HyperNormalisation

Adam Curtis - The Pope of Team-B at the BBC

"Now, the situation in brotherly Czechoslovakia is normalised."

- Leonid Brezhnev, 1968

You have now found urself trapped in The Incomprehensible Maze - 

Where's UR Head?

"Our World is strange and often fake and corrupt. 
But we think it’s normal because we can’t see anything else."

HyperNormalisation - The Story of How We Got Here.

Men at sometime, are Masters of their Fates.
The fault (deere Brutus) is not in our Starres,
But in our Selves, that we are underlings.

—Cassius to Brutus,

from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

It’s a great brainwashing process, which goes very slow[ly] and is divided [into] four basic stages.

The first one [is] Demoralisation. 

It takes from 15-20 years to Demoralise a nation. 

Why that many years? 

Because this is the minimum number of years which [is required] to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of the enemy. 

In other words, Marxist-Leninist ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged, or counter-balanced by the basic values of Americanism (American patriotism).

The result? The result you can see. 

Most of the people who graduated in the sixties (drop-outs or half-baked intellectuals) are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, [and the] educational system. 

You are stuck with them. 

You cannot get rid of them. 

They are contaminated; they are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. 

You cannot change their mind[s], even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behaviour. 

In other words, these people... the process of Demoralisation is complete and irreversible. 

To [rid] society of these people, you need another twenty or fifteen years to educate a new generation of patriotically-minded and common sense people, who would be acting in favour and in the interests of United States society.

Griffin: And yet these people who have been ‘programmed,’ and as you say [are] in place and who are favorable to an opening with the Soviet concept... these are the very people who would be marked for extermination in this country?

Bezmenov: Most of them, yes. Simply because the psychological shock when they will see in [the] future what the beautiful society of ‘equality’ and ‘social justice’ means in practice, obviously they will revolt. They will be very unhappy, frustrated people, and the Marxist-Leninist regime does not tolerate these people. Obviously they will join the leagues of dissenters (dissidents).

Unlike in [the] present United States there will be no place for dissent in future Marxist-Leninist America. Here you can get popular like Daniel Ellsberg and filthy-rich like Jane Fonda for being ‘dissident,’ for criticizing your Pentagon. 

In [the] future these people will be simply squashed like cockroaches. 

Nobody is going to pay them nothing for their beautiful, noble ideas of equality. 

This they don't understand and it will be [the] greatest shock for them, of course.

The Demoralisation process in [the] United States is basically completed already. 

For the last 25 years... actually, it's over-fulfilled because Demoralisation now reaches such areas where previously not even Comrade Andropov and all his experts would even dream of such a tremendous success. Most of it is done by Americans to Americans, thanks to [a] lack of moral standards.

As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who was demoralised is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures; even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him [a] concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it, until he [receives] a kick in his fan-bottom. When a military boot crashes his... then he will understand. But not before that. That's the [tragedy] of the situation of Demoralisation.

So basically America is stuck with demoralization and unless... even if you start right now, here, this minute, you start educating [a] new generation of American[s], it will still take you fifteen to twenty years to turn the tide of ideological perception of reality back to normalcy and patriotism.

The next stage is Destabilisation.

This time [the] subverter does not care about your ideas and the patterns of your consumption; whether you eat junk food and get fat and flabby doesn’t matter any more. This time—and it takes only from two to five years to destabilize a nation—what matters [are] essentials: economy, foreign relations, [and] defense systems. And you can see it quite clearly that in some areas, in such sensitive areas as defense and [the] economy, the influence of Marxist-Leninist ideas in [the] United States is absolutely fantastic. I could never believe it fourteen years ago when I landed in this part of the world that the process [would have gone] that fast.

The next stage, of course, is Crisis. 

It may take only up to six weeks to bring a country to the verge of Crisis. You can see it in Central America now.

And, after crisis, with a violent change of power, structure, and economy, you have [the so-called] period of Normalisation.

It may last indefinitely. 

