On Eternal Strangers Critical Views of Jews and Judaism Through the Ages - Thomas Dalton

 

Poor Jews! Condemned by God and fate to be forever misunderstood, ne-glected, insulted, abused, envied, pitied—indeed, hated by all mankind. 

The subject of insult, calumny, slander, nay, even beatings, torture, and all manner of physical abuse. Such an unkind destiny. How did it come to this? How is it that throughout history, Jews have come to be detested, battered, and beaten down? Is it something about Jewish culture? Religion? Ethnicity? Values? And how does this long history relate to present-day abuse and hatred heaped upon Jews worldwide, and on the Jewish state? 

These are important questions, given the present condition of the world and the power and influence commanded by the Jewish community generally. Part of the current animosity is based, no doubt, on the mere fact that Jews, a small minority in every nation of the world save Israel, hold grossly disproportionate power to their numbers.1 Acting through the United States, Jews are more dominant than ever; we need only recall the statement of Malaysian president Mahathir Mohamad, who said, “Today the Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.”2 People everywhere, no matter their religious or political context, understand an elemental fact of democracy: a small, wealthy minority of people should not exert disproportionate influence in the life of a nation. 

That the Jews do this is undeniable, and they would be disliked on this count alone. 

But there is much more to the story. Their present level of influence is unprecedented, but Jews have had access to power for millennia. Against this backdrop have been numerous pogroms, banishments, and outright massacres. Thus it was not strictly their influence that led others to detest them. Other factors have been at work. By recounting this history, and the observations of prominent individuals, we may better understand the Jewish phenomenon, and thus learn how to better deal with this most influential minority.

In the present work, I will trace the history of negative attitudes toward Jews and Jewish society, beginning in ancient times. The point is not to revel in abuse, but to give voice to the most articulate and insightful critics of Jews—and to draw plausible conclusions. 

In the academic literature, such a study would come under the heading ‘history of anti-Semitism.’ There are many such works; the library database WorldCat lists over 800 English-language books on this topic published in the past 10 years alone. But these books—the vast majority by Jewish authors—reflect a strongly pro-Jewish bias. Consequently, the critics are nearly always the source of the problem, never the Jews or Jewish actions.

The Jews themselves are almost uniformly portrayed as an innocent and beleaguered people, set upon by cruel and vindictive forces. The various “anti-Semites” are depicted as sick individuals, sadistic in nature, even downright evil. At the very least, they are severely mentally ill. Consider this impressive statement from a recent “anatomy of anti-Semitism”: 

In the 1940s and 1950s, students of anti-Semitism widely regarded that phenomenon … as a ramification of severe emotional or social disor-der. They realized that Christian prejudice… could not explain the fire-storm that had nearly obliterated twentieth-century European Jewry. … In the agonized post-Holocaust reassessment, … psychohistorians, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts tended to focus on flaws in the argument that anti-Semitism sprang from christological sources. … [American postwar studies] describe anti-Semitism as an emotional disorder produced by intrapsychic tensions and sexual and social anxieties and frustrations. … Jew haters accordingly exhibit grave personality disorders. They are asocial or antisocial, alienated, isolated, inhibited, anxious, repressed, rigid, regressive, infantile, narcissistic, hostile, punitive, conformist, dependent, delusive, guilt-ridden, paranoid, irrational, ag-gressive, and prone to violence. (Jaher 1994: 10-12) Frederic Jaher all but exhausts his thesaurus in seeking pejorative appella-tions for the insane “Jew haters.” And yet we must ask ourselves: Is this rational? Were there no other causes that might have motivated the critics of Jewry? Were all the notable ‘anti-Semites’ in history—and there were many, as I will show—really insane? All those prominent and brilliant in-dividuals, by all other accounts men of genius—were they closet lunatics? 

Or does the problem lie elsewhere? Is the psychosis, perhaps, resident in the Jewish personality, the Jewish psyche, the Jewish race? Is it a defense mechanism to reflect one’s own deficiencies upon one’s enemies? 

In the following assessment of historical attitudes, I will be seeking common and universal themes. Attitudes, criticisms, and other negative observations that persist over the centuries and across cultures are significant markers; they indicate a set of robust and persistent traits that are ap-parently embedded in the Jewish character. It is enlightening to examine such traits in an open and objective manner.

George Orwell - Bookshop Memories

 

When I worked in a second-hand bookshop – so easily pictured, if you don’t work in one, as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios – the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people. Our shop had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one. First edition snobs were much commoner than lovers of literature, but oriental students haggling over cheap textbooks were commoner still, and vague-minded women looking for birthday presents for their nephews were commonest of all.

Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop. For example, the dear old lady who ‘wants a book for an invalid’ (a very common demand, that), and the other dear old lady who read such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a copy. Unfortunately she doesn’t remember the title or the author’s name or what the book was about, but she does remember that it had a red cover. But apart from these there are two well-known types of pest by whom every secondhand bookshop is haunted. One is the decayed person smelling of old breadcrusts who comes every day, sometimes several times a day, and tries to sell you worthless books. The other is the person who orders large quantities of books for which he has not the smallest intention of paying. In our shop we sold nothing on credit, but we would put books aside, or order them if necessary, for people who arranged to fetch them away later. Scarcely half the people who ordered books from us ever came back. It used to puzzle me at first. What made them do it? They would come in and demand some rare and expensive book, would make us promise over and over again to keep it for them, and then would vanish never to return. But many of them, of course, were unmistakable paranoiacs. They used to talk in a grandiose manner about themselves and tell the most ingenious stories to explain how they had happened to come out of doors without any money – stories which, in many cases, I am sure they themselves believed. In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money. In the end one gets to know these people almost at a glance. For all their big talk there is something moth-eaten and aimless about them. Very often, when we were dealing with an obvious paranoiac, we would put aside the books he asked for and then put them back on the shelves the moment he had gone. None of them, I noticed, ever attempted to take books away without paying for them; merely to order them was enough – it gave them, I suppose, the illusion that they were spending real money.

Like most second-hand bookshops we had various sidelines. We sold second-hand typewriters, for instance, and also stamps – used stamps, I mean. Stamp-collectors are a strange, silent, fish-like breed, of all ages, but only of the male sex; women, apparently, fail to see the peculiar charm of gumming bits of coloured paper into albums. We also sold sixpenny horoscopes compiled by somebody who claimed to have foretold the Japanese earthquake. They were in sealed envelopes and I never opened one of them myself, but the people who bought them often came back and told us how ‘true’ their horoscopes had been. (Doubtless any horoscope seems ‘true’ if it tells you that you are highly attractive to the opposite sex and your worst fault is generosity.) We did a good deal of business in children’s books, chiefly ‘remainders’. Modern books for children are rather horrible things, especially when you see them in the mass. Personally I would sooner give a child a copy of Petronius Arbiter than Peter Pan, but even Barrie seems manly and wholesome compared with some of his later imitators. At Christmas time we spent a feverish ten days struggling with Christmas cards and calendars, which are tiresome things to sell but good business while the season lasts. It used to interest me to see the brutal cynicism with which Christian sentiment is exploited. The touts from the Christmas card firms used to come round with their catalogues as early as June. A phrase from one of their invoices sticks in my memory. It was: ‘2 doz. Infant Jesus with rabbits’.

But our principle sideline was a lending library – the usual ‘twopenny no-deposit’ library of five or six hundred volumes, all fiction. How the book thieves must love those libraries! It is the easiest crime in the world to borrow a book at one shop for twopence, remove the label and sell it at another shop for a shilling. Nevertheless booksellers generally find that it pays them better to have a certain number of books stolen (we used to lose about a dozen a month) than to frighten customers away by demanding a deposit.

Our shop stood exactly on the frontier between Hampstead and Camden Town, and we were frequented by all types from baronets to bus-conductors. Probably our library subscribers were a fair cross-section of London’s reading public. It is therefore worth noting that of all the authors in our library the one who ‘went out’ the best was – Priestley? Hemingway? Walpole? Wodehouse? No, Ethel M. Dell, with Warwick Deeping a good second and Jeffrey Farnol, I should say, third. Dell’s novels, of course, are read solely by women, but by women of all kinds and ages and not, as one might expect, merely by wistful spinsters and the fat wives of tobacconists. It is not true that men don’t read novels, but it is true that there are whole branches of fiction that they avoid. Roughly speaking, what one might call the average novel – the ordinary, good-bad, Galsworthy-and-water stuff which is the norm of the English novel – seems to exist only for women. Men read either the novels it is possible to respect, or detective stories. But their consumption of detective stories is terrific. One of our subscribers to my knowledge read four or five detective stories every week for over a year, besides others which he got from another library. What chiefly surprised me was that he never read the same book twice. Apparently the whole of that frightful torrent of trash (the pages read every year would, I calculated, cover nearly three quarters of an acre) was stored for ever in his memory. He took no notice of titles or author’s names, but he could tell by merely glancing into a book whether he had ‘had it already’.

