BEATEN, HUMILIATED, TORMENTED children with no helping witness to turn to for aid frequently develop a serious syndrome in later life. They are ignorant of their own feelings, they even fear them like the plague, and accordingly they are unable to perceive a number of vital connections. As adults, they take out the cruelty they have experienced on innocent people, without noticing it and without accepting responsibility for it because, like their parents before them, they see this as a “redemption” for others. The result is highly irresponsible behavior decked out in spurious legitimacy by any number of different ideologies coupled with unlimited hypocrisy. Especially in an age like ours, when technology appears to know no bounds, this leads directly to inimical and inhuman actions posing a serious threat to the future of our planet.
“We don’t want to beat you but we have to in order to banish the evil that you have brought into the world with you.” This is what parents believed in Luther’s day, and this is how they spoke to their children. Luther told them it was their duty to release their children from the clutches of the devil and to make them into God-fearing little Christians by beating the living daylights out of them. And they believed him. They had no way of knowing that as a child Luther had been ferociously flayed by his mother and that his affirmation of this kind of upbringing was designed to preserve the image of a good and loving mother that he had created with the aid of denial and repression.
Because they believed him, they did not know that instead of exorcising the “devil” in their innocent children, their cruelty was in fact planting the “seeds of evil” in them. The harder and the more often they beat their children, the worse they became, exacerbating the destructiveness of the later adult when those “seeds” came to fruition.
Do present-day parents know better? Many do, but by no means all. Even today, four hundred years later, many of them are confirmed in their ignorance by so-called authorities. It is only the terminology that has changed. We no longer speak of the devil in connection with parenting. It is the “genes” that are to blame. Some media have no qualms about ignoring the history of the last world war and the lessons it teaches us, informing their readers with blithe disregard for all the progress that has been made that crime and mental disorders can be traced back to the genes. This goes hand in hand with advocacy of the hoary old “wisdom” that insists that leniency in youth is harmful and that this is the reason there are so many disturbed adolescents in present-day society.
Does reality not contradict these assertions? Were Hitler, Himmler, and Eichmann treated too indulgently? Ask the advocates of physical correction these questions, and you will not get an answer. The point is that their ideology has no truck with the facts. Instead, it is fueled by these people’s own repressed experiences. Here an entirely different kind of logic prevails, the logic of repression, which has no difficulty in dealing with contradictions. Its purpose is not to find out the truth but to preclude the resurgence of old wounds.
Every individual enters this world free of evil intentions, with the strong and unequivocal need to preserve his or her own life, to love and to be loved. But if children encounter not love and truth but hatred and lies, if they are beaten rather than protected, then it must surely be their inalienable right to scream out their protests at such idiocy and evil. This would be the healthy and natural response to the destructive attacks mounted against them by adults. Such protest would salve their mental health, their dignity, self-esteem, integrity, self-awareness, and responsibility.
But beaten, neglected, and abused children are not allowed to defend themselves. All the recourses bestowed on them by nature for the purposes of self-preservation are out of bounds. Such protest might even cost them their lives.
In addition, an organism still in the process of growth has no way of dealing with such overwhelming feelings. In most cases children will accordingly suppress the memory of this trauma and the potent but undesired feelings that go with such injuries: murderous rage, desire for revenge, and the feeling of being threatened by the whole world. For a child without “helping witnesses” the parents are the whole world. So it is only too likely that in the child’s unconscious brain the desire to destroy that world will materialize as the only prospect of survival.
As all these feelings are repressed, as they are never consciously experienced, as the need for respect, truth, and love have never been adequately articulated, many of these injured children go in search of symbolic satisfaction, for example in the socially acknowledged forms of perversion and crime. Weapons manufacture, the arms trade, and ultimately war are ideal scenes in which they can vent the murderous rage stored in the organism but successfully repressed and never consciously experienced. But this rage is vented on people who have no part in its genesis, while denial and idealization are pressed into service to spare the true culprits.
In warfare everything is permitted that was previously forbidden. The image of an enemy suffices to divert the pent-up hatred and the limitless, unbounded, blind destructive rage of the little child, uncontrolled and uncorrected because never consciously experienced, into permissible channels without those feelings ever needing to penetrate into the conscious mind.
A United States pilot involved in the Gulf War of 1990–91 was once asked what he felt on returning from an air raid. His answer was gratification at having done a good job. “Was that all?” the journalist asked. “What else was I supposed to feel?” the pilot answered with unruffled equanimity. If this man had been allowed to feel, if his feelings had not been frozen for years on end, he might have sympathized with the fear, helplessness, and rage of the people he had been bombarding, he might even have sensed the former helplessness of the small boy exposed to a rain of blows. Then he would have appreciated the connection between humiliation experienced at an early stage and the satisfaction of being able to threaten others with bombs and no longer being a helpless victim. He would no longer have been an ideal soldier, but as a conscious human being he might have been able to help others see through the insanity they were conniving in. He could have contributed to preventing war in future. Wars are tolerated because there are countless people for whom both their own lives and those of others are worthless and execrable, people who have learned to destroy or be destroyed. These people have never been able to develop a love of life because they have never had the opportunity to do so.
Stronger than Weapons
If we do not want to count among their victims, all we can do is to appreciate that this hatred is stronger than any weapons we can conceive of. We must finally understand that this hatred can be resolved if we only know how. What we experience today is the consequence of the repression of our early sufferings, dissociation from our feelings, and the resultant inability to see the connections.