Normalisation is a cynical expression borrowed from Soviet propaganda. When the Soviet tanks moved into Czechoslovakia in ‘68, Comrade Brezhnev said,

‘Now the situation in brotherly Czechoslovakia is normalised.’

VLADIMIR PUTIN: We know how these decisions were taken and who was applying the pressure. But let me stress that Russia is not going to get all worked up, get offended or come begging at anyone’s door. Russia is a self-sufficient country. We will work within the foreign economic environment that has taken shape, develop domestic production and technology and act more decisively to carry out transformation. Pressure from outside, as has been the case on past occasions, will only consolidate our society, keep us alert and make us concentrate on our main development goals.

Of course the sanctions are a hindrance. They are trying to hurt us through these sanctions, block our development and push us into political, economic and cultural isolation, force us into backwardness in other words. But let me say yet again that the world is a very different place today. We have no intention of shutting ourselves off from anyone and choosing some kind of closed development road, trying to live in autarky. We are always open to dialogue, including on normalising our economic and political relations. We are counting here on the pragmatic approach and position of business communities in the leading countries.

VLADIMIR PUTIN: First of all, regarding my view of Ukraine’s sovereignty: I have never disputed that Ukraine is a modern, full-fledged, sovereign, European country.

But it is another matter that the historical process that saw Ukraine take shape in its present borders was quite a complex one. Perhaps you are not aware that in 1922, part of the land that you just named, land that historically always bore the name of Novorossiya… Why this name? This was because there was essentially a single region with its centre at Novorossiisk, and that was how it came to be called Novorossiya. This land included Kharkov, Lugansk, Donetsk, Nikolayev, Kherson and Odessa Region. In 1921-22, when the Soviet Union was formed, this territory was transferred from Russia to Ukraine. The communists had a simple logic: their goal was to increase the share of proletariat in Ukraine so as to ensure they had more support in various political processes, because in the communists’ view, the peasantry was a petty bourgeois group that was hostile to their aims, and so they needed to create a bigger proletariat. That is my first point.

Second, what also happened I think is that during the Civil War, nationalist groups in Ukraine tried to seize these regions but didn’t succeed, and the Bolsheviks told their supporters in Ukraine: Look what you can show the Ukrainian people. The nationalists didn’t manage to get hold of this territory, but you have succeeded. But it was all one country at the time and so this was not considered any great loss for Russia when it was all part of the same country anyway.

In 1954, Khrushchev, who liked to bang his shoe at the UN, decided for some reason to transfer Crimea to Ukraine. This violated even the Soviet Union’s own laws. Let me explain what I mean. Under Soviet law at that moment, territory could be transferred from one constituent republic to another only with the approval of the Supreme Soviets in each of the republics concerned. This was not done. Instead, the Presidiums of the Russian and Ukrainian Supreme Soviets rubber-stamped the decision to go ahead, but only the presidiums, not the parliaments themselves. This was a flagrant violation of the laws in force at the time.

In the 1990s, after the Soviet Union’s collapse, Crimea pressed for and proclaimed autonomy with wide-ranging powers. 

Unfortunately, the authorities in Kiev then started abolishing these autonomous powers and essentially reduced them to zero, centralising all the political, economic and financial processes. The same goes for southeast Ukraine as well.

As for western Ukraine, perhaps you are not aware that Ukraine gained territory following World War II? Some territory was transferred from Poland and some from Hungary, I think. What was Lvov if not a Polish city? Are you not aware of these facts? Why do you ask me this question? Poland was compensated through the territory it gained from Germany when the Germans were driven out of a number of eastern regions. If you ask around, you will see that there are whole associations of these expelled Germans.

I cannot judge here and now whether this was right or wrong, but this is what happened. In this respect it is difficult not to recognise that Ukraine is a complex, multi-component state formation. This is simply the way historical developments went. The people of Crimea feared for their and their children’s future following a coup d’etat carried out with the support of our Western partners and decided to make use of the right to self-determination enshrined in international law. However, this does not in any way mean that we do not respect Ukraine’s sovereignty. We do respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and will continue to do so in the future.

