What is remarkable is that our selfishness never really disappears

 We Are What We Own

THE EXTENDED SELF

Nusrat Durrani looks like a rock star. When I met him in 2017, he was a senior executive at MTV, but even if you did not know that, you probably would have guessed he came from the media world just by looking at him. He wears designer clothes, most often black or leather, over his slight frame, has an abundance of jet-black long hair and wears tinted glasses – an Indian Joey Ramone. Even among the colourful gathering of fashionistas, futurists, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs at the Kinnernet gathering in Venice where we met, you could tell that Nusrat was super cool. Except that, when we met, he was far from cool.

Nusrat had just arrived from Rome where, the evening before, he had been robbed in a restaurant by opportunistic thieves who had taken his bag of personal items. With around 40 per cent unemployment in Rome, petty crime and theft from tourists has become a main source of income for the poor. It was an inconvenience but Nusrat is a relatively wealthy man. He has the luxury of time and resources to travel the world. These possessions could be easily replaced. At first, he was relaxed about the incident and seemed calm and collected. But over the next few days of the meeting, he became increasingly agitated about it. Like many unwelcomed intrusions in life, theft generates initial bewilderment followed by a growing sense of rage.

Nusrat’s reaction is common. We are often surprised by how much theft upsets us, no matter how well off we are or how cool and calm we would wish to remain. This is because possessions are an extension of our selves. When they are taken without permission, it is equivalent to a violation of our person. Household burglary is particularly distressing as it includes an invasion of our territory where we usually feel most safe. Almost two-thirds of those burgled in the UK are extremely upset, experiencing a variety of symptoms including nausea, anxiety, crying, shaking and ruminating well after the event. Insurance companies report that it takes around eight months to feel safe again, and one in eight never recover emotionally.1 It is not just the financial loss that distresses us; rather, it is more an intense sense of infringement. Someone has come into our world uninvited and undermined our control.

Loss can also be upsetting when we are forced to give up possessions that we would rather keep. It is this reluctance to let go which is one of the more revealing aspects about humans and their relationship with possessions. Consider the storage unit industry that took off in the late 1960s, after the decades of post-war consumerism. Every year more of us are putting our stuff in storage rather than getting rid of it. Currently, there are more self-storage facilities in the US than there are branches of McDonald’s, even though 65 per cent of storage users also have garages.2 Many garages no longer contain cars but rather the overspill of possessions that we can no longer keep in the house. Why are we reluctant to relinquish our things, and why do we keep lock-ups full of personal possessions that are of little value? Why do we have this peculiar emotional dependency on our possessions?

The reason is that we are what we own. In 1890, the father of North American psychology, William James, wrote how the self was defined by what we can claim ownership over:

In its widest possible sense, however, a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands, and yacht and bank-account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down, – not necessarily in the same degree for each thing, but in much the same way for all.3James is describing what psychologists call ‘self-construal’, the way we think about who we are as well as the emotional consequences of loss, which reveals the special relationship we have with our possessions. It is not particularly surprising that we consider our bodies and minds as part of our self. After all, who else can claim them? However, many material things on the list are not unique to us and could be owned by another. Houses, lands and yachts are properties that we acquire. It is striking then that losing them can affect us so personally.

Many thinkers have considered the intrinsic link we have to our material possessions. Plato famously had little regard for the material world and thought we should aspire to higher, immaterial notions. He argued that collective ownership was necessary to promote pursuit of the common interest, and to avoid the social divisiveness of private property that leads to inequality and theft. His student Aristotle, always one to argue with his mentor, was a little more grounded, and emphasized the importance of studying the material world. He thought private ownership promoted prudence and responsibility but noted how we tend to envy and be jealous of others because of ownership. Two thousand years later, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre maintained that the only reason we want to own is to enhance our sense of self, and the only way we can know who we are is to observe what we have – almost as if we need to externalize our self through our possessions. Our acquisitions are tangible markers of our success. Like the study of wealth in the US, we may not get much happier after reaching an income of $75,000 a year, but we are more self-assured that we are successful if we can see our possessions. Not only do we signal our self to others through our possessions, our possessions signal back to us who we are.

Sartre, in his book Being and Nothingness, realized the extent to which humans are defined by what they own: ‘the totality of my possessions reflects the totality of my being … I am what I have … What is mine is myself.’4 He proposed a number of ways in which this arises. First, by exerting exclusive control over something, one is claiming it for the self – something that we saw evidenced early in infants. Secondly, and in line with the views of John Locke, creating something from scratch means you own it. Finally, Sartre thought that possessions evoke passions.

One way that people express their passion for possession is through accumulating stuff. In 1769, another French philosopher, Denis Diderot, wrote about how possessions can shape behaviour. Diderot bought a new luxury dressing-gown that he thought would make him happy, but he was surprised how miserable this purchase made him and how this item changed his life. Rather than enriching his life, the luxury gown stood in stark contrast to the shabbier items he already possessed. Soon, he found himself buying new items to match the quality of the dressing-gown. But Diderot was not a rich man so this escalation in spending made him even more unhappy. In comparison to his old dressing-gown, in which he had felt comfortable cleaning the house, his luxury purchase meant that he no longer wore his gown to do household chores. As he wrote, ‘I was absolute master of my old dressing-gown, but I have become a slave to my new one.’ The ‘Diderot effect’, a term coined by the anthropologist Grant McCracken, describes the influence that individual items can have on subsequent purchases.5 For example, if you buy one luxury item, you are tempted to aspire to more such items even though you may not need them. Many retailers capitalize on the Diderot effect by advertising to us items that complement our initial purchase. This is also part of the appeal of Apple products. The purchase of the iPhone was for many, according to McCracken, a ‘departure good’ which exerted a new pressure to acquire other Apple products because they reflect identity. Even though a different purchase may be good value, if it sends the wrong signal about identity then the purchaser will be less likely to buy it.

Probably the most excessive form of emotional attachment to objects is found among collectors. Collectors are emotionally invested in their collections. It is not simply the monetary value associated with their things but rather the effort and pursuit that collectors expend when amassing their desirable possessions. Sometimes, the prospect of losing them can be unbearable. In 2012, the German authorities discovered that Cornelius Gurlitt, a recluse living in Munich, had amassed a huge collection of art masterpieces estimated to be worth around $1 billion. The art had been stolen from Jewish owners by the Nazis and sold to Cornelius’s father for a fraction of their true value during the war. Cornelius had come to regard the hoard as his personal responsibility to protect. He described the experience of watching the police confiscate his prized collection as hitting him harder than the loss of his parents or his sister, who had died of cancer that same year. Cornelius told the authorities that protecting the collection was his duty to the extent that he had become ‘intense, obsessed, isolated, and increasingly out of touch with reality’.6One of the earliest studies to test James’s claims regarding self-construal was conducted by the Yale psychoanalyst Ernst Prelinger in 1959.7 He asked adults to categorize 160 items on a scale from non-self to self and found that minds and bodies were considered more relevant to the sense of self than personal possessions. However, possessions were considered more relevant to the self than other people (though, as we shall shortly discover, this is a very Western perspective). When children were asked to rank the same items, they followed much the same pattern as adults except that, with age, there was an increasing emphasis on the importance of possessions that reflect our relationships with others, which makes perfect sense as we grow up into cohabiting adults.8The Canadian marketing guru Russell Belk has also written about the relationship between the self and what we own in a series of influential papers championing the concept known as ‘the extended self’.9 Building on the work of James and Sartre, Belk proposed four developmental stages in the emergence of the extended self. First, the infant distinguishes self from the environment. Second, the child distinguishes self from others. Third, possessions help adolescents and adults manage their identities, and finally, possessions help the old achieve a sense of continuity and preparation for death. As we age, we shift in our valuation more to those possessions that remind us of our relationships over the years such as mementoes, heirlooms and photographs – the sorts of things that people often say they would save from a burning house. Sometimes this is literally true. The legendary blues musician B. B. King was famous for his guitar he called ‘Lucille’, which went with him everywhere. He named it after the time when he was playing a gig in Arkansas in 1949, and a fight broke out between two men and a heater was kicked over that set the hall on fire, forcing everyone to evacuate. Once outside, King realized he had left his $30 guitar onstage, so he re-entered the burning building to retrieve it. The next day he learned that the two men were fighting over a woman called Lucille, so King gave his guitar – and every subsequent guitar he owned – the same name to remind him never to run into a burning building again for a guitar, or to fight over a woman.

(...)

SELFISH ME

Sometimes we give our stuff away as a measure of who we are. The reason self-construal is so relevant to ownership is not only that it reflects our attitudes towards our possessions, but also what we do with them. Ownership entitles you to share your resources with others. You can’t share what you don’t own, nor can you share that which belongs to others. If our possessions are part of our self-construal, then the cultural differences in individualist and collectivist processing style can explain the differences observed in sharing behaviour around the world. Someone who is self-focused is less likely to be generous to others compared to someone who thinks more about other people.

As every parent knows, children have to be constantly reminded to share with others, as we all start out fairly self-centred. Jean Piaget described the mental world of the young child as egocentric and demonstrated this in his perspective-taking games. In one classic study,45 young children were seated directly opposite an adult. On the table in front of them was a papier mâché model of a mountain range with three differently coloured peaks of different sizes that were readily distinguishable. Some had conspicuous landmarks such as a building or cross on top. Children were then shown photographs of the mountain range taken from different angles and asked to select which picture matched what they could see. They were also asked to choose the picture that corresponded to what the adult could see. Below four years of age, children typically selected the photograph that corresponded to their own view, irrespective of where the adult was sitting. Piaget argued that this revealed they could not easily take another’s perspective because they were so egocentric. This is one reason why it is unusual to see spontaneous sharing behaviour at this age. However, from an early age, children from the East are encouraged to be less egocentric and, as a consequence, share more than their Western counterparts, which reflects their collectivist upbringing.

What is remarkable is that our selfishness never really disappears. Both children and adults donate less to charity when they are not being watched, indicating that, privately, we still retain selfish motivation.46 When they look to others, children in both urban America and rural India will reduce their sharing if stingy behaviour is modelled by an adult, but only Indian children increase their giving when generous behaviour is provided as a role model. One reason is that Eastern collectivist societies are more focused on reputation, whereas this is less of a concern for children from individualist societies.47 But again, this can be easily manipulated. In her studies of Indian and British children, Sandra Weltzien showed that both groups become more selfish simply by being asked to talk about themselves just before they are asked to share. Again, the power of priming reveals that we can be shifted in our attitudes to what we own. Sharing is flexible and context specific but strongly influenced by others’ expectations if we are reminded of them.

One of the reasons we are less likely to share our possessions is not so much that we do not think about other people, but rather we think too much about what we have. When we think about our self we are more task-focused, paying particular attention to things that are relevant to us. In a supermarket-sweep study,48 participants were asked to sort a series of images of grocery and household items into a red or blue shopping basket, based on a colour cue on the item image. They were then asked to imagine that they had won all the items in one of the baskets, so all the items pictured in it belonged to them. After the sorting was over, participants were tested to see how many items they could remember. Both adults and children as young as four remember significantly more items they are told they have won compared to the items in the other basket.49 This is known as the ‘self-reference effect’ whereby information encoded with reference to the self is more likely to be subsequently remembered than similar information encoded with reference to other people.50The advantage for processing self-referential information registers in the brain as activity in the medial prefrontal cortex – where your temples are – but when associated with ownership also triggers corresponding activation in the lateral parietal cortex, an area further back just above your ears, which is usually active during object processing.51 In other words, as objects are processed, they are given the additional ownership tag that registers in regions of the brain that are active when we think about ourselves. This explains why activation of this self-referential and object processing network is stronger in Western compared to Eastern subjects.52 In contrast, when it comes to thinking about others, activation in Eastern subjects is stronger in brain regions that respond when reflecting about one’s relationships with others.

If Eastern ways of perceiving the world are collectivist, does that mean they are less obsessed with social status and, if so, less likely to pursue status symbols? On the contrary, Asia is one of the strongest markets for luxury goods. How can competition to be seen to be successful through conspicuous consumption square with traditional collectivist values that emphasize group identity? How can an Indian farmer spend extravagantly on a helicopter ride, if Indian society is supposedly collectivist and other-focused?

Marketing expert Sharon Shavitt argues that in addition to the individualistic–collectivist dimension, there is also a critical vertical–horizontal dimension within cultures that explains the apparent contradiction.53 Individualistic cultures with a vertical structure include countries such as the US, UK and France, where people distinguish themselves through competition, achievement and power. They are likely to endorse statements such as ‘winning is everything’ and ‘it is important that I do my job better than others’. However, individualistic cultures with a horizontal structure include such countries as Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Australia, where people view themselves as self-reliant and equal in standing to others. They are more likely to agree with statements such as ‘I’d rather depend on myself than others’, and ‘my personal identity, independent of others, is very important to me’. In contrast, collectivist cultures with a vertical social hierarchy include countries such as Japan, India and Korea, where people focus on complying with authority and enhancing the cohesion and status of their in-groups, even when that entails sacrificing their own personal goals. They are more likely to say, ‘it is my duty to take care of my family, even when I have to sacrifice what I want’, and ‘it is important to me that I respect the decisions made by my group’. Finally, collectivist cultures with a horizontal structure, such as Brazil and other South American countries, are characterized by sociability and egalitarian arrangements of assumed equality. They are more likely to endorse statements such as ‘to me, pleasure is spending time with others’, and ‘the well-being of my co-workers is important to me’.

When cultures have vertical structures, members are still going to aspire to social status through conspicuous consumption, irrespective of whether their self-construal is independent or collectivist. Cultures with horizontal structures will have more aversion to conspicuous consumption, bragging and showing off, and are more likely to promote modesty or engage in tall-poppying. These dimensions also explain why marketeers need to be sensitive to the cultural structures of countries. In Denmark, advertising appeals to individual identity and self-expression, whereas in the US, another individualistic society but with a vertical structure, advertisements are more likely to emphasize status and prestige.54At birth, one human brain is much the same as another, but the emerging body of neuroscience research indicates that cultural self-construal manifests in different brain activation. These variations reflect historical, political and philosophical perspectives indicating that our brains are shaped by biocultural influences during development rather than through some evolutionary hard-wiring. If ownership is a major component of our self-construal, then it’s how we raise our children that determines their attitudes towards possessions.