In a lending library you see people’s real tastes, not their pretended ones, and one thing that strikes you is how completely the ‘classical’ English novelists have dropped out of favour. It is simply useless to put Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Trollope, etc. into the ordinary lending library; nobody takes them out. At the mere sight of a nineteenth-century novel people say, ‘Oh, but that’s old!’ and shy away immediately. Yet it is always fairly easy to sell Dickens, just as it is always easy to sell Shakespeare. Dickens is one of those authors whom people are ‘always meaning to’ read, and, like the Bible, he is widely known at second hand. People know by hearsay that Bill Sikes was a burglar and that Mr Micawber had a bald head, just as they know by hearsay that Moses was found in a basket of bulrushes and saw the ‘back parts’ of the Lord. Another thing that is very noticeable is the growing unpopularity of American books. And another – the publishers get into a stew about this every two or three years – is the unpopularity of short stories. The kind of person who asks the librarian to choose a book for him nearly always starts by saying ‘I don’t want short stories’, or ‘I do not desire little stories’, as a German customer of ours used to put it. If you ask them why, they sometimes explain that it is too much fag to get used to a new set of characters with every story; they like to ‘get into’ a novel which demands no further thought after the first chapter. I believe, though, that the writers are more to blame here than the readers. Most modern short stories, English and American, are utterly lifeless and worthless, far more so than most novels. The short stories which are stories are popular enough, vide D. H. Lawrence, whose short stories are as popular as his novels.

Would I like to be a bookseller de métier? On the whole – in spite of my employer’s kindness to me, and some happy days I spent in the shop – no.

Given a good pitch and the right amount of capital, any educated person ought to be able to make a small secure living out of a bookshop. Unless one goes in for ‘rare’ books it is not a difficult trade to learn, and you start at a great advantage if you know anything about the insides of books. (Most booksellers don’t. You can-get their measure by having a look at the trade papers where they advertise their wants. If you don’t see an ad. for Boswell’s Decline and Fall you are pretty sure to see one for The Mill on the Floss by T. S. Eliot.) Also it is a humane trade which is not capable of being vulgarized beyond a certain point. The combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman. But the hours of work are very long – I was only a part-time employee, but my employer put in a seventy-hour week, apart from constant expeditions out of hours to buy books – and it is an unhealthy life. As a rule a bookshop is horribly cold in winter, because if it is too warm the windows get misted over, and a bookseller lives on his windows. And books give off more and nastier dust than any other class of objects yet invented, and the top of a book is the place where every bluebottle prefers to die.

But the real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for life is that while I was in it I lost my love of books. A bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that gives him a distaste for them; still worse is the fact that he is constantly dusting them and hauling them to and fro. There was a time when I really did love books – loved the sight and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if they were fifty or more years old. Nothing pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them for a shilling at a country auction. There is a peculiar flavour about the battered unexpected books you pick up in that kind of collection: minor eighteenth-century poets, out-of-date gazeteers, odd volumes of forgotten novels, bound numbers of ladies’ magazines of the sixties. For casual reading – in your bath, for instance, or late at night when you are too tired to go to bed, or in the odd quarter of an hour before lunch – there is nothing to touch a back number of the Girl’s Own Paper. But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books. Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening. Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book that I want to read and can’t borrow, and I never buy junk. The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me no longer. It is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead bluebottles.

Fortnightly, November 1936

Juan Ramón Jiménez, Platero and I

 Platero and I is usually thought of as a children’s book. In the book trade it is certainly marketed as such. Yet in this set of vignettes held together by the figure of the donkey Platero there is much that an impressionable child will find hard to bear, and in addition much that is beyond the range of interest of children. I therefore find it better to conceive of Platero and I as impressions of the life of a town, Juan Ramón Jiménez’s home town of Moguer in Andalusia, recollected by an adult who has not lost touch with the immediacy of childhood experience. These impressions are recorded with the delicacy and restraint that is proper when side by side with the adult reader is an audience of children.

Besides the ever-present gaze of the child, there is a second and more obvious gaze in the book: the gaze of Platero himself. Donkeys are, to human beings, not particularly beautiful creatures – not as beautiful as (to speak only of herbivores) gazelles or even horses – but they do have the advantage of possessing beautiful eyes: large, dark, liquid – soulful, we sometimes call them – and long-lashed. (We find the smaller, redder eyes of pigs less beautiful. Is this the reason why we do not find it easy to love or befriend these intelligent, friendly, humorous beasts? As for insects, their organs of sight are so alien to us that it is not easy to find a place in our affections for them.)

There is a terrible scene in Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment in which a drunken peasant beats an exhausted mare to death. First he beats her with an iron bar, then he beats her over the eyes with a club, as if above all he wants to extinguish the image of himself in her eyes. In Platero and I we read of an old blind mare who is chased away by her owners but insists on returning, angering them so much that with sticks and stones they kill her. Platero and his owner (this is the term our language provides for us – it is certainly not the word Jiménez uses) come upon the mare lying dead by the roadside; her sightless eyes seem at last to see.

When you die, Platero’s master promises his little donkey, I will not abandon you by the roadside but bury you by the foot of the great pine that you love.

It is the mutual gaze, between the eyes of this man – a man whom the gypsy children mock as crazy, and who tells the story of Platero and I rather than of I and Platero – and the eyes of ‘his’ donkey that establishes the deep bond between them, in much the same way that a bond is established between mother and infant at the moment when their gazes first lock. Again and again the mutual bond between man and beast is reinforced. ‘From time to time Platero stops eating to look at me. I from time to time stop reading to look at Platero’.1

Platero comes into existence as an individual – as a character, in fact – with a life and a world of experience of his own at the moment when the man whom I call his owner, the crazy man, sees that Platero sees him, and in the act of seeing acknowledges him as an equal. At this moment ‘Platero’ ceases to be just a label and becomes the donkey’s identity, his true name, all that he possesses in the world.

Jiménez does not humanize Platero. To humanize him would be to betray his asinine essence. By its asinine nature, Platero’s experience is closed off and impenetrable to human beings. Nevertheless, this barrier is now and again breached when for an instant the poet’s vision, like a ray of light, penetrates and illuminates Platero’s world; or, to make the same claim in a different form, when the senses that we human beings possess in common with the beasts, infused with our heart’s love, permit us, through the agency of Jiménez the poet, to intuit that experience. ‘Platero, his dark eyes scarlet from the sunset, walks off gently to the pool of crimson and rose and violet waters; he dips his mouth gently into the mirrors which seem to turn liquid at his touch; and through his great throat flows the heavy stream of shadowy, bloodlike water’. (p. 37)

‘I treat Platero as if he were a child … I kiss him, tease him, infuriate him; he understands very well that I love him and he bears me no spite. He is so like me that I have come to believe that he dreams my very dreams’. (p. 58) Here we tremble on the edge of the moment so urgently longed for in the fantasy lives of children, when the great divide between species crumbles away and we and the creatures who have so long been exiled from us come together in a greater unity. (How long exiled? In the Judaeo-Christian myth, the exile dates from our expulsion from Paradise, and the end of exile is yearned for as the day when the lion shall lie down with the lamb.)

At this moment we see the crazy man, the poet, behaving toward Platero as joyfully and affectionately as small children behave toward puppies and kittens; and Platero responds as young animals do to small children, with equal joy and affection, as if they know, as well as the child knows (and the sober, prosaic adult does not), that we are finally all brothers and sisters in this world; also that no matter how humble we are we must have someone to love or we will dry up and perish.

In the end Platero dies. He dies because he has swallowed poison, but also because the lifespan of a donkey is not as long as that of a man. Unless we choose to befriend elephants or turtles, we will mourn the deaths of our animal friends more often than they will mourn ours: this is one of the hard lessons that Platero and I does not shirk. But in another sense Platero does not die: always this ‘silly little donkey’ will be coming back to us, braying, surrounded by laughing children, wreathed in yellow flowers. (p. 45)

From: Stranger Shores,  J.M. Coetzee

Holocaust Handbooks & Documentaries - Taboo-Breaking Books and Documentaries

 Holocaust Handbooks

This ambitious, growing series addresses various aspects of the “Holocaust” of the WWII era. Most of them are based on decades of research from archives all over the world. They are heavily referenced. In contrast to most other works on this issue, the tomes of this series approach its topic with profound academic scrutiny and a critical attitude. Any Holocaust researcher ignoring this series will remain oblivious to some of the most important research in the field. These books are designed to both convince the common reader as well as academics. The following books have appeared so far, or are about to be released. Compare hardcopy and eBook prices at www.findbookprices.com.