I hope very much for normalisation and development of Russian-Ukrainian relations and I think this is an inevitable process.

RESEARCH DIRECTOR AT THE GERMAN-RUSSIA FORUM ALEXANDER RAHR: Mr President, a question on energy. Will Europe freeze in the winter if Russia does not sign the agreement with Ukraine that is so important for us?

Also, could you please explain to this audience, which I think is probably aware of all the details, what is the catch in these talks? Why hasn’t there been any success in agreeing with Ukraine on the price for two or three months now, when there are constant meetings?

And another question: how will you build the new energy strategy with the European Union, which has suddenly changed the rules and begun to liberalise its market, and will offer to buy gas from Russia at one price? What are your thoughts on this?

VLADIMIR PUTIN: I will start with the latter part of your question. We have long been in discussion with our colleagues in the European Commission about the Third Energy Package, so this was not born yesterday. We feel that this decision is harmful for Europe. At first glance, it seems like liberalisation, the creation of market conditions. In fact, we believe, it’s nothing of the sort, because everything was liberalised long ago in the oil sector; oil is traded on the exchange, and the price is set at the exchange. Of course, you can partially manipulate the prices for a period by sharply increasing the volume being traded, by increasing production, but that is also impossible to maintain forever, because it will be damaging to shale oil producers and to traditional black gold exporters.

In the gas sector, for example, nothing is more sustainable than long-term contracts that are tied to the market price for oil. This is an absolutely fair pricing system. What can be more liberal than the market price for oil, which is traded on the exchange? There are standard parameters that indicate the calorific value of gas which is comparable to the calorific value of oil, and everything can be easily calculated by experts. And an important factor for our European consumers is that they can be certain that this volume will definitely be delivered according to those rules of setting the price. This creates certainty in European energy security. And Russia has never – I want to stress this – has never failed to abide by its commitments, not a single time.

In 2008, a crisis occurred because Ukraine practically blocked transit. But Russia was not responsible for this. Regardless of what anyone says, the experts are all fully aware of this.

What happened in 2008? Ukraine did not want to sign a new contract with Russia, and the old one had expired. And without signing a new contract, they began siphoning certain volumes of gas from the export pipeline in the winter. At first, we tolerated this, simply indicated to them that this was unacceptable. We tolerated it for some time, and then said that every day, we will reduce the amount of gas pumped equal in volume to the amount illegally taken – essentially stolen. They stole one million cubic metres one day, so the next day, we reduced the volume pumped out by a million cubic metres. And we continued this, from day to day. Eventually, we reduced it to zero. But this was not our doing. We cannot deliver free gas. What kind of behaviour is that?

Now over to the existing threats and what is going on there. As you may know, last year, to help Ukraine pay the debt it accrued since 2013 – they stopped paying last July and by November the unpaid debt had added up – to normalise the situation we said, and I have to repeat this: we will lend you $3 billion and we will reduce the price in the first quarter of 2014 to below the lowest limit. However, we will keep this price for the second quarter only if Ukraine uses the loans it receives to pay off its entire debt for 2013 and makes regular payments at the lowest rate - $268.5 for 1,000 cubic metres.

The result is that the debt for the previous year was not paid out and the current payments for the 1st quarter were not made in full. Therefore, in full compliance with its agreements, Gazprom shifted to contractual pricing. As we all remember, the contract was signed in 2009. It has been in effect all this time and was never questioned by our partners in Europe, by us, or by our Ukrainian friends. This contract has been in effect all these years. The Timoshenko government signed it. The current authorities in Kiev, including Energy Minister Prodan attended the signing ceremony and are fully aware of all this. Now it suddenly turns out that this was a bad contract and it needs to be revised. Why? Yet again, they don’t want to pay.

