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Happy people don't start wars. They don't need "purifying"
or "liberation," and their everyday lives are already full of hope
and meaning, so they don't need a war to save them from anything.
What sort of strange emotional disorder is it that war cleanses,
liberates and saves people from? And how can killing, raping and torturing
people be acts that purify and restore hope in life? Obviously war is a serious
psychopathological condition, a recurring human behavior pattern whose motives
and causes have yet to be examined on any but the most superficial levels
of analysis.
STANDARD THEORIES OF CAUSATION OF WAR
All standard theories of war deny that it is an emotional disorder at all.1
War, unlike individual violence, is usually seen solely as a response to events
outside the individual. Nations that start wars are not considered
emotionally disturbed--they are either considered as rational or they
are "evil," a religious category. Although homicide and suicide
are now studied as clinical disorders,2 war, unfortunately, is
not.
Most historians of war have given up in advance any attempt
to understand its causes, claiming "it is simply not the historian's
business to give explanations."3 Genocide, in particular,
appears outside the universe of research into motivations, since if one tries
to understand Holocaust perpetrators, one is said to "give up one's
right to blame them." At best, historians avoid the psychodynamics of
the perpetrators of wars entirely, saying, "Leave motivation to the psychologists."4
The standard explanations given for war by political scientists
and anthropologists equally avoid clinical understanding. Instead, they break
down war causes into three general categories:
1.Instincts and Other Tautologies: The most
popular cause of war is that it is a result of a human instinct for destruction.
From Clausewitz's "instinctive hostility"5 and Freud's
"instinct for hatred and aggression"6 down to biologists'
statements that war is "macho male sexual selection" that "accelerates
cultural evolution,"7 none of them notice that simply assuming
an instinct for war without any neurobiological, genetic evidence at all is
wholly tautological, saying no more than "the group's desire for war
is caused by the individual's desire for war." Since tribes and states
spend more of their time at peace than at war, one must also then posit an
"instinct for peace," which, through group cooperation, should favor
survival even more.
One can proliferate tautological instincts at will, but
only evidence counts. Unfortunately, all tests for the heritability for violence
have failed completely.8 The best study of instinct theories concludes:
"Human warfare, and indeed killing, are too rare to be the product of
a drive that needs to be satisfied. There is no drive or instinct that builds
up, gives rise to aggression, is satiated upon release, and then builds up
again...Furthermore, humans also have a genetic inheritance shared with fellow
primates for peacemaking, and that propensity must also be factored into the
equation."9
Tautological explanations proliferate in the field of war studies.
Historians are particularly prone to claiming that the reason a lot of people
do something is because they all are just following each other, a perfect
tautology. War is often said, for instance, to be caused by "ideology"
or by "the culture of militarism" of this or that state10
or by "a marked tendency for the military to prepare offensive military
plans."11
But saying war is caused by an arms race is about
as meaningful as saying homicide is caused by someone buying a gun. What one
expects when asking for the motivation for homicide is not how the perpetrator
got the weapon but the internal development of his psyche plus the events
leading up to the violent act. Besides, empirically most states start wars
without an arms buildup. Germany in 1913-1914, for instance, spent less on
her military than France and Russia,12 yet began WWI because she
felt insecure with a smaller army than other countries and felt paranoid about
being attacked.
Yet another common tautological reason for wars is that they
are "preventive." Bismarck put that reason in its place when he
was urged to start a preventive war by saying it was "as irrational as
committing suicide because one was afraid to die."13 America
even today continues to have a "first strike nuclear deterrence"
preventive war policy that is based on the causing of 600 million deaths as
"acceptable."14 Just as meaningless are all the theories
of war being caused by "lack of collective security," or "the
anarchic nature of the state system" or similar systems theories.
The lack of instruments to prevent wars is a symptom not a cause; presumably if
one could discover the underlying causes of war and reduce their power, states
would then set up international systems of settling differences and of providing
collective security. As Holsti puts it, "To argue that we have war because
of systems structures is analogous to an argument that we have automobile
accidents because we have highways."15 One must not reify
groups; only individuals have motives.
2. Greed as a Motive for War: War is usually claimed
to be purely plunder by social scientists: "War is defined as stealing
en masse what other men own."16 Yet we would never accept
greed as a real motive from a man who murders his family after taking out
life insurance on them, nor would we accept the excuse of greed from a man
who raped and murdered women and then took some of their jewelry. Even thieves
turn out to have deeper motives than greed. As James Gilligan, a prison psychiatrist
who has spent his life analyzing the lives of criminals, puts it, "Some
people think armed robbers commit their crimes in order to get money. But
when you sit down and talk with people who repeatedly commit such crimes,
what you hear is, 'I never got so much respect before in my life as I did
when I first pointed a gun at somebody.'"17
That anyone should imagine that hundreds of millions of people
can enthusiastically engage in mutual mass butchery over minor pieces of territory
is so patently ludicrous that it is a wonder anyone could ever have taken
it seriously; yet this what historians and political scientists still ask
us to believe. The entire "rational decisions" school of war theorists,
all of whom claim utility as the ultimate motive for war, run up against the
extensive empirical research done on hundreds of wars in recent years that
consistently shows that wars are destructive not rational, that wars cost
even winners more than they gain, that those who begin wars usually lose them
and that leaders who go to war historically never actually calculate before
they do so whether the gains will exceed the costs.18
Zinnes summarizes
the results of all this testing of war as a rational activity motivated by
materialistic gain as follows: "After thirty years of empirical research,
in which we have devoted an enormous amount of time to collecting, measuring
and summarizing observations about nation-state behavior, we cannot find any
patterns" that show any relationship at all between war frequency and
economics, population density or any other material condition of states.19
Otterbein even shows that cross-culturally there is "no influence on
war of economic or ecological factors;" even tribal warfare destroys
far more than it gains, and tribes rarely even pretend they are going to war
to gain territory.20 Rummel concurs, finding from his huge historical
database that a country's propensity to go to war is unrelated to its economic
development, its technological abilities or even its military capabilities.21
The costs of wars have repeatedly been demonstrated to be far
in excess of any gains that could be hoped for.22 In Vietnam, it
cost America hundreds of thousands of dollars to kill each enemy soldier;
the world even today spends trillions of dollars a year to fight wars and
maintain military forces, far in excess of anything that could be gained by
war. In fact, wars are so self-destructive that when a nation goes to war
the people must at some level realize that they are engaging on a truly suicidal
venture. Often, a careful examination of the actual historical decision process
reveals explicitly suicidal imagery.
As just one example from many, when Tojo
called together the Japanese leadership to decide whether or not to attack
Pearl Harbor, he went around the table and asked each minister to tell what
he thought would happen if they attacked the U.S. Each one forecast decisive
defeat. It was so obvious that an attack would be suicidal for Japan that
Tojo ended up saying, "There are times when we must have the courage
to do extraordinary things--like
jumping, with eyes closed, off the veranda of the Kiyomizu Temple."23
The Kiyomizu Temple was well known to all present as the place in Kyoto where
people committed suicide.
3. Stress Theories of War: Even those theories of war
that allow that it is wholly irrational end up blaming economic stress as
the cause of the irrationality. "Hard times make people feel threatened
and frustrated," so they go to war from the emotional stress of economic
downturns. Most leaders who try to promote peace cite the stress theory: "By
eliminating the economic dissatisfaction that breeds war we might have a chance
for lasting peace" (Sumner Hull) or "Freedom from fear is eternally
linked with freedom from want" (Franklin Roosevelt).24 Marxist
theorists in particular believe wars break out because of capitalist economic
downturns. In particular, most theorists believe WWII was caused by stresses
of the economic Depression.
The problem with these stress theories is that empirically
wars usually occur during economic upswings, not during depressions. Wars
not only occur far more frequently after prosperous periods, but are longer
and bigger after prosperity, "six to twenty times bigger as indicated
by battle fatalities."25 Macfie finds "the outbreak
of wars has avoided years of heaviest unemployment...excessive expansions
are required to germinate the seeds of war."26 In Europe
since 1815, no great-power wars have been started during a depression.27
WWI broke out after 40 years of growth of real incomes for workers (80 percent
higher for Germans),28 and even WWII broke out several years
after Germany had regained and surpassed pre-Depression levels of production--the
supposed cause, economic distress, having disappeared by 1939. Wars are
in fact prosperity-reducing rituals. They are responses to what we
have earlier termed growth panic--responses to progress and
prosperity, not to depletion. What is depleted when nations decide to go
to war is their emotional not their economic resources.
By examining only the sociogenic and not the psychogenic sources
of war, major theorists to date have been disappointed by the total lack of
results of their research. David Singer concludes that the study of war has
failed to "achieve any significant theoretical breakthrough" and
is saddened by the fact that no one has found any "compelling explanation"
for war.29 Bruce Bueno de Mesquita admits that "we know little
more about the general sources of international conflict today than was known
to Thucydides[perhaps] scientific explanations of such conflicts are not
possible."30 Such extreme pessimism is understandable. Clausewitz's
dicta that war is an extension of political policy has been fully discredited,
and all the usual reasons for wars --for territory, for revenge, to obtain
sacrificial prisoners, to obtain coups, as God's will, to stop dominoes
from falling--turn out to be only rationalizations.31 But
the failure to find valid motives for wars only applies to sociogenic theories,
ones that carefully avoid the psychological model of human violence that has
proved so fruitful in the study of the causes of homicide and suicide. We
will first turn to the results of the recent clinical studies of individual
violence before we propose our psychogenic theory of war.
THE CLINICAL STUDY OF HUMAN VIOLENCE
Because those societies which have the harshest child-rearing practices have
been shown to produce low-esteem adults who have the highest incidence of
murder, suicide and war,32 the study of human violence can most fruitfully
begin with examining the findings of clinicians who have closely interviewed
murderers and determined their motives.