Bruce Hood

POSSESSED

Why We Want More Than We Need

Pathologies of Knowing and Learning

 Ways of Not Knowing:

 Distortions of Science and Intelligence

* * *

INTELLIGENCE (Late Middle English [origin: Old French and Modern French from Latin “intelligentia,” formed as “intelligent”]): The faculty of understanding; intellect. —Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 6th ed., s.v. “intelligence”

* * *

I’ve focused on essential science as a formal system for gaining and refining knowledge, and scientism as a degeneration of essential science that harms many people by irrationally dismissing and pathologizing all aspects of the spiritual perspective. (Scientism hinders progress in all areas of science, of course, inhibiting new ways of thinking, but in this book we focus on its effects on our possible spiritual nature.) Real people, with all of their good and bad qualities, and individual differences, use systems, philosophies, and knowledge tools. I have no doubt that there are some materialistic practitioners of scientism, for example, who are kind, generous people who wish the best for others, just as there are practitioners of essential science or of various spiritual systems who are, for whatever reasons, mean spirited and derive some kind of pleasure from belittling and dismissing other people. So while we focus on these formal philosophies and systems of materialism and spiritual views, we have to remember that there are always important differences in the way real people use them. Your motivations, personality, and other psychological factors interact with the formal characteristics of the knowledge system.

In terms of establishing how we would discover and refine knowledge about the spiritual, as well as progress in general, we’ll take a brief look at some of the ways people use knowledge tools to actually avoid learning new things or getting better understandings of old things. If you sometimes recognize yourself in these descriptions, as I too often recognize myself—well, better to be embarrassed and learn than to remain ignorant!

* * *

“…it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail” (Maslow 1966, 15–16).

* * *

Abraham Maslow, a pioneering psychologist who was the primary founder of both humanistic and transpersonal psychology, published a brilliant little book back in 1966, The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance. He focused on science since it was and remains prestigious and a highly influential way of knowing, but his insights into the psychology of knowing and not knowing—what real people may actually do when they try to expand their knowledge, as opposed to what they say they do—are vitally applicable to ordinary, religious, and spiritual life. His insights are a psychology of scientism, or just about any “ism.”

I often sum up his insights in this way: Used correctly, science can be an open-ended, error-correcting, personal-growth system of great power. Used incorrectly and inappropriately, science can be one of the best and most prestigious neurotic defense mechanisms available. As Maslow (1966, 33) beautifully put it: “Science, then, can be a defense. It can be primarily a safety philosophy, a security system, a complicated way of avoiding anxiety and upsetting problems. In the extreme instance it can be a way of avoiding life, a kind of self-cloistering. It can become in the hands of some people, at least, a social institution with primarily defensive, conserving functions, ordering and stabilizing rather than discovering and renewing.”

The same is true, in my experience, for spiritual systems. They can be open-ended, error-correcting growth systems, opening to new, vital knowledge and compassion for self and others, or they can be used as neurotic defense mechanisms, protecting users from real spiritual growth while allowing them to feel superior to ordinary people, and “spiritual” at the same time.

So what are these pathologies of cognition, both intellectual and emotional, that Maslow identified in The Psychology of Science? There are twenty-one of them, and I’ll summarize them in a table later, but let’s look at them more thoroughly now.

* * *

The American revolutionary Patrick Henry became famous for his saying, “Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.” Without taking this to paranoid levels, I think this is just as true psychologically and spiritually as politically. Without our cultivating mindfulness and desiring to better learn the truth, our intentions too often go astray.

* * *

Pathologies of Knowing and Learning

A compulsive need for certainty is the first pathology. Many psychological studies have found that a tolerance for ambiguity—an ability to admit “I don’t know” or “I’m confused by this”—is a sign of psychological maturity.

Premature generalization is one of the consequences of an excessive need for certainty. Your mind forces actual instances of life into general categories that eliminate much of life’s richness and subtler differences, while giving you the impression that you know so much.

Hanging onto a generalization in spite of new information that contradicts it is something people may desperately and stubbornly do for the kinds of reasons just stated. You attach too much to what makes sense, what makes you feel good, what has worked before. Remember our discussion of essential science: theory is always subject to change if new data doesn’t fit. When human experience doesn’t fit into scientistic materialism, for instance, there’s often a specious generalization invoked to make such potentially disturbing information go away. A common method is to invoke human fallibility: people are misled, superstitious, crazy, liars, or deluded, so you can stop paying attention to anything that doesn’t fit your idea of the way the world works.

Denial of ignorance is another major obstacle to knowledge. Because we all want to look good, of course, to ourselves and others, we’re unable to say, “I don’t know” or “I was wrong about that.” Personally I’ve found that the sooner I can admit, at least to myself if not to others, that I don’t understand something, the sooner I stop digging myself deeper into a messy mixture of ignorance and deluded pride about what I do know.

The need to appear decisive, certain, confident is often what covers such denial of doubt, confusion, or puzzlement. We’re talking about an inability to be humble.

It’s funny, here, I don’t think of myself as a particularly spiritual person, and yet I sometimes think that I have, in my role as a “scientist,” a great advantage over people recognized as “spiritual teachers.” I can say I don’t know something, whereas our social and personal expectations put those designated as spiritual teachers under enormous pressure to (pretend to) know everything. Various spiritual systems all make claims of knowing everything that’s really important. (When was the last time you came in contact with a religion that said, “We have a few aspects of the truth but a lot to learn, so we may be wrong about some things”?) Add to this the need for teachers, as representatives of their spiritual traditions, to uphold their systems, and these folks are under enormous pressure to feel as if and act as if they always know whatever’s required.

An inflexible, neurotic need to be tough is another expression of this. The person needs to be powerful, fearless, strong, and severe. That’s the kind of person, the kind of scientist or spiritual teacher, we respect, isn’t it? But these image investments, personas, are what are called counterphobic mechanisms by psychotherapists; they’re defenses against fear and ignorance. As Maslow (1966, 27) put it, “Among scientists the legitimate wish to be ‘hard nosed’ or tough minded or rigorous may be pathologized into being ‘merely hard nosed’ or exclusively tough minded, or of finding it impossible not to be rigorous. There may develop an inability to be gentle, surrendering, noncontrolling, patient, receptive even when the circumstances clearly call for it as prerequisite to better knowing, e.g., as in psychotherapy.”

A lack of balance between our masculine and feminine sides is another major obstacle to growing in knowledge. Science, religion, and most spirituality have been socially and historically shaped mainly by men, often with active suppression of women and the characteristics we usually consider feminine. Balance, full openness to knowledge, calls for the ability to be not only active, dominant, masterful, controlling, “in charge,” and “masculine,” but also noncontrolling, noninterfering, tolerant, receptive, and “feminine.” Knowing which stance is appropriate for a given task is important, or, if you don’t know what’s best, being willing to experiment with different stances to see what each yields.

Rationalization is another major obstacle to knowing. The brain’s emotional circuits often react and form a judgment before the more intellectual parts have even gotten the message that something’s happening, something’s being perceived. It’s as if a controlling part of our minds said, “I don’t like that fellow, and I’m going to find a good, logical-seeming reason why.” Our enormous skill at rationalization, our ability to create an apparently logical connection between almost anything, regardless of whether that connection exists in reality, is why I stressed that in essential science we can’t stop at the theory stage, feeling good because our explanations make so much sense; we’ve got to go on and make predictions, and see how our theories account for new input.

Intolerance of ambiguity, an inability to be comfortable with the vague and mysterious, is a strong personality trait of some people, despite that learning new things can often take a long time. So, to get more comfortable, their minds generalize or rationalize too soon or too broadly, or oversimplify by ignoring parts of reality.

Social factors biasing the search for knowledge should never be underestimated, of course. This pathology can manifest as the need to conform, to win approval, to be a member of the in-group. At an ordinary level, it feels a lot better to be an accepted member of a high-prestige group known as “scientists” or, in a much smaller subset of the population, “spiritual seekers” than to be a “crackpot” or a “weirdo.”

I’ve struggled with such social factors throughout my career. On the one hand, I’ve taken pride in the model of Gautama Buddha, expressed in me in an attitude of “I, Charles T. Tart, on my own, am going to sit down under this tree and meditate or think until I have figured out everything important about the world! No mindless conformity for me!” ( I’m not grandiosely claiming that the Buddha was like me, but instead I’m talking about the way we tend to perceive him as a solitary hero conquering the world of illusion.)

On the other hand, I’ve learned, often after considerable struggle, that I’m not only actually a very social creature and strongly influenced by the beliefs and attitudes of those around me, I need other people; social life is woven into the fabric of my being. Trying to accurately see where I am on the seesaw between these forces and ideals is important work for me, as I do want to get at the truth insofar as I can.

Grandiosity, megalomania, arrogance, egotism, and paranoid tendencies are among the faults that serve as additional human obstacles to refining knowledge. Obstacles that these factors are, the situation is often even more complicated by the deeper psychological factors that they might be covering up, like feelings of worthlessness.

Pathological humility, what Maslow calls a “fear of paranoia,” is another extreme that people exhibit. For various reasons, conscious or unconscious, we can undervalue ourselves and thus try to evade our own growth as a defense; for example, “How can I, a mere everyday person, be seriously interested in spirituality and the paranormal when the real authorities, the scientists, have dismissed it all as nonsense?”

Overrespect for authority, for the prestigious institution, for the great man, and the need to mirror his opinion to (in your mind) keep his love is another pathology. These authorities can be troublesome! Maslow (1966, 28) sees this as “Becoming only a disciple, a loyal follower, ultimately a stooge, unable to be independent, unable to affirm himself.”

Underrespect forauthority is, of course, another extreme, and it often manifests as a compulsive need to fight authority. Then you’re unable to learn from your elders or teachers. The way of authority, as discussed earlier, can be quite misleading if practiced in isolation from the other ways or by being influenced by authorities who happen to be wrong about some things, but it’s very useful as part of the balanced process of essential science.

Overrespect for the intellectual powers of themind also is another pathology, one where you have a need to be always and only rational, sensible, and logical. Bucke, in his description of his Cosmic Consciousness experience, showed a sensible respect for the intellectual in, for example, describing his experience in the third person because he felt it helped him be more accurate, but he certainly didn’t make us feel as if intellectuality and rationality were the main points of Cosmic Consciousness or even the most important aspects.

Intellectualization is very tricky in general. Our ability to step back from the immediacy of experience, emotion, and bodily agitation to take a broader, more logical view of a situation is one of the greatest powers of the human mind. But considering it as always being the “highest” ability, using it (or, too often, being used by it) compulsively in all situations for all knowledge seeking, or both is maladaptive.

A particular style of psychopathology that psychotherapists often see used, for example, is an automatic or compulsive (or both) transforming of the emotional or the bodily into the (apparently) rational, “…perceiving only the intellectual aspect of complex situations, being satisfied with naming rather than experiencing, etc. This is a common shortcoming of professional intellectuals, who tend to be blinder to the emotional and impulsive side of life than to its cognitive aspects” (Maslow 1966, 28). I personally understand this all too well, and one of the major growth themes in my own life has been developing my emotional and bodily intelligence, and at least taking it into account, if not letting it lead when appropriate for situations, instead of having my life compulsively and automatically intellectualized.

Dominating, one-upping, or impressing people is a pathology for which your intellect may be a tool. Then, rationality frequently gets subtly shifted into rationalization in the service of power, often at the cost of part of the truth.

Fearing the truth and knowledge to the extent of avoiding or distorting it is hard to appreciate unless you’ve done a lot of self-discovery work. It’s a scary, unknown world out there in many ways, and we all die in the end, so it’s understandable that we create our own little “knowledge clearing” in the forest of reality, and are very reluctant to venture into the woods beyond the clearing. Like all these obstacles to increasing knowledge, if you consciously know you’re doing it, you have a chance to alter things. When any of these obstacles become completely automatic and you don’t even know you’re using them and being used by them, you have little chance of changing, unless perhaps reality “hits you over the head” very hard, and even then you may just curse your fate instead of seeing difficulties as potential growth opportunities and calls for deeper insight into who you are and what your attitudes are.

Rubricizing, or forcing reality into categories that have an authoritative quality about them so that so we’re hesitant to think about them any other way, is what a lot of intellectual and emotional activity amounts to. As with other obstacles to knowledge we’ve discussed so far, lack of flexibility in dealing with experience and reality always has costs.

Compulsively dichotomizing is one very common and general kind of forced categorization. With this, there are only two opposing values to everything: good or bad, yes or no, black or white. A spiritual tradition like Buddhism, for example, sees this automatic compulsive duality as a primary cause of our suffering. At times, reality may be good or bad, good and bad, neither good nor bad, or something in between, something else altogether.

A compulsive seeking of and need for novelty and the devaluation of the familiar is the opposite obstacle to knowledge of attachment to the familiar, to the known, mentioned above. Sometimes important truths are indeed commonplace, humdrum, just repeated over and over again knowledge.

Table 3.1 lists these obstacles to knowing in a shorthand way for convenience.

Table 3.1 Pathologies of Cognition and Perception

Compulsive need for certainty —Unable to tolerate and enjoy ambiguity

Premature generalization —Derives from compulsive need for certainty

Compulsive attachment to a generalization —Ignoring information that contradicts beliefs you’re attached to

Denial of ignorance —Inability to admit “I don’t know” or “I was wrong”; need to look smart and tough

Denial of doubt —Refusing to admit puzzlement, doubt, confusion

Inflexible need to be tough, powerful, fearless, hard nosed —Can lead to counterphobic defense mechanisms

Only dominant, masterful, controlling; never noncontrolling, noninterfering,receptive —Overmasculine, lack of versatility, rigidity

Rationalization masquerading as reason —The classic “I don’t like that fellow and I’m going to find a good reason why”

Intolerance of ambiguity —Can’t be comfortable with the mysterious, the unknown

Need to conform, to win approval —Be a member of the in-group

Grandiosity, egotism, arrogance —Often a defense against deeper feelings of weakness, worthlessness

Fear of grandiosity, egotism,arrogance —Evasion of one’s own growth

Overrespect for authority —To be approved of by great men and considered a loyal disciple

Underrespect for authority —Compulsive rebelling against authority, inability to learn from elders

Compulsive rationality —Inability to be wild, crazy, intuitive, risk-taking when it’s appropriate

Intellectualization, blindness to nonintellectual aspects of reality —Satisfaction with naming rather than experiencing

Intellectual one-upmanship —Impressing people with your brilliance without regard to truth

Rubricizing, inaccurate categorizing and stereotyping —Easier than deep perception and thinking

THE END OF MATERIALISM

by Charles T. Tart, Ph.D.