Everybody knows these figures, but I would like to repeat them. Last year we issued a loan for $3 billion. The official debt for this year has already reached $5.6 billion. However, we are willing to revise it with a $100 discount on the gas price. This still adds up to $4.5 billion for last year and this year. Thus, a $3 billion loan plus a $4.5 billion debt adds up to $7.5 billion.

In addition to that, Gazprombank lent its client in Ukraine, a private company, $1.4 billion to buy gas for the chemical industry at the lowest price of $268. The same Gazprombank gave Naftogaz Ukrainy another $1.8 billion to balance current accounts.

Nobody wants to pay off their debts. We undertook a huge responsibility. Now we have agreed on almost everything – the price and the payment procedure. I would like to stress that under the contract and in line with current agreements, Gazprom has switched to advance payment, which means we will only ship as much gas as we are paid for in advance. Under the previous arrangement, we first shipped the gas and they paid a month later. However, since they don’t pay, we cannot carry on in the same way. We said, and this is in strict compliance with the contract, that first they pay and then we ship. Everybody agreed to this as well. Our Ukrainian partners agreed and the members of the European Commission admitted this was fair: they have to repay their debt to us and shift to advance payment.

The IMF and the European Commission have confirmed what our Ukrainian friends are saying. Ukraine now has $3.1 billion to pay its debt. This is not the entire $4.5 billion, only $3.1 billion. Technically, we could assume a tough stance and say we want it all. I had to put some pressure on Gazprom, and I would like to apologise to its shareholders, including foreign shareholders for this, but I asked Gazprom not to insist and to let them pay at least the $3.5 billion and then argue over the balance.

So, they have $3.5 billion, and they say: either we use the entire amount to pay our debt and then we have nothing left to make advance payments, or we prepay future shipments, but then we would not be able to repay the debt. In the latter case, we would ask for an extension of our debt repayment until March or April 2015. What does this mean for us? I can say with a great degree of certainty that if we agree to this, we will get nothing for the last month. This has happened a countless number of times before. Therefore, we said no, we are not doing this anymore.

What did the European Commission suggest – and this was publicly voiced by Mr Ettinger? They suggested that we again lend money to our Ukrainian partners to pay for future transit. Another loan from us, or we can ship without prepayment. This is also a loan – a commodity loan, this time. We told our friends in Ukraine and in the European Commission that we will not do this anymore. Our total loan to Ukraine currently stands at nearly $11 billion. In January, Ukraine is to receive another $3 billion tranche from the IMF. So we told them that we know Ukraine is to get money is January, and we want them to get it, so let us move this payment from January to December. In reply, they said this was impossible due to the complicated decision-making procedure at the IMF. Then I suggested that they provide Ukraine with a bridge loan for a month, since everyone knows that there will be payment in January. The reply was they could not make that decision in the European Union, the European Commission because they have a very complicated lending procedure. All right, we asked for a guarantee from a top class European bank instead. And again, we hear that this is a complicated procedure, they cannot do it right now.

You know, the mentality here in Russia, and in Ukraine is different from Europe. Here if a man invites a woman to a restaurant, he will pay the bill, while you would normally go Dutch, when everybody pays for themselves. However, this is a different situation. The European Union has chosen association with Ukraine and undertook certain commitments. Why don’t you help Ukraine and issue it a bridge loan for a month, only for one month?

We are having a very professional and amicable discussion with our partners both in Ukraine and in the European Commission. We took on a huge responsibility and great risks and we think it would be absolutely fair if we shared these risks with our European or American partners. Why are they humiliating Ukraine with these $40 million handouts? What should them do with them? Give them at least $1.5 billion, and only for a month.

I very much hope that this issue will be resolved shortly, maybe next week. If this is the case, then there is and can be no threat. However, if this does not happen, we will again face the threat of gas siphoning from the export pipeline, which, in turn, could lead to a crisis. We don’t want to see this happen. However, Russia would never cause a crisis. We will comply with all our contractual commitments with great care and ship in a timely manner.