Most of what we usually believe about interpersonal violence
is unconfirmed by statistics. Homicide is not regularly higher in big cities;
cross-cultural studies find there is "no significant associations between
community size and homicide or assault."33 Nor do men assault
their spouses more often than women do; studies in various countries show
"wives hit their husbands at least as often as husbands hit their wives,"34
although men do more damage with their assaults.35 When war is
counted as violence, men constitute at least 75 percent of the victims of
lethal physical violence in the United States, and die from two to five times
as often from personal violence as women do world-wide.36 Mothers are not
more often gentle while fathers mainly do the hitting of children; in fact,
American mothers today abuse their children nearly twice as much as fathers.37
Both statistically and clinically, researchers have found violent
adults have only one thing in common: poor childrearing.38 Studies
of homicidal youths, for instance, found 90 percent could be documented as
coming from severely emotional, physical or sexually abusive families.39
James Gilligan summarizes his decades of interviewing murderers:
In the course of my work with the most violent men in maximum-security
settings, not a day goes by that I do not hear reports--often confirmed
by independent sources--of how these men were victimized during childhood.
Physical violence, neglect, abandonment, rejection, sexual exploitation and
violation occurred on a scale so extreme, so bizarre, and so frequent that
one cannot fail to see that the men who occupy the extreme end of the continuum
of violent behavior in adulthood occupied an extreme end of the continuum
of violent child abuse earlier in life.As children, these men were shot,
axed, scalded, beaten, strangled, tortured, drugged, starved, suffocated,
set on fire, thrown out of windows, raped, or prostituted by mothers who were
their "pimps."
The cause of adult violence, says Gilligan, is a "collapse
of self-esteem" triggered by an incident in which the murderer imagines
himself or herself to be humiliated and shamed, resorting in what he calls
a "logic of shame, a form of magical thinking that says, 'If I
kill this person in this way, I will kill shame--I will be able to protect
myself from being exposed and vulnerable to and potentially overwhelmed by
the feeling of shame.'"41 Gilligan points out that shame is
at the root of mass violence too, pointing out that "Hitler came to power
on the campaign promise to undo 'the shame of Versailles'--and
clearly that promise, and the sensitivity to shame from which it derived its
power, struck a responsive chord in the German people as a whole."42
Though criminologists report that in homicides "the most common altercation
was of relatively trivial origin: insult, curse, jostling, etc.,"43
these shaming events turn childhood traumas into current rage, what Katz terms
"righteously enraged slaughter,"44 producing a "tremendous
rush [that is] almost orgasmic" for the murderer45 as they
avenge all their past hurts and humiliations. "All violence,"
says Gilligan, "is an attempt to achieve justice."46
As we shall shortly see, this includes mass violence as well, which also involves
imagining one achieves justice through violent, righteous vengeance for earlier
wrongs.
THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF VIOLENCE
People start wars when something changes in their brains, neurotransmitters,
hormones and cellular neuropeptide systems.47 This "something" is
the result of a developmental process that begins before birth and is turned
into a capacity for violence during childhood. Contrary to the views of Freud
and Piaget, children are actually quite empathic toward others from birth
if treated well. Neonates cry in response to the crying of another baby; "even
6-month-olds responded to distressed peers with actions such as leaning
toward, gesturing toward, touching or otherwise contacting the peer."48
Babies who are treated well can be quite generous with their love, gently
touching and patting other babies and even their mothers when they notice
they look sad.
But the majority of children throughout history--particularly
boys, who are physically and emotionally abused more than girls--feel
so helpless and afraid that they grow up in what has been called a "culture
of cruelty,"49 where they graduated from violent families to form gangs
and try to dominate and hurt each other in order to be perpetrators rather
than victims, thereby preparing themselves for cooperating in the violence
of war. In one study, for instance, Lewis and Pincus report "a significantly
greater proportion of very violent children demonstrated paranoid' symptomology
[and] believed that someone was going to hurt them constantly feeling the
need to carry weapons such as guns and metal pipes for their own protection"50
The more violent children, Lewis reports, "had been physically abused
by mothers, fathers, stepparents, other relatives and 'friends' of the
family. The degree of abuse to which they were subjected was often extraordinary.
One parent broke her son's legs with a broom; another broke his fingers and
his sister's arm; another chained and burned his son; and yet another threw
his son downstairs. Several children witnessed their fathers, stepfathers,
or mothers' boyfriends slash their mothers with knives. They saw their siblings
tortured with cigarette butts, chained to beds, and thrown into walls."51
Severe neglect and emotional abuse have been shown to be equivalent to and
often worse than physical abuse in producing lasting traumatic effects upon
children.52
The neurobiological affects of trauma upon children have been
extensively studied. As we have discussed earlier, serotonin levels are reduced
by trauma, and are found in reduced levels in adult antisocial personalities,
because the lower level of their inhibiting ability allows less control over
impulsivity and therefore higher rates of violence.53 External stress also
increases corticosterone production, decreasing the effectiveness of the hippocampal
system which evaluates the emotional meaning of incoming stimuli.54 Psychopathic
personalities have been found to be "actually slower to respond emotionally
than the rest of us. Even when they're just sitting around, antisocial individuals
are more low-key than the average person" because their noradrenergic
behavioral inhibition systems were crippled due to excessive early neglect,
traumas and over control by caretakers.55 Very early maternal neglect in particular
produces an undersized orbitofrontal cortex--the brain region behind
the eyes that allows one to reflect on one's emotions and to empathize with
the feelings of others--resulting in such a diminished self and such
a low capacity for empathy that the baby grows up literally unable to feel
guilt about hurting others.56 Thus swaddled babies abandoned to cribs in dark
rooms--as most children were in history--who totally miss the mother's
gaze and loving interaction in their early years are programmed for later
impulse disorders, psychopathic personalities and the need for killing in
war, simply because they never have developed what today we consider "normal-sized"
orbitofrontal cortexes through sustained eye contact and mutual play with
the mother. As Shore puts it:
The orbitofrontal cortex functionally mediates
the capacity to empathize with the feelings of others and to reflect on internal
emotional states, one's own and others'.The socioaffective stimulation
produced by the mother's face facilitates the experience-dependent growth. Children
deprived of early visual sensory stimulation frequently show impairments
in representational and affective functions that are responsible for severe
emotional problems.57
Lesions of the orbitofrontal cortex produce unregulated aggression
and dramatic mood state alterations in both humans and other animals because
"unmodulated rage represents a hyperactivation of the dopaminergic
system [and] impulsive acting out episodes [of] narcissistic rage."58
Children neglected and abused in early months "manifest pathological
self-importance, or narcissism, displayed as grandiosity, recklessness insecurity
and emotional shallowness [plus] the inability to feel ordinary human empathy
and affection for others and the perpetrating of repeated antisocial acts."59
Thus the slow evolution of childrearing results in a slow historical increase
in size in the average orbitofrontal cortex and more balanced serotonin, dopamine
and other hormonal levels, resulting in a steady reduction of grandiosity,
paranoia and uncontrolled rage and a diminishing historical rates of infanticide,
homicide, suicide and war deaths.
DISSOCIATION OF THE TWO BRAINS
One of the most important findings of Athens from his lifetime of interviewing
of violent criminals is that before they kill they consult "phantom communities"
who approve of their violent acts as revenges for past humiliations.60
These phantom communities are, of course, identical to the "social alters"
I have discussed previously, where dissociated violent selves and internalized
harmful caretakers are kept and engaged in dialogues that influence our deepest
emotions and approve of our most violent behavior. Athens determined that
violence didn't just follow trauma; it required a further "belligerency
stage of violentization" during which the brutalized subject resolves
in consultation with his inner phantoms, his alters, that he or she has had
enough, that violence is sometimes necessary if one isn't to remain a victim
one's whole life and that he or she will now use physical violence for those
who unduly provoke or humiliate him or her. These alters are often actual
inner voices telling the criminal what to do, so that
their decisions to act violently followed from a dialogue with
their phantom communities--the "voices" were their phantom
companions coming in exceptionally loud and clear. Lews corroborated Athens's
finding that the self incorporates phantom companions when she examined Arthur
Shawcross, the Rochester, New York, so-called serial killer who murdered prostitutes.
"Arthur Shawcross also experienced dissociative states," Lewis reports.
"At these times he would hear his mother in his head, berating him and
the women he was seeing. No one was good enough for Arty. They should die."61
These dissociated social alters, it turns out, are concentrated
in only one side of the brain, in one hemisphere, a different one in each
of us. Frederic Schiffer explains how his studies of dual-brain psychology
led him to ask his psychiatric patients to look through special glasses, one
pair of which had only the left side of the left eye uncovered (reaching only
the right hemisphere), the other only the right side of the right eye (reaching
only the left hemisphere), so that the patient would transmit information
only to one half of the brain at a time.62 He found that one hemisphere
looked at the world with extreme anxiety and the other saw things more maturely:
One patient, a Vietnam veteran, whom I had diagnosed with a
severe posttraumatic stress disorder, looked out of one side and developed
an expression of intense apprehension as he looked at a large plant in my
office. "It looks like the jungle," he said with some alarm. I asked
him to look out the other side, and he said, "No, it's a nice-looking
plant."
Schiffer finds he can help patients by having them analyze the
emotional attitudes of the traumatized hemisphere, since "the troubled
side is often like a traumatized person who hasn't been able to move beyond
the trauma, even when removed from it, because he continues to expect retraumatization."63
Schiffer and others have done extensive work on dual-brain psychology, including
putting one hemisphere to sleep with sodium amytal and finding the patient
well-adjusted and pleasant, while putting the other side to sleep made him
belligerent.64 He also showed that children who were admitted to
hospitals after abuse more often showed abnormalities in brain waves of their
left hemisphere and that PTSD patients felt more distress in their left hemispheres.