An ethics of listening

 One can develop an ethics of listening from Michael Ende’s novel Momo. Momo is characterized first of all by a wealth of time: ‘time was Momo’s only form of wealth’.8 Momo’s time is a special time. It is the time of the Other, the time that she gives Others by listening to them. Momo is admired for her ability to listen. She appears as a listener:

[…] what little Momo was better at than anyone else was listening.

Anyone can listen, you may say – what’s so special about that? – but you’d be wrong. Very few people know how to listen properly, and Momo’s way of listening was quite unique.9Momo just sits there and listens. But her listening works wonders. She gives people ideas that would never have occurred to them on their own. Her listening is actually reminiscent of Hermann Broch’s hospitable listening, which frees the Other for themselves:

She simply sat there and listened with the utmost attention and sympathy, fixing them with her big, dark eyes, and they suddenly became aware of ideas whose existence they had never suspected.

Momo could listen in such a way that worried and indecisive people knew their own minds from one moment to the next, or shy people felt suddenly confident and at ease, or downhearted people felt happy and hopeful. And if someone felt that his life had been an utter failure, and that he himself was only one among millions of wholly unimportant people who could be replaced as easily as broken windowpanes, he would go and pour out his heart to Momo. And, even as he spoke, he would come to realize by some mysterious means that he was absolutely wrong: that there was only one person like himself in the whole world, and that, consequently, he mattered to the world in his own particular way.

Such was Momo’s talent for listening.10

Listening gives everyone back what is theirs. Momo also resolves conflict merely through pure listening:

Another time, a little boy brought her his canary because it wouldn’t sing. Momo found that a far harder proposition. She had to sit and listen to the bird for a whole week before it finally started to trill and warble again.11

8 Michael Ende, , transl. J. Maxwell Brownjohn (London: Puffin, 1985), p. 19.

9 Ibid., p. 18.

The Expulsion of the Other

Society, Perception and Communication Today

Byung-Chul Han

10 Ibid., pp. 18f.

11 Ibid., p. 23.

Transcript of a Live Radio Interview with Chess Champion Bobby Fischer

14 January 1999

(Fischer’s mother, Regina Wender, was Jewish and it is very probable that his biological father was also Jewish)

Pablo Mercado: (speech in Filipino). Bobby Fischer. You can just lift the... Eugene you can just lift the phone and let’s put it on the air, that’s easy, OK?

Eugene Torre: Bobby? Yeah, This is Eugene. I’m here beside Mr. Pablo Mercado.

Bobby Fischer: Yes.

Torre: He’s the radio announcer here in Bomba Radio in Baguio. So good morning Bobby, how are you?

Fischer: OK, Mr. Bomba is it?

Torre: Wait, wait. Mr. Pablo Mercado – here wait.

Fischer: Oh, pardon me, Mr. Pablo Mercado of Bomba Radio, excuse me, ya.

Mercado: Yes, uh, how are you Bobby?

Fischer: Thank you, very well, yes.

Mercado: You’re very well. You see, Eugene Torre is here with us right now and he related to us your present problem regarding your memorabilias in the States. Can you tell us something about it Bobby?

Fischer: Yes, well, umm, this is just the latest in a long line of crimes against me by World Jewry and the Jew-controlled United States of America.

Mercado: Uh huh. Why is it so? Why is it so? Why are they doing this to you?

Fischer: They don’t like me.

Mercado: (laughs). As simple as that. As simple as that, that they don’t like you.

Fischer: Ya.

Mercado: All right. Which of these properties that you have are now being sold by the States?

Fischer: No... they’re already been sold. They’re gone.

Mercado: Really?

Fischer: Ya, ya. They said I owe them a few hundred dollars which is, you know, without contacting me, nothing. They just sold it all off – stuff that it took me a lifetime to accumulate. I had it in. They broke open my safes and they broke open my file cabinets and everything. And just sold off everything. Sold off like a hundred boxes of my stuff and sold off my photo album, my letters from President Marcos, my photo album with President Marcos – everything.

Mercado: Uh-huh.

Fischer: This is just a conspiracy against me by the Jews.

Mercado: Why? Why?

Fischer: Those filthy, filthy bastards. You know they’ve trying to take over the world.

Mercado: Why?

Fischer: You know they invented the Holocaust story. There’s no such. There was no holocaust of the Jews in World War II.

Mercado: Really?

Fischer: They’ve been pulling this shit from time immemorial about persecution. They’re a filthy, lying, bastard people. That’s all they ever do. That’s all they’ll ever be.

Mercado: Why do you have this thing about the Jews?

Fischer: I have no thing. They have a thing about me.

Mercado: (laughs).

Fischer: Study the history.

Mercado: Really?

Fischer: Are you a Christian?

Mercado: Yes, I am.

Fischer: Well, you know. The Catholic Church. The Catholic Church taught for a long time about that they’re guilty of the murder of Christ, right?

Mercado: Yes. So? (Laughs.)

Fischer: You know.

Mercado: (laughs). Anyway, Bob, this memorabilia that has been sold that you owned.

Fischer: That I owned? I still own it. This is all stolen property, you know?

Mercado: All right. All right. Uhhh, would you?

Fischer: I have spent on this... just in storage fees alone over 10,000 dollars. I have spent in buying the custom-made safes, custom-made file cabinets, with secret built-in safes in the file cabinets, another file cabinet, a safe with special drill-proof doors, with a second door inside, combination locks, both timers, in case somebody tries to force you to open it. The works! To preserve my memorabilia. My stuff from Marcos, my letters from President Nixon, books dedicated to me by President Nixon, former President Nixon when he dedicated the books, but he was President Nixon when he wrote to me. All kinds of stuff, photo albums, statues, the works! They have stole every fucking thing and sold if off. The dirty Jews that want to put me in prison for 10 years. They have sold off all of my memorabilia which I collected over years. They have confiscated, they have stolen my book My 60 Memorable Games. They have come out with the illegal movie called Searching for Bobby Fischer which is exploiting my name for money. They’ve made tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars on this movie. I never get a penny of it. They came out with the illegal. The Jews have come out with the illegal CD-ROM called ‘Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess.’ Zero for me. I get nothing. Even from the legitimate edition of My 60 Memorable Games. Nothing. These fucking Jews are thieves, they are liars, they are mother-fuckers, and it’s time we took care of these bastards.

Mercado: I have a photocopy of several checks that you have issued to...

Fischer: Yeah yeah. I faxed them to Eug.

Mercado: Yes, who is this Bob Ellsworth?

Fischer: This guy was acting as my agent to pay my bills there in the States.

Mercado: Uh, huh.

Fischer: I have some stuff in storage in New York. I have the stuff in storage in Pasadena which has all been robbed. And I have a PO box, two PO boxes in Pasadena. And I had some property in Florida which I have to pay taxes on every year.

Mercado: Uh, huh.

Fischer: This. All of these things come to less than 4,000 dollars. So I was sending him five grand a year to take care of all this, plus giving him like a thousand dollars for his trouble. And he was paying it. But then he got the words from the dirty Jews. Fuck Fischer’s ass. Sell his memorabilia. This was in collusion. This was in collusion with this Bekins storage company in Pasadena. You know. What the hell am I gonna give away all of the stuff which I have taken years to accumulate and to preserve over 400 dollars. I’ve got 300 million dollars in Switzerland. I got dough here in Hungary. They did it all behind my back. Nobody contacted me. Nothing. They didn’t contact my lawyers. Nothing. The fucking Jews want to destroy everything I’ve worked for all my life. There was no Holocaust. The Jews are liars. It’s time we took off the kid gloves with these parasites.

Mercado: All right. With all of these things Mr. Fischer, what do you intend to do now?

Fischer: I intend to do what I’m doing right now.

Mercado: What?

Fischer: Which is to expose the Jews for the criminals they are, the parasites they are, the liars they are, the thieves they are, the niggers they are.

Mercado: You speak like an Arab.

Fischer: You ask the Palestinians. I was just listening to the BBC. The horror story that come out of there when you get into an Israeli prison. The way they torture you. It’s unheard of. I was listening to a Palestinian woman, a Christian woman from Palestine, not even Muslims, Christian women who were anti-Israel. They got picked up by the Israeli police, taken down to the jail, and then the Israeli police tried to get information – Who do you know among your friends that’s anti-Israel? Give us all the names of your Arab, Christian friends who are anti-Israel. When they refused, they put the women in a cell, these are mothers, these women, mostly. They put ‘em in a cell, and then they start playing, in Arabic, on the loudspeaker, 24 hours a day, "Mommy, come home, Mommy, we miss you" in Arabic. They played it over and over again until the women just collapsed.

Mercado: All right, do you have any...

Fischer: This is the Jewish mentality. These are a criminal people. They torture their prisoners in the worst way. It’s even illegal! They don’t even deny it hardly. Jews were always bastards throughout history. They are liars, they are the worst pieces of shit in the world. They mutilate their own children.

Mercado: All right.

Fischer: Fuck the Jews.

Mercado: OK. You don’t plan any legal moves against them? Against those who sold your memorabilia?

Fischer: What is this he said?

Mercado: Legal moves, like a case in court.

Fischer: You know, the Jews control the courts. What is your name, Mr. Mercado?

Mercado: Yes, Pablo.

Fischer: Yes, the Jews. Pablo, yeah, Pablo. The Jews control the courts. It’s just a charade they go through. It’s Facade City, you know – Facade City. I’ve been involved in a number of lawsuits in America. Never got a penny, never got a stop order, never got nothing. I’ve been involved in about five or six lawsuits, about five cases throughout the years, never got a penny, never got any property back, never got a stop order, never got nothing man. I spent a lot of money, and I have all the documents, and I have all the justice on my side. It’s a joke. The United States is a farce controlled by dirty, hook-nosed circumcised Jew bastards.

Mercado: Bob, uhh, I have no other questions. Maybe Eugene, he has a few questions for you.

Fischer: Ya, ya, Hi Eugene.

Torre: Hi, Hi Bobby. Well, uhh, not much questions. I think you have expressed, uhh, quite good your side, and exposed these people, you know? (Laughs.)

Fischer: Hey Eugene, what’s the difference between a good Jew and a bad Jew?

Torre: Yeah. What’s the difference between a good Jew and bad Jew?

Fischer: The good Jew fucks you slower. (All laugh.)

Torre: OK. So... It’s OK, Bobby. I think it should be over now, and...

Fischer: OK.

Torre: And I have good news. I was able to contact... Anyway, maybe you can get in touch with me later, OK?

Fischer: OK, I’ll call you at home, OK?

Torre: OK, ya, and uhh...

Bobby Fischer: OK, what time, I’ll call you what, in about 10 minutes, half an hour?

Torre: Maybe in half an hour, ya.

Fischer: OK. OK. Did we go out live? Did we go out live?

Torre: This is live. This is live, Bobby. Everybody hears...

Fischer: OK, good. You know, because that’s the only way to go, you know. I don’t like to be edited, you know.

Torre: No, no. No editing here. Here, it’s live.

Fischer: Get a copy. Get a copy of this, OK?

Torre: Ya, I got already here a tape of this conversation, this interview, OK? So give me a call after thirty or one hour, no?

Fischer: OK, take it easy.

Torre: OK. Bye.

Source: https://heretical.com/miscella/fischer.html

The Profound Impact of Profanity: How Swearing Affects the Brain, Emotions and Soul

It is a peculiar irony of modern life that while most people strive to improve their lives with technology and sophistication, language is sliding comfortably into the gutter. Profanity has become the linguistic wallpaper today, increasingly commonplace among the youth and emblematic of a shift toward a lifestyle that is as casual as it is vulgar.

Tragically, swearing has taken up permanent residence in the repertoire of the masses, especially among the youth. Unlike mathematics or history, it is not a subject taught in a classroom—at least, not in the traditional sense.

Instead, it is absorbed through osmosis from peers, parents, and, most aggressively, social media and Hollywood. There is a rich contradiction here: society largely condemns the use of expletives, turning up its nose at their rude offensiveness, yet simultaneously consumes them with a voracious appetite.

Swear words are sanctioned and restricted under the vague assumption that harm will befall society if they are used, especially if they become a habit. Yet the exact nature of this harm—whether to the speaker, the listener or society at large—remains ever so vague.

Swearing is done to vent. Sharp, jagged words release pressure valves of anger, frustration, or even exuberant excitement. There is a pervasive notion that no other collection of sounds is quite as efficient or effective at conveying raw emotion. In a sense, this is true; curse words are not merely random insults.

Why Swear?

They pack an emotional wallop. Linguists, such as Timothy Jay, author of Why We Curse, suggest that profanity hijacks the brain’s limbic system—the very center of emotions. When an expletive is spoken, it triggers a dopamine surge, embedding itself in memory with a tenacity that polite language simply cannot match.

Hollywood and social media, in their infinite wisdom, seem intent on promoting this vulgarity. They prioritize profanity for drama, embedding it into iconic movie lines. Curse words are short, punchy and versatile—a scriptwriter’s dream for quick character development and an even quicker shock value sure to be remembered.

Social media and streaming platforms have become central pillars of modern life, particularly for the younger generation. While these tools were ostensibly created to entertain and connect us, they have arguably succeeded in spreading a contagion of unhealthy trends—online vulgarity being among the most pernicious. This growing tide is eroding young minds, undermining moral frameworks, and weakening emotional health in ways we are only just beginning to understand.

The Psychological Drive to be Vulgar

The relentless parade of vulgar and provocative content distorts what “popularity” actually looks like. Many young people have come to believe they must display bold behavior, air their dirty laundry, or act in shocking ways simply to garner likes and followers. Consequently, they drift away from cultivating genuine talent or personality. Rather than focusing on developing culture, education, or creativity, they begin to value the fleeting attention gained from shock value over the enduring peace of self-respect.

This online vulgarity is fundamentally altering how young people view human connection. On many platforms, the superficiality of physical appearance and attraction is elevated above virtue, emotional depth, respect, and trust, fostering wildly unrealistic expectations of love and companionship.

SATANIC CHRIST PORN-BLASPHEMY AT WALMART — SIGN PETITION

Many young people begin to operate under the delusion that relationships are solely about appearances, pleasure, and excitement rather than about understanding, virtue, patience or responsibility. The inevitable result is a landscape of unstable relationships and emotional confusion, contributing to the fracturing of families and higher divorce rates.