HoloTrump : The Emergency Commander-in-Chief Hologram (ECiCH)

"Please State the Nature of the Fascist Political Emergency"

 

Jim Marrs in The Jeff Rense Show, October 11, 2016. 
Jim Marrs: 
"Let me tell you something. The more they come out trying to break Donald Trump, the more you should understand that he has got the establishment very, very concerned, OK?!"

SAME AS IT EVER WAS

Prez

Arrogant Presumption

KIRK: Dining on ashes?

SPOCK: You were right. It was arrogant presumption on my part that got us into this situation. 

You and the Doctor might have been killed.

KIRK: The night is young. 

You said it yourself. It was logical. 

Peace is worth a few personal risks. 

...You're a great one for logic. I'm a great one for rushing in where angels fear to tread. 

We're both extremists. 

Reality is probably somewhere in between us. 

...I couldn't get past the death of my son.

SPOCK: I was prejudiced by her accomplishments as a Vulcan.

KIRK: Gorkon had to die before I understood how prejudiced I was.

SPOCK: Is it possible 

...that we two, you and I, have grown so old and so inflexible 

...that we have outlived our usefulness? 

...Would that constitute.... a joke..?

KIRK: Don't crucify yourself. It wasn't your fault.

SPOCK: I was responsible.

KIRK: For no actions but your own.

SPOCK: That is not what you said at your trial.

KIRK: That was as Captain of a ship. Human beings...

SPOCK: But Captain, we both know that I am not human.

KIRK: Do you want to know something? 

...Everybody's human.

SPOCK: I find that remark ...insulting.

KIRK: Come on. I need you.

I've Already Gone Places

F26. What does Carl mean by "I've already gone places"?
When Agents Desmond and Stanley are checking out Teresa's trailer, the trailer park manager, Carl, says 

"I've already gone places. 

 I just want to stay around."

Some say this indicates Carl believes the agents see him as a suspect and he doesn't want to go to jail, he's already been there.

Others suggest that perhaps Carl had had an experience like Agent Philip Jeffries (which we learn about later) and what may have happened to Agent Stanley (also later); namely, a trip to what we assume is the Black Lodge.

This is yet another unanswered question. These lines are not in the FWWM shooting script, and none of the other dialogue in this scene talks about anyone going anywhere, so we can only assume that they were a last-minute change by Lynch, or an ad lib by actor Harry Dean Stanton

.

It reminds me of a line from "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" the last story I read to my class before... the accident. Ichabod Crane disappears... the line goes: 

"As he was a bachelor, and in nobody's debt, nobody troubled their head about him anymore."

"Is that what you feel?"

It's what I want... what I want.

The Dead Zone

You cowardly bastard! 

You're not the voice of the people, I am the voice of the people! 

The people speak through me, not you!

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, 

still is sitting, on the pallid bust of Pallas 

just above my chamber door, 

and his eyes have all the seeming 

of a demon's that is dreaming, 

and the lamp light o'er him streaming 

throws his shadow on the floor, 

and my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor, shall be lifted... 

Nevermore. 

Don't be an Alarmist - The Germans 1933-45

They Thought They Were Free

The Germans, 1933-45

Excerpt from pages 166-73 of "They Thought They Were Free" First published in 1955

By Milton Mayer

But Then It Was Too Late

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

"You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time."

"Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the baker. ‘One had no time to think. There was so much going on.’"

"Your friend the baker was right," said my colleague. "The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

"How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might.

"Your ‘little men,’ your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better. Pastor Niemöller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too late."

"Yes," I said.

"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. 

In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. 

These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. 

On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. 

You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. 

This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. 

The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

"What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or ‘adjust’ your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares to know."

I said nothing. I thought of nothing to say.