Schiffer concludes:
Traumatic memories are likely closely related to a lower brain
center called the amygdalain each hemisphere which is inhibited by a high-level
cortical center, the orbital frontal lobe in that same hemisphere. Both
the orbital frontal cortex and the hippocampus tend to try to calm the amygdala. We
have too little information to do more than speculate about why the left brain
may be more involved in the traumatic experiences of abused patients. Patients
who have strong reactions to the glasses apparently have two distinct parts
of their mind--one that sees the world as threatening and one that sees
it as much less so. Frequently I have asked a troubled part of a person
to stop attacking the other part of him, and suddenly the person feels remarkable
relief.65
These alters which still live in the past, seeing the world
as threatening and abusive, constitute, as Schiffer says, two separate minds,
one frightened and angry, the other denying the concerns of its partner. When
the more grown-up hemisphere moves into new freedom and new behavior, the
traumatized hemisphere reexperiences the fear and helplessness it stores from
early childhood and produces the "growth panic" I have found lies
at the root of war and other violence. This struggle between the hemispheres
is not always unconscious; more often it is simply dissociated, with one hemisphere
being unaware of the feelings with which the other hemisphere is filled. When
Rudolph Höss, SS Kommandant at Auschwitz, says, "I have never personally
mistreated a prisoner, or even killed one. I have also never tolerated mistreatment
on the part of my subordinates,"66 he is not being disingenuous.
The
nontraumatized half of his brain sincerely believes he and his subordinates
never mistreated a Jew as they were beating and torturing and murdering them
by the hundreds of thousands. His social alter in his traumatized hemisphere
was fully in control and cut off all meaning of what he was doing, which to
his non-traumatized hemisphere appeared as normal. He had two brains which
he was forced to keep separate; as he put it, "Many a night as I stood
out there on the railroad platforms, at the gas chambers, or at the burnings,
I was forced to think of my wife and children without connecting them to what
was taking place."67
This dissociation into traumatized alters occurs more in groups
because one feels more helpless and more depersonalized in large
groups,68 particularly in the largest groups, nations, and therefore
more fearful. When we think of acting in society or even of what it is like
to speak in front of a large group, one feels more open to attack, to humiliation,
and one can more easily switch into the traumatized hemisphere. Our first
line of defense when in a social trance is to cling to a "strong"
leader or a "strong" subgroup, merge our alters with them and join
in various group activities, often violent ones, to defend ourselves.
Thus
it makes sense that Freud, Le Bon and others define the inevitable characteristics
of a group as invincibility, grandiosity, irresponsibility, impulsiveness,
suggestibility and fearfulness,69 all qualities of the neglectful and traumatic
figures stored in our social alters. Without the laterality of the brain,
neither politics nor religion can exist, as they do not in other animals who
do not have divided selves. (In fact, the only other animals who do sometimes
go to war and murder each other senselessly are chimps and dolphins, both
of which are large-brained, lateralized creatures with the beginnings of the
ability for self-recognition.) It is only because humans have radically lateralized
hemispheres with larger impulse inhibitors--orbitalfrontal cortexes and
hippocampuses--that they are able to go to war with one hemisphere and
build Leagues of Nations with the other.
The lower the childrearing mode, the more divided are the hemispheres.
New Guinea natives can be warm and friendly while in their more mature hemisphere
and suddenly switch into their social alters in the other hemisphere and kill
you because they think you are bewitching them. The lower the childrearing
mode, the more traumatic the early experiences, and the more divided the hemispheres.
In tribal societies, switching into warrior alters is a simple process: "The
man or boy leaves his former self behind and becomes something entirely different,
perhaps even taking a new name the change usually accomplished through ritual
drumming, dancing, fasting and sexual abstinences a new, warriorlike
mode of being, denoted by special body paint, masks and headdresses."70
In modern societies, with a wide range of childrearing modes, "only 2
per cent of recruits kill easily, so the rest must be brought to do so by
careful military training" featuring new traumatic experiences.71
The split mind begins to form with early trauma, even perinatally.
Fredrick Leboyer, author of Birth Without Violence,72 once told me
that babies born with his non-traumatic techniques not only were far more
calm and happy after birth but "less one-handed," less brain-lateralized.
The two halves of the brain are even sometimes recognized in political imagery.
Hitler, for instance, often spoke of a strange "kinship" between
the Aryan and Jew (the two sides of his brain): "Has it not struck you
how the Jew is the exact opposite of the German in every single respect, and
yet is as closely akin to him as a blood brother? so closely allied and
yet so utterly dissimilar."73 This split mind is responsible for what
is termed "the banality of evil;" one side is banal (Winnicott's
"False Self"), the other side evil (the "Bad Boy" alter).
It accounts for how nations can joyfully choose violent leaders to take them
to suicidal wars, and yet one part of their mind can be wholly unaware of
what is happening. For example, the following is William L. Shirer's description
of sitting in the Berlin Sportpalast watching Hitler shouting and shrieking
that "he will go to war this Saturday. Curious audience, the fifteen
thousand party Bonzen packed into the hall. They applauded his words
with the usual enthusiasm.
Yet there was no war fever. The crowd was good-natured,
as if it didn't realize what his words meant."74 The dual brain also
explains how "ordinary Germans"--extremely traumatized by "ordinary
German childrearing" around 1900--could have, during the Holocaust,
"humiliated, beat and tortured defenseless people and then shot them
in the back of the neck without the slightest hesitation [and then dissociate
and] pose before their living or dead victims, laughing into the camera {and]
write home that these snapshots and extermination anecdotes would someday
be 'extremely interesting to our children.'"75
EARLY MOTHER-CHILD INTERACTIONS AS THE SOURCE OF HUMAN VIOLENCE
The primary sources of violent political behaviors are the concrete mother-child
interactions of one generation earlier--how mainly the mother responded
to, cared for and conveyed her feelings and fears to her fetus, infant and
young child. We have already described in Chapter 3 how going to war is preceded
by flashbacks to intrauterine, perinatal traumas and group-fantasies of the
need for national rebirth. Here we will begin to examine the sources of human
violence in early mother-child interactions.
Videotape recordings of children's relationships with their
mothers in the preverbal period "have been shown to remain essentially
the same over time and to be duplicated with other 'substitute' mother
figures. A child who has a warm, affectionate relationship with the mother
will relate to others in a warm, affectionate manner, whereas a child with
a guarded, distant relationship will relate to others in a guarded, distant
manner."76 This maternal relationship is eventually restaged in international
relations in a concrete manner, being acted out in "the sandbox of history"
with nations playing the emotional roles of the mothers and children from
early life.
Mothers in history who because of their own life experiences
see their children as harmful and aggressive have historically mainly treated
them in ways that have made them grow up as violent adults, by routinely inflicting
upon them murder, abandonment, neglect, binding, enemas, domination, beatings,
sexual assaults and emotional abuses77 that are later restaged in wars and
political behavior. Necessity was not the main source of these cruelties toward
children--wealthy parents were historically even more overtly rejecting,
giving their children to others at birth for years for what they expected
would be abusive caretaking. Fathers have until recently usually only worsened
this early traumatic upbringing, since historically the father has almost
always been mostly absent from the child's early life --most fathers
in history spending their days in the fields or factories and their nights
in the taverns (see Chapter 7). When home, fathers have lent little support
to mothers in caretaking and emotional nurturance, requiring that his wife
"mother" him rather than his children.
Growing up, Mahler found, is built upon basic maternal care,
since "differentiation is from the mother, not from the father."78
Therefore, women not men have until recently for better or worse been the
main sources of care, neglect and abuse throughout history. As St. Augustine
put it, "Give me other mothers and I will give you another world."
His words have been confirmed by recent clinical studies. What Erikson said
about girls has been found to be true of all children: "By the time a
girl developmentally turns to the father, she has normally learned the nature
of an object relationship once and for all from her mother."79 In short,
mothers are major actors in childhood history--they are perpetrators80
and not just victims, as the theory of patriarchy holds.
Most of the extremely abusive historical childrearing practices
which are detailed in the next three chapters of this book are routine reactions
to the child's daily needs and growth process, wherein immature mothers expect
their children to give them the love they missed as a child and therefore
experience the child's independence as rejection. As one battering mother
said, "I have never felt really loved all my life. When the baby was
born, I thought he would love me, but when he cried all the time, it meant
he didn't love me, so I hit him."81 Surveys show mothers in most cultures
report initial feelings of "indifference" toward their newborn.82
In fact, childbirth often triggers post-partum depression and feelings of
emptiness83 because it means the mother must give up her own hopes to receive
the care she missed from her own mother.84 The moment the infant needs something
or turns away from her to explore the world, it triggers her own memories
of maternal rejection. When the infant cries, the immature mother hears her
mother, her father, her siblings and her spouse screaming at her. She then
"accuses the infant of being unaffectionate, unrewarding and selfish as
not interested in me."85 All growth and individuation by the child is
therefore experienced as rejection. This is why social progress, prosperity
and new political freedoms are so anxiety-producing. "When the mother
cannot tolerate the child's being a separate person with her own personality
and needs, and demands instead that the child mirror her, separation becomes
heavily tinged with basic terror for the child."86 Children first experience
"growth panic" anxieties because their mother rejects, humiliates
or punishes them for their needs and for their individuation. As adults, they
then turn to paranoid and violent political behavior during periods of growth
and individuation because society threatens to reproduce this intolerable
early maternal rejection, shame or punishment. Because these maternal interactions
are so early, they are primarily nonverbal, which means that politics has
a dominantly nonverbal quality that can only be studied by research into illustrations
rather than words--group-fantasies shown in cartoons, magazine covers
and TV images. This is why I often watch the nightly news on TV with the sound
off.87
It is likely that the centrality of mothers in bringing up
children is even responsible for the fact that men are more violent than women
and universally fight wars. Testosterone is not the cause, as is usually imagined,
since (1) testosterone levels are actually lower in the most aggressive
boys,88 and (2) "testosterone is present in boys and girls in roughly
the same amounts before the age of ten" and (3) although "all normal
boys experience a huge surge of testosterone in early adolescence, [they]
do not all display increased aggression[so] testosterone does not cause
aggression."89 Evidence is beginning to accumulate that it is differential
treatment of boys, especially by mothers, that is responsible for their higher
rates of violence in later life. Boys in every culture are physically punished
more often and with greater severity than girls;90 boys are more often used
sexually by their mothers in their early years than girls;91 boys are given
less nurturance, are ignored more often, are spoken to less and are coached
to be more violent than girls;92 boys are subject to over control by humiliation
and shame more often than girls;93 and boys are more harshly disciplined for
the same actions by parents and teachers.94 Mothers also see their boys as
"just like his dad," and take revenge against them for their husband's
actions--after all, Medea killed her sons, not her daughters, to hurt
Jason for his infidelity.95 Thus although boys begin life with no more aggression
than girls, they grow up to be more violent simply because they are less trusted
and more feared by their earliest caretakers.