The algorithms that govern our digital lives only exacerbate the situation. Because platforms are designed to promote posts that elicit strong reactions, vulgar content travels much faster than meaningful discourse. This creates a perverse structure of incentive in which creators post increasingly provocative material to remain relevant.

The more young people consume this content, the more they crave that specific brand of excitement, eventually losing their taste for the God-given beauty of normal life. Over time, they experience reduced concentration, diminished motivation and poor emotional control.

The Hidden Impact of Profanity: How Swearing Affects Your Brain, Emotions, and Spirit

Ancient wisdom, particularly within the Catholic tradition, has long emphasized the importance of pure, respectful speech as a reflection of one’s inner values. Religious teachings encourage us to use language that inspires, comforts, and uplifts rather than degrades.

When we speak with forethought and restraint, it reflects internal discipline and strength. Choosing respectful language is not just about manners; it is a way to nurture both the soul and the society it inhabits.

From a psychological perspective, habitual profanity can deeply affect our emotional and cognitive landscape. Swearing is inextricably linked to the expression of intense emotions such as anger or stress.

When these explosive words become the default in our vocabulary, they reinforce negative emotional patterns and atrophy our ability to manage stress with grace. Research in cognitive psychology indicates that frequent exposure to harsh language may actually lower one’s emotional self-regulation and self-esteem.

Habitual profanity creates cognitive ruts that hinder the development of adaptive coping strategies, affecting our overall mental health. Studies show that profanity activates brain regions linked to emotion and impulsivity, such as the amygdala and the limbic system.

Over time, the repeated firing of these neural pathways strengthens our tendency toward intemperate, quick and unfiltered emotional reactions, while diminishing the faculties responsible for self-control and thoughtful regulation.

Profanity’s Adverse Effect on Family and Society

Changing speech habits that have been etched into our psyche may seem like a Herculean task, but it is entirely possible with self-awareness and resolve. Our choice of words has a profound impact on mental well-being and relationships. Practicing self-reflection allows one to identify triggers and replace negative verbal reflexes with constructive language.

Pursuing the company of supportive individuals who model positive communication can further reinforce these changes. The goal is not to surgically remove strong emotions but to express them in ways that promote self-control, mental clarity and emotional resilience.

Understanding the profound effects of foul language on mental, emotional and spiritual health is essential to personal growth. Profanity, used to express deep emotion, reinforces negative thought patterns, increases stress and disrupts interpersonal harmony. In short, foul language accelerates vice.

The journey toward a healthier way of communicating begins with self-awareness and a commitment to practicing virtue. The power of thoughtful speech must be embraced through self-awareness, the exploration of alternative expressions, and the fostering of respectful interactions. In doing so, an important step can be taken toward not only improving one’s mental health but also contributing to more compassionate and understanding relationships.

To solve this issue, a coalition of the willing—the clergy, families, schools, governments, and the youth themselves—must work together. Parents need to engage in open, honest dialogue with their children. Schools must teach the curriculum of digital responsibility. Governments must enforce strict rules against harmful content*. Most importantly, young people need to develop the armor of self-control, valuer eal-life relationships over digital ones, and eliminate the harmful noise generated by social media and Hollywood.

Every word matters when it comes to cultivating a healthy mental state and a positive social environment. We must choose words wisely and take pride in meaningful, expressive dialogue bereft of swear words. If society hopes to build a healthy and emotionally robust future generation, it must recognize the serious pitfalls of vulgarity and return to the principles of a well-ordered, Christian civilization.

Gary Isbell
https://www.returntoorder.org/2026/01/the-profound-impact-of-profanity-how-swearing-affects-the-brain-emotions-and-soul/.

* Governments in modern world aim for the destruction of the society, so expecting anything positive from government is naivety.

Abelard

Although he was a goliard, Peter Abelard, the glory of the Parisian milieu, meant and contributed much more. He was the first great modern intellectual figure — within the limits of the term “modernity” in the twelfth century. Abelard was the first professor.

To begin, Abelard’s career, like the man, was remarkable. This Breton from the outskirts of Nantes, born in Le Pallet in 1079, belonged to the petty nobility, for whom life was becoming difficult with the advent of a monetary economy. Abelard gladly abandoned a military career to his brothers and devoted himself to his studies.

If Abelard gave up the weapons of a warrior, it was to engage in another type of battle. Always the fighter, he was to become, in the words of Paul Vignaux, “the knight of dialectics.” Always in motion, he went wherever there was a battle to be waged. Always awakening new ideas, he brought enthralling discussions to life wherever he went.

Abelard’s intellectual crusade inevitably led him to Paris. There he revealed another trait of his character: the need to destroy idols. His admitted self-confidence — de me presumens, he willingly said, which does not mean “to be too presuming,” but rather, “being aware of my worth” — led him to attack the most illustrious of the Parisian masters, William of Champeaux. He provoked him, pushed him into a corner, won the students over to his own side. William forced him to leave. But it was too late to stifle that young talent. Abelard became a master. Students followed him to Melun, then to Corbeil, where he ran a school. But his body suddenly failed him, this man who lived only for knowledge; ill, he had to retire for a few years to Brittany.

Having recuperated he went to Paris to look for his old enemy William of Champeaux. There were new jousts; a shaken William modified his doctrine by taking the criticism of his young detractor into account. Abelard, far from being satisfied, intensified his attacks and went so far that he again had to retreat to Melun. But Williams’s victory was in fact a defeat. All his students abandoned him. The defeated old master gave up teaching. Abelard triumphantly returned to Paris and settled in the very place where his old adversary had retreated: on Mount Ste Genevieve. The die was cast. Parisian intellectual culture would no longer have the Ile de la Cité as its center, but would forever have Mount Ste Genevieve on the left bank: this time a man had established the destiny of a quarter.

But Abelard suffered in not having an adversary at his level. As a logician, he was irritated, moreover, at seeing theologians placed above everyone else. He made an oath: he, too, would be a theologian. He returned to his studies and hurried off to Laon to work with Anselm, the most illustrious theologian of the time. The glory of Anselm did not last long in the presence of the iconoclastic passion of the impetuous antitraditionalist:

I therefore approached the old man who owed his reputation more to his advanced age than to his talent or his culture. All those who approached him to have his advice on a subject about which they were uncertain left him even more uncertain. He was admirable in the eyes of his hearers, but of no account in the sight of questioners. His fluency of words was admirable, but in a sense they were contemptible and devoid of reason. When he kindled a fire he filled his house with smoke, rather than lighted it with a blaze. His tree, in full life, was conspicuous from afar to all beholders, but by those who stood near and diligently examined the same it was found to be barren. To this tree therefore, when I had come that I might gather fruit from it, I understood that it was the fig-tree which the Lord cursed, or that old oak to which Lucan compares Pompey, saying–

There stands the shadow of mighty name,
Like to a tall oak in a fruitful field.!”

Edified, I did not waste my time at his school.

Abelard was challenged to make good his promise. He took up the gauntlet. He was told that even if he had great knowledge of philosophy, he knew little of theology. Abelard’s reply was that the same method could be used for both. His inexperience was pointed out. “I replied that it was not my custom to have recourse to tradition to teach, but rather to the resources of my mind.” He then improvised a commentary on the prophesies of Ezekiel which delighted his listeners. People scurried for the notes taken at this lecture to have them copied. A growing audience implored him to continue his commentary. He returned to Paris to do so.

Abelard continued his rise to glory — which was abruptly interrupted in 1118 by his adventures with Heloise. We know the details of this adventure from Abelard’s extraordinary autobiography Historia Calamitatum—“The History of My Troubles” — those premature Confessions.

It all began like Cholderlos de Laclos’ novel, Dangerous Liaisons. Abelard was not a rake. But middle-aged lust attacked this intellectual who, at the age of thirty-nine, knew love only through the books of Ovid and the songs he had composed — in true goliard spirit, but not through experience. He was at the height of his glory and pride. He confessed as much: “I believed there was only myself, the only philosopher in the world.” Heloise was a conquest to add to those of his intelligence. And it was at first an affair of the head as much as of the flesh. He learned of the niece of a colleague, the Canon Fulbert; she was seventeen, pretty, and so cultivated that her scholarship was already famous throughout France. She was the woman he was meant to have. He would not have tolerated an idiot, but he was pleased that Heloise was also very pretty. It was a question of taste and prestige. He coolly devised a plan which succeeded beyond his greatest hopes. The canon entrusted the young Heloise to Abelard’s care as a pupil, proud to be able to give her such a master. When they discussed his salary Abelard easily convinced the thrifty Fulbert to accept payment in kind: room and board. The devil was keeping watch. There were fireworks between the master and the pupil: first, intellectual exchanges, then, soon after, carnal exchanges. Abelard abandoned his teaching, his work — he was possessed. The affair continued and deepened. A love was born which would never end. It would resist all difficulties, then tragedy.

The first difficulty came when they were caught in the act. Abelard had to leave the home of his deceived host. The lovers met elsewhere. At first hidden, their relationship was soon flaunted. They believed they were above all scandal.

Next, Heloise became pregnant. Abelard took advantage of Fulbert’s absence to take his lover, disguised as a nun, to his sister's home in Brittany. There Heloise gave birth to a son whom they called Astralabe (the danger of being the child of a couple of intellectuals . . .).

The third difficulty was the issue of marriage. Abelard, with a heavy heart, would have made amends to Fulbert for his actions by offering to marry Heloise. In his admirable study on the famous couple, Etienne Gilson has shown that Abelard’s repugnance was not due to his being a clerk. As an unordained priest he was canonically allowed to have a wife. But Abelard feared that as a married man he would see his academic career hindered, and would become the laughing stock of the scholarly world.

WOMEN AND MARRIAGE IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY

In the twelfth century, there was in fact a very strong antimarriage current. At the same time that women were being liberated, were no longer considered the property of men or as baby-making machines, when the question of whether women had souls was no longer being asked — this was the age of Marian expansion in the West — marriage was the object of disdain, both in noble circles — courtly love, carnal or spiritual, existed only outside marriage; it was embodied in Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere — as well as in scholarly circles, where a complete theory of natural love, later found in the Roman de la Rose in the following century, was being developed.

There was a strong female presence, therefore. And Heloise’s appearance beside Abelard, while it accompanied the movement supported by the goliards, which demanded the pleasures of the flesh for clerks as well as priests, strongly highlighted an aspect of the new face of the intellectual in the twelfth century. His humanism demanded that he be fully a man. He rejected anything that might appear to be a diminution of his self. He needed a woman by his side to be complete. With the freedom of their vocabulary, the goliards stressed, with the support of citations from the two Testaments, that men and women were endowed with organs whose use should not be made light of.

Disregarding the memory of so many lewd and dubious jokes, we should think of that climate and psychology, to better grasp the significance of the tragedy which was to occur, and to better understand the feelings of Abelard.

Heloise was the first to express her feelings. In a surprising letter she begs Abelard to reject the notion of marriage. She evokes the image of the couple of poor intellectuals which they would form:

You could not give your attention at the same time to a wife and to philosophy. What concord is there between pupils and serving-maids, desks and cradles, books or tablets and distaves, styles or pens and spindles? Who, either, intent upon sacred or philosophic meditations can endure the wailing of children, the lullabies of the nurses soothing them, the tumultuous mob of the house- hold, male as well as female? Who, moreover, will have strength to tolerate the foul and incessant squalor of babes? The rich, you will say, can, whose palaces or ample abodes contain retreats, of which their opulence does not feel the cost nor is it tormented by daily worries. But the condition of philosophers is not, I say, as that of the rich, nor do those who seek wealth or involve themselves in secular cares devote themselves to divine or philosophic duties.

Moreover, there were authorities to support this position and condemn the marriage of the sage. One might cite Theophrastus or rather St Jerome, who repeated his arguments in Adversus Jovinianum, which was so popular in the twelfth century. And, joining the Ancient to the Church Father, there was Cicero who, after rejecting Terentia, refused the sister of his friend Hirtius. And yet Abelard rejected Heloise’s sacrifice. The wedding was decided, but remained a secret. Fulbert, whom they wished to appease, was notified, and even attended the nuptial benediction.

But the intentions of the various actors in this drama were not the same. Abelard, with his conscience at peace, wanted to resume his work with Heloise remaining in the shadows. And Fulbert wanted to announce the marriage, make public the satisfaction he had obtained, and undoubtedly weaken the credibility of Abelard, whom he had never pardoned.

Abelard, in distress, conceived of a strategy. Heloise would go into retreat in the convent of Argenteuil, where he had her wear a novice’s habit. That would put an end to the stories. In that disguise, Heloise, who had no other will than that of Abelard, waited for the rumors to cease. They had not counted on Fulbert, for he thought he had been tricked. He believed that Abelard had gotten rid of Heloise by having her enter a convent, and that the marriage had been dissolved. One night he led an angry mob to Abelard’s house where a crowd gathered, Abelard was mutilated, and the next morning there was a huge scandal.

Abelard went to hide his shame at the royal abbey of Saint-Denis. Remembering what was said above, one can understand the extent of his despair. Could a eunuch still be a man?

We will abandon Heloise here, as she no longer plays a role in the present work. Yet we know how the two lovers, from one cloister to another, continued to exchange the essence of their souls until death did them part.

NEW BATTLES

His intellectual passion cured Abelard. With his wounds bandaged he once again found his fighting spirit. The ignorant and slovenly monks weighed heavily on him. With his arrogant attitude Abelard weighed equally heavily on the monks, whose solitude was all the more troubled by the many disciples who came to implore the master to resume his teaching again. He wrote his first treatise on theology for them. Its success did not make everyone happy. In 1112 a conventicle in the guise of a council assembled in Soissons to judge it. In a tumultuous atmosphere — to impress the council his enemies had stirred up the mob who threatened to lynch Abelard — in spite of the efforts of the bishop of Chartres who demanded additional information, the book was burned and Abelard was sentenced to end his days in a monastery.

He returned to Saint-Denis, where his quarrels with the monks became increasingly heated. He inflamed them by showing that the famous pages by Hilduin on the founder of the abbey were only so much nonsense, and that the first bishop of Paris had nothing to do with Denis of Athens [a.k.a. Dionysius the Areopagite], the Areopagite whom St Paul had converted. The following year he fled the monastery and finally found refuge with the bishop of Troyes. He was given some land, near Nogent-sur-Seine, settled there as a recluse, and built a little oratory to the Trinity. He had forgotten nothing; the condemned book was dedicated to the Trinity.

