fear is in the distant past. We must look and see as far as we can, identify as nearly as we can what that great traumatic event was, whether meteorite strike, massive volcanic eruption or earthquake, and understand its impact on our early ancestors, recognise their response to that traumatic event, acknowledge the taboos they built up and the effect of those taboos.
As Frankl said, we must be very brave, we must have courage.
Anti Semitism 13a
The Nazis were not courageous. They were cowards who bullied their way into power, and committed terrible crimes across Europe.
Why did those senior Nazis believe that they were innocent?
They believed that they were heroes.
Human nature is fundamentally good, all babies are born good and loving.
In their cultural infancy, a terrible catastrophe, a natural disaster happened in the world of our early ancestors who were thrown into terror and confusion. The adults were fully developed physically, but they had the emotional capacity and mental development of infants now. Infants now of 2 or 3 years old are often intelligent and, if given the opportunity, have cultural knowledge without their adults being aware of the infants’ intelligence and understanding.
One legacy of that traumatic event is that something happens to all of us, in the phylogenic breakthrough of the repressed memory of the event; we inherit the trauma of the event; we inherit the consequences of that phylogenic trauma, and we inherit the consequences of the psychological effect on our ancestors, the consequences of the ways in which they tried to overcome the event.
Traumatised infants regress, they become emotionally and intellectually confused, and we may understand that our traumatised ancestors regressed in this way.
We all inherit the consequences of phylogenic traumas and regress, but with kind parents, we recover to the extent that we become reasonable adults within the context of our traumatised human societies. Some individual infants, children and adults, suffer ontogenic psychological trauma, personal trauma in addition to the phylogenic traumas, which makes them more vulnerable.
We may speculate that this major event happened when our ancestors were the equivalent of infants of three and a half years old now. The human species had already developed the capacity to tell lies, had learnt to ‘say the thing that is not’ as Jonathan Swift phrased it in Gulliver’s Travels. The human species was capable of inventing.
Nothing like this catastrophe had happened in their experience. They could not identify it. They could not name it but it must be something.
Ever since that early phylogenic trauma our species has run away from the event. From the earliest times, conscious memory of the event has been repressed, pushed down as deeply as possible; it is forbidden to remember, to bring the event into consciousness. The event was monstrous and must be forgotten.
But, at the same time as we are hiding from the facts, we want to defeat the terror. The dragon from fairy stories, the monsters of myth and legend, the ‘things that are not’ invented in the minds of our ancestors, are the catastrophe in disguise; they must be fought and defeated; and then, so the unconscious thinking goes, humanity will be free of the phylogenic terror.
There aren’t any monsters in the natural world, everything has its niche, and even human beings aren’t monsters, though of course there are human beings who behave monstrously.
Hitler was not a simple-minded innocent. Frankl once mentioned that leading Roman Catholics encouraged him, as they thought that they could manipulate him, in which they failed. Anti Semitism was widespread, and I speculate that Hitler deliberately targeted the Jewish people in order to gain support. Hitler was cunning, like his hero Siegfried.
Some say that Hitler was charismatic. It is difficult to see charisma in the news reels of the hysterical, ranting, angry man, but many people admired him, even loved him. There may have been cynics among the leading Nazis, but it seems that many were captivated by him. Unconsciously they shared the infantile heroic dream to defeat the dragon and gain freedom - for the German people.
Those Nazis on trial believed they were innocent because they believed that they were heroically fighting the monster.
Dear God.
Anti Semitism 14
That was unexpected. But George Frankl proved that human nature is fundamentally good, all babies are born good and loving. From his proof, I cannot reach a different finding.
The tyrant rouses the mob to do what he wants them to do. The Germans, not all Germans, of course, but very many were roused by Hitler’s hysteria; they identified with him, with his nightmare vision of conquest, of world domination; it is very likely that they more or less consciously recognised his dependence on Siegfried, his cunning, the magic cloak of invisibility. The people felt aggrieved - the phylogenic difficulties cause practically everyone to feel they have somehow been unjustly treated. Germany was in great difficulties since the First World War, and the Germans were humiliated. Hitler promised them the world and they fell in behind him. He showed them the dragons, his targets for their wrath: first the Jewish people, followed by the communists, the Roma people, homosexuals, ‘degenerates’, the disabled and so on until who was left that wasn’t a dragon, a target for the extreme bullying of the Nazis? Or we could say that roused by their new hero, the Germans regressed: the ancient phylogenic trauma rose up close to consciousness and they fought the memory by becoming a mob, willing to believe what he told them and to do what he wanted.
I can see it very clearly. But you must not simply accept what I say, you must question my findings. (I am not George Frankl; I cannot provide proofs. But perhaps the neurologists can; they are doing remarkable work, and it may be possible to find very significant changes in the brain of infants at different stages of development, and then to compare again the brains of infants at those different stages with adults’ brains.)
It is shocking to see that a traumatised and unhappy boy can grow into manhood capable of such monstrous behaviour. But hasn’t psychoanalysis often shown us that? Frankl always insisted that human-made disaster was not inevitable, but it is very clear that for us to avoid disaster is increasingly difficult. We are in trouble and we must wake up. There is no force of evil: there are people, all of us phylogenically traumatised, all suffering from a sense of injustice, and all sadly capable of behaving against our fundamentally good human nature. And God won’t do the work for us.
There is a sense of entitlement, that we humans are entitled to have whatever we want. (This seems to come from the ancient trauma which breaks through in our two year old infants, and which is then reinforced by the ecstatic phase of the three year old infant.)