Section One: General Overviews of the Holocaust The First Holocaust. The Surprising Origin of the Six-Million Figure. By Don Heddesheimer. This compact but substantive study documents propaganda spread prior to, during and after the FIRST World War that claimed East European Jewry was on the brink of annihilation. The magic number of suffering and dying Jews was 6 million back then as well. The book details how these Jewish fundraising operations in America raised vast sums in the name of feeding suffering Polish and Russian Jews but actually funneled much of the money to Zionist and Communist groups. 5th edition, 198 pages, b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. (#6)

Lectures on the Holocaust. Controversial Issues Cross Examined. By Germar Rudolf. Between 1992 and 2005 German scholar Germar Rudolf lectured to various audiences about the Holocaust in the light of new findings. Rudolf’s sometimes astounding facts and arguments fell on fertile soil among his listeners, as they were presented in a very sensitive and scholarly way. This book is the literary version of Rudolf’s lectures, enriched with the most recent findings of historiography. Rudolf introduces the most important arguments for his findings, and his audience reacts with supportive, skeptical and also hostile questions. We believe this book is the best introduction into this taboo topic. Third edition, 590 pages, b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. (#15)

Breaking the Spell. The Holocaust, Myth & Reality. By Nicholas Kollerstrom. In 1941, British Intelligence analysts cracked the German “Enigma” code. Hence, in 1942 and 1943, encrypted radio communications between German concentration camps and the Berlin headquarters were decrypted. The intercepted data refutes, the orthodox “Holocaust” narrative. It reveals that the Germans were desperate to reduce the death rate in their labor camps, which was caused by catastrophic typhus epidemics. Dr. Kollerstrom, a science historian, has taken these intercepts and a wide array of mostly unchallenged corroborating evidence to show that “witness statements” supporting the human gas chamber narrative clearly clash with the available scientific data. Kollerstrom concludes that the history of the Nazi “Holocaust” has been written by the victors with ulterior motives. It is distorted, exaggerated and largely wrong. With a foreword by Prof. Dr. James Fetzer. 5th edition, 271 pages, b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. (#31)

Debating the Holocaust. A New Look at Both Sides. By Thomas Dalton. Mainstream historians insist that there cannot be, may not be a debate about the Holocaust. But ignoring it does not make this controversy go away. Traditional scholars admit that there was neither a budget, a plan, nor an order for the Holocaust; that the key camps have all but vanished, and so have any human remains; that material and unequivocal documentary evidence is absent; and that there are serious problems with survivor testimonies. Dalton juxtaposes the traditional Holocaust narrative with revisionist challenges and then analyzes the mainstream’s responses to them. He reveals the weaknesses of both sides, while declaring revisionism the winner of the current state of the debate. 4th, revised and expanded edition, 341 pages, b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. (#32)

The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. The Case against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry. By Arthur R. Butz. The first writer to analyze the entire Holocaust complex in a precise scientific manner. This book exhibits the overwhelming force of arguments accumulated by the mid-1970s. It continues to be a major historical reference work, frequently cited by prominent personalities. This edition has numerous supplements with new information gathered over the last 35 years. Fourth edition, 524 pages, b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. (#7)

Dissecting the Holocaust. The Growing Critique of ‘Truth’ and ‘Memory.’ Edited by Germar Rudolf. Dissecting the Holocaust applies state-of-the-art scientific technique and classic methods of detection to investigate the alleged murder of millions of Jews by Germans during World War II. In 22 contributions—each of some 30 pages—the 17 authors dissect generally accepted paradigms of the “Holocaust.” It reads as exciting as a crime novel: so many lies, forgeries and deceptions by politicians, historians and scientists are proven. This is the intellectual adventure of the 21st century. Be part of it! Third revised edition. Ca. 630 pages, b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. (#1)

The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry. By Walter N. Sanning. Six Million Jews died in the Holocaust. Sanning did not take that number at face value, but thoroughly explored European population developments and shifts mainly caused by emigration as well as deportations and evacuations conducted by both Nazis and the Soviets, among other things. The book is based mainly on Jewish, Zionist and mainstream sources. It concludes that a sizeable share of the Jews found missing during local censuses after the Second World War, which were so far counted as “Holocaust victims,” had either emigrated (mainly to Israel or the U.S.) or had been deported by Stalin to Siberian labor camps. 2nd, corrected edition, foreword by A.R. Butz, epilogue by Germar Rudolf containing important updates; 224 pages, b&w illustrations, bibliography (#29).

Air Photo Evidence: World War Two Photos of Alleged Mass Murder Sites Analyzed. By John C. Ball. During World War Two both German and Allied reconnaissance aircraft took countless air photos of places of tactical and strategic interest in Europe. These photos are prime evidence for the investigation of the Holocaust. Air photos of locations like Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Babi Yar etc. permit an insight into what did or did not happen there. John Ball has unearthed many pertinent photos and has thoroughly analyzed them. This book is full of air photo reproductions and schematic drawings explaining them. According to the author, these images refute many of the atrocity claims made by witnesses in connection with events in the German sphere of influence. 3rd revised and expanded edition. Edited by Germar Rudolf; with a contribution by Carlo Mattogno. 168 pages, 8.5”×11”, b&w illustrations, bibliography, index (#27).

The Leuchter Reports: Critical Edition. By Fred Leuchter, Robert Faurisson and Germar Rudolf. Between 1988 and 1991, U.S. expert on execution technologies Fred Leuchter wrote four detailed reports addressing whether the Third Reich operated homicidal gas chambers. The first report on Auschwitz and Majdanek became world famous. Based on chemical analyses and various technical arguments, Leuchter concluded that the locations investigated “could not have then been, or now be, utilized or seriously considered to function as execution gas chambers.” 4th edition, 252 pages, b&w illustrations. (#16)

The Giant with Feet of Clay: Raul Hilberg and His Standard Work on the “Holocaust.” By Jürgen Graf. Raul Hilberg’s major work The Destruction of European Jewry is an orthodox standard work on the Holocaust. But what evidence does Hilberg provide to back his thesis that there was a German plan to exterminate Jews, carried out mainly in gas chambers? Jürgen Graf applies the methods of critical analysis to Hilberg’s evidence and examines the results in light of modern historiography. The results of Graf’s critical analysis are devastating for Hilberg. 2nd, corrected edition, 139 pages, b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. (#3)

Jewish Emigration from the Third Reich. By Ingrid Weckert. Current historical writings about the Third Reich claim state it was difficult for Jews to flee from Nazi persecution. The truth is that Jewish emigration was welcomed by the German authorities. Emigration was not some kind of wild flight, but rather a lawfully determined and regulated matter. Weckert’s booklet elucidates the emigration process in law and policy. She shows that German and Jewish authorities worked closely together. Jews interested in emigrating received detailed advice and offers of help from both sides. 2nd ed., 130 pages, index. (#12)

Inside the Gas Chambers: The Extermination of Mainstream Holocaust Historiography. By Carlo Mattogno. Neither increased media propaganda or political pressure nor judicial persecution can stifle revisionism. Hence, in early 2011, the Holocaust Orthodoxy published a 400 pp. book (in German) claiming to refute “revisionist propaganda,” trying again to prove “once and for all” that there were homicidal gas chambers at the camps of Dachau, Natzweiler, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, Ravensbrück, Neuengamme, Stutthof… you name them. Mattogno shows with his detailed analysis of this work of propaganda that mainstream Holocaust hagiography is beating around the bush rather than addressing revisionist research results. He exposes their myths, distortions and lies. 2nd edition, 280 pages, b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. (#25)

Section Two: Specific non-Auschwitz Studies Treblinka: Extermination Camp or Transit Camp? By Carlo Mattogno and Jürgen Graf. It is alleged that at Treblinka in East Poland between 700,000 and 3,000,000 persons were murdered in 1942 and 1943. The weapons used were said to have been stationary and/or mobile gas chambers, fast-acting or slow-acting poison gas, unslaked lime, superheated steam, electricity, diesel exhaust fumes etc. Holocaust historians alleged that bodies were piled as high as multi-storied buildings and burned without a trace, using little or no fuel at all. Graf and Mattogno have now analyzed the origins, logic and technical feasibility of the official version of Treblinka. On the basis of numerous documents they reveal Treblinka’s true identity as a mere transit camp. 2nd edition, 372 pages, b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. (#8)

Belzec in Propaganda, Testimonies, Archeological Research and History.By Carlo Mattogno. Witnesses report that between 600,000 and 3 million Jews were murdered in the Belzec camp, located in Poland. Various murder weapons are claimed to have been used: diesel gas; unslaked lime in trains; high voltage; vacuum chambers; etc. The corpses were incinerated on huge pyres without leaving a trace. For those who know the stories about Treblinka this sounds familiar. Thus the author has restricted this study to the aspects which are new compared to Treblinka. In contrast to Treblinka, forensic drillings and excavations were performed at Belzec, the results of which are critically reviewed. 142 pages, b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. (#9)

Sobibor: Holocaust Propaganda and Reality. By Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues and Carlo Mattogno. Between 25,000 and 2 million Jews are said to have been killed in gas chambers in the Sobibór camp in Poland. The corpses were allegedly buried in mass graves and later incinerated on pyres. This book investigates these claims and shows that they are based on the selective use of contradictory eyewitness testimony. Archeological surveys of the camp in 2000-2001 are analyzed, with fatal results for the extermination camp hypothesis. The book also documents the general National Socialist policy toward Jews, which never included a genocidal “final solution.” 442 pages, b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. (#19)

The “Extermination Camps” of “Aktion Reinhardt”. By Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues and Carlo Mattogno. In late 2011, several members of the exterminationist Holocaust Controversies blog published a study which claims to refute three of our authors’ monographs on the camps Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka (see previous three entries). This tome is their point-by-point response, which makes “mincemeat” out of the bloggers’ attempt at refutation. It requires familiarity with the above-mentioned books and constitutes a comprehensive update and expansion of their themes. 2nd edition, two volumes, total of 1396 pages, illustrations, bibliography. (#28)

Chelmno: A Camp in History & Propaganda. By Carlo Mattogno. At Chelmno, huge masses of Jewish prisoners are said to have been gassed in “gas vans” or shot (claims vary from 10,000 to 1.3 million victims). This study covers the subject from every angle, undermining the orthodox claims about the camp with an overwhelmingly effective body of evidence. Eyewitness statements, gas wagons as extermination weapons, forensics reports and excavations, German documents—all come under Mattogno’s scrutiny. Here are the uncensored facts about Chelmno, not the propaganda. 2nd ed., 188 pages, indexed, illustrated, bibliography. (#23)