"I can tell you," my colleague went on, "of a man in Leipzig, a judge. He was not a Nazi, except nominally, but he certainly wasn’t an anti-Nazi. He was just—a judge. In ’42 or ’43, early ’43, I think it was, a Jew was tried before him in a case involving, but only incidentally, relations with an ‘Aryan’ woman. This was ‘race injury,’ something the Party was especially anxious to punish. In the case at bar, however, the judge had the power to convict the man of a ‘nonracial’ offense and send him to an ordinary prison for a very long term, thus saving him from Party ‘processing’ which would have meant concentration camp or, more probably, deportation and death. But the man was innocent of the ‘nonracial’ charge, in the judge’s opinion, and so, as an honorable judge, he acquitted him. Of course, the Party seized the Jew as soon as he left the courtroom."

"And the judge?"

"Yes, the judge. He could not get the case off his conscience—a case, mind you, in which he had acquitted an innocent man. He thought that he should have convicted him and saved him from the Party, but how could he have convicted an innocent man? The thing preyed on him more and more, and he had to talk about it, first to his family, then to his friends, and then to acquaintances. (That’s how I heard about it.) After the ’44 Putsch they arrested him. After that, I don’t know."

I said nothing.

"Once the war began," my colleague continued, "resistance, protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of enthusiasm, or failure to show it in public, was ‘defeatism.’ You assumed that there were lists of those who would be ‘dealt with’ later, after the victory. Goebbels was very clever here, too. He continually promised a ‘victory orgy’ to ‘take care of’ those who thought that their ‘treasonable attitude’ had escaped notice. And he meant it; that was not just propaganda. And that was enough to put an end to all uncertainty.

"Once the war began, the government could do anything ‘necessary’ to win it; so it was with the ‘final solution of the Jewish problem,’ which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its ‘necessities’ gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in Germany who, once the war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting, resisting, were betting on Germany’s losing the war. It was a long bet. Not many made it."

Copyright notice: Excerpt from pages 166-73 of They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©1955, 1966 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press. 
(Footnotes and other references included in the book may have been removed from this online version of the text.)

Freud and the Science of Human Irrationality.

Freud and the Frankfurt School by Michael Minnicino

So, tell me: About how long have you been feeling depressed? ...

Okay, we can come back to that later. If you are going to undergo psychoanalysis with me, perhaps it might be better if I started, and told you how I go about things. I'm not really a strict Freudian psychoanalyst, you know—almost nobody is a strict Freudian these days. But, that is not to say that the old boy doesn't have his influence. It's amazing, you know: Sigmund Freud's scientific credibility was nearly destroyed, but right after World War II, his ideas became the most widely discussed topic in America. 

Do you know why he became so popular? 

Because he said that it was okay to be a pessimist; he proved that if you were unhappy, it was okay, and it wasn't your fault.

And, I can't help noticing that you, personally, don't appear very pessimistic; as a matter of fact, you look rather optimistic. Too much optimism is how a lot of people get depressed: They think they can solve the problems of the whole world; all they have to do is get people to act rationally. If you put too much faith in the power of reason, you are going to fail, and you are just going to make yourself depressed. Sigmund Freud understood that—that down deep, people aren't reasonable. That is why my old teacher Erich Fromm back in 1970 said that psychoanalysis was really "the science of human irrationality."

Anyway, this optimism stuff is 130 years out of date. Let me see if I can remember that poem:

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Now, that is pessimism: Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach," 1859. And you know, people didn't generally write poetry that pessimistic before 1859. That, by the way, is the same year that Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, the book that really got people to look at the human race realistically. Most people think that Darwin's book is devoted to evolution. Not really; as a matter of fact, Darwin didn't even use the word "evolution" in that first edition. 

The full title tells it all: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or, the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. Darwin got people to realize that life is not progress or development, but an endless struggle; you can't be optimistic, because how things turn out is not a question of morality, or a divine plan; it's a question of biology—over which you and I have very little control.

Thomas Huxley, Darwin's good friend, said it best: "I know of no study which is so utterly saddening as that of the evolution of humanity. Man emerges with the marks of his lowly origin strong upon him. He is a brute, only more intelligent than other brutes, a blind prey to impulses ... a victim to endless illusions, which make his mental existence a burden, and fill his life with barren toil and battle."