But his disciples soon discovered his refuge and there was a stampede toward solitude. A scholarly village of tents and huts rose up. The oratory, enlarged and rebuilt out of stone, was dedicated to the Paraclete, which was a provocative innovation. Only Abelard’s teachings could make these ersatz country folk forget the satisfactions of the city. They sadly recalled that “in the city students enjoy all the conveniences they need.”

Abelard’s peace did not last long. Two “new apostles,” he said, were organizing a conspiracy against him. They were St Norbert, the founder of the Prémontré, and St Bernard, the reformer of Citeaux. He was persecuted so harshly that he dreamt of fleeing to the East:

God knows, I fell into such a state of despair that I thought of quitting the realm of Christendom and going over to the heathen [to go to the Saracens, as is specified in Jean de Meung’s translation], there to live a quiet Christian life amongst the enemies of Christ at the cost of what tribute was asked. I told myself they would receive me more kindly for having no suspicion that I was a Christian on account of the charges against me.”

He was spared that extreme solution — the first temptation of the Western intellectual who despairs of the world in which he lives.

He was elected abbot of a Breton monastery, but there were new confrontations. Abelard felt he was living among barbarians. Only Low Breton [the language of Lower Brittany] was spoken there. The monks were unimaginably vulgar. He attempted to refine them. They tried to poison him. He fled from there ins 1132.

Abelard appeared once again on Mount Ste Geneviéve in 1136. He resumed teaching with more students than ever before. Arnold of Brescia, banished from Italy for fomenting unrest in the towns, took refuge in Paris, joined up with Abelard, and brought his poor disciples, who begged for a living to listen to his teaching. Ever since his book was burned in Soissons, Abelard never ceased to write. It was only in 1140, however, that his enemies again began attacking his works. His ties with the Roman proscript must have been the greatest incitement to their hostility. It is understandable that the alliance of town dialectics and the democratic communal movement would appear signifi- cant to his adversaries.

ST BERNARD AND ABELARD

Leading the movement against Abelard was St Bernard. According to the apt expression of Pere Chenu, the abbot of Citeaux “was in another realm of Christendom.” That rural man, who remained a medieval and foremost a soldier, was ill-suited to understand the town intelligentsia. He saw only one course of action against the heretic or the infidel: brute force. The champion of the armed Crusade, he did not believe in an intellectual crusade. When Peter the Venerable asked him to read the translation of the Koran in order to reply to Mohammed in writing, Bernard did not respond. In the solitude of the cloisters he delved into mystical meditation— which he raised to the greatest heights — to find what he needed to return to the world as an administrator of justice. That apostle of the reclusive life was always prepared to fight against innovations he deemed dangerous. During the last years of his life he essentially governed western Christian Europe, dictating his orders to the pope, approving military orders, dreaming of creating a Western cavalry, the militia of Christ; he was a great inquisitor before his time.

A clash with Abelard was inevitable. It was St Bernard’s second in command, William of Saint-Thierry, who led the attack. In a letter to St Bernard, William denounced the “new theologian,” and encouraged his illustrious friend to pursue him. St Bernard went to Paris, tried to lure Abelard’s students away (with the little success so far as we know), and became convinced of the seriousness of the evil Abelard was spreading. A meeting between the two men resolved nothing. One of Abelard’s disciples suggested they debate in Sens before an assembly of theologians and bishops. The master undertook once again to uproot Abelard’s followers. In secret St Bernard entirely changed the character of the gathering. He transformed the audience into a council, and his adversary into the accused. The night before the opening debate St Bernard assembled the bishops and gave them a complete file showing Abelard as a dangerous heretic. The next day Abelard could only impugn the competence of the assembly and make an appeal to the pope.
The bishops communicated a very mitigated condemnation to Rome. Alarmed, St Bernard quickly regrouped. His secretary gave the cardinals, who showed him complete devotion, letters which extracted a condemnation of Abelard out of the pope, and Abelard’s books were burned at St Peter’s. Abelard learned of this en route, and took refuge at Cluny. This time he was broken. 

Peter the Venerable, who welcomed him with infinite charity, arranged his reconciliation with St Bernard, persuaded Rome to lift his excommunication, and sent him to the monastery of St-Marcel, in Chalon-sur-Sa6éne, where he died on April 21, 1142. The great abbot of Cluny had sent him written absolution, and in a final gesture of exquisite delicacy, had it sent to Heloise, who was then the abbess of the Paraclete.

Abelard’s was a typical existence, while his destiny was extraordinary. From the considerable body of Abelard’s works we unfortunately have space to discern only a few remarkable aspects of it here.

THE LOGICIAN

Abelard was foremost a logician, and like all great philosophers he primarily contributed a method. He was the great champion of dialectics. With his Logica Ingredientibus, and especially with his Sic et Non of 1122, he gave Western thought its first Discours de la Méthode. In it he proves with shocking simplicity the necessity of having recourse to reason. The Church Fathers could agree on no issue; where one of them said white, the other said black — Sic et Non.
Whence the necessity of a science of language. Words are made to signify — nominalism—but they are based on reality.

They correspond to the things they signify. The whole effort of logic must consist of making feasible the signifying appropriateness of language to the reality expressed by it. For this demanding mind, language was not the veil of reality, but rather its expression. This professor believed in the ontological value of his instrument, the word.

THE MORALIST

The logician was also a moralist. In his Ethica seu Scito te ipsum this Christian, nourished on ancient philosophy, grants introspection as much importance as monastic mystics such as St Bernard or William of Saint-Thierry did. But as de Gandillac has said, “whereas for the Cistercians ‘Christian Socratism’ was above all a meditation on the impotence of man-the-sinner,  self-knowledge appears in the Ethics as an analysis of free will through which it is up to us to accept or reject the contempt for God which constitutes sin.”

To St Bernard’s cries: “Born of sin, of sinners, we give birth to sinners; born of debtors, we give birth to debtors; born corrupt, we give birth to the corrupt; born slaves, we give birth to slaves. We are wounded as soon as we come into this world, while we live in it, and when we leave it; from the soles of our feet to the top of our heads, nothing is healthy in us,” Abelard replied that sin is only an omission:

To sin is to despise the Creator; that is, not to do for Him what we believe we should do for Him, or, not to renounce what we think should be renounced on His behalf. We have defined sin nega- tively by saying that it means not doing or not renouncing what we ought to do or renounce. Clearly, then, we have shown that sin has no reality. It exists rather in not deing than in being.
Similarly, we could define shadows by saying: The absence of light where light usually is.

And he insisted that man has that power to consent, that assent or refusal given to the uprightness which is the center of moral life.

Thus Abelard contributed strongly to questioning the conditions of one of the essential sacraments of the Christian Church: penance. Confronted with a radically evil man, the Church in the barbarous age had made lists of sins and the appropriate punishments, copied from barbarian laws. These penitentials attested that, for man of the High Middle Ages, what was essential in penitence was sin, and consequently, punishment. Abelard expressed and strengthened the tendency to inverse that attitude. Henceforth the sinner was most important, that is, his intention, and the primary act of penitence would be contrition. “Sin does not persist,” wrote Abelard, “along with this heartfelt contrition which we call true penitence. Sin is contempt of God or consent to evil; and the love of God which calls forth our grief, allows no vice. ”The many confessors who appeared at the end of the century had incorporated this reversal in the psychology —if not the theology —of penitence. Thus in the towns and town schools, psychological analysis gained increasing importance and the sacraments were humanized in the fullest sense of the term. What enrichment for the mind of Western man!

THE HUMANIST

Let us stress only one trait of Abelard the theologian. No one ever proclaimed more than he the alliance of reason and faith. In this realm, while awaiting St Thomas, he surpassed the great initiator of new theology, St Anselm, who in the preceding century had set forth his rich formula: faith itself seeking understanding (fides quarens intellectum).

In this he satisfied the needs of the scholarly milieux which in theology “demanded human and philosophic reasoning and sought more what could be understood rather than what could be said: of what use, they asked, were words devoid of intelligibility? One cannot believe in what one does not understand, and it is ridiculous to teach others what neither oneself nor one’s listeners cannot understand through thought.”

During the last months of his life at Cluny, this humanist undertook to write, in great serenity, his Dialogus inter philosophum, Judaeum et Christianum [“Dialogue between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian”]. In it he wanted to show that neither original sin nor the Incarnation had caused an absolute break in the history of humanity. He sought to illustrate what the three religions, which for him represented the sum total of human thought, had in common. He aimed to discover the natural laws which, beyond religions, would enable one to recognize the son of God in all men. His humanism culminated in tolerance and, unlike those who were uncompromising, he sought that which connected men, remembering there are “many mansions in the Father’s house.” If Abelard was the highest expression of the Parisian milieu, we must go to Chartres to discover other traits of the emerging intellectual.

Intellectuals in the Middle Ages
Jacques Le Goff

Mark Collett & Germar Rudolf – Holocaust Summit 2026

[In this livestream video Mark Collett, leader of the pro-White British nationalist movement, Patriotic Alternative, talks with “Holocaust” revisionist Germar Rudolf. Items discussed include:

Promotion of a virtual “Holocaust Summit” that Rudolf is organising.

Rudolf directs viewers to his website and to holocaustsummit.com for event details and contact information.

Recent work: Multilingual rollout of Rudolf’s “Holocaust Encyclopedia” (English 2023; Spanish and French released; Arabic in progress), noting heavy editing and verification post AI machine translation.

On restrictive laws abroad, Rudolf states he won’t comply with what he considers unjust speech laws: “I don’t give a rat’s arse about any dictatorship passing laws prescribing the writing of history.”

He says distribution uses diffuse international channels and has not yet encountered seizures.

Outlines the history of “Holocaust scepticism” from Arthur Butz’s 1976 book, the IHR conferences (late 1970s–1990s), and their decline after internal conflicts.

Rudolf’s biography: Attended early-2000s conferences; arrested/deported in 2005; served 44 months in Germany; later returned to the US after legal challenges.

Family concerns kept him low-profile for years; post-divorce and with older children, he agreed to spearhead a virtual event.

COVID-era normalisation of online conferences reduced costs / risks and made the Summit feasible.

He argues recent Gaza events have opened minds to re-examining historical narratives, claiming the Holocaust is invoked to justify policy and censor debate.

He registered holocaustsummit.com and launched “Holocaust Academy” to teach what he calls “sound” Holocaust historiography.

Mission framing: Oppose what he calls the weaponisation of history for war and censorship; “We are going to be independent… fearless… and not constrained by politically correct taboos.”

Date: Jan 27 (International Holocaust Remembrance Day). He says the Red Army “conquered” Auschwitz in 1945—“the Red Army never liberated anyone.”

Format: Livestream beginning 9:00 am. ET (2:00 pm UK), recorded for replay; viewers can watch live or later.

Platform: FTGmedia.com (to avoid de-platforming); Summit links will be kept current on holocaustsummit.com.

Structure: 45-minute talks; 15-minute Q&A; chat requires a platform account; Q&A uses small paid Superchats; recordings to be posted on Rumble, BitChute and Odysee.

Anticipated pushback: Cites pressure from anti-racism, anti-anti-semitism groups; worries about DDoS / backbone interference; contingency planning ongoing.

Opening talk (Rudolf):

“80 Years of Holocaust Skepticism”—history of the movement, key claims, and resources; an on-ramp for newcomers.

Speaker: James Mawdsley (UK Catholic priest, film-maker) on Treblinka; Rudolf served as a historical advisor on Mawdsley’s documentaries.

Speaker: Peter Rushton (UK) on British intelligence and Himmler; “The Dog That Didn’t Bark” theme about wartime assessments.

Lunch break: Premiere of a new CODOH-related documentary (~35 minutes); break also helps absorb schedule overruns.

Personal testimonies panel: Brother Nathanael Kapner (online activist), Leo Walls (US bookstore owner), Georges-Marc Theil (France) on entry into scepticism and consequences (ostracism / prosecution).

Speaker: Vincent Reynouard (France), with decades of activism and multiple current cases, on “misuse of the law” to suppress dissent.

Speakers: Heinz Bartesch and attorney Andrew Allen on US OSI “Nazi-hunting” cases; allege legal overreach and evidence abuses in immigration prosecutions.

Speaker: Prof. David Skrbina on early wartime/postwar mainstream voices who expressed scepticism.

Closing paper: Carlo Mattogno (Italy) on the state of research, presented by Rudolf; Rudolf adds “where we go from here,” future research gaps, and generational handoff.

Legal caution for EU presenters: Some will stick to personal experiences to avoid violations; audience asked not to corner them with risky questions.

Attendance: A few hundred email sign-ups so far; hopes for several thousand live viewers and many more on replay.

Sponsors/hosts: Holocaust Academy and CODOH highlighted; FTG Media donating platform access; many contributors working unpaid.

Donations: Sponsorship tiers available via the Holocaust Academy shop; live Q&A questions are donation-based.

Replay/Archive: All talks to be archived on holocaustsummit.com and mirrored to alternative video platforms.

Merchandise: Summit mugs and T-shirts available via Armreg.co.uk (publisher’s merch page).

UK legal context: Watching is legal; case law allows debate if not disparaging; both host and Rudolf stress a civil, scholarly tone to avoid issues.

On humour and speech: Rudolf warns that in some countries jokes can be criminalised—“When jokes become punishable by law, you stop laughing”—and both urge avoiding “edgy” jokes or disparagement; Mark closes by praising Rudolf, plugging future shows, and urging lawful, respectful engagement.

– KATANA]

Mark Collett: Hello everybody, and welcome to tonight’s special stream. We are live tonight on Odysee, Rumble, DLive and Entropy. Please do share the links because we’ve got a very special guest here tonight that I’ll be introducing shortly. It is of course, Germar Rudolf. And before we do that, I’m going to give you a couple of updates.

Now, as I said, this is a very important stream. It’s because we’re introducing a special event that Germar Rudolf is hosting called, The Holocaust Summit. And this event is something that hopefully will be very big. And this is basically a bit of an advert for the event, a bit of a discussion about how it came about, but also a discussion about who’s trying to stop it!

So we’re going to go through all those things and many more tonight and at the end you’ll have a chance to ask questions.

Now, if you support my work, if you like what I do, please share the stream.

But also if you support my work and like what I do, you can give a donation, you can donate through Rumble, you can donate through Entropy. Anything donated throughout the show will be read out live on the show and any questions will be put directly to Germar Rudolf.