The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation. (A perfect companion to the Chelmno book.) By Santiago Alvarez and Pierre Marais. It is alleged that the Nazis used mobile gas chambers to exterminate 700,000 people. Up until 2011, no thorough monograph had appeared on the topic. Santiago Alvarez has remedied the situation. Are witness statements reliable? Are documents genuine? Where are the murder weapons? Could they have operated as claimed? Where are the corpses? Alvarez has scrutinized all known wartime documents, photos and witness statements on this topic, and has examined the claims made by the mainstream. 390 pages, b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. (#26)

The Einsatzgruppen in the Occupied Eastern Territories: Genesis, Missions and Actions. By C. Mattogno. Before invading the Soviet Union, the German authorities set up special units meant to secure the area behind the German front. Orthodox historians claim that these unites called Einsatzgruppen primarily engaged in rounding up and mass-murdering Jews. This study sheds a critical light into this topic by reviewing all the pertinent sources as well as material traces. It reveals on the one hand that original war-time documents do not fully support the orthodox genocidal narrative, and on the other that most post-“liberation” sources such as testimonies and forensic reports are steeped in Soviet atrocity propaganda and thus utterly unreliable. In addition, material traces of the claimed massacres are rare due to an attitude of collusion by governments and Jewish lobby groups. 830 pp., b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. (#39)

Concentration Camp Majdanek. A Historical and Technical Study. By Carlo Mattogno and Jürgen Graf. Little research had been directed toward Concentration Camp Majdanek in central Poland, even though it is claimed that up to a million Jews were murdered there. The only information available is discredited Polish Communist propaganda. This glaring research gap has finally been filled. After exhaustive research of primary sources, Mattogno and Graf created a monumental study which expertly dissects and repudiates the myth of homicidal gas chambers at Majdanek. They also critically investigated the legend of mass executions of Jews in tank trenches (“Operation Harvest Festival”) and prove them groundless. The authors’ investigations lead to unambiguous conclusions about the camp which are radically different from the official theses. Again they have produced a standard and methodical investigative work, which authentic historiography cannot ignore. Third edition, 358 pages, b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. (#5)

Concentration Camp Stutthof and Its Function in National Socialist Jewish Policy. By Carlo Mattogno and Jürgen Graf. The Stutthof camp in Prussia has never before been scientifically investigated by traditional historians, who claim nonetheless that Stutthof served as a ‘makeshift’ extermination camp in 1944. Based mainly on archival resources, this study thoroughly debunks this view and shows that Stutthof was in fact a center for the organization of German forced labor toward the end of World War II. Fourth edition, 170 pages, b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. (#4)

Section Three: Auschwitz StudiesThe Making of the Auschwitz Myth: Auschwitz in British Intercepts, Polish Underground Reports and Postwar Testimonies (1941-1947). By Carlo Mattogno. Using messages sent by the Polish underground to London, SS radio messages send to and from Auschwitz that were intercepted and decrypted by the British, and a plethora of witness statements made during the war and in the immediate postwar period, the author shows how exactly the myth of mass murder in Auschwitz gas chambers was created, and how it was turned subsequently into “history” by intellectually corrupt scholars who cherry-picked claims that fit into their agenda and ignored or actively covered up literally thousands of lies of “witnesses” to make their narrative look credible. Ca. 300 pp., b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. (Scheduled for mid-2019; #41)

The Real Case of Auschwitz: Robert van Pelt’s Evidence from the Irving Trial Critically Reviewed. By Carlo Mattogno. Prof. Robert van Pelt is considered one of the best mainstream experts on Auschwitz and has been called upon several times in holocaust court cases. His work is cited by many to prove the holocaust happened as mainstream scholars insist. This book is a scholarly response to Prof. van Pelt—and Jean-Claude Pressac. It shows that their studies are heavily flawed. This is a book of prime political and scholarly importance to those looking for the truth about Auschwitz. 3rd edition, 692 pages, b&w illustrations, glossary, bibliography, index. (#22)

Auschwitz: Plain Facts: A Response to Jean-Claude Pressac. Edited by Germar Rudolf. French pharmacist Jean-Claude Pressac tried to refute revisionist findings with the “technical” method. For this he was praised by the mainstream, and they proclaimed victory over the “revisionists.” In Auschwitz: Plain Facts, Pressac’s works and claims are debunked. 2nd ed., 226 pages, b&w illustrations, glossary bibliography, index. (#14)

Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers: An Introduction and Update. By Germar Rudolf. Pressac’s 1989 oversize book of the same title was a trail blazer. Its many document reproductions are still valuable, but after decades of additional research, Pressac’s annotations are outdated. This book summarizes the most pertinent research results on Auschwitz gained during the past 30 years. With many references to Pressac’s epic tome, it serves as an update and correction to it, whether you own an original hard copy of it, read it online, borrow it from a library, purchase a reprint soon on sale, or are just interested in such a summary in general. 144 pages, b&w illustrations, bibliography. (#42)

The Chemistry of Auschwitz: The Technology and Toxicology of Zyklon B and the Gas Chambers – A Crime Scene Investigation. By Germar Rudolf. First, this study subjects the claimed chemical slaughterhouses of Auschwitz to a thorough forensic examination. Next, it analyzes the murder weapon, the poison gas Zyklon B, to determine how this substance operated, and what traces, if any, it might have left where it was employed. The results are convincing to the open-minded, but scandalous to the dogmatic reader. To which side do you belong? Fourth edition, 454 pages, more than 120 color and over 100 b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. (#2)

Auschwitz Lies: Legends, Lies and Prejudices on the Holocaust. By Carlo Mattogno and Germar Rudolf. The fallacious research and alleged “refutation” of Revisionist scholars by French biochemist G. Wellers, Polish Prof. J. Markiewicz, chemist Dr. Richard Green, Profs. Zimmerman, M. Shermer and A. Grobman, as well as researchers Keren, McCarthy and Mazal, are exposed for what they are: blatant and easily exposed political lies created to ostracize dissident historians. In this book, facts beat propaganda once again. Third edition, 404 pages, b&w illustrations, index. (#18)

Auschwitz: The Central Construction Office. By Carlo Mattogno. Based upon mostly unpublished German wartime documents, this study describes the history, organization, tasks and procedures of the Central Construction Office of the Waffen-SS and Auschwitz Police. Despite a huge public interest in the camp, next to nothing was really known about this office, which was responsible for the planning and construction of the Auschwitz camp complex, including the crematories which are said to have contained the “gas chambers.” 2nd ed., 188 pages, b&w illustrations, glossary, index. (#13)

Garrison and Headquarters Orders of the Auschwitz Camp. By G. Rudolf und E. Böhm. A large number of all the orders ever issued by the various commanders of the infamous Auschwitz camp have been preserved. They reveal the true nature of the camp with all its daily events. There is not a trace in these orders pointing at anything sinister going on in this camp. Quite to the contrary, many orders are in clear and insurmountable contradiction to claims that prisoners were mass murdered. This is a selection of the most pertinent of these orders together with comments putting them into their proper historical context. 185 pages, b&w illustrations, bibliography, index (#34)Special Treatment in Auschwitz: Origin and Meaning of a Term. By Carlo Mattogno. When appearing in German wartime documents, terms like “special treatment,” “special action,” and others have been interpreted as code words for mass murder. But that is not always true. This study focuses on documents about Auschwitz, showing that, while “special” had many different meanings, not a single one meant “execution.” Hence the practice of deciphering an alleged “code language” by assigning homicidal meaning to harmless documents – a key component of mainstream historiography – is untenable. 2nd ed., 166 pages, b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. (#10)

Healthcare at Auschwitz. By Carlo Mattogno. In extension of the above study on Special Treatment in Auschwitz, this study proves the extent to which the German authorities at Auschwitz tried to provide appropriate health care for the inmates. This is frequently described as special measures to improve the inmates’ health and thus ability to work in Germany’s armaments industry. This, after all, was the only thing the Auschwitz authorities were really interested in due to orders from the highest levels of the German government. 398 pages, b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. (#33)

Debunking the Bunkers of Auschwitz: Black Propaganda vs. History. By Carlo Mattogno. The bunkers at Auschwitz are claimed to have been the first homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz specifically equipped for this purpose. With the help of original German wartime files as well as revealing air photos taken by Allied reconnaissance aircraft in 1944, this study shows that these homicidal “bunkers” never existed, how the rumors about them evolved as black propaganda created by resistance groups in the camp, and how this propaganda was transformed into a false reality. 2nd ed., 292 pages, b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. (#11)

Auschwitz: The First Gassing—Rumor and Reality. By Carlo Mattogno. The first gassing in Auschwitz is claimed to have occurred on Sept. 3, 1941, in a basement room. The accounts reporting it are the archetypes for all later gassing accounts. This study analyzes all available sources about this alleged event. It shows that these sources contradict each other in location, date, preparations, victims etc, rendering it impossible to extract a consistent story. Original wartime documents inflict a final blow to this legend and prove without a shadow of a doubt that this legendary event never happened. Third edition, 190 pages, b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. (#20)

Auschwitz: Crematorium I and the Alleged Homicidal Gassings. By Carlo Mattogno. The morgue of Crematorium I in Auschwitz is said to be the first homicidal gas chamber there. This study investigates all statements by witnesses and analyzes hundreds of wartime documents to accurately write a history of that building. Mattogno proves that its morgue was never a homicidal gas chamber, nor could it have worked as such. 2nd ed., 152 pages, b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. (#21)