This stuff changed the world back in the 1860s and '70s; everybody had to explain the universe in terms of Darwin. Even Hermann Helmholtz, the mechanist physicist, told his colleagues that the "struggle for existence" was "the highest principle of explanation, in the face of which not even the molecules ... and the stars in heaven are safe." And Sigmund Freud said that the two most important influences on him were Charles Darwin and Hermann Helmholtz. He even tried to study with Huxley in London and with Helmholtz in Berlin.

Below-the-belt identity

You see, what Freud did, was take the blind, mechanical forces of biology described by Darwin, and show that they operated on the mind. For instance, some people get the idea that they can help the whole human race; but, Freud told everybody that this was an illusion, like religion. Freud realized that, if you get the idea that you can help all humanity survive and grow, that this idea is actually your own desire to survive and reproduce—your own individual sexual urges—channeled (what we call "sublimated") into a more socially acceptable form.

Look at Freud's case history of Leonardo da Vinci—maybe the greatest combination of artist and scientist of all time. You think Leonardo was moved by some higher purpose? No way—it's sex! It's always sex. Freud said: Sex starts even before you're born; right from the start, you are biologically impelled to explore the physical world; that's where you get your ideas, from groping around in the world of the senses.

For centuries people thought that this erotic groping around was a bad thing. Freud helped us understand that this was natural—that you have these erotic instinctual drives, these irrational little demons inside you, and you can't do that much about it. For most people, this eroticism becomes totally inhibited by religion, or by some other cultural problem; or it gets repressed by childhood experiences and transformed into various kinds of neuroses.

But Freud said that the reason why Leonardo was such a genius, was that he was one of those rare individuals whose erotic drives became perfectly sublimated; according to Freud, Leonardo effectively never grew up (somewhat like Michael Jackson); and scientific and artistic investigation became Leonardo's substitute for sexual activity. As old Sigmund said, Leonardo became a complete narcissist, "the ideal homosexual type."

Homosexual? No, psychoanalysis understands that homosexuality is not really a perversion; it is just one of the healthy ways of dealing with the irrational drives within us all. Anyway, Freud said that all human beings are naturally bisexual.

I see that you are somewhat afraid of this subject; perhaps you have never dealt with your own homosexual urges. Don't worry: We can deal with that problem later on in your therapy.

You have got to be realistic. It is absurd to worry about universal truths; the only universals are these mechanical forces in your brain and in your pants. And, each person comes up with his or her own, more or less successful way of reconciling these forces with the experiences that you receive in the course of growing up. Why, the whole history of social science—from Freud and almost every psychologist, plus almost all of sociology, and almost all of anthropology—is one great effort to prove that you can't judge a truth in terms of all mankind; truth is all relative to the individual. And what is more, you have to accept that your mind is not truly free: Biology means that you can never completely control those erotic little demons inside you. So, don't set your sights unrealistically high: The only thing you can hope to discover—with the help of professionals like me—is how to be well-adjusted.

Origins of the Frankfurt School

Well, of course, I can't prove it!

Psychoanalysis cannot clinically prove that the unconscious, the id, dream analysis, the Oedipus complex, or any important Freudian concept really exists. Freud said that psychoanalysis is like a religion: You can't prove it, but you accept it on faith. As a matter of fact, Carl Jung once wrote Freud a letter, suggesting that psychoanalysis start acting as a formal religion; Freud thought that was a bit too premature.

Actually, I think it was this religious aspect which attracted the Frankfurt School to Freud in the 1930s. I probably should tell you that, like many psychoanalysts today, I came to Freud by way of the Frankfurt School—you know: Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno.

A Hungarian fellow named Georg Lukacs founded the Frankfurt School because he was trying to determine how to cause massive social changes. Lukacs was specifically interested in developing Bolshevism, but the technique works for any ideology. Lukacs said that you had to make people completely pessimistic; you had to make them believe that they lived in "a world abandoned by God," as he put it. At the same time, the new social movement that you were trying to create had to have certain key similarities to a religion—but, of course, without a concept of a Supreme Being. In fact, Lukacs seriously investigated the Baal Shem cult, a Jewish cabbalistic sect, as well as several medieval Christian heresies, in order to find what he called the "messianic" ideas which could be incorporated into Bolshevik organizing.