So if you ask me a question or pay for a question via a Superchat, I will read it out after the initial presentation and we will answer your questions. All donations are gratefully received. And as I always say, if everyone gave a small amount, $3, $5, $10, that would make a great, great difference. Some of my streams in the past few months have been seen by upwards of 75,000 people. Imagine if everyone had just given $3, what we would be able to do with that money would be almost limitless at that point. But everyone would barely notice that money leaving their account because it’s probably the price of an energy drink, probably less than a coffee house coffee, certainly less than the price of a McDonald’s double cheeseburger these days.

So if you can afford something, please do consider donating. You can also donate by crypto-currency. All the crypto links, as always, are in the description below and you can email me at mark@thefallofwesternman.com. And many of you will be saying:

“Well, how can I get in touch with Germar?”

And this is obviously all about Germar. You can get in touch with Germar via the Show Notes. The Show Notes have the link to his website about this very event. So you can find him there. You can also find him on Telegram.

So thank you so much to anyone who does donate in advance. And please do consider supporting Germar’s event, because that’s what this is all about.

Now, obviously, Germar is the special guest here tonight, and I did a special show with him a while back. It was an excellent show, and his ability to present his evidence and to tell his story is almost unrivalled! I couldn’t believe it! I asked one question and Germar sort of spoke very eloquently for about 58 minutes, at which point we went to Questions and Answers. It was sort of the least work I had to do ever in a show! I didn’t need to interrupt. I didn’t need to ask him any additional questions. He just has this skill of being able to tell his story in a timely way and weave it all together almost perfectly in the allotted space that we had on the show. And after doing that show with him, I was sort of really happy with the way it turned out. I was really happy with the reception, Germar got from my audience, and I really did want to have him back on.

So when he contacted me and told me he was doing this conference, this Summit, I was very happy to promote it. And I asked him:

“So, hey, sort of, what can I do to help you?”

He said:

“Well I could always come on the show.”

So I thought:

“Well, what better way to push this event than invite him back on and spend sort of 45 minutes to an hour talking to him about this event and also just having a general catch up.”

Because the last show, as I said, it was so good and everyone appreciated it so much. I did want to get him back on eventually anyway, so this is a perfect time.

Germar, you have been a very busy man since we last spoke. How have you been? And what sort of led up to you wanting to do this event? Because you have an excellent website, you have a number of really good books, you’ve been busy with other content creators. I know that you went on Unity News Network and you’ve had sort of a little flurry of appearances, but if you want to get people up to date with what you’ve been up to and when, what sort of inspired you to decide to put on this conference, please tell us all about it.

Germar Rudolf: Yeah, well, thank you.

First of all, thank you for having me on the show again. A short remark. If people want to get in touch with me personally, learn more about me, how they can support me if they are so inclined, the easy way is just go to my personal website, which is Germarrudolf.com. So you see my name there on the screen. Just put this together without a blank and a dot com at the end, and you’re on my personal website and you can browse it there.

Now, as to what I’ve been up to over the past year, the main work that I’ve been focusing on was getting the Holocaust Encyclopedia, the English edition of which had appeared in late 2023, out in several other languages. The Spanish and French are out. The Spanish came out in I think it was maybe of last year. And the French we got out, I think it was in November. So we are up now to four languages. English, German, which was done by a different company. It was not in my ballpark. But the French and the Spanish edition, and that’s a lot of work. I mean, writing an encyclopedia is one thing, then AI helps you translate. But at the end you have to walk through it. My Spanish and French is good enough. I could do most of the proofing and editing myself. And then came the big one that we’re preparing right now! It’s an Arabic edition.

So that’s like proofing a pot full of spaghetti, because that’s how that language looks like to me. [chuckling] No clue about it! But I have professionals working on it.

And so this is making good progress and hopefully within a few months that will hit the mark and we’ll see how that’s going to be received. What kind of ripples that we’ll have, if any. So that’s on that side.

Now coming to the actual event for which we have come together today. Holocaust sceptics have been organising conferences since the late 1970s. And the early, …

Mark Collett: Okay, I just ask a quick question before you go into this?

You mentioned that the books are available in French and Spanish, but aren’t the Holocaust sort of revisionism laws or laws and against revisionist literature in France?

Germar Rudolf: So what?

Mark Collett: I was just asking about sort of the legality of the sales. Really, I was just, … What you might have to overcome in that case.

Germar Rudolf: Yes, if I have the intention to abide by unjust and illegitimate laws that violate United Nations Charter of Human Rights, I wouldn’t have gotten into the topic to begin with. So I don’t give a rat’s arse about any dictatorship passing laws, prescribing the writing of history at government gunpoints. This is something that doesn’t go down well with me.

Now, when it comes to printing and publishing the book, that’s an international network and I’m not going to expose here or reveal here what kind of logistics we use. But it basically gets lost in the massive mail stream that goes into and out of every country every day. So we haven’t had any interference, be it getting literature, English literature, or French, also to Canada, to France, to, … You name the countries. If we had them by the bag or by the truck load going into the country that would be selectively subject to border controls, that would be a problem.

But it’s just going individual for every customer into the mail stream. And this just gets lost in the shuffle. So we haven’t encountered any problems yet. So knocking on wood. Fingers crossed. I hope I’m not going to jinx it now.

Mark Collett: Yeah, I was just interested about the logistics of these things because there are draconian laws and I think what you’re doing is obviously very brave. And that answer of you’re not going to allow unjust laws to stop you. I think you’re a very courageous man. So sorry for the interjection. Please, please continue.

Germar Rudolf: That’s quite all right. So back in 1976, the first really scholarly book of Holocaust scepticism was published. That was Arthur Butz’s hoax of the 20th century. The first edition of which actually was published by Historical Review Press, kind of a small outlet that was established on occasion of that book appearing down in Brighton by Tony Hancock in the UK, even though the author, of course, is in the United States. That was the launching pad of people getting interested into Holocaust scepticism seriously, but also realizing that this is a serious School of thought that has to be reckoned with. And it led to the formation of the Institute for Historical Review in California. And they did have first conference was in 78 or 79 [1979], I can’t remember, I think it was in 79.*

[* See: The World’s First Anti-Holocaust Convention-Instauration Dec, 1979

https://katana17.com/2016/09/27/the-worlds-first-anti-holocaust-convention-instauration-dec-1979/.

[In this article, written for the Dec. 1979 edition of the revisionist journal,  Instauration, an interesting account is given of the first ever, “Anti-Holocaust” convention,  with speakers including:  Robert Faurisson from France; John Bennett from Australia; Udo Walendy from Germany; Louis FitzGibbon from Britain; Arthur Butz and James Martin from the US. This was held in Los Angeles and organised by the Institute for Historical Review  —  KATANA.]

And they had had subsequently, over the next two decades, conferences almost on a yearly basis, with a few exceptions. And unfortunately they had some internal strife in the mid-1990s, a kind of a schism there that led to internal fighting, unfortunately. That’s something that occurs on occasion. And that led to the whole School of thought and the Institute losing steam. And eventually those conferences petered out in the early 2000s.

And there hasn’t been any for the better part of 20 years now. And now I myself participated, since the first conference I attended was in 2000, I think so participated in the last few that happened, until I got arrested and deported back in 2005 and had a hiatus of six years in Germany, well, 44 months of them, full board at government expense. And after I came back to the United States a little bit shell shocked, got my feet wet slowly and eventually got back into the race.

But my family situation, I was married to a US citizen and we had a baby. And of course I was deported right out of this family. And she had to raise her daughter the first six years almost by herself. And so she was more traumatized by that event of government persecution. It was eventually decided that they deported me in violation of US law, and I had to litigate but eventually succeeded and came back. And now here I am in the United States, relatively safe from European style thought crime prosecution.

But my wife wasn’t happy in me continuing this kind of work, fearing that it would have another negative impact down the road for the family, not just for me. So we had an agreement that I could continue my work privately but keep my head down and limit or try to not even at all have any public exposure. That also means I couldn’t do any conferences. I was approached during those years starting 2014, 15, something, that a conference should be held again and I would have been the person to go to with my connections, with my involvement in the various organisations and with my track record of productivity. But I waved it off. I couldn’t have pulled it off logistically back then.

A physical conference requires a lot of work of getting the venue, organising food and accommodation for all the people that want to attend and of course for the presenters themselves. And the costs, the overhead costs could be daunting! And it’s not clear that at the end you actually walk away with profit more likely not. Most of all because you always have to have a “Plan B”. The traditional enemies of free speech and freedom of assembly in the past have always tried to shut down events like that. And they most certainly continue doing this to this day. Not just when it comes to Holocaust scepticism, but anything that is considered Right-wing, whatever that be. Even though Holocaust scepticism is neither Right nor Left. It’s about accuracy in history. But it is something that finds interest in the Right-wing spectrum of the political spectrum more prominently than in Left-wing circles or libertarian for that matter.

Be that as it may, you have to have a Plan B, a second venue, in case the first bails out under pressure of the usual suspects, you have to quickly be able to switch over. So you always have to pay kind of for both. And if your contracts are not written right, you start paying through the nose. With all these challenges, I said I can’t do it, apart from the agreement I had with my wife.

Now Covid hit. With all the negative things there is one upside to Covid and that is that in the meantime everyone is used to and technically capable of attending virtual conferences.

So the kind of discussion we have now with a lot of people watching, we can have 10 people discussing something and 10 million people watching. It has become so common due to Covid that this is something that can now be pulled off. The platforms are there are plenty of them and the overhead costs are reduced. People have the software, have the gadgets to participate, to watch it. And they used to it. Particularly the new generation is very comfortable that kind of technology.

So last summer a friend and supporter of mine, actually a pair of sisters, approached me and said we need to do something with Gaza brewing there’s an opportunity opening with people opening their mind that who see that the Zionists and the jewish Israelis to a large degree, not all of them, are pushing and committing genocide. The United Nations Commission has officially recognised Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza with the justification that they have to pre-emptively wipe out the Gazans in order to prevent them from committing another holocaust against the jews.

So the Holocaust is used as a political weapon to commit mass atrocities, to commit a genocide. That has made people realise that the agendas and the historical narrative pushed by Zionists and it’s not just jewish Zionists, I always say there are more Christian Zionists in the world than they are jewish Zionists, is recognised by people as being illegitimate, as being driven by a Holocaust narrative that is misused for these ends. And they see how the narrative about what happened on October 7th back in when was that? 2023, right? So long ago already, wasn’t quite accurate what Zionist sources told about it either. So there is the distortion and misuse of history for political purposes.

And then people are willing with their open mind:

“Wait, what’s going on here?”

To look back in history and see other cases and then to look at the big elephant in the room when it comes to historical narratives. And that’s the Holocaust used by pressure groups, not just jewish, not just Zionist ones, to push their agendas.

With that said, I couldn’t really bail out anymore. Unfortunately I had gone through a divorce in the meantime. And so my agreement with my ex-wife was no excuse anymore, that had evaporated. So with my family situation, most of my children are now grown up and they’re out of the home. There’s only one left who needs a little bit more of tender loving care still.

So that argument is gone. The logistical nightmare of doing physical conferences doesn’t exist when you do a virtual one. And I had agreed:

“Okay, let’s do it!”

The sisters actually suggested a name, Holocaust Summit.

So I went online and looked whether the domain name is still there was. HolocaustSummit.com was available. I instantly reserved it and we started contacting people who would be willing to present it. Now the website is up. If we can share that screen with the audience. I’d like to go through a number of things we’ve put up there.

So as I mentioned, anyone can go there. Holocaust Summit.com, and it is organised and sponsored by a number of organisations. I’ve actually created a Holocaust Academy roughly a year ago, which I plan on and in the process of developing as a platform to teach sound Holocaust historiography to whoever wants to listen to give an accurate and holistic picture of the evidentiary situation when it comes to this event.

One of the first things that we’re now doing as the academy, major things we have already given private lessons, but the website itself is currently under development. So having a curriculum of a college style is somewhat daunting. But I’m working together with a retired Professor of humanities to get this going. And sometime later this year we will have that flying. But it will come now into the open as the organisation that will officially host the Holocaust Summit. So we are going to be independent, we’re going to be fearless, because unfortunately in this area you have to be! And we are not going to be censored if we can help it. And we’re not going to be constrained by politically correct taboos of thinking and asking questions and looking for answers.

So we’ll be tackling the most harmful ideology, undermining peace, truth and freedom world-wide. Because the Holocaust is used to trigger wars and genocides. That is used to enact censorship laws that suppress the search, the sharing of truth, and thus is used as a starting point for government to increase censorship measures. It’s easy to get a quote, unquote, “anti-Holocaust denial” law through Parliament.

And once the first fortress of freedom has fallen, then censorship like a cancer grows. And we see that in every country in the UK. You know it for yourself, what’s going on in your country. It used to be a stronghold of freedom of speech until they passed the new., … What was in 2002, I think the Public Communications Act. And now it’s completely escalating with the constraints they put on it.

So we need to be aware that the Holocaust is at the centre of the orthodox Holocaust narrative and its abuse, its misuse for political purposes, is at the centre of the problem of deteriorating freedom world-wide, or at least in the Western hemisphere.

Now we have picked the 27th of January, which, what is today, the 20th? I’m getting flustered here. Third. It’s already the 23rd, so it’s just in four days and next Tuesday should be. We picked that day for a reason. 27th of January 1945 was the day when the Red Army conquered the Auschwitz camp. And I choose that word wisely because the Red Army never “liberated” anyone. So they conquered the camp. And in 2005, if I’m not mistaken, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution declaring that particular day 27 January, International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

So the iconic camp of Auschwitz, which is the most known alleged crime scene of what is labelled the Holocaust, Auschwitz is also the reason why we have this day as the international day of commemorating this event. And we want to use that too. Commemorating the truth and the lies, the exaggerations and distortions and the victims of this Holocaust narrative. The Gazans are the most recent, most extreme victims of this narrative. But we will have people present their experience of persecution and prosecution. Victims, martyrs, dissidents thrown into prison or having their livelihood destroyed.

So there’s a lot to commemorate and remember for us as well, and we will do that as well.

So the event itself will start 9:00 AM Eastern US time, which if I’m not mistaken is 2 clock in the afternoon for the UK and 3 PM for the rest of the most of the, …

Mark Collett: I think 7 PM in the UK. 2 PM Eastern is 7 PM in the UK.