Auschwitz: Open Air Incinerations. By Carlo Mattogno. Hundreds of thousands of corpses of murder victims are claimed to have been incinerated in deep ditches in the Auschwitz concentration camp. This book examines the many testimonies regarding these incinerations and establishes whether these claims were even possible. Using aerial photographs, physical evidence and wartime documents, the author shows that these claims are fiction. A new Appendix contains 3 papers on groundwater at Auschwitz and cattle mass burnings. A must read. Second edition. 202 pages, b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. (#17)

The Cremation Furnaces of Auschwitz. By Carlo Mattogno & Franco Deana. An exhaustive technical study of the history and technology of cremation in general and of the cremation furnaces of Auschwitz in particular. On a sound and thoroughly documented base of technical literature, extant wartime documents and material traces, Mattogno and Deana can establish the true nature and capacity of the Auschwitz cremation furnaces. They show that these devices were cheaper versions than what was usually produced, and that their capacity to cremate corpses was lower than normal, too. Hence this study reveals that the Auschwitz cremation furnaces were not monstrous super ovens but rather inferior make-shift devices. 3 vols., 1198 pages, b&w and color illustrations (vols 2 & 3), bibliography, index, glossary. (#24)

Curated Lies: The Auschwitz Museum’s Misrepresentations, Distortions and Deceptions. By Carlo Mattogno. Revisionist research results have put the Polish Auschwitz Museum under enormous pressure to answer this challenge. They’ve answered. This book analyzes their answer and reveals the appallingly mendacious attitude of the Auschwitz Museum authorities when presenting documents from their archives. With a contribution by Eric Hunt on the Auschwitz Museum’s misrepresentations of its most valued asset, the “gas chamber” in the Main Camp. 248 pages, b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. (#38)

Deliveries of Coke, Wood and Zyklon B to Auschwitz: Neither Proof Nor Trace for the Holocaust. By Carlo Mattogno. Researchers from the Auschwitz Museum tried to prove the reality of mass extermination by pointing to documents about deliveries of wood and coke as well as Zyklon B to the Auschwitz Camp. If put into the actual historical and technical context, however, these documents proof the exact opposite of what these orthodox researchers claim. Ca. 250 pp. b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. (Scheduled for mid-2019; #40)

Section Four: Witness CritiqueElie Wiesel, Saint of the Holocaust: A Critical Biography. By Warren B. Routledge. The first unauthorized biography of Wiesel exposes both his personal deceits and the whole myth of “the six million.” It shows how Zionist control has allowed Wiesel and his fellow extremists to force leaders of many nations, the U.N. and even popes to genuflect before Wiesel as symbolic acts of subordination to World Jewry, while at the same time forcing school children to submit to Holocaust brainwashing. Third edition. 458 pages, b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. (#30)

Auschwitz: Eyewitness Reports and Perpetrator Confessions of the Holocaust. By Jürgen Graf. The traditional narrative of what transpired at the infamous Auschwitz camp during WWII rests almost exclusively on witness testimony from former inmates as well as erstwhile camp officials. This study critically scrutinizes the 30 most important of these witness statements by checking them for internal coherence, and by comparing them with one another as well as with other evidence such as wartime documents, air photos, forensic research results, and material traces. The result is devastating for the traditional narrative. 370 pp. b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. (#36)

Commandant of Auschwitz: Rudolf Höss, His Torture and His Forced Confessions. By Carlo Mattogno & Rudolf Höss. When Rudolf Höss was in charge at Auschwitz, the mass extermination of Jews in gas chambers is said to have been launched and carried out. He confessed this in numerous postwar depositions. Hence Höss’s testimony is the most convincing of all. But what traditional sources usually do not reveal is that Höss was severely tortured to coerce him to “confess,” and that his various statements are not only contradictory but also full of historically and physically impossible, even absurd claims. This study expertly analyzes Höss’s various confessions and lays them all open for everyone to see the ugly truth. Second edition. 410 pages, b&w illust., bibliography, index. (#35)

An Auschwitz Doctor’s Eyewitness Account: The Tall Tales of Dr. Mengele’s Assistant Analyzed. By Miklos Nyiszli & Carlo Mattogno. Nyiszli, a Hungarian physician, ended up at Auschwitz in 1944 as Dr. Mengele’s assistant. After the war he wrote a book and several other writings describing what he claimed to have experienced. To this day some traditional historians take his accounts seriously, while others reject them as grotesque lies and exaggerations. This study presents and analyzes Nyiszli’s writings and skillfully separates truth from fabulous fabrication. 484 pages, b&w illust., bibliography, index. (#37)

For current prices and availability see book finder sites such as www.bookfinder.com, www.addall.com, www.bookfinder4u.com or www.findbookprices.com; learn more at www.HolocaustHandbooks.com

Published by Castle Hill Publishers, PO Box 243, Uckfield, TN22 9AW, UK

The Circus

The circus is a natural part of the traveling fair. This is a segregated society with its own costumes, pride, and laws. It comprises a population jealous of its special character, proud of its isolation, and endogamous. Its professional secrets are transmitted from father to son. As far as possible, it settles its own differences without resorting to the courts.

Lion tamers, jugglers, equestriennes, clowns, and acrobats are subjected to a rigorous discipline from infancy. All dream of perfecting their numbers to the least detail in order to assure success and— in an emergency— safety.

This closed and rigorous universe constitutes the austere side of the fair. The decisive sanction of death is necessarily present, for the lion tamer just as for the acrobat. It forms part of the tacit agreement that binds the performers and the spectators. It enters into the rules of a game that anticipates a total risk. The unanimity of circus people in refusing the net or cable that would protect them from a tragic fall speaks for itself. It is necessary  for the state to impose such safety devices against their stubborn resistance, but this falsifies the totality of the wager.

For circus people the big top represents not merely a profes­sion but a way of life, not really comparable to sports, casino, or stage for champions, gamblers, or professional actors. In the circus there is added a kind of hereditary fatalism and a much sharper break with ordinary life. Because of this, circus life, strictly speaking, cannot be regarded as synonymous with play.

And yet, two of its traditional activities are literally and sig­ nificantly associated with ilinx and mimicry. I allude to the tightrope and the universality of certain kinds of clowning.

The Tightrope

Sports is the profession corresponding to agon; a special way of courting chance is the profession or rather the denial of a profession associated with alea; and the theater is comparable to mimicry. The tightrope is the profession corresponding to ilinx. In fact, vertigo is not merely an obstacle, difficulty, or danger on the tightrope. The flying trapeze goes beyond mountain climbing, forced recourse to parachute jumping, and those oc­ cupations requiring the worker to do his job high over the earth. On the high wire, the very heart of prowess and the only aim is to master vertigo. The game consists expressly in moving through space as if the void were not fascinating, and as if no danger were involved.

An ascetic existence is necessary to obtain this supreme skill. It involves a regime of severe privation and strict continence, ceaseless exercise, continuous repetition of the same movements, and the acquisition of impeccable reflexes and faultless re­sponses. Somersaults are performed in a state bordering upon hypnosis. Supple and strong muscles and imperturbable self-control are necessary conditions. To be sure, the acrobat must calculate the effort, time, distance, and trajectory of the trapeze.

But he lives in terror of thinking of it at the decisive moment, when it nearly always has fatal consequences. It paralyzes in­ stead of aiding, at a moment when the least hesitation is dis­astrous. Consciousness is the killer. It is disturbing to his som­nambulistic infallibility and compromises the functioning of a mechanism whose extreme precision cannot tolerate doubts or regrets. The tightrope walker only succeeds if he is hypnotized by the rope, the acrobat only if he is sure enough of himself to rely upon vertigo instead of trying to resist it. Vertigo is an integral part of nature, and one controls it only in obeying it.

These games are always comparable to the exploits of the Mexi­can voladores, affirming and exemplifying the natural creativity involved in mastering ilinx. Aberrant disciplines, heroic feats accomplished to no purpose or profit, disinterested, mortally dangerous and useless, they are of merit in furnishing admirable witness, even if not generally recognized, to human perseverance, ambition, and hardiness.

Quote from the book Man, Play and Games (Roger Caillois)

Kerry Bolton - The Value of Tradition

 

Our “progressive” obsessions for change neglect to consider consequences. Change is demanded for the sake of a fad or a slogan: “equality”, “democracy”, “reproductive rights”... Even a word of caution is damned as “reactionary”, “old fashioned”, or “fascist”. Traditions, customs, beliefs, are regarded as being as transient as the planned obsolescence of computers. Carl Jung made the point that Western man’s psyche is not keeping pace with his technology. The levels of our unconscious are multi-layered, reaching back to primordial existence, yet Western technology has exponentially leaped ahead leaving behind any anchorage of tradition. That is called “progress”. Jung wrote of this:

“Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The ‘newsness’ of the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no place in what is new. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in things that have just come into being. We are certainly far from having finished with the middle ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend. Nevertheless we have plunged into a cataract of progress which sweeps us into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it take us from our ranks. The less we understand of what our forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts”. 154Konrad Lorenz, the father of the science of ethology, the study of animal instinct, gave a warning from an ecological viewpoint, that the abandonment of customs and traditions is steeped with dangers which are likely to be unforeseen. Culture is “cumulative tradition”.155 It is knowledge passed through generations, preserved as belief or custom. The deep wisdom accrued by our ancestors, because it might be wrapped in the protection of religions and myths, is discounted by the “modern” as “superstitious” and “unscientific”. Lorenz referred to the “enormous underestimation of our nonrational, cultural fund, and the equal overestimation of all that man is able to produce with his intellect” as factors “threatening our civilization with destruction”. “Being enlightened is no reason for confronting transmitted tradition with hostile arrogance”, stated Lorenz. Writing at a time when the New Left was rampant, as it is today under other names, Lorenz observed that the attitude of youth towards parents shows a great deal of “conceited contempt but no understanding”.156 Lorenz perceived a great deal of the psychosis of the Left as a pathogen in the social organism, as it remains today: “The revolt of modern youth is founded on hatred; a hatred closely related to an emotion that is most dangerous and difficult to overcome: national hatred. In other words, today’s rebellious youth reacts to the older generation in the same way that an ‘ethnic’ group reacts to a foreign, hostile one”.157What is of interest is that Lorenz saw this as a youth subculture that was tantamount to a separate, foreign ethnos, when a group forms around its own rites, dress, manners and norms. In the biological sciences this is called “pseudospeciation”. With this new group identity comes a “corresponding devaluation of the symbols” of other cultural units.158 The obsession with all that is regarded as “new” among the youth revolt was described by Lorenz as “physiological neophilia”. While this is necessary to prevent stagnation, it is normally gradual and followed by a return to tradition. Such a balance however is easily upset.159 Fixation as the stage of neophilia in the psychology of individuals results in behavioural abnormalities such as vindictive resentment towards long-dead parents.160This lack of respect for tradition is aggravated by the breakdown of traditional social hierarchy, mass organisation and “a money-grabbing race against itself”161 that dominates the Late West.