Although the battlegrounds may change, wars--whether between
mother and child or between nations--are inevitably about the basic feelings
of infancy: trust, security, approval, domination, envy, rage, threats, shame
and independence.96 Since having a child revives in mothers long-dormant wishes
for the closeness that they missed from their own mothers, mothers often envy
the child each of the needs they are asked to satisfy, thinking, "I never
got that; why should my child?" Even today psychologists find many mothers
reject their infants in many ways because they "fear bodily damage due
to the child's aggressiveness."97 But before the nineteenth century mothers
throughout history were so immature that they thought their infants were so
full of violence that they would "scratch their eyes out, tear their
ears off, or break their legs" if they didn't tie them up in endless
bandages, "so as to resemble billets of wood so the flesh was compressed
almost to gangrene."98 Therefore, through most of history, early mother-child
interactions which most "good-enough mothers" today are capable
of--centering around mutual gazing, babbling and smiling99 --were
all missing, because mothers tightly bound their babies up at birth and stuck
them in another room, severely neglected for their first year of their lives.100
International affairs has not throughout history been much negotiated in a
secure and peaceful manner because infantile life was not very secure nor
peaceful.
Sociologists and historians have avoided looking for the family
sources of wars and social violence. Whenever a group produces murderers,
the mother-child relationship must be abusive and neglectful. Yet this elementary
truth has not even begun to be considered in historical research; just stating
that poor mothering lies behind wars seems blasphemous. Instead, the grossest
sort of idealizations of historical mothering proliferate. When, for instance,
studies of the sources of the extreme violence of the Mafia turn to depictions
of Sicilian mother-child relations they inevitably come to resemble the happy,
loving families out of "The Godfather." Yet it is only when an Italian
psychoanalyst, Silvia di Lorenzo, writes a book on La Grande Madre Mafia
that her descriptions of typical Sicilian mother-child interactions begin
to give us an accurate picture of the maternal origins of Mafia violence:
If a boy of theirs commits a slight fault, they do not resort
to simple blows, but they pursue him on a public street and bite him on the
face, the ears, and the arms until they draw blood. In those moments even
a beautiful woman is transformed in physiognomy, she becomes purplish-red,
with blood-shot eyes, with gnashing teeth, and trembling convulsions, and
only the hastening of others, who with difficulty tear away the victim, put
an end to such savage scenes.101
Thus the conditions of early mothering have profound affects
on adult human violence. It is not surprising that Ember and Ember found in
their cross-cultural studies that where the mother sleeps closer to the baby
than to the father and uses the baby as a substitute spouse--usually
sexually--there is more homicide and war.102 Every childrearing practice
in history is restaged in adult political behavior. Children whose mothers
swaddled them and were "not there" emotionally could not as adults
maintain object consistency and grew up paranoid, imagining "enemies"
everywhere. Children whose mothers regularly did not feed them in a timely
fashion experienced the world as malevolently withholding. Children whose
mothers rejected them with depressive silence experienced peaceful international
periods as threatening. Children whose mothers dominated them and who were
engulfing often choose totalitarian political leaders. Children whose mothers
were so needy they describe their children as "born selfish and demanding"
and or who saw them as "angry since birth" experienced other nations
as demanding too much or as angry "bad babies." Children whose mothers
used them as antidepressants chose manic, often violent leaders to counter
their own depression. And mothers who ridiculed and humiliated their children
whenever their activities didn't coincide with her own were experienced in
the international sphere as poison containers of intolerable ridicule and
shame--as in "the shame of Versailles." It is not surprising,
then, that violent, authoritarian political behavior has been statistically
correlated with rejecting, punitive parenting.103
As Godwin puts it, society
is an "exopsychic structure" where adults restage the "parental
purification system" of childhood by "cleansing bad, frustrating
and abusive aspects of the parent-child relationship" in the political
arena.104 In Chapter 3 I have dealt extensively with the evidence showing
that war and social violence are preceded by rebirth group-fantasies of cleansing
and purification of "sins." It is only the elimination of the most
abusive and neglectful historical parenting practices in some nations that
have allowed them to set up trusting, non-violent rules of political interactions
and have permitted them to achieve more or less cooperative democratic societies
and to avoid fighting wars with other democracies. Obviously international
peace will not prevail until most parents around the world trust rather than
fear their children.
THE PSYCHOGENIC THEORY OF WAR
War, then, is the act of restaging early traumas for the purpose of maternal
revenge and self purification. Wars are clinical emotional disorders, periodic
shared psychotic episodes of delusional organized butchery intended--like
homicide--to turn a severe "collapse of self esteem" into "a
rage to achieve justice." Wars are both homicidal and suicidal--every
German in 1939 who cheered Hitler on as he promised to start an unwinnable
world war against overwhelming opposing nations knew deep down they were committing
suicide.
Like all homicides and suicides, wars are reactions to our failed
search for love, magical gestures designed to ensure love through projection
into enemies, by "knocking the Terrifying Mommy off her pedestal"
and by "killing the Bad Boy self." As Kernberg puts its, violence
occurs only when "the world seems to be split between those who side
with the traumatizing object and those who support the patient's wishes for
a revengeful campaign against the traumatizing object."105 Thus the early
crisis in maternal love, which had been internalized during childhood in Terrifying
Mommy and Bad Boy alters, is resolved by acting out on the historical stage
the revenge against the Terrifying Mommy and by the wiping out of the Bad
Boy self.
1. War as Righteous Rape--Revenge Against the Terrifying
Mommy: Enemy nations in wars are often pictured as women (see Chapter
3), witches, even placental beasts. When they are seen as women, enemies are
there to be pushed around, not eliminated, since even when raging against
a bad mommy the hurt child knows he needs her desperately. This is why Hitler
kept hoping to manipulate Mother England into being friendly. And it is why
he didn't destroy Paris when he marched into La Belle France. Nations to the
west of Germany were mainly seen as mommies to be revenged against, to be
"knocked off their pedestals" but not to be eliminated. "Francewas
not marked for subjugation but rather for a secondary role in the Nazi scheme
[and] Hitler was always keen on reaching some settlement with the British [therefore]
the German army fighting in the west was given strict orders to conduct itself
according to the rules of war."106 The same group-fantasy of war as
righteous rape was voiced by Germans in 1914, when they imagined that
"only if we are able to hurt England badly will she really leave us unmolested,
perhaps even become a 'friend.'"107
2. War as Purification--Killing Off the Bad Boy Self:
Enemy nations are also imagined as Bad Boys, disobedient, disgusting, violent,
sexual--everything one was accused of as a child by one's caretakers.
If the Bad Boy self can be killed off entirely, "finally mommy will love
me." This is why Hitler vowed to wipe out the "bad" nations
to the east and settle "good Germans" in their place. Poles, Russians,
Jews, every nation east of Germany were projected with Bad Boy imagery: "Slavs
were considered subhumans, to be either murderer starved to death."108
Moscow, Hitler promised, would be leveled and turned into a reservoir, and
Jews would be totally eliminated. In addition, WWII would be a suicidal mission
for millions of Germans, thus killing off the "Bad Boy" part of
themselves, the most vital, growing, independent self. Then the "good
German" self that remained would be purified and would finally
be loved by mommy, the Motherland.
It is not surprising that in early societies bloodthirsty War
Goddesses ruled over battlefields, since wars are all about resolving the
crisis between Terrifying Mommies and Bad Boys. Leaders are delegated the
task of being sacrificial priests. Even simple societies go to war to win
the love of mommy; in the Yanomamo war ritual myth, the culture hero Child
of Water goes to war and slays enemies to "end chaos" and "do
what his mother desires and thereby win her approval."109 The role of
the father in war is quite different: it is to provide the violence needed
to rape and revenge the Terrifying Mommy and to punish and wipe out the Bad
Baby.
Hitler carried a dog whip everywhere he went, the same whip he and millions
of German children were beaten with by their fathers.110 Oddly enough, nations
don't go to war as revenge against bad fathers--the drama is earlier
than that. Even though children are terribly frightened by their father's
violence in the family, the goal in starting wars isn't finally to take revenge
against the father, but to "kill the shame," to purify the self
and to force mother to love you--to organize men into Fatherlands so
they can conquer Motherlands.
Nations switch into their dissociated traumatized hemispheres
after periods of peace and prosperity because the individuation challenges
of social progress means separating from mommy, a dangerous act in adulthood
if it was not allowed by the mother in childhood. Ralph Waldo Emerson, among
others, noticed the growth panic that went along with prosperity and progress
when he wondered in his journal why Americans felt such a "strange melancholy
in the midst of abundance."111 Increases in freedom and prosperity for
people who have been abused as children lead first to fears of separation
and then to a clinging to the early abusive mommy, even to merging with her.
But to merge with a mommy means losing one's masculinity--it means becoming
a woman--therefore long periods of peace mean castration.