Germar Rudolf: Yeah, but we started 9 AM so it should be 2 PM

Mark Collett: Oh, okay. Sorry.

Germar Rudolf: Yeah. We actually may start the stream a little earlier to test things and make things sure that things are running smoothly and make few accommodations and have a few organisational remarks before actually the day picks up with the presentations that we have.

Now if you click on the second link there, that CCR list and timeline of presenters that gets everyone down to the actual table where we have the presenters.

So this is our day. How we plan on having it unfold. We have the day started out with a contribution that I’m giving. Originally we had hoped actually for Nicholas Kollerstrom to take that spot. He initially had submitted a paper but then he had to retract it because it came under pressure, has been under pressure for a long time. So he wanted to talk about the English eclipse of communications.

But anyway, it’s not going to happen. There’s already one casualty of censorship and suppression, which is mounting and increasing in the UK. So I’ve taken that spot. And I take the opportunity because that event, short side note here, that event of course is streamed live. We will have the links on that website where people can reach it. Actually at the top there is already one and we’ll keep that updated.

But it’s a Tuesday. Not everyone will be able to sit and watch an event like this all day, on a normal workday. We will of course record it will be posted and people will be able to watch it whenever they please. And we will have it not only on our holocaustsummit.com website, but the company that actually hosts it, as at least the plan, is FTG media.com, and they are an independent platform.

So when it comes to them, we will not be de-platformed because it’s owned actually by one of the board members of one of our main sponsors, which is the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust. And he’s on the board there and he has suggested we use that platform so that we can’t be de-platformed.

I will be talking about 80 years of Holocaust scepticism, whence we came and where we are. So I give a historical overview since we assume that a lot of people over time, as years go by and these contributions will be accessible, a lot of people will not know much about our School of thought, its history and its views, that an introduction is due. We haven’t had anything like this happen in 20 years.

So there’s an entire generation that has grown up which needs to be or should be given an introduction of what we are handling and what we’re dealing with here. So I will be talking about the main events and the main achievements of Holocaust scepticism over the past, well, since the end of the war, basically 1946 or 47 when it kind of started. And in the second half I will give a quick rundown giving the most striking, the most convincing arguments why everyone should be sceptical about the mainstream Holocaust narrative, and give resources in that context where people can learn more.

So with that, the event kicks off. Every contribution, full contribution will have 45 minutes. I hope everyone stays in that slot, but you know how it goes. There will be a time overrun, possibly. Followed by 15 minutes of question answers. There will be a chat feature, FTG media.com like any other, like Rumble, like YouTube has a chat feature. In order to chat you have to have registered with the platform that doesn’t cost anything. You just submit your email address and get a free account and then you can chat. Now for the question and answer series session at the end, the last quarter hour, people are requested to make a donation in order to submit a question like the Superchat and various other platforms. And in order to do that you have to have a wallet with FTG media and the wallet is just automatically set up. When you get an account, you just have to fill it with some funds, whatever resources you take it from, plastic money or crypto or whatever.

So that is the plan. My contribution is followed by a compatriot of yours, James Mosley, who is a Catholic priest from the UK. He has done a number of documentaries on the Holocaust over the past several years. Really good documentaries. And when he was working on his first one, he approached me and asked me a number of questions. So I became his historical advisor, if you wish. Each time he was working on one, he submitted what he was doing and I would make suggestion how to improve it.

And he will be presenting what he found about the evidentiary situation in one particular camp that he had investigated and done a documentary on. And that’s Treblinka. Now if you click on James Mawdsley’s name up there in the list that actually will get you to, for every one of the presenters will get you to where there’s a short bio, you can see a portrait and a summary of the presentation. If you scroll a little up or down, you can go back to the list, back to the timetable.

So this is James Mawdsley. We have actually grouped the European presenters first. UK comes first. James Mawdsley. Next one is Peter Rushton, also from the UK and he will be talking about also history between dogma and taboo. He talks about the British intelligence communications and interaction with the German intelligence toward the end of the war. Looking for evidence that the Brits were really thinking that the German intelligence community, which was under the rule of Heinrich Himmler, the supposed main architect of the Holocaust, that the British were actually acting and communicating as if they believed that Himmler was really murdering or had already murdered at that point of time six million jews is a very interesting contribution. I’m looking forward to myself that the title of it, the Dog that Didn’t Bark is already an indication of which direction that will go.

We’re having a lunch break after that. It is scheduled to be 2 hours long now I expect some time overruns and maybe stretching into the hour between 12 and 1. But we will have enough time during that break and I have yet to announce it because we just finished up preparing for this. The lunch break will have will see the premiering of a new documentary we have just finished. And this is about an appearance of representatives of the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust in the public arena. And we had a little bit of an impact there and we want to share that with the community. That’s I think a 35 minutes so it will fit in there either way.

So in the afternoon the first session is actually shared by three individuals who will be talking about their personal experience getting into Holocaust scepticism, how that happened and then also to what degree they were exposed to persecution, prosecution, ostracism and that kind of stuff. Nathaniel Kapner has been a very active person on social media, on YouTube, and now on other alternative platforms going after self-chosen people and their capers and also critiquing the misuse of history for political purposes.

Leo Walls is a bookstore owner in the US who tells his story of how that went when he started offering books that most don’t like.

And Georges-Marc Theil is actually a French fellow who has had decades of experiences of exposure to persecution in France.

Which leads us then to the next contribution that’s a bigger one. Seasoned revisionist Vincent Reynouard from France has under his belt now already 30 years of activism and I would say historical scepticism in general on the World War II issue, not just the Holocaust. And he has been the main focus as of last two, three years of the French judiciary to lock him away for good. He currently has to deal with seven court cases at once. He will be speaking during his presentation primarily about his experience of the abuse, … No. Not the abuse, the misuse of the law and the judiciary to suppress dissidents, peaceful dissidents on historical issues.

And after that we go into abuse of power and politics based on history. Heinz Bartesch and Andrew Allen will report about their experience with the Office of Special Investigations, that’s the jewish branch of the FBI that was focusing on what they call informally, “Nazi Hunting”. Hunting down immigrants who had some association during the war with what the Axis powers were doing and the OSI was trying to deprive them of their immigration status or even citizenship and deport them to Europe to have them put on show trials there. The biggest case known is probably the case of Ivan Demjanjuk, John Demjanjuk from the 1980s. Bartesch and Allen will actually discuss a different case, that concerns Heinz Bartesch’s father, late father, who the OSI wanted to deport. And they got a bloody nose because they didn’t reckon with the stiff resistance and skilled defense that Andrew Allen, a lawyer from the San Francisco Bay area, was putting up. They were presenting some insight into how the FBI’s branch, back in the days, it has been disbanded by now, was violating the law, breaking the law left and right and forging evidence and so forth in order to frame immigrants, just to have a heyday for themselves or to push Holocaust propaganda.

After that we have retired Professor Dr. David Scrbina, who used to lecture in the humanities and philosophy at Michigan State University, if I’m not mistaken. He will be talking about early mainstream voices of Holocaust scepticism already during the war and right not too long after the war, which shows that back in the days, even mainstream people were sceptical about the narrative being pushed at war’s end.

And we wrap up the day making full circle what I started beginning the day, showing where we came from and where we are. Carlo Mattogno, probably the most prolific revisionist scholar and writer that we have, but in my opinion, also the most knowledgeable Holocaust scholar on the planet! The mainstream included! He is. He can’t speak English or understand it well, and he is currently in a besieged situation in Italy where they passed a law in 2016, threatening anyone voicing their dissent on the Holocaust narrative with up to six years in prison. Now they haven’t done anything against him, even though he kept publishing books by the truckload. I think he’s by now more than 50 books published on that topic. But he does that in a very scholarly manner and in a very low profile. So in Italy there are a few, 10 people and maybe buy the books, but they’re kind of shelf warmers. And he wants to keep it that way. He doesn’t want to gain a larger profile. He wants to do his work underneath the radar of public attention in Italy. And therefore he has submitted his paper to me to present it. And I have increased it by my own take of: Where Do We Go from Here? One part of it is what are the White spots on the map of Holocaust historiography, which still need to be investigated, explored. But also what else needs to be done to hand the relay staff over to the next generation. And there are some quite promising prospects when it comes to new people coming on board with new ideas, with the help of new technologies, bringing it to a new level and a different level. So trying to imitate or copy what Carlo Mattogno has done with his massive work is not what’s going to happen. The direction I think will go somewhere completely different. And I will be talking about that and hopefully this is going to happen. And with this I hope we will be closing the day.

Now, there’s always a possibility that things don’t run as smoothly as they are listed here. Just today we got information that a powerful group, international group, in the business of suppressing a free speech and freedom of assembly. They call themselves “Opponents Against Racism and Anti-semitism”. But basically what that means is they want to stifle anyone who has an opinion that certain ethnic and religious groups with power and influence, don’t want to hear!

So they are working in the background. We know of that and we hopefully will be able to prepare for there’s no way of telling from DDoS attacks to trying to get to the backbone provider and what have you. Anything is possible these days to just. And if it takes to turn off the power plant so you don’t have electricity, [chuckling] but that’s what it takes, that’s what they’ll do! So we expect something. They have noticed with the kind of exposure that our Summit has already received beforehand that we are there, what we’re doing and that we are reaching out and having a ripple effect and they don’t like it!

Now the kind of presentation that I’m giving here right now, I’ve done a number of them. If you scroll up on the screen here slowly, you can actually see listed on the right-hand side a number of presentations linked to of other platforms where I have given an introduction to this event. So if anyone is interested in listening to those, you just click on the image and go to the respective platform which is usually Rumble or Bitchute where this is posted. And because of this, I think, and you helping out now too, this event hopefully is going to be a success. It promises to be a success for us, and it threatens to become one for those who don’t want our voices to be heard.

So there is going to be in the background the usual electronic warfare from the traditional enemies of free speech, to be expected, and we will see how that goes.

This is by and large my narrative now we are here right on the screen where the organisation of that event is shown. We actually, when we submitted to people who were potentially able to give presentations, the invitation to do so, we said we basically accept papers on three main topics.

The first is Holocaust in History, Taboo Between Dogma and Descent. It just talks about new historical findings and insights and interpretations on the event itself. The next one is Holocaust and Politics History as a Weapon. And I mentioned we have one contribution in this regard which will discuss the weaponisation of immigration law against immigrants in order to get propaganda campaigns out of it. And the last one is Holocaust and Human Rights History as a Muzzle, Holocaust Used to Push Censorship. And we have a number of presenters as mentioned who will discuss their very private experience of censorship.

So it should all be civilised and decent and for no one to get overly excited about in either direction. But of course certain groups get extremely excited if they fear that voices be heard that can disrupt their main source of power and influence.

And there’s a lot at stake for them and they will go to extremes if need be to shut us down. We’ll see who at the end will have the upper hand.

Mark Collett: So are you expecting the usual sort of suspects to try and put a stop to this? Have you had anybody threaten your platform or have you had any threats in the run up to this or any attempts to stop this already?

Germar Rudolf: Yes, yes! We just today we got information that as I mentioned, you can have your own platform which is a computer program, but it has to run at the end of the day. It has to run on a server and has to have the connection to the backbone with the Internet cables with enough bandwidth. And usually you have some company providing services from the telecommunications company that hooks you up to what we call today the Internet, the physical Internet, to companies who do server co-location or dedicated server renting. And along that line I’m not quite sure what it was and I wouldn’t necessarily want to reveal it either. We already had approaches from certain quarters of pressure groups to shut down any link in that chain that would get our voice from where we sit to the Internet to the world. So that’s going on in the background and we have to see how that goes. Nothing has been shut down yet, but they’re trying.

Mark Collett: And when you kick this off, what sort of attendance are you expecting?

Germar Rudolf: Well, the Holocaust Summit website itself, HolocaustSummit.com if you go to the top, you actually see a link there where people can jump to the sign up form and just submit their email address so that they can stay informed if there are any sudden changes in the timeline in whatever is going to happen. Because we never know. If we go by that the last time I checked and that’s a week ago, that’s not quite accurate. We had submitted 300 emails through that. But I would expect these are only the hardcore ones who are willing to share their email. And the other, there’s not really a need if you just keep to the website. Go to the website and look up what the link is to the actual event and we will have it posted on other websites as well. You don’t have to identify yourself. So I would assume that the vast majority will not identify themselves even with an anonymous email.

So we need to see how it goes. I don’t know. Sign up has really accelerated with my frequent experience appearances on shows like yours over the past two weeks. And I would assume by now we have probably harvested several hundred more. But there’s no way of telling, as I mentioned, how many people who, how many of those who will attend will actually have submitted their email address. I would assume it’s a minority.

So hopefully we are going to have several thousand which will most certainly exceed, far exceed the range we could have had in the past with physical conferences, which were limited to a few hundred.

And of course then we have it not just streamed, but we have it posted. So on the usual platforms that will reach many, many more thousands, ten thousands in days, weeks, a month and years to come.

Mark Collett: And bearing in mind you said you are going to be doing donations and questions and answers on the day, sort of how do you expect or is there a way that people can sort of sponsor you in advance?

So obviously these events, they take a lot of time and effort to put together. I know it’s not a physical event and I know you’re not paying people to be there, but sort of, is there a way that people can actually sponsor the event and make donations in advance to help you guys with your infrastructure and to make sure the event goes smoothly?

Germar Rudolf: Absolutely! The HolocaustSummit.com website itself, if you were to go there and you go to the very end of the very bottom of the page, it shows the logos of the two companies who are the main sponsors and have officially declared themselves to be sponsors. You know, most actually want to stay anonymous. But there’s also a link that simply says, “Become an AMREC Holocaust Summit sponsor today”, which gets you to the shop of our Holocaust Academy where you can buy sponsorship packages and that actually has several tiers of whatever you want to invest in it. This would be the way to go. So holocaustsummit.com at the very bottom of the page, that’s where you could chip in to cover any costs. Most of us are actually working for free right now and there’s no payment. And FTG Media.com is a sponsor itself and their way of sponsoring is by giving us access to the platform free of charge. We don’t know what happens if, excuse my French, shit hit the fan with all kinds of attempts to shut us down and then we have to come to some more expensive ad hoc solutions to circumvent these things. There’s no way of telling right now!

Mark Collett: And one final question. So with it being on a Tuesday, it’s going to be difficult for some people to attend. Obviously it looks like it’s going to be a fascinating day and your lineup is an extremely strong lineup. And it’s rare to have a conference that is that well packed with guests, to start at 9 AM and go all the way through to 6 PM. It’s a big event. So where will this be posted for Replay? Is this going to be up on Odysee? What sort of places will it be available on replay?