Since Lorenz wrote of these symptoms of Western decay during the 1970s the Western social organism has increasingly fractured. There are now the presence, vastly greater than in Lorenz’s time, of actual ethnoi that have no attachment to the West, but maintain a great resentment. There is also further pseudospeciation among women in terms of radical feminism and “gays”, possessing their own manners, rites, dress, terms of speech, and even their own flags and other symbols. They are united in their hatred of the West, which is often denigrated as “white patriarchy”; with its symbols being torn down162 and its heroes ridiculed as “dead white males”.

154 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 235-236.

155 Lorenz, 61.

156 Ibid., 64.

157 Lorenz, 64.

158 Lorenz, 64-65.

159 Lorenz, 69.

160 Lorenz, 69-70.

161 Lorenz, 73.

162 Such as the destruction of Confederate monuments in the USA, as this is being written.

From: The Decline and Fall of Civilisations

by

Dr Kerry R Bolton

Roger Caillois - The Corruption of Games

Where the problem is to enu­merate the characteristics that define the nature of play, it ap­pears to be an activity that is (1) free, (2) separate, (3) uncertain, (4) unproductive, (5) regulated, and (6) fictive, it being understood that the last two characteristics tend to ex­clude one another.

These six purely formal qualities are not clearly related to the various psychological attitudes that govern play. In strongly opposing the world of play to that of reality, and in stressing that play is essentially a side activity, the inference is drawn that any contamination by ordinary life runs the risk of corrupting and destroying its very nature.

At this point, it may be of interest to ask what becomes of games when the sharp line dividing their ideal rules from the diffuse and insidious laws of daily life is blurred. They certainly cannot spread beyond the playing field (chess- or checkerboard, arena, racetrack, stadium, or stage) or time that is reserved for them, and which ends as inexorably as the closing of a parenthe­sis. They will necessarily have to take quite different, and on occasion doubtlessly unexpected, forms.

In addition, a strict and absolute code governs amateur players, whose prior assent seems like the very condition of their participation in an isolated and entirely conventional activity. 

But what if the convention is no longer accepted or regarded as applicable? Suppose the isolation is no longer respected? The forms or the freedom of play surely can no longer survive. All that remains is the tyrannical and compelling psychological atti­ tude that selects one kind of game to play rather than another. 

It should be recalled that these distinctive attitudes are four in number: the desire to win by one’s merit in regulated competi­tion (agon), the submission of one’s will in favor of anxious and passive anticipation of where the wheel will stop (alea), the desire to assume a strange personality (mimicry), and, finally, the pursuit of vertigo (ilinx). In agon, the player relies only upon himself and his utmost efforts; in alea, he counts on every­ thing except himself, submitting to the powers that elude him; in mimicry, he imagines that he is someone else, and he invents an imaginary universe; in ilinx, he gratifies the desire to temporarily destroy his bodily equilibrium, escape the tyranny of his ordinary perception, and provoke the abdication of conscience.

If play consists in providing formal, ideal, limited, and escapist satisfaction for these powerful drives, what happens when every convention is rejected? When the universe of play is no longer tightly closed? When it is contaminated by the real world in which every act has inescapable consequences? Corresponding to each of the basic categories there is a specific perversion which results from the absence of both restraint and protection.
The rule of instinct again becoming absolute, the tendency to interfere with the isolated, sheltered, and neutralized kind of play spreads to daily life and tends to subordinate it to its own needs, as much as possible. What used to be a pleasure becomes an obsession. What was an escape becomes an obligation, and what was a pastime is now a passion, compulsion, and source of anxiety.

The principle of play has become corrupted. It is now neces­ sary to take precautions against cheats and professional players, a unique product of the contagion of reality. Basically, it is not a perversion of play, but a sidetracking derived from one of the four primary impulses governing play. The situation is not unique. It occurs whenever the specified instinct does not en­ counter, in an appropriate game, the discipline and refuge that anchor it, or whenever it does not find gratification in the game.

The cheat is still inside the universe of play. If he violates the rules of the game, he at least pretends to respect them. He tries to influence them. He is dishonest, but hypocritical. He thus, by his attitude, safeguards and proclaims the validity of the conven­tions he violates, because he is dependent upon others obeying the rules. If he is caught, he is thrown out. The universe of play remains intact. Neither does the professional player change the nature of the game in any way. To be sure, he himself does not play, but merely practices a profession. The nature of competi­tion or the performance is hardly modified if the athletes or comedians are professionals who play for money rather than amateurs who play for pleasure. The difference concerns only the players.

For professional boxers, bicycle riders, or actors, agon or mimicry has ceased being a recreation intended as a relaxation from fatigue or a relief from the monotony of oppressive and exhausting work. It is their very work, necessary to their sub­sistence, a constant and absorbing activity, replete with obstacles and problems, from which they properly find relaxation by play­ ing at a game to which they are not contracted.
For the actor also, a theatrical performance is mere simula­tion. He puts on make-up and costume, plays and recites. But when the curtain falls, and the lights go on, he returns to reality. 

The separation of the two universes remains absolute. For the professional bicycle rider, tennis or football player also, the con­test, match, and track remain regulated and formal competition. 

As soon as the contest ends, the audience runs for the exit. The champion returns to his routine responsibilities, where he must protect his interests, devise and apply a strategy that will assure him a successful future. As soon as he leaves the stadium, velodrome, or ring, the perfect and precise rivalries in which he has pitted his strength under conditions as artificial as possi­ble give way to rivalries that are formidable in quite another way. The latter are insidious, incessant, and implacable, and permeate all of life. Life, the comedian off the stage, is now again part of the common lot, removed from the closed-off space and the privileged time ruled by the strict, gratuitous, and indisputable laws of play.

Outside of the arena, after the gong strikes, begins the true perversion of agon, the most pervasive of all the categories. It appears in every conflict untempered by the rigor or spirit of play. Now competition is nothing but a law of nature. In society it resumes its original brutality, as soon as it finds a loophole in the system of moral, social, and legal constraints, which have limits and conventions comparable to those of play. That is why mad, obsessive ambition, applied to any domain in which the rules of the game and free play are not respected, must be de­ nounced as a clear deviation which in this case restores the original situation. There is no better example of the civilizing role of play than the inhibitions it usually places upon natural avidity. A good player must be able to contemplate with ob­jectivity, detachment, and at least an appearance of calm, the unlucky results of even the most sustained effort or the loss of large sums. The referee’s decision is accepted in principle even if unjust. The corruption of agon begins at the point where no referee or decision is recognized.

In games of chance, there is a comparable corruption of the principle as soon as the player ceases to respect chance, that is, when he no longer views the laws of chance as impersonal neutral power, without heart or memory, a purely mechanical effect. With superstition, the corruption of alea is born. It is indeed tempting for one who submits to fate to try to predict the outcome, or at least influence it in his favor. The player finds special significance in all kinds of phenomena, encounters, and omens, which he imagines to be forebodings of good or bad luck. He looks for talismans that will protect him most effica­ciously. He abstains from anything unlucky, as revealed by dreams, forebodings, or presentiments. Finally, in order to be rid of unlucky influences, he indulges in various magical prac­tices.

Such an attitude is only aggravated by games of chance. It is found to be quite prevalent, even if subconscious. It is not re­stricted to the habitues of casinos or racetracks and the pur­chasers of lottery tickets. The regular publication of horoscopes by daily and weekly newspapers transforms each day and each week into a kind of promise or menace for their readers, who are thus kept in suspense by the heavens and the dark powers of the stars. These horoscopes most often reveal the daily lucky num­ber for readers born under the different signs of the Zodiac. Each one can then buy the lottery tickets corresponding to these num­bers: some ending with that number, some in which that number is contained several times, and some with a succession of numbers that add up to it— thus applicable to all to some degree.1 0 It is significant that the most popular and most obvious superstition of this type is directly associated with games of chance. And yet it must be admitted that it is not limited to games of chance.