An excellent example of this is the production of poison gas. Who, after all, wanted the Gulf War? The German companies merely wanted to earn money by producing and selling poison gas. This is quite legitimate, is it not? And it is equally legitimate to be impervious to the consequences and never spare a thought for the suffering thus visited on others. Did the German government want poison gas to be manufactured in its country? Not at all. The fact that the honest taxpayers tolerated this is equally legitimate, right? Did no one recall that this was gas for killing people? It was no one’s job to think such thoughts. Everyone has his own department, but there is no Department for Useless Thoughts. But what about the Belgian toxicologist Aubin Hendrickx? Did he not inform the United Nations and various governments about the lethal nature of this gas? Why did his representations fall on deaf ears?
Young people of today may ask these questions, aghast. The answers they receive are always the same: “I had no idea, it wasn’t my department, I wasn’t responsible, I was acting on instructions.” Such responses are chillingly reminiscent of similar statements in the postwar period. The Nazis exterminated whole peoples with poison gas, calling it a “clean” solution because millions of people were killed without bloodshed. The sons who never summoned up the courage to look their fathers’ atrocities in the face are later participating in a potential revival of those atrocities because they never seriously questioned them in the first place. If they had, they would have realized the atrocity of those atrocities and would then have been incapable of perpetuating them.
Here we see the logic of repression at work. I refuse to acknowledge what my parents did to me and others, I forgive them blindly, I prefer not to look any closer, not to condemn them, not to question them. They remain inviolate because they are my parents. Since my system (my body) knows what happened, although I have no conscious memory of it as long as my feelings are blocked off, I feel the urge to repeat the crimes perpetrated on me (destruction of life) without noticing it. In the abuse of my own children, in the cruel battle against people I have declared my enemies, in the destruction of life wherever it flourishes, I can erect a monument to my parents and prove my undying loyalty to them. Millions of degraded and humiliated children unable to defend themselves against the destructive attacks on their personal integrity are reminded by war of the more or less completely repressed history of the threats they were exposed to. They feel upset and confused. But as they usually have no access to those early memories and the feelings that go with them, they cannot appreciate them for what they are. To escape from their own painful histories, they have recourse to the methods they learned as children: destroy or be destroyed, but stay blind at all costs. In their blindness they seek escape from something that already happened long ago.
To spare themselves the story of the painful humiliations passed off on them as tokens of love, men go to prostitutes, pay them for lashings, and persuade themselves, much as their parents persuaded them all those years ago, that they are actually benefiting from this tragic situation (the loss of dignity and inner orientation). To consign the memory of their own fathers’ sexual abuse to oblivion, some women become prostitutes and subject themselves to further humiliation in line with the old illusion that constantly changing partners and the malleability of men will give them something akin to power. The S/M industry and the various flagellation clubs thrive on this burning desire (both of men and women) to inter the history of their childhood once and for all with the help of new, but basically very similar, scenarios. However, this plan is doomed to misfire, and they constantly have to explore new avenues so as not to have to face up to the truth of their own childhood. Alcohol and drug excesses suggest themselves, but the price is high.
Wars, on the other hand, offer us free of charge—though not without cost in the long run—a tremendous scenario of a similar kind. They provide an ideal opportunity to rid ourselves of the emotional pressure that has dogged us since childhood, either by destroying or being destroyed. Recently, a television program showed footage of an elite unit of the United States Army undergoing training in how to withstand torture in captivity. This brutal training had much in common with the practices of the nineteenth-century German “educator” Dr. Daniel Moritz Schreber, who asserted that the torments he inflicted on children were designed to “harden” them and were hence all for their own good. He recommended them as a universal parenting strategy. The fact that, just like the officers in charge of the elite unit, he was gratifying his own sadistic urges in the process escaped the notice of his victims. That unit included women, and participation was entirely voluntary.
Knowing, as we do, from inquiries into the childhood histories of the Green Berets that virtually all volunteers taking part in the Vietnam War were subjected to brutal training methods designed to instill unconditional obedience in them, very much like the Nazi criminals, we no longer have to ask ourselves why people volunteer to let themselves be treated in such an absurdly sadistic manner. All that is needed is to tell them, as they were told in childhood, that this will make them impervious to later tortures because they have learned to be tough, unfeeling, and “cold-blooded.” If these sons and daughters had access to their own histories, they would find much more meaningful and productive ways of preserving themselves and the world from real dangers. Unlike children, adults are unlikely to actually die from the indignation and pain caused by the sufferings inflicted on them. They have no reason to resign themselves to blindness and the constant flight from something that happened a long time ago. There are ways of achieving access to our repressed histories.
Even the most effective weapons will never halt the production of new and even more terrible weapons, nor will they do away with destructive hatred as long as this hatred is deflected onto substitutes, disguised by ideology, and left unresolved in its original context. If we want to protect life on this planet, then we must challenge this dangerous blindness wherever we encounter it and above all in ourselves.
People who know about their own histories will not sacrifice themselves for other people’s attempts to settle old scores and escape from their own past. They will find other and much better ways of settling conflicts than saber-rattling and the destruction of life. Nor will they feel the need to sacrifice others to escape their own truth. They will be fully familiar with it. There is no alternative to the truth, to the confrontation with our individual and collective histories. Knowledge of that truth is the only thing that can protect us from perfect self-destruction.