And as a final sort of additional question, usually with conferences there are some kind of sort of, I don’t know, maybe a brochure, or some kind of physical keepsakes available. Is there any merchandise that people can purchase as well to support the event? So sort of two questions. There will there be sort of a full re-upload of everything? And is the like to commemorate this, any kind of physical merchandise that supporters could also purchase?

Germar Rudolf: Yeah. So to the first question, once the event is over, it’s getting archived on our own website. HolocaustSummit.com will be moved to a folder 2026, and we will have there with posters and a short description, all the contributions listed. You click on it and you will probably have several options. They will be on Rumble and Bitshute and Odysee, and you can pick which platform you want to watch it on. We are probably not going to strain our own server because those platforms are good enough.

So this will all be available and the link to that archive will then be of course on the front page, on the home page, prominently displayed. When it comes to merchandise, we just started developing that and if I am not mistaken, … Let me have a quick look where we are with this.

The only company right now that actually has a merch contract is Armreg and we are developing, … Now if you were to go to armreg.co.uk as you know, the publishing branch of what we are doing is actually located in the UK. It is located in London. So if you go to armreg.co.uk and share that with the audience or do you want me to share it? Which way is faster?

Mark Collett: I’m just doing that myself now.

Germar Rudolf: So Armreg.co.uk.

Mark Collett: Just bringing that up. There’ll be two seconds. Just give me a couple of seconds just to get that set up. There we go.

Germar Rudolf: Okay, now at the top menu you see merch as the third entry. Yeah, click on that’s for merchandise and once that has loaded.

Mark Collett: Oh, it has loaded. Sorry, it’s just now I have to share that window as well. Well, just give me a second because it’s a pop out window. So two seconds. It’s weird how that works. Give me a second. Share screen. That’s the one.

Germar Rudolf: Yeah, that’s the one, yeah.

So if you scroll down a little, we have our various merchandise there’s one for Armreg itself and general stuff and there you see some merchandise. We have a mug and a Tshirt right now that has the announcement of that particular event.

Mark Collett: Wonderful.

Germar Rudolf: So that’s how to go about it.

Now I have still to put that link more prominently on the Holocaust Summit website so people can get there directly. That’s  a good point for you to make that and I will make that happen once we’re off here, and I will add that to the site so people can get to the merchandise easily.

Mark Collett: Well, thank you so much! We do have some Superchats so I’m just going to bring them up two seconds. We actually have a couple that hung over from the other night, so I’ll deal with them quickly. Covenant Soldier gave $10. Thank you so much! And said:

“Love the show with Rob Rondo. Hail the active clubs.”

Thank you so much! Flying Dutchman gave $50.

Thank you very much. And said:

“Catching up. Happy New Year!

Well, thank you my friend. I’ve actually sent you a message today so you can pick that up on Telegram. Thank you very much. Nationless Nationalist gave $3. Thank you so much! And said:

“Hope and encouragement to those suffering in silence.”

Well, thank you so much! Some Guy 14 gave $10, thank you so much! Said:

“Qu huge respect to Mr. Rudolf.”

Thank you so much! And Aunt Sally gave $5 and said:

“Mark, how likely am I to get my door kicked in for watching this conference?”

In the UK you see, one thing I’ll say is like in the UK, if I’m correct, And I’m just getting this sort of as correct as I can. In the UK it isn’t illegal to actually deny the Holocaust or to engage in revisionism, as far as I know.

However, if you were to do so in a way that was seen as insulting or demeaning to people, it would be. So if you were making jokes or if you were saying things which were couched in the way that was meant to be insulting, that may be illegal.

However, if you were doing sort of academic work such as what you do, that would be seen in a different light.

So I think in the UK this would be legal, but it would be very hard for anyone to get into trouble for simply watching this at home. Would you agree with that?

Germar Rudolf: Absolutely! We have, with all the censorship laws we have not a single case where a country has stooped down to the point where they persecute people for just attending, listening and consuming. Even the countries with the harshest policies when it comes to this. That’s Austria and Germany. You can, for instance, you can buy Holocaust sceptical literature that is not illegal if you buy only one copy for your own use. If the government happens to intercept it, they can still destroy it, but they can’t prosecute you for it. The same with attending a conference like this. It is not an offence in any country of the Western world. And when it comes to the UK, case law says you can contest the mainstream Holocaust narrative until you’re blue in the face. What you cannot do is in that context, disparage victims, survivors, martyrs, whatever. So in any way talking ironically, sarcastically, humourously, or in any way that is considered offending toward the survivors, the victims and so forth.

Now the company, as I just mentioned, Armreg.co.uk that has published and republished all this material and before that we were actually in the UK since 1996. I was personally, I lived in the UK until 1999. And I started the whole operation there. And it was called Castle Hill Publishers has gone belly up in late 2023, and then we switched over to Amreg. So just a reorganisation basically. Almost at all times been in the UK except for a stretch of one and a half, two years, and we have never been harassed by anyone. So keeping it scholarly, keeping it matter of factly and civilised, as you should, any discourse anyhow, keeps you safe in the UK for now.

Anyone attending, when you are in the chat and you make comments in there that can be considered disparaging to jews in general or survivors or descendants and victims of the National Socialist persecution of the jews. And you do that with an account that for some reason, because you set it up that way, allows the authorities to identify you, which would probably not be smart.

If you want to go on FTG media or somewhere else, use an ID that doesn’t allow anyone to identify you. And if an email is required, if you want safety, use a burner email or someone, some email that is not officially traceable to you directly.

However, if you abstain from making those kind of comments, which I advise under any circumstances, because nasty language doesn’t reflect good on the community and I’m no fan of it. So if you abstain from these kind of comments, you should be good under any circumstances on any place on this planet.

It’s different for our presenters. Some of them come from Europe and as I’ve mentioned, when we’re talking about those coming from France, they’re talking about their persecution. They’re not going to make statements on history themselves because we don’t want to get them in trouble. And if we have the question and answer session, I would like the audience also to abstain from questions that corners those French individuals and putting them on the spot, because they need to fly home and don’t want to be arrested. Not fly home, [chuckling] because they are at home! They don’t want to get arrested the next morning or whenever.

Mark Collett: Yeah, and I want to echo that. I mean, look, I believe it’s very important to talk about the kind of things that we’re talking about tonight. I think it’s important that we discuss things like this.

But I also think it’s very important to ensure that we do so in a productive and polite manner. Talking about this kind of stuff in a way that is disparaging or rude or ridiculous, it not only opens you up for arrest, which is a ridiculous position to put yourself in, but it also demeans the seriousness of the topic and it takes what we do out of an academic light.

Now, I’m not a revisionist. I talk about revisionism. I have revisionist guests on, but I’m generally speaking somebody who talks about demography and jewish or Zionist power and the way that jewish power affects the Western world. They’re the topics that I mainly specialise in. I do speak to revisionists. I’m interested in it. But obviously, if you are going to get involved in this, my suggestion is that you deal with it in an academic way for your own safety.

And also so the topic is held in the high regard that it deserves to be held in. If you’re there sort of cracking jokes and sharing memes and trying to be as edgy as possible, kind of undermines what people like Germar are doing. And there’s an awful lot of revisionists who have suffered greatly at the hands of the authorities over the years. And you don’t want to demean their suffering and their sacrifices.

We’ve got a five dollar Superchat from Mr. Smalls 14, who, regardless of what I just said, said:

“Germar, is it true you tried to sell soap in Sacramento with Pastor Eli?”

That’s obviously one of those jokes. You don’t have to answer that if you don’t wish. No.

Germar Rudolf: Yeah. The UK’s attitude towards Germany is that Germans have no humour. And you need to understand that the chicken has come to roost. The UK, as a winner of the Second World War, has pushed Germany in a situation where Germans can go to prison for jokes. The shortest German joke, do you know what that is?

Mark Collett: No, I don’t.

Germar Rudolf: The German word for joke is “witz”. Okay. The shortest German joke is “Ausch-witz”.

Mark Collett: [uncertain laughter from Mark]

Germar Rudolf: That gets you in prison in Germany.

Mark Collett: Indeed, indeed.

Germar Rudolf: So Germans don’t have humour because they have to watch their back. And they had to watch their backs for centuries. The Nazis didn’t invent book burning and the current government didn’t invent censorship laws. Germany has been under the stranglehold in the medievals of the Holy Inquisition, the worst of all European countries. So it has been bred into the German and out of the Germans to make certain jokes. Jokes live from the tension of putting things together that are not quite acceptable, talking seriously about them. So you package them.  And that is exactly the attempt that this fellow has been doing, pushing the envelope into the not quite acceptable. But making this joke.

And that has become a crime in Germany and in borderline areas, has always been. And now in the UK, people are getting in trouble for showing sarcasm, irony and so forth in that context. If and when jokes become punishable by law, you stop laughing! And I take that opportunity to make that clear. These kind of jokes. Make them when you’re sitting in the bar, but don’t make them publicly.

Mark Collett: Yeah, I want to sort of echo this is a serious point. So I actually believe that when it comes to comedy, when it comes to humour, when it comes to making a joke, really nothing should be off limits.

And once you start making certain things off limits, it’s very easy to make anything and everything off limits. So then you get sort of the Edinburgh Fringe voting the joke of the year as “Why did the chicken cross the road?” Because no one’s allowed to actually joke about anything else.

And I think it was Jimmy Carr who made the remark, a famous British comedian, who made the remark that:

“He’s probably already made the joke that will get him one day cancelled and ruin his career.”

And that’s how it is, because we constantly see the mainstream media, liberals, sort of fans of censorship, spending hours, if not days, if not in some cases weeks, trawling through people’s back catalogue of streams, tweets, Facebook posts, searching for something that they can find offensive in order to cancel someone, or worse still, get them arrested. And I find this very interesting because I’ve wrestled with this myself. People might say:

“Well, look, Mark, I came to your shows and I’ve now watched 200 hours of them and I found these three things offensive.”

And my question would be, if you came to the shows of Britain’s leading ethno-nationalists, and you were looking to find something offensive, is that really my fault? You know, I’m not out there saying it in the street. I’m not shouting it through a megaphone into people’s faces. I’m hosting a show. People come to the show, they know what they’re gonna get when they come to the show. This isn’t something that’s being broadcast to every car and home and workplace in the UK. You come here and you seek this out, knowing that you’re going to get a discussion about things relating to our cause.

And I think the people going out of their way to dig things up on people and to, it’s like Germar’s conference. If you were to go there and to record everything that was said and watch it in detail, taking notes, looking to find something offensive, that kind of defeats the object of watching the conference in the first place or attending the conference in the first place, because you’re not going there in good faith and then finding it offensive by accident. You’re going there on purpose to look for a reason to be offended so that you can then report it.

And this is one of the widespread problems in the West that people, the people who claim they don’t want to be offended will go out of their way and go to great lengths in order to be offended, or so they can claim that they were offended in order to report people to the authorities, which is just essentially a charter for censorship, allowing this to happen. But I do always ask people to be respectful, to exercise caution, not to use racial stuff.

As I said to all my guests, you know, please abide by sensible rules so that we are always the polite academic group that talk about things in a sensible manner.

And one thing that impresses me with Germar both times I’ve had him on is the way he can speak so fluently and in such a way that I think it would be impossible for anyone to find him offensive unless they were going out of their way to do. Optics prime gave $5. Thank you so much! And said:

“This man is a national treasure. Thank you for your work, good sir.”

Well, thank you for that Superchat. Lars Aerback with AE, gave $15.

Thank you so much! He said:

“A positive story from Denmark today. Our Supreme Court acquitted a man for hosting a site with racist jokes. Old fashioned holocaust jokes amongst them. The case has been through all three courts and has been going for over six years. This is a win for freedom of speech!”

Well, that is certainly good news from Denmark, and I hope to see more.

Germar Rudolf: Denmark? Regarding Denmark?

Mark Collett: Yeah.

Germar Rudolf: Oh that’s good! Yeah. Denmark has been a stronghold in all those years. Some German holocaust sceptics and historical sceptics actually fled to Denmark and found refuge there over the past four, five, six decades.

Mark Collett: And I’d like to say as well, big thank you to Malibu and Coke for gifting 10 subs to the channel.

And as I always say, those who accepted the gifted subs. It would mean a great deal to me if you kept them up. You know, $5 a month means very little to most people, but if I had four or five hundred people every month subbing my channel, it would take a lot of weight off my mind at the beginning of every month.

And that’s the end of the Superchat so I’m going to bring the stream to a close now. You’ve been a wonderful guest as ever! The advert for the conference has been excellent and again you’ve done most of the heavy lifting tonight and most of the speaking, but is there anything you’d like to say as a final thought before we wrap things up?

Germar Rudolf: Not much more than holocaustsummit.com! So the ultimate link will be streaming and that can change any minute depending on what happens, will be posted there there. If you submit your email, you’ll get it also in an email. And I hope we all see you there! And we are going to build a new community that gets stronger by the day!

Mark Collett: Well, thank you so much!

I’d like to thank Germar for being here. He’s a courageous guy. He’s a very good speaker. We have interviewed him in full before. If you want to watch that interview, it is in my previous videos. Go and watch it. It’s well worth watching. It’s a two hour special, that one where we talk about Germar’s personal journey, what he’s been through, the incredible repression he’s faced and his incredible journey in his life. Please do that and also support his event, support his work. He’s a really nice guy. It was really kind of him to come on here tonight and he’s been, as always, the perfect guest.

I’d like to remind you all that I will be back on Sunday with the ladies from Return to the Land. That’s three housewives, mothers and home-schoolers from Return to the Land talking about women in nationalism and their roles as mothers and homemakers and educators. So that’ll be an interesting stream. Please join me then 7 PM UK time on Sunday for that. Until then, if you’re out doing activism at the weekend, please be safe, stay within the law and know your rights. And until Sunday, have a great evening, have a great weekend and I’ll see you all again soon.

Thank you to Germar, thank you to everyone who donated so generously. And as always, thank you to this wonderful community for supporting us, for supporting these shows and for supporting the good work of my guests. Thank you everyone. I love you all. Have a great weekend. Good night.

https://katana17.com/2026/01/25/mark-collett-germar-rudolf-holocaust-summit-2026-jan-23-2026-transcript/