Upon waking up in the morning, everyone is supposed to find himself winning or losing in a gigantic, ceaseless, gratuitous, and inevitable lottery which will determine his general coefficient of success or failure for the next twenty-four hours. Decisions, new enterprises, and love affairs are all considered. The astrologer is careful to point out that the influence of the stars is exerted within quite variable limits, so that the oversimplified prophecy could scarcely turn out to be entirely false. To be sure, the reac­tion of the majority of the public is to smile at such puerile pre­dictions. But it still reads them. And more important, it keeps on reading them. At this point, many begin reading the astrological section of their newspaper. It seems that newspapers with large circulations do not readily risk depriving their readers of this satisfaction, the importance or prevalence of which should not be underestimated.

The more credulous are not content with the summary articles in papers and general magazines. They have recourse to special­ized periodicals. In Paris, one of these has a circulation of more than 100,000. The adept often visit a fortuneteller with some regularity. The figures are quite revealing: 100,000 Parisians consult 6,000 diviners, seers, or fortunetellers daily. According to the Institut national de Statistique, 34 billion francs are spent annually in France on astrologers, magicians, and other frauds. 

In the United States, for astrology alone, a 1953 investigation counted 30,000 professional establishments, twenty specialized magazines with a circulation of 500,000 readers, and 2,000 periodicals that publish horoscopes. It was estimated that $200 million are spent annually for no other purpose than seeking answers from the stars— this not including other methods of divination.

Numerous indications of the association between games of chance and divination are easily found. One of the most con­ spicuous and immediate is that the very same cards used by players in trying their luck may also be used by prophets to pre­dict the future. Seers only use special games in order to enhance their prestige. Ordinary dinner plates may be used, newly in­ scribed with naive legends, impressive illustrations, or traditional allegories. At every point there is a quite natural transition from chance to superstition.
As for the avarice today observed in the pursuit of good for­tune, it probably compensates for the continuous tension in­volved in modern competition. Whoever despairs of his own resources is led to trust in destiny. Excessively rigorous com­petition discourages the timid and tempts them to rely on ex­ternal powers. By studying and utilizing heavenly powers over chance, they try to get the reward they doubt can be won by their own qualities, by hard work and steady application. Rather than persist in thankless labor, they ask the cards or the stars to warn them of the propitious moment for the success of their enterprises.

Superstition therefore seems to be a perversion, i.e. the appli­cation to reality of one of the principles of play, alea, which causes one to expect nothing of himself and leaves all to chance. 

The corruption of mimicry follows a parallel course. It is pro­duced when simulation is no longer accepted as such, when the one who is disguised believes that his role, travesty, or mask is real. He no longer plays another. Persuaded that he is the other, he behaves as if he were, forgetting his own self. The loss of his real identity is a punishment for his inability to be content with merely playing a strange personality. It is properly called aliena­tion.

Here, too, play is a protection from danger. The actor’s role is sharply defined by the dimensions of the stage and the dura­tion of the spectacle. Once he leaves the magic area, the fantasy ends and the most vainglorious histrionics and the most eloquent performances are brutally constrained by the very necessity of passing from the dressing-room of the theater to the resumption of his own personality. Applause is not merely approval and re­ward. It marks the end of illusion and play. The masked ball ends at dawn and the carnival is only for a short time. The costume is returned to the store or the wardrobe. The old per­sonality is restored. The sharp limits of play prevent alienation.
Alienation occurs toward the end of profound and continuous labor. It takes place when there is no sharp dividing line between fantasy and reality, when the subject has gradually donned a second, chimerical, and all-pervasive personality which claims exorbitant rights with respect to a reality with which it is of necessity incompatible. The time arrives when the alienated one — who has become another— tries desperately to deny, subdue, or destroy this new self, which strongly resists, and which he regards as inadmissible, inconceivable, and irksome.

It is remarkable that in agon, alea, and mimicry, the intensity of play may be the cause of the fatal deviation. The latter always results from contamination by ordinary life. It is produced when the instinct that rules play spreads beyond the strict limits of time and place, without previously agreed-to rules. It is permissi­ble to play as seriously as desired, to be extremely extravagant, to risk an entire fortune, even life itself, but the game must stop at a preordained time so that the player may resume ordinary responsibilities, where the liberating and isolating rules of play no longer are applicable.

Competition is a law of modem life. Taking risks is no longer contradictory to reality. Simulation also has a role, as in the case of confidence men, spies, and fugitives. As a compensation, vertigo is almost absent except for those rare professions in which the task is to control it. The risk of sudden death is also present. At fairs, special precautions are taken to avoid acci­dents on the various rides that stimulate vertigo artificially. Acci­dents nevertheless happen even on equipment designed and con­structed to assure complete safety to the users, through having undergone careful periodic checks. Physical vertigo, an extreme condition depriving the patient of protection, is as difficult to attain as it is dangerous to experience. That is why the search for unconsciousness and distortion of perception, in order to spread into daily life, must assume forms very different from those ob­served on contraptions that gyrate, speed, fall, or propel and which were devised to stimulate vertigo in the closed and pro­tected world of play.

 These costly, complex, cumbersome installations are scarce except for amusement parks in capitals or when erected periodi­cally by traveling carnivals. In their very atmosphere, they be­long to the universe of play. In addition, the thrills they provide correspond point for point to the definition of play: they are brief, intermittent, calculated, and as discrete as games or suc­cessive encounters. And finally, they remain independent of the real world. Their influence is limited to the duration of the ride.

It stops as soon as the machine stops and leaves no trace in the rider except for his being fleetingly stunned until his usual equi­ librium is restored.

To adapt vertigo to daily life, it is necessary to substitute am­biguous chemical power for clear-cut physical effects. The de­sired stimulus or sensuous panic, which is brutally and brusquely provided by the amusements at a fair, is now sought in drugs or alcohol. But this time the whirling is no longer outside or separate from reality. It is imbedded and generated there. If this intoxication and euphoria can temporarily destroy clarity of vision and motor coordination, free one from the burden of memory and from the terrors of social responsibilities and pressures, just as in the case of physical vertigo, nevertheless its influence does not cease with the passing of the seizure. The organism is slowly but permanently changed. Given a permanent need, there is created an unbearable anxiety. This is in complete contrast to play, which is always contingent and gratuituous activity. Through intoxication, the pursuit of vertigo makes increasing inroads into reality, all the more extensive and per­nicious in that it creates a dependency which constantly presses against the threshold across which the desired disorder is found.

Even on this point, the case of insects is instructive. They find a source of pleasure in games of vertigo, illustrated by the whirling mania of whirligig-beetles which transform the surface of the quietest pond into a silvery carousel, if not by moths flitting about a flame. Yet insects, especially the social insects, also exhibit the “corruption of vertigo” in the form of an intoxi­cation that has disastrous consequences.

Thus, one of the most prevalent types of ant, Formica sanguinea, greedily licks up the fragrant exudates of rich ether secreted by the abdominal glands of a small coleopterous insect called Lochemusa strumosa. The ants place its larvae into their nests, feeding them so meticulously that they neglect their own young. Soon the larvae of Lochemusa devour the ants’ offspring. 

The ant queens, badly cared for, will no longer give birth to any but sterile females. The anthill dies and disappears. Formica fusca, which in a free state kills the Lochemusae, spares them when it is enslaved by Formica sanguinea. To indulge its taste for fragrant grease, it permits Atemeles emarginatus, which is no less a peril to its safety, to enter its hive. Moreover, it will de­stroy this parasite if it is enslaved by Formica rufa, which does not tolerate the parasite. Thus, it is not a case of irresistible attraction, but of a kind of vice that can disappear under certain circumstances. Servitude, in particular, sometimes stimulates it, and sometimes makes it resistible. The masters impose their habits upon the slaves.20 These are not isolated cases of voluntary intoxication. An­ other species of ant, lridomyrmex sanguineus of Queensland, seeks the caterpillars of a small grey moth in order to drink the intoxicating liquid they exude. The ants press the juice flesh of these larvae with their mandibles in order to extract the liquid. 

When they have drained one caterpillar, they move on to an­ other. It is unfortunate that the larvae devour the eggs of lridomyrmex. Sometimes the insect that produces the fragrant exudate “is aware of” its power and entices the ant to its vice. 

The caterpillar of Lycaena arion, studied by Chapman and Frohawk, is provided with a sac of honey. When it encounters a worker of the species Myrmica laevinodis, it raises the anterior segments of its body, inviting the ant to transport it to its nest. 

There it feeds on the larvae of Myrmica. The latter has no inter­est in the caterpillar during the periods in which it does not produce any honey. Lastly, a Javanese hemipter, Ptilocerus ochraceus, described by Kirkaldy and Jacobson, has in the middle of its ventral side a gland containing a toxic liquid which it offers to ants that are partial to it. They hasten to lick it up at once. The liquid paralyzes them, and they thus become an easy prey for Ptilocerus.' The aberrant behavior of ants does not prove the existence of instincts harmful to the species, as has been maintained. It proves rather that the irresistible attraction for a paralyzing sub­stance may neutralize the most powerful instincts, particularly the instinct for self-preservation which causes the individual ant to guard its safety and directs it to protect and feed its offspring.

The ants, so to speak, “forget” everything because of the drug. They behave most disastrously, submitting themselves or aban­ doning their eggs and larvae to the enemy.
In an oddly analogous way, the stupidity and drunkenness produced by alcohol lead man down a road where he is insidi­ously and irrevocably destroyed. In the end, deprived of the freedom to desire anything but his poison, he is left a prey to chronic organic disorder, far more dangerous than the physical vertigo which at least only momentarily compromises his ca­pacity to resist the fascination of oblivion.