Thus Kant's
dicta that wars are necessary because "prolonged peace favors effeminacy"
parallels Machiavelli's claim that war exists to purge nations of effeminato,
the "daily accretion of poisonous matter [caused by women's] conspiracy
to "poison' manhood" and John Adams' query to Jefferson, "Will
you tell me how to prevent luxury from producing effeminacy, intoxication,
extravagance, vice and folly?"112 In fact, in groups where they do not
have effective war rituals available when people experience severe ego disintegration,
people often go amok--a dissociative state where people suddenly
kill people in wild, uncontrolled sprees, as often occurs in the otherwise
placid Balinese.113 Even chimpanzees "go amok" when given
food supplies by humans and "engage in episodes of apparently unprovoked
explosive behavior as though they had entered an ASC [Alternate State
of Consciousness]to discharge an inner state of tension similar to human
dissociative behaviours"114 Prosperity appears to be anxiety-producing
even in non-human primates, switching them into their more violent, dissociated
hemispheres. Chimpanzees who are not artificially fed by anthropologists live
in "peaceful, open groups without signs of any dominance hierarchy, enforced
territoriality or single leaders."115
Prosperity leads to starting wars most often in societies where
the economic advances of a minority, a more advanced psychoclass, outrun the
childrearing evolution of the majority, producing in the less advanced psychoclasses
extreme anxieties about changes that require individuation. Thus the most
destructive wars have occurred in the twentieth century when there is a rapid
"leap into modernity" by nations whose average childrearing lagged
badly behind their social and economic progress--so that they tried to
run modern capitalist systems with crippled human capital--while the
most peaceful periods (for instance, Europe's "century of peace"
from 1815 to 1914)116 occurred while the childrearing of most Western European
nations was most rapidly evolving and could keep up with the individuation
challenges of modernity.117
WAR AND GROUP-FANTASY CYCLES
In Chapter 4 evidence was presented that wars most often occur after leaders
have been in office for some time and are seen as weakening in their ability
to be in control of national group-fantasies. Thus, the longer the leader
is in office, the more likely he will be to take the nation to war. This is
confirmed in the case of the United States, where no president has gone to
war during his first year, his "strong" phase; where smaller wars
sometimes begin in the second and third year of office, as the president weakens;
and where its three most destructive wars--the Civil War and the two
World Wars, with their hundreds of thousands of American battle fatalities--occurred
at the end of 45, 48 and 103 months of the terms of Buchanan, Wilson and FDR,
after their group-fantasy strength had collapsed.
Much empirical work has been done on the historical study of
war cycles.118 A cycle of about 25 years in the level of violence for most
nations in recent centuries has been determined,119 as though each new generation
must be thrown into the mouth of Moloch as a purification sacrifice. There
has also been considerable work done on economic cycles and their close relationship
to war cycles,120 with the finding that "wars between great powers occur
during periods of economic expansion, while stagnation hinders their outbreak
[so that] after 1815 no wars have been started during a depression."121
Furthermore, "fatalities follow the pattern of [economic] upswings and
downswings perfectly the average annual fatality rate was21 times higher
on upswings than downswings."122 Thus, although wars have been confirmed
to be the results of prosperity, it is because no psychological analysis has
ever been attempted that scholars have had to admit, "We do not understand
the causal dynamics of the long wave encompassing political and economic
elements."123 In the remainder of this chapter we will present a psychogenic
theory of group-fantasy cycles that will explain this periodic alternation
between economic depressions and wars.
In the chart below, four American group-fantasy cycles have
been drawn for the past two centuries of American history, each consisting
of four phases: (1) Innovative, (2) Depressed, (3) Manic and (4) War. At the
bottom of the chart are listed the major depressions and wars, which coincide
with the second and fourth phases of group-fantasy. In the middle of the chart
is drawn Klingberg's extrovert-introvert Foreign Policy Mood Curve, which
he compiled by counting such foreign policy indices
as the proportion of presidential speeches given over to positive
action needed in world affairs.124 As can be seen, there is a close correlation
between Klingberg's mood index stages and my independently-derived group-fantasy
phases.
An outline of the four group-fantasy phases is shown below.
 American Group-Fantasy Cycles
Empirical verification follows on each point in the outline, stressing American
and other national group-fantasies and its resulting political and economic
behavior. Then the four phases are followed in detail at the end of the chapter
for German childrearing around 1900 and its restaging in the four phases of
group-fantasy from the Weimar Republic to World War II and the Holocaust.
Group-Fantasy Phases
1. Innovative Phase:
A new psychoclass comes of age after the previous war, a minority
of the cohort born two to three decades earlier and raised with more evolved
childrearing modes. This new psychoclass introduces new inventions, new social
and economic arrangements and new freedoms for women and minorities, producing
an "Era of Good Feelings," a "Gilded Age" that for a few
years is tolerated even by the earlier psychoclasses. By the end of the Innovative
Phase, however, the challenges produced by progress and individuation begin
to make everything seem to be "getting out of control" as wishes
surface into consciousness that threaten to revive early maternal rejection
and punishment.
In addition, as women, children and minorities get new freedoms,
older psychoclasses find they cannot be used as much as they previously had
been as poison containers who can be punished for one's sins. Purity Crusades
begin, anti-modernity movements demanding that new sexual and other freedoms
be ended to reduce the anxieties of the nation's growth panic and "turn
back the clock" to more controlled times and social arrangements.
2. Depressed Phase:
The older psychoclasses become depressed because of their new
individuation challenges, expecting punishment for them, and produce an economic
depression by withdrawing money from circulation, by raising interest rates,
by reducing consumption, by limiting trade and by making all the other surplus-reducing
motivated "mistakes" in fiscal policies that are so familiar in
economic history. Economic depressions are motivated internal sacrifices which
often kill more people than wars do.125 Cartoons prior to and during depressions
often show sinful, greedy people being sacrificed on altars,126 and the depressed
nation becomes paralyzed politically, unable to take action to reverse the
economic downturn. Just as depressed individuals experience little conscious
anger--feeling they "deserve to be punished"--so too nations
in depressions are characterized by "introverted" foreign policy
moods, start fewer military expeditions and are less concerned with foreign
affairs. The feeling during depressions is "I should be killed"
for my wishes rather than "I want to kill others." Depressions are
economic anorexias, where people starve themselves to avoid being eaten up
by the Dragon Mother, the maternal vulture of infancy. The nation begins to
look for a Phallic Leader with whom they can merge and regain their failed
potency and who can protect them against their growing delusional fears of
a persecutory mommy.
3. Manic Phase:
As eventual economic recovery threatens fresh anxiety, manic
economic, social and military activity builds up as a defense against depressive
anxieties, as the nation engages in speculative investment, credit explosions,
foreign belligerence, military buildups and other grandiose, hypergenital
attempts to demonstrate omnipotent control of symbolic love supplies. Apocalyptic
group-fantasies of a world full of evil and a God who is furious and about
to end it all proliferate, producing severe growth panics such as the American
"Great Awakenings" that occurred in manic periods prior to wars.
Continued prosperity leads to a search for poison containers, both internal
(minorities, criminals, children) and external (foreign enemies), who can
be punished in national Purity Crusades as Bad Boys who embody the nation's
sinful greed. Maternal engulfment fears increase as grandiose defenses and
memories of being a helpless baby return, so people imagine their nations
as "pitiful, helpless giants," with gigantic needs, but helpless
to satisfy them. As paranoid delusional enemies seem to surround the nation,
sacrificial rebirth group-fantasies appear, complete with devouring placental
sea monsters, picturing violence as the only antidote to growing fears of
disintegration of self.127
4. War Phase:
When another nation is found that agrees to provide the humiliation
episode needed as a casus belli, a tremendous relief is felt of "Aha!
I knew the enemy was real and not just in my head." The group-psychotic
insight that diabolical enemies are strangling and poisoning one's nation
forces a final complete switch into the social trance wherein group-fantasy
becomes reality, goals disappear and violent action becomes irresistible as
early traumas are restaged.128 The neurotransmitters, hormones and neuropeptides
of the nation change dramatically, in the same manner as the neurochemistry
of individuals changes as they move toward violence.129 War provides the opportunity
for both righteous rape and purification. The righteous rape can be
described as both maternal (Mother England) and homosexual (the soldiers)--in
fact, war is overwhelmingly a homosexual perversion, since men leave their
female partners and go abroad and stick things into other men's bodies. The
purification accomplishes the sacrifice of the Bad Boy self, both through
the suicidal part of war, killing the nation's own youth as sacrifice of soldiers,
and the homicidal part, killing the enemy, each representing Bad Boy selves
that must be wiped out so the mommy-nation can finally love the "real"
self.
Thus wars and depressions can be seen as classically occurring
in cycles similar to individual manic-depressive cycles of violence, only
stretched out into periods of approximately one full generation in length.
Each of the first three American group-fantasy cycles in the chart above is
approximately 50 years long and ends with two wars, first usually a "nice
little war" as a sort of trial balloon and then a full-fledged war that
produces the rebirth of national virility. This pattern was partially broken
after WWII--when improving childrearing reduced the size of both economic
downturns and wars--and since when there has been a shorter cycle of
group-fantasies, wars and recessions (see discussion at the end of this chapter).
Although most Western nations in the past three centuries have had the same
"four wars a century" pattern as the United States, whether they
also have followed the same four-stage group-fantasy cycle has yet to be investigated.130
THE INNOVATIVE PHASE: PROGRESS AND PURITY CRUSADES
The central force for change in economic life is the result of earlier changes
in childrearing among a minority of the society. The usual causal chain of
modernization theory--that more prosperity means more money for improving
childrearing--is simply backward, both because empirically childrearing
change always precedes economic change131 and because the richest families
traditionally have not given more to their children, they have routinely sent
them out at birth to abusive caretakers. Those children whose parents actually
bring them up themselves and try to surpass traditional childcare practices
grow up as a new, innovative psychoclass that tries the new social and economic
ventures which soon appear dangerous to the earlier psychoclasses.
The innovative phases in the chart of American group-fantasies
above are familiar to every student of American history as periods of unparalleled
growth and technological invention.
They contain the early growth of steamboats,
railroads and telegraphs; the two phases of the nineteenth-century Industrial
Revolution with its rapid industrialization and immigration; the Second Industrial
Revolution after World War I; and even the computer revolution produced by
the Spock generation.132 These were times when not only was national income
soaring and work hours dropping, but "there was a tacit or explicit consensus
between employers and labour organizations to keep labour demands within limits
that did not eat into the profits, and the future prospects of profits high
enough to justify the huge investments without which the spectacular growth
of Golden Age labour productivity could not have taken place."133 Thus
investment in children paid off in investment in productivity.