Freudian theory fit this bill precisely; it was just like going back to the Gnostic cults of the Middle Ages: The demons were back, the evil was being generated in your own mind, and you needed a new priesthood to save you. The Frankfurt School's extension of Freud was the major reason why psychoanalysis became so influential in American life after World War II. The Frankfurt School helped us all to discover how bad our mental health really was—how we had to liberate ourselves from the authoritarian constraints that made us neurotic; that we must resist the imposition of universal values, and embrace a healthy personal hedonism.

Fixing up Freud

Now, as your psychoanalyst, I hate to admit it, but, even though he had a great model for the individual mind, Freud's social psychology was a disaster. But, the Frankfurt School solved that. Freud had said that the individual human identity was based on the interaction of biology—that is, the instinctual drives embedded in man's hereditary structure—with the experiences of growing to maturity within the structure of the family. Freud thought all people were more or less the same, because the instinctual drives were the same, and the family structures were more or less the same. The Frankfurt School corrected this by emphasizing that each culture, each people, each race, have important differences in their psychologies, because their differing family structures transmit the ideas of authority, value, morality, in different ways.

So, if you want to liberate your eros and become healthy, the most important thing is to find what separates one culture, one people, one race, from the other ones. The differences don't have to be in the genes—I mean, today, very few people will admit publicly that black people are biologically different from white people. But, the Frankfurt School emphasized what Freud only hinted at: Cultural differences transmitted through the family can be as rigid and as powerful as biological differences, and thus they proved that black people are fundamentally different from white people because their cultures are different.

And a lot of people in this country supported and sponsored the Frankfurt School, because they were able to use Freud's psychoanalytic theory to demonstrate scientifically that all values must be relative. And this is why, today, everybody—everybody except for a few extremists and religious fanatics—understands that universal values are really authoritarian, and that the family structure has to be changed—maybe even destroyed—to stop imposing these obsolete values on the young.

The 'Jewish identity' project

Anyway, in the modern world, in the post-industrial society, we can no longer afford this authoritarian sense of power over nature which the patriarchal family transmits; today, the most important aspect of mental health is giving people an identity that will make them happy and erotically satisfied. 

This was the great original contribution of the Frankfurt School after World War II, when they worked with several Jewish organizations to create a new identity for American Jews. 

The Frankfurt School said that henceforth, Jewish identity would be defined, not by religious belief, not by the ideas through which Jews contributed to the rest of humanity, but by the Holocaust: Jews would be trained to see themselves primarily as victims of genocide. 

This has worked fantastically; even today, Jews who think that the B'nai B'rith are a bunch of crooks still give money to that organization because they have been trained to believe that they are profoundly different from everybody else, and that anti-Semites are ready to start a new Holocaust at any moment.

The Jewish identity project worked so well that we Frankfurt School Freudians asked to do the same thing for black people. In the 1960s, many black people were successfully re-trained to believe that what really defined their identity was how their African ancestors had been enslaved by white people. We did the same thing for women: The feminist movement used Frankfurt School theory and Freud to help millions of women realize that what really defined their identity was male chauvinism.

You see how successful we have been? Today, we give everybody the identity they need. We even teach it in the schools—it's called multiculturalism. Everybody gets an identity based on who raped whom: The Latin Americans understand that the most important thing is to get back at the Spanish colonialists; the Native Americans understand that the most important thing is to get back at the whites—everyone separated from everyone else. Fear? hatred? revenge? Sure! We give them that—but we also give them an identity, and they are happy.

But, we have spent too much time talking about what I think. We should be talking about what you think. But, I see that our time is about up. I think that I can fit you in next week; shall we say Tuesday? A short session is usually $75; you can pay as you leave.