Then there is the completely muddled thinking: we know that there are too many of us on the planet; people have been worried about this human population increase for almost a century, and yet when a country reports a decline in population growth - I think Japan was the latest - everyone goes into a panic. We should be asking them how they managed it, so that perhaps we could try to do it ourselves, but there is terrible alarm.
Then there is the plastic menace: we’ve seen the images of creatures dying from eating plastic; we know that plastic is poisoning the land and the seas, but we continue to use plastic.
And then there are the cars. Everyday there is news of car-related trouble, everyday, but people are addicted to their cars, and won’t give them up even though using cars - and aeroplanes - is causing very great pollution.
There are simple solutions to all of this muddled thinking. But of course, behind the muddle there is complexity.
We can do it. We are capable of changing our ways and making the world a good place to be.
Anti Semitism 15
Babies are not separated from the universe. Young children do not know that they are small; they have no concept, no idea of themselves as ‘little people’ - that is an adult perception of infants, based on relative size, in physical terms.
The brain contains, among other things, the memory; the individual memory has, or is, the record of everything that individual has experienced, and the record of everything experienced by the species. In the physical spaces of the brain is the entire history of the individual and the species, and quite possibly the history of the universe and everything in it. This is, in so many ways, difficult to understand, even to think of.
Our bright faculty of memory is blocked by the strong taboos surrounding the severe trauma suffered by our early ancestors, in their cultural infancy.
The memory contains everything experienced by our species, including the feelings and terror of that trauma. These terrors are themselves terrifying, and the taboo was perhaps established as a protection, intended to prevent us from re-experiencing those feelings. Of course, the taboo does not prevent us from feeling again the terror; the terror continually threatens to break through into consciousness. This is a healthy sign that we are trying to understand, but it is difficult: we are so afraid of the fear.
Alas, poor humanity. But come, let us be very brave.
The Nazis set out to kill the dragon. The dragon is the early trauma, but the taboo forbids this knowledge: we must not know of the early trauma. And because they were ignorant of the nature of the trauma and the taboos, and because they were of bad intention, the Nazis failed to ‘kill the dragon’ and instead made Europe a monstrosity.
It is in the public records that in their filthy camps and elsewhere, the Nazis murdered millions of people, men, women and children. We have come to call this the Holocaust.
It is all on record. There are survivor testaments. It is the unbearable fact. The Nazis themselves kept records of their crimes. And yet there are people who deny the fact of the Holocaust. How? Why?
We may see the Holocaust as a re-enactment of the original trauma. It is not a replica of the original event - the main difference is that the original trauma was a naturally occurring catastrophe, whereas the Holocaust was perpetrated by human beings. In its monstrosity of the suffering caused, the Holocaust is a re-play of that trauma.
We may recognise that the holocaust deniers are Nazis or at least sympathetic to the Nazis. For the deniers the Nazis are heroes; the deniers unconsciously understand the ‘great adventure to kill the dragon’ undertaken by these mythical heroes. But when confronted by the fact of the Holocaust, the deniers cannot see it. We may speculate that for them, it is too close to the repressed memory of the original trauma, which they must not see. We may thus recognise that the Holocaust deniers are obeying the taboo surrounding the great trauma in the infancy of our species.
But we must see the trauma, we must recognise the terrible event which almost annihilated our species.
Our early ancestors did their best to recover, but over the millions of years which have passed since the great trauma, humanity has sacrificed more and more of our innate, our natural goodness, until we have made life almost unbearable for ourselves and everything else here. We have, all adult humanity, set up a reign of terror over the world.
Anti Semitism 16
It is puzzling that our species reacted so badly to the great trauma. The other animals seem to have recovered much better than we have; for instance, the other species are kindly towards their own off-spring, whereas so many human beings are so horrible to their own children.
We may speculate that this exaggerated difficulty in human recovery is connected to our capacity to tell lies, to imagine ‘the thing that is not’. Other animals do have imagination, as we may see when a cat plays with a piece of string, as if the string were a mouse. But the cat knows the difference between a piece of string and a mouse, whereas we humans very often believe our own imaginings.
The Apocalypse was then, at the time of that ancient catastrophe. The Apocalypse is of the past. It has happened. All the miseries inflicted on the planet by human beings are re-enactments of that original event.
To do this work here we must revisit our ancestors at the time of the event; we must feel what they felt; we must experience for ourselves what they felt. Many individuals do revisit the event and do experience the terrors, as we may recognise with all the various phobias. A patient suffering a phobia is told it is all irrational and will be given pills. Our job here is to bring the ancient memories of trauma into consciousness, to write down what our ancestors experienced, to put words to the chaos of the event and to make it sensible to our understanding of human behaviour.
If you have personal experience of suffering a phobia, please note that you will find its origins in ancient phylogenic trauma. Your experience of phobia is a personal re-enactment of some aspect of ancient trauma.
In this investigation to revisit our ancestors, I was personally very upset that there was no evidence of God among our ancestors. In their cultural infancy, to be left without that idea of the magnificent and creative God, was devastating. Then I realised that of course there was no God among them: our early ancestors lived within the world, they lived within and were part of the magnificent creative energy of the universe. Until the devastating trauma, they didn’t need God, they didn’t need God ‘out there’, they were part of the energy of life without question.
When I was an infant I accepted that idea of the loving, magnificent and creative God, and I still do. Now I can see that, perhaps, any idea of God might be a fiction. But it seems to me that the idea of such a God - if it is a fiction - is a fiction leading towards the reality of life.
I was very lucky to have been told that idea of God, at the time I was told it, and in terms I could immediately understand. I was very lucky to meet George Frankl and to work with him for so many years.
I do strongly suggest that all infants are taught that idea of God; and that all infants are, with kindness and good humour, taught the difference between a truth and a lie.