During these innovative phases, governments manage to work out
various formal and informal rules to settle international disagreements. Since
peace is not just an absence of war and involves establishing intergovernmental
organizations and conferences to resolve disputes, nations that are not in
an emotional state of collapsed self-esteem have regularly found ways even
without an overarching international government to break stalemates and settle
their disagreements without violence.134 Whether by bilateral agreement or
through the restraints of peace conferences, innovative psychoclasses have
demonstrated that there are many ways--such as buffer states, compensation
and concerts of power--whereby issues can be resolved outside of power
politics that lead to wars.
Each of these innovative phases also were periods of women's
rights, the best-known of which in America were the early nineteenth-century
groups pressing for women's education, jobs, new divorce laws and property
rights; the post-Civil War Woman's Sufferage Movement; the post-WWI women's
rights movement; and the post-Vietnam War feminist movement. The earlier psychoclasses--both
men and women--reacted to these freedoms for "the new women"
with extreme horror.135 Just as the economic advances of early modern Europe
resulted in a million women killed as witches, the progress of the modern
innovative periods engendered fears of the femme fatale phallic females136
--a restaging of the early Terrifying Mothers--who were "strongly
passionate and endowed with strong animal natures"137 --who produced
"sexual anarchy" where "men became women [and] women became
men."138 Ever since Cato wailed in 195 B.C., after a few Roman women
sought to repeal a law that forbade them from wearing multicolored dresses,
that "women have become so powerful that our independence has been lost
in our own homes and is now being trampled and stamped underfoot in public,"139
innovative periods in history have produced anti-women Purity Crusades designed
to reverse social progress and return to more familiar repressive times.140
Purity Crusades have, of course, centered on sexual morality,
whether they combated Noyes' "free love" debates before the Civil
War or Margaret Sanger's birth control ideas in the 1920s.141 They include
"moral reform" crusades against prostitution, against pornography,
against alcohol--against everything that represented unfulfilled wishes,
including even bicycle seats, that "might cause women's moral downfall."142
Even the reduction of the work week--the Saturday Half-Holiday Act of
1887-- was opposed as likely to cause the masses to turn to "dancing,
carousing, low behavior, rioting, shooting, and murder."143 Children's
rights were opposed because any relaxation of punitive childrearing would
inevitably lead to "running wild, blatant disobedience masturbation
and insanity"144 and since children are "made monsters in life by
indulgence in infancy" if given the slightest independence would
go "directly to the grog shop, the gambling house or the brothel."145
Cars for women were opposed because they could be turned into "houses
of prostitution on wheels."146 And whenever the Purity Crusade began,
it usually continued right into the next war, which borrowed its language
and moral fervor, so that it seemed the war itself was a purification of the
nation. Thus purity reformers of the 1850s, reacting to the feminism of the
time, began a crusade against sex between Southern white men and black women,
objecting to slavery not so much on behalf of the rights of the slaves but
in order "to protect the sexual purity of America." In the words
of purity crusaders, "The Southern states are one Great
Sodom a vast
brothel" which only a war between the North and the South could clean
up.147 Thus, too, World War I was said to have been needed to be fought "to
save men from moral decay [from homosexuality]"148 and the Vietnam War
was accompanied by a fantasy that, according to Time's special issue on "SEX
IN THE U.S.," found a dangerous "demise of Puritanism" in America
due to "Freudian psychology" that had made "America one big
Orgone Box [of] pornography."149 Eventually, all Purity Crusades move
abroad and punish our desires in living enemies.
THE DEPRESSED PHASE: THE DRAGON MOTHER AND THE PHALLIC LEADER
The task of controlling growth panic by depressions is given during the modern
period mainly to central banks, which first flood the nation with low interest
liquidity to encourage overinvestment, excess borrowing, inflation and stock
market bubbles, and then, when the expansion becomes too sinful for the national
psyche, reverse the monetary expansion by increasing interest rates and reducing
liquidity ("Taking away the punch bowl when the party gets going.")150
Depressions come because really people become depressed, reducing their
spending and investment, and feel hopeless. Depressions are, as Keynes
said, "a crises of sentiment a collapse of confidence."151 The
task of government, according to Keynes, was to recognize that demand (desire)
is subject to irrational contractions which had to be offset through fiscal
and monetary manipulations--rather like a psychiatrist prescribing medications
to change serotonin levels. Yet neither Keynes nor any other economist asked
why people periodically become depressed and reduce their activities.
In fact, nations enter into depressions because they feel persecuted
for their prosperity and individuation by what Jungians have termed the "Dragon
Mother"--the needy, "devouring mother of infancy who cannot
let her children go because she needs them for her own psychic survival."152
Weston has found anorexics in particular are dominated by fantasies of persecution
by the Dragon Mother, who "gives her child the impossible task of filling
her ‘limitless void''' so the child fears being "eaten alive."153
To prevent this, when these children grow up and try to individuate, they
refuse to eat so they won't have any flesh on them for the Dragon Mother
to devour. Economic depressions evidence similar group-fantasies of devouring
mommies; they are "economic anorexias" where nations inflict economic
wounds upon themselves to limit consumption, become "all bones"
and not tempt the devouring Dragon Mother. Banks, in particular, are often
pictured as greedy dragons. For instance, President Jackson imagined the Bank
of the United States was what he called the "Mother Bank" that by
issuing paper money was a "bad mother dominating her children" who
had to be stopped before the nation was eaten up, and so conducted a "kill
the Great Monster" campaign that would "strangle the many-headed
hydra" and kill it.154 Needless to say, his success in "crushing
the Mother Bank dragon" led to an economic downturn.
That depressions purposefully punish families is rarely acknowledged.
In the depression beginning in 1873, for instance, produced by "a decade
of speculative excess and overinvestment,"155 there was "20 percent
unemployed, 40 percent worked for only six or seven months a year, and only
20 percent worked regularly."156 Depressions have killed hundreds of
thousands of women and children, a sacrifice of Bad Children greater than
many wars. Yet depressions are still seen as "beneficial purges"
of the economic bloodstream; as the Treasury Secretary said in 1929 as the
Federal Reserve helped push the world into depression, "It will purge
the rottenness out of the system."157 Depressions are indeed blood purges,
only sacrificial, similar to the practice of the Aztecs sacrificing humans
and regularly drawing blood from their thighs and genitals to "feed"
the goddess to prevent her from becoming angry with them for their sinful
prosperity.158 Thus William K. Joseph's study of cartoons and ads during 1929
found they were "full of strong, wealthy women, but the men were pictured
as puny, neurotic, and insignificant."159
That depressions--like anorexia and like all blood sacrifices--are
self-inflicted wounds and not just the results of "mysteriously wrongheaded
monetary policies"160 is still not admitted by most economists. The end
of prosperity comes "with a sense of relief."161 Even the "mistakes"
by authorities that lead to a downturn are unconsciously motivated: for instance,
the "mistake" of the Federal Reserve in 1925 in lowering interest
rates and igniting the stock market bubble, followed by the "mistake"
of their overly restrictive monetary policy after 1929 that reduced the stock
of money by a third and turned the downturn into a severe depression, plus
the "mistaken" higher tariffs of the Hoover administration and the
"mistaken" budget-balancing of the Roosevelt administration,162
all were determined by the nation's sacrificial group-fantasy of a devouring
Dragon Mother who needed to be placated.
One of the best defenses against fears of maternal engulfment
is merging with a Phallic Leader to restore potency. Anzieu found small groups
regularly searched for a narcissistic, aggressive leader when they felt that
"everything is crumbling" in the group.163 Parin found the Anyi
tribe he studied, where the mothering was neglectful and incestuous, produced
men who feared being "poisoned, devoured and castrated by women"
and who chose exceptionally violent leaders because they felt that "the
preoedipal mother is more dangerous than the oedipal father," and merging
with a "strong and severe father" saved them from feeling castrated.164
And Blum found that when nations choose "hypnotic-like surrender to the
leader," they overcome "infantile helplessness and weakness, childhood
traumata, child abuse and neglect and feelings of being unloved [through]
an escalation to war [whereby] the sacrifice of the sons in battle by their
oedipal fathers and a ‘macho' defense against femininity are powerful
dynamics."165
The initial task of the Phallic Leader is to "make real"
the growing paranoia of the nation:
It is as if a therapist said to the paranoid-schizoid patient,
"You really are being persecuted. Let me help you by naming your persecutors you
and your true friends can fight the persecutors and praise each other's righteousness,
which will help you realize that the source of aggression and evil is out
there, in the real world. And you thought it was all in your head!"166
The most effective Phallic Leaders have been found to be "narcissistic
personalities who are characterized by intense self-involvement [whose] interpersonal
relations are frequently marked by a lack of empathy, [who] oscillate between
feelings of grandiosity and omnipotence and feelings of inferiority and
low self-esteem [and who] are particularly susceptible to feelings of shame
and humiliation."167 Only narcissistic leaders who from early childhood
have felt shamed and humiliated could, like Richard Nixon, lead wars that
had no other purpose than to avoid accepting "a national humiliation
[that would] destroy our country's confidence in itself."168 The deep
well of loneliness created in them by the emotional distancing of their mothers
is usually worsened by the absence of their fathers, which has been found
by Broude to result in hypermasculinity and violence.169 The loneliness leads
them to volunteer as delegates to lead large masses of people out of their
depression through "macho" politics. Conquering women and conquering
nations are one for the Phallic Leader.170 It is no coincidence that virtually
all of America's wartime presidents were adulterers or compulsive womanizers.171
Conquest is the political function of the Phallic Leader. As Hitler put it,
"The crowd is a woman after a speech I feel as if I had a sexual release."172
Dominance and violence restores and purifies the self. As Hitler said after
the Röhm massacre, "So! Now I have taken a bath, and feel clean
as a new-born babe again."173
Thus a Phallic Leader wards off the humiliations of maternal
abuse and neglect by political violence. Lyndon Johnson, for instance, remembers
his engulfing mother's withdrawal of affection whenever he failed to do as
she wished, "walking around the house pretending I was dead [and] refusing
to speak or even look at [me]."174 As a result, he had a recurring dream
that a stampede of cattle--a symbol of maternal engulfment175 --was
coming toward him while he was paralyzed in a chair, and that he cried out
for his mother, but no one came.176 His fear of helplessness and humiliation
returned just before Vietnam, when, he said, "I felt that I was being
chased on all sides by a giant stampede coming at me the American people
were stampeding me to do something about Vietnam I deserved something more
than being left alone in the middle of the plain, chased by stampedes on every
side."177 According to his biographer, he "avoided at all costs
the threat to his self-esteem that public humiliation might entail"178
and started the war. The war restored his and the nation's masculinity: "unzipping
his fly, [Johnson] pulled out his penis and asked the reporters (according
to one who was there), 'Has Ho Chi Minh got anything to match that?'"179
The war castrated the "enemy," not Johnson: "I didn't just
screw Ho Chi Minh. I cut his pecker off."180 Those who opposed the war
were women: "[They have] to squat to piss."181 Going to war meant
not being a woman, not being overwhelmed by mommy.
Merging with a Phallic Leader involves switching into the dissociated
hemisphere and entering into the social trance. Atlas has shown that political
trances derive their power not from any magical "charismatic" qualities
of the leader but from the correlation between adult hypnotizability and abusive
childrearing.182 The Phallic Leader, like a shaman, is adept at entering into
trance states himself--Hitler often called himself "a sleepwalker."
Political meetings are easily seen as altered states of consciousness. A journalist
reports getting "caught in a mob of ten thousand hysterics who jammed
the moat in front of Hitler's hotel shouting, ‘We want our Führer!'
I was a little shocked at the faces, especially those of the women. They
reminded me of the crazed expressions I saw once in the back country of Louisiana
on the faces of some Holy Rollers. They looked up at him as if he were a
Messiah, their faces transformed."183 Switching into their social alter
gave them a shot of dopaminergic power, exactly the same as taking amphetamines,
that made them feel merged with both the Phallic Leader and the group, the
nation, the Volk. Fichte described this merging as he felt it take
hold of him:
When I thought of the Volk and saw it, and when the great
feeling of it gripped me, when a great crowd moves before me, when a band
of warriors passes before me with flowing banners. I feel the indestructible
life, the eternal spirit, and the eternal God. I am immediately freed from
all sins. I am no longer a single suffering man, I am one with the Volk184
Because nations continue to live in both their hemispheres as
they go to war, they must both prepare for war by maneuvering an enemy into
a pose where they can be righteously attacked, and at the same time provide
deniability that their nation is really responsible for the war. Leaders might
recognize, as Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend in 1897, that "In
strict confidence. I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country
needs one."185 But Phallic Leaders usually find ways to invent "unprovoked
attacks," from Wilson's lies about the sinking of the Lusitania
and LBJ's lies about the attack in the Gulf of Tonkin to Hitler's lies about
an attack by Polish forces. One of the most complex lies that carefully provoked
an attack that was then pretended to be a surprise was that of President Franklin
Roosevelt's year-long actions to get Japan to attack Pearl Harbor. Stinnett's
voluminously-documented book, Day of Deceit, demonstrates that in October
of 1940 FDR secretly began to carry out a series of eight actions that forced
the hawks among the Japanese government to go to war with the U.S., embargoing
trade, "tightening the noose" on their economy and deploying American
warships on "pop-up" cruises within the territorial waters of Japan,
then purposely leaving the U.S. fleet unprotected at Hawaii and hiding the
fact that Japanese codes had been broken so that the attack would be a "surprise."186
If FDR hadn't provoked his unnecessary war with Japan, American military strength
would have been fully available for fighting Germany years earlier, and the
Holocaust may not have been as disastrous.
A typical case of provoking an enemy can be shown for the actions
of John F. Kennedy in the Cuban Missile Crisis, which we earlier187 examined
briefly. JFK's childhood was typically abusive, dominated by his mother's
emotional distancing of him--"She was never there when we really
needed her. [She] never really held me and hugged me. Never."--and
her brutality, battering John with "hairbrushes, coat hangers, belts
and shoes [and] once slapping young Bobby's face so viciously that she punctured
his eardrum and split his lip."188 The result in JFK was a phallic-narcissistic
personality focused on conquering women in "daily assignations and a
lifetime of venereal disease [and] a steady diet of mood-altering drugs."189
Claiming a mythical "missile gap" with the Russians, Kennedy was
elected President to "get America moving again" after the peaceful
Eisenhower Fifties, and soon authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba over
the objections of most experts who said it would fail, telling his aides he
"wasn't going to be ‘chicken.'"190 The resulting failure was
taken by him as a personal humiliation, for which he needed revenge. He authorized
Operation Mongoose, various assassination attempts against Castro, including
using the Mafia, but success evaded him.191
By 1962, Kennedy decided to regain his potency by invading Cuba
with U.S. forces. He told the military to prepare for a U.S. invasion of the
island and asked his staff to formulate a pretext that would give an appearance
of a Cuban attack on a U.S. airline that would justify it.192 But war with
a small neighbor would not be enough; Kennedy moved to make certain the Russians
would be involved in the war. On January 31, 1962, he asked Khrushchev's son-in-law,
Aleksei Adzhubei, to meet with him and, in order to humiliate the Russians
as he felt humiliated, told him he was preparing to attack Cuba like Russia
attacked Hungary: "If I run for re-election and the Cuban question remains
as it is," he said, "we will have to do something" about Cuba.
Kennedy told a startled Adzhubei, "I called Allen Dulles into my office
[after the Bay of Pigs] and dressed him down. I told him: ‘You should
learn a lesson from the Russians. When they had difficulties in Hungary, they
liquidated the conflict in three days [by sending in troops.]'" Adzhubei
repeated this to Khrushchev, who told Soviet diplomats: "An attack on
Cuba is being prepared. And the only way to save Cuba is to put missiles there."
In April 1962, 40,000 American troops began practicing invading
Cuba in North Carolina,193 and by October 6, 1962, thousands of American troops
were positioned for invasion, along with plans and equipment, prepared to
invade on October 20, 1962, using the Bahamas as an invasion base camp. But
on October 16, 1962, the CIA took clear U-2 photos that told them Russian
nuclear missiles were in Cuba. Kennedy told no one of his own bellicose actions
and threats, instead declaring the Russian move wholly unprovoked. Despite
the fact that 100 million Americans lay in the range of the Russian missiles--and
despite the opinion of his staff that they made no military difference at
all because nuclear missiles on Russian submarines had long been stationed
a few miles off Cuba--Kennedy instituted a naval embargo and prepared
for a full-scale attack on Cuba, risking a nuclear World War III. Saying "If
Khrushchev wants to rub my nose in the dirt, it's all over"194 and "we
must not look to the world as if we were backing down,"195 Kennedy fully
expected war. When his staff told him there were diplomatic means which could
be used to remove the missiles, he replied, "The object is not to stop
offensive weapons, because the offensive weapons are already there, as much
as it is to have a showdown with the Russians of one kind or another."196
Since Kennedy had already publicly declared the U.S. was "prepared to
use nuclear weapons at the start" of any war,197 Kennedy's embargo and
invasion would mean nuclear war if the Russians didn't accept the humiliation
and back down, "one hell of a gamble," as Kennedy put it.198
Luckily
for mankind, Khrushchev backed down, was removed from office because of the
humiliation and America was rescued from its self-inflicted humiliations.
For his role in hiding the real cause of the near-apocalyptic actions, President
Kennedy remains universally seen as one of America's greatest Presidents because
he "kept his head" during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
THE MANIC PHASE: EGO DISINTEGRATION AND PARANOIA
Nations engage in manic economic and political projects for the same reasons
newly successful rock stars go to all-night parties and take drugs--to
get a "dopamine rush" that counters the depression and guilt about
their success. Political paranoia and slow ego disintegration are now seen
in conspiratorial group-fantasies, fears of femininity and imaginary humiliations
by other nations. These are countered in the economic sphere by manic overinvestment,
risky ventures, excess money supply growth, soaring debt and stock market
speculations, and in the political sphere by jingoistic nationalism, expansionist
ventures, military buildups and belligerent, insulting foreign affair behavior.
As in drug addiction, each dopamine rush leaves a dopamine hangover that requires
an even larger manic activity to overcome the resulting depression. Purity
Crusades multiply as anti-modern and anti-child (Bad Boy) movements. Fears
of "becoming feminine" (desires to merge with mommy) are countered
by persecution of homosexuals. A search for external enemies results from
the growing ego disintegration, as grandiosity fails and Poison Alerts and
sacrificial group-fantasies proliferate.
In America, these paranoid fears of apocalyptic punishment for
success have taken the form of revivalist Great Awakenings, which occurred
at the end of long period of peace: the First after 24 years of peace (1714-38)
under the Georges, the Second after 30 years of peace (1815-45) under Madison
and Monroe, and the Third after 31 years of peace (1866-97) following the
Civil War. These apocalyptic fantasies of fears of how furious God (Mommy)
was because of mankind's sinfulness merge into the war movements that follow.
The American Revolution has been said to have been "caused by a pandemic
of persecutory delusions" featuring "a fear of effeminacy"199
and a fantasy of "Mother England persecuting her children."200 Similarly,
beginning with the Annus Mirabilis of 1858, daily gatherings of thousands
of people in spontaneous prayer meetings took place, where people fell down,
saw visions and went out and destroyed their goods in preparation for the
end of the world.201 This apocalyptic mood lasted and merged with the "cleansing
in the fires of war" that would "purge the virus" of the nation
in Civil War bloodshed that was "sacramental, erotic, mystical, and strangely
gratifying."202 All these apocalyptic group-fantasies were caused by
the growth panic of a period of prosperity--exactly the opposite cause
from Barkun's theory of millenarian movements being produced by "deprivation"
and "natural catastrophes."203
Perhaps the classic era of paranoid fears leading to apocalyptic
group-fantasies as punishment for prosperity is the period before World War
I--when the world growth rate jumped to over five percent, and when Europe
appeared to be going clinically paranoid from "the decadence of the times
[when] no more rank, titles, or race [meant] all is mixed, confused, and blurred
[and] the end of the world seemed nigh."204 Prosperity and the beginnings
of liberal reforms produced widespread growth panic that decried "the
decline of religiosity, the disintegration of the patriarchal family, and
the decline of respect for authority."205 Fears of "becoming feminine"
proliferated, along with campaigns against homosexuals. Goethe's Werther (Goethe:
"Anything in the world can be endured, except a series of wonderful days")206
was revived during the late nineteenth century as thousands of Germans committed
suicide during their rising prosperity, climaxed eventually by all of Europe
going to war and committing suicide. At the end of the nineteenth century,
books like The World's End Soon pictured the degeneration and apocalyptic
demise of Europe and feminine blood-sucking vampires derived from representations
of the New Woman as an "oversexed wife who threatened her husband's life
with her insatiable erotic demands"207 flooded the popular literature.
Artists featured vampires devouring helpless men,208 and invented modern art
as "a pervasive vision of Fragmentation" showing "everything
disintegrated into parts whirlpools [that] led into the void."209 H.
G. Wells wrote a book in 1913, The World Set Free, that predicted an
apocalyptic war using radioactive "atomic bombs" that would nearly
destroy the world and lead to the eternal peace.210 Objective journalists
wondered if "Europe was about to become a gigantic madhouse."211
Nations felt they had to defend themselves against their growing paranoid
delusions. "That the English are merely waiting for a chance to fall
upon us is clear," declared the German Chancellor.212 Only starting a
"preventive war" could save the nation.213 "I believe a war
to be unavoidable and the sooner the better," said the German Chief of
Staff.214 Europe was swept up in "a terrible readiness, indeed a thirst,
for what Yeats was to call the ‘blood-dimmed tide'fascinated by the
prospect of a purging fire."215 Going to war would prevent engulfment
by the Terrifying Mommy, would avoid effeminacy and restore potency, and would
purge the national arteries with a good bloodletting that would purge the
polluting prosperity,216 teach the Terrifying Mommy enemy a lesson and sacrifice
the sinful Bad Boy so mommy would finally love the Good Boy self who remained.
WAR PHASE: RIGHTEOUS RAPE OF MOTHER SUBSTITUTES
Even though
wars are supposed to be fought between men, they have equally affected women
and children. In most wars, more civilians are killed than soldiers, and,
according to UNICEF, "in the wars fought since World War II 90 percent
of all victims are found in the civilian population, a large share of them
women and children."217 In our imaginations, however, wars are mainly
about women and children. Divine wars were always fought for a goddess of
war, from Ishtar to Teshub, almost always mothers of the war heroes,218 "crying
to be fedhuman blood."219 Even the Hebrew Lord counsels Moses to "kill
every male among the little ones and kill every woman that hath known man
by lying with him. But all the virgin girls keep alive for yourselves [to
rape]."220 Yanomamo war raids might kill a few men in raids, but would
abduct all enemy women and rape them.221 Child murder and rape were the center
of ancient war. The Greeks often used to rape all virgin girls and boys in
wars and often trod all children of a city to death under the feet of oxen
or covered them with pitch and burned them alive.222 As van Creveld puts it,
"During most of history, the opportunity to engage in wholesale rape
was not just among the rewards of successful war but, from the soldier's point
of view, one of the cardinal objectives for which he fought."223
Socarides describes the function of sexual sadism as
Forces and extracts love; destroys the threatening body of the
mother rather than be destroyed by her discharges, aggressive impulses that
threaten annihilation of the self even to the point of sexual murder; achieves
temporary freedom from fear of the engulfing mother reassures against and
lessens castration fear; cancels out separation anxiety.224
Clinical studies of rapists find it a result of extreme childhood
neglect and abuse, continuous shaming and humiliation--and often even
of actual sexual abuse as a child.225 The rapist's fantasies center around
control and dominance, and the actual rape is often triggered by "flashbacks"
to earlier humiliations that had to be restaged in sexual violence, where
"my life would flash in front of my mind so I went out looking for
a victim."226 Rape is a "pseudosexual act," first done for
violence and revenge, then sexualized: "I wanted to knock the woman off
her pedestal, and I felt rape was the worst thing I could do to her,"
said one serial rapist.227 Much of the time the rapist cannot even orgasm,
but this doesn't matter because he has defiled, degraded and humiliated the
woman: "After the assault I felt relieved. I felt I had gotten even.
There was no sexual satisfaction; in fact, I felt a little disgusted."228
Sex may be the weapon, but revenge is the motive.
Rape fantasies are extremely widespread; in America, a third
of all men regularly fantasize about raping women during masturbation or intercourse,229
while in a country like Yugoslavia--where earlier historical childrearing
practices are still prevalent in the zadruga so that the rape of children
is routine--adult male rape fantasies are so strong that rape is a common,
everyday part of life even in peacetime.230 Before wars, humiliation group-fantasies
proliferate, as nations spend more and more time trading gratuitous insults,
complaining about being humiliated and pushed around by others, and worrying
about not receiving the recognition due them,231 all flashbacks to early shame
and neglect. The unrequited love for the mother is reexperienced in "rejected
overtures" with other nations. Hitler, for instance, clearly explained
his reasons for starting WWII as arising out of rejected maternal love:
I have repeatedly offered England our friendship, and if necessary
closest co-operation. Love, however, is not a one-sided affair, but must be
responded to by the other side. I do not want to conquer her. I want to
come to terms with her. I want to force her to accept my friendship232
The war that began as rape to win love ended as rape to win
love. When the war was nearly over, sitting in his bunker in 1945, Hitler
justified his rape of Europe as necessary because, he said,
It could not be conquered by charm and persuasiveness. I had
to rape it in order to have it.233
In a world full of humiliating, rejecting, provocative motherlands,
neighboring countries seem to be "just asking to be raped." Group-fantasies
of wanting to "explode into her" to "penetrate her life"
and avenge her for "turning down our overtures" in order to "knock
her off her throne" and "teach her a lesson she won't forget"
begin to be expressed in diplomacy, political cartoons and in the media.234
Hypermasculinity begins
to infect the nation's mood with the need for "standing
tall" and "displaying our firmness" with a "stiffening
of the national will." Newspapers headline rape fantasies to goad leaders
into war; as the British tabloids screamed out before the Falkland invasion,
"STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA." Cartoons begin showing barbarian men in
neighboring nations about to rape men's wives.236 Leaders begin to express
projections of rape in meetings, as when Lyndon Johnson excitedly asked before
expanding the war in Vietnam, "how many times do I let a fiend rape my
wife?"237
Finally, when the group-fantasies peak and action to "get
some respect" is irresistible, war begins as "righteous rape"
against any enemy that can be imagined to be a convenient humiliating mommy.
War, gang rape and degradation of women merge into one. For instance, the
Serbian attacks on its neighbors that followed the overt rape cartoons like
the one above had "the degradation and molestation of women central to
the conquest, women of sixty and girls under twelve being gang-raped, often
in front of their relatives [while men] pushed bottle necks into our sex,
even shattered, broken bottles, guns too[as men screamed] ‘I'll
fuck your mother, all your mothers.'"238 Wars usually begin as group-fantasies
of mother-rape, revenges for earlier neglect and domination, righteous violence
that will "teach her a lesson."
WAR PHASE: PURIFICATION OF BAD BOY SELF
But while war is seen as an way to avenge maternal mistreatment, it is also
a merging with the Terrifying Mommy to wipe out the Bad Boy self whose fault
it must be that mommy wasn't loving. The purification of mankind through the
sacrifice of children to an avenging goddess was, of course, the practice
of ancient societies like Carthage, where tens of thousands of jars have been
found with charred bones of sacrificed children along with inscriptions saying
they had been killed by their parents to cleanse their sinfulness.239 The
symbol of the warrior in Aztec society was a bleeding fetal war-god standing
at the placental center of the city whose blood streamed out into the four
quarters of the universe, feeding every citizens of the state.240 In every
war, young men march off essentially to commit suicide as heroic acts of sacrifice,
"losing ourselves [in] ecstasy because we are conscious of a power outside
us with which we can merge."241 As one soldiers wrote during WWI, "Sacrificing
oneself is a joy, the greatest joy. Never before has such a powerful desire
for death and passion for sacrifice seized mankind."242 The Bad Boy self
must die for the Good Boy self to be loved; therefore, blood must flow to
renew the sinful nation: "The souls of nations are drinking renewal from
the
blood of the fallen soldiers."243 Soldiers may sent back
to their mothers dead, but they are wrapped in "living flags," maternal
symbols, as though they had been reborn into new swaddling-clothes with a
new chance to be loved.244 A soldier "dies peacefully. He who has a Motherland
dies in comforting her, like a baby falling asleep"245
The ecstatic relief once war begins is felt because it is the
revanche supréme for early abuse and because it promises to
cleanse the self of sinfulness. However convinced people are as they begin
wars that the "enemy" is outside themselves, they are in fact fighting
alters inside themselves--raping Terrifying Mommies and killing
Bad Boy selves. Nations "descend into visions of purgations and redemption"
in a "holy war [to] cleanse our souls of the dross of selfish pettiness."246
War is "the highest happiness that ordinary men can find,"247 a
"purifying thunderstorm"248 that provides a chance to be "born
again"249 a "triumph of righteousness"250 and a "magical
restoration of potency."251 "It is a joy to be alive," rejoiced
a German paper in 1914.252 "The heather is on fire. I never before knew
what a popular excitement can be," wrote an American as the Civil War
began, describing jubilant crowds "with flushed faces, wild eyes, screaming
mouths."253 At last, one could take revenge against the Terrifying Mommy,
kill the Bad Boy self, be reborn and finally become pure and lovable, all
in one splendid act of mass butchery.
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