As for ludus and paidia, which are not categories of play but ways of playing, they pass into ordinary life as invariable op­posites, e.g. the preference for cacaphony over a symphony, scribbling over the wise application of the laws of perspective. 

Their continuous opposition arises from the fact that a con­certed enterprise, in which various expendable resources are well utilized, has nothing in common with purely disordered move­ment for the sake of paroxysm.

What we set out to analyze was the corruption of the princi­ples of play, or preferably, their free expansion without check or convention. It was shown that such corruption is produced in identical ways. It entails consequences which seem to be in­ ordinately serious. Madness or intoxication may be sanctions that are disproportionate to the simple overflow of one of the play instincts out of the domain in which it can spread without irreparable harm. In contrast, the superstitions engendered by deviation from alea seem benign. Even more, when the spirit of competition freed from rules of equilibrium and loyalty is added to unchecked ambition, it seems to be profitable for the daring one who is abandoned to it. Moreover, the temptation to guide one’s behavior by resort to remote powers and magic symbols in automatically applying a system of imaginary correspondences does not aid man to exploit his basic abilities more efficiently.
He becomes fatalistic. He becomes incapable of deep appreci­ation of relationships between phenomena. Perseverance and trying to succeed despite unfavorable circumstances are dis­couraged.

Transposed to reality, the only goal of agon is success. The rules of courteous rivalry are forgotten and scorned. They seem merely irksome and hypocritical conventions. Implacable com­petition becomes the rule. Winning even justifies foul blows. If the individual remains inhibited by fear of the law or public opinion, it nonetheless seems permissible, if not meritorious, for nations to wage unlimited ruthless warfare.

Various restrictions on violence fall into disuse. Operations are no longer limited to frontier provinces, strongholds, and military objectives. They are no longer conducted according to a strategy that once made war itself resemble a game. War is far removed from the tournament or duel, i.e. from regulated combat in an enclosure, and now finds its fulfillment in massive destruction and the massacre of entire populations.

Any corruption of the principles of play means the abandon­ment of those precarious and doubtful conventions that it is always permissible, if not profitable, to deny, but the arduous adoption of which is a milestone in the development of civiliza­tion. If the principles of play in effect correspond to powerful instincts (competition, chance, simulation, vertigo), it is readily understood that they can be positively and creatively gratified only under ideal and circumscribed conditions, which in every case prevail in the rules of play. Left to themselves, destructive and frantic as are all instincts, these basic impulses can hardly lead to any but disastrous consequences. Games discipline in­ stincts and institutionalize them. For the time that they afford formal and limited satisfaction, they educate, enrich, and im­munize the mind against their virulence. At the same time, they are made fit to contribute usefully to the enrichment and the establishment of various patterns of culture.

from the book Man, Play and Games by Roger Caillois

Shalamov - SHOCK THERAPY

 SHOCK THERAPY

EVEN IN that distant blissful period when Merzliakov worked as a stableman and was able, by using a homemade grinder cobbled together from an old tin can with holes in the bottom to make a sieve, to make flaked grain fit for human consumption from the oats that were provided for the horses, and thus cook porridge, a bitter hot gruel that suppressed and reduced his hunger, he was pondering one simple question. The big draft horses brought in from the mainland were given a government oats ration every day which was twice what the squat, shaggy Yakut ponies got, although the draft horses pulled no more than the ponies. Thunder, the monstrous Percheron, had as much oats poured into his trough as five Yakut ponies could eat. This was justifiable, it was done everywhere, and that was not what tormented Merzliakov. He couldn’t understand why the human rations in the camp, the mysterious prescription of proteins, fats, vitamins, and calories destined to be swallowed by prisoners and called the “pot sheet,” were drawn up with absolutely no consideration of people’s live weight. If they were to be treated as beasts of burden, then questions of rations should be dealt with more logically, instead of observing some terrible mathematical average or bureaucratic whim. At best this terrible average would benefit only the lightweights, and in fact those who weighed less took longer than the others to become goners. Merzliakov had a constitution like that of Thunder, the Percheron, and that pathetic breakfast of three spoonfuls of porridge only increased the nagging pain in his stomach. Yet a workman in a brigade could get almost nothing in addition to his ration. The most precious items—butter, sugar, and meat—were never added to the pot in the quantity prescribed by the pot sheet. There were other things that Merzliakov had seen: tall people were the first to die. Being inured to heavy labor made absolutely no difference. An intellectual weakling still held out longer than a giant from Kaluga, where tilling the earth was in the blood, if they received the same food, in accordance with camp rations. There was not much advantage in increasing your ration by exceeding the production norm by a percentage either, because the basic prescription was unchanged and still did not match the needs of tall men. If you wanted to eat better, you had to work better; but if you wanted to work better, you had to eat better. Everywhere, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians were the first to die. They were the first to become goners, which always led the doctors to remark that the Baltic peoples were weaker than the Russians. True, the living standards of the Latvians and Estonians were far higher than those of the camps, or even of the Russian peasant, so they found things harder. But the main cause lay elsewhere: they weren’t less tough, they were just taller.

About eighteen months earlier, after an attack of scurvy, which quickly knocked out anyone new to the camps, Merzliakov was given a job as a temporary nurse in the tiny local hospital. He saw there that medicines were dispensed in doses according to the patient’s weight. New medicines were tested on rabbits, mice, or guinea pigs, and human doses were determined by calculating body weight. Children’s doses were less than adult doses.

But the camp rations were not calculated according to the weight of the human body. This was, then, the wrong answer to the question that astonished and worried Merzliakov. But before he became hopelessly weak, he managed by some miracle to get a stableman’s job, where he could steal the horses’ oats and stuff his own stomach with them. Merzliakov was already thinking he could get through the winter and then face whatever was coming. But things worked out differently. The stable manager was dismissed for drunkenness, and a senior stableman was promoted. He was one of the men who had shown Merzliakov how to use a tin can to make porridge oats. The senior stableman had himself been something of an oats thief and knew perfectly well how it was done. He now felt the need to ingratiate himself with his bosses, and he no longer needed any oat flakes. He therefore personally sought out and destroyed all the homemade grinders. People started roasting, boiling, and eating oats, husk and all, treating their stomachs as if they were horses. The new manager wrote a report to the authorities. Several stablemen, including Merzliakov, were put in solitary confinement for stealing oats and then sent from the stables back to where they had come from: ordinary manual labor.

•

Doing manual labor, Merzliakov soon realized that death was imminent. He staggered under the weight of the beams he had to drag around. The foreman took a dislike to the idle bruiser (“bruiser” is what they called anyone tall in the camp) and always put Merzliakov “under the butt,” that is, made him carry the heavy butt end of the beam. Once Merzliakov fell down and could not at first get up from the snow-covered ground; he suddenly decided to refuse to carry this damned beam. It was late, dark, and the guards were in a hurry to get to their indoctrination class, while the workmen wanted to reach the barracks and food as fast as they could; that evening the foreman was late for a card-game duel. Merzliakov was blamed for all the delay. So he was punished. First, he was beaten up by his workmates, then by the foreman and the guards. The beam lay abandoned in the snow and, instead of the beam, it was Merzliakov that was carried to the camp. He was let off work and lay on the bunk. The small of his back hurt. The paramedic rubbed him down with tallow—the medical center hadn’t had any proper ointments for ages. Merzliakov lay there, bent half double, all the time complaining of pain in the small of his back. The pain had gone long ago, his broken rib had quickly mended, but Merzliakov was determined, using any lie he could, to put off being declared fit for work. They didn’t declare him fit. One day they put his outdoor clothes on, laid him on a stretcher, and loaded him into the cab of a truck to take him, with other patients, to the district hospital. There was no X-ray machine there. Some serious thinking had to be done about everything, and Merzliakov thought. He stayed there for some months, still bent half double; he was then transferred to the central hospital where, of course, there was an X-ray machine, and where Merzliakov was put in the surgical section, in the ward for traumatic illnesses (the patients, unaware of the irony in the pun, called these illnesses “dramatic”).

•

“And this man, too,” said the surgeon, pointing to Merzliakov’s notes, “we’ll hand over to you, Piotr Ivanovich. He doesn’t need treatment in the surgical section.”

“But you’ve written a diagnosis of ankylosis due to spinal trauma. Why should I have him?”

“Well, of course there is ankylosis. What else can I put down? Worse than that can happen after a beating. I had a case at the Gray mine, where the foreman beat up a good worker—”

“Seriozha, I haven’t got time to listen to your cases. I’m asking why you’re transferring him.”

“But I’ve written ‘To be examined with a view to documentation.’ Poke him with needles, let’s document him and get him on a ship. Then he can be a free man.”

“But you’ve taken X-rays, haven’t you? We shouldn’t need needles to detect any abnormalities.”

“I have. Have a look, if you’d care to,” and the surgeon placed a dark film negative on the muslin screen. “This picture makes no sense at all. Until we get proper lighting, proper voltage, our X-ray photographers will go on giving us this fuzz.”

“It really is fuzzy,” said Piotr Ivanovich. “All right, so be it.” And he signed his name on the notes, agreeing to accept Merzliakov’s transfer.

The surgical section was noisy, chaotic, overcrowded with cases of frostbite, dislocated limbs, fractures, burns—the northern mines were no joke—and some of the patients lay on the ward and corridor floors; just one young, infinitely tired surgeon and four paramedics worked there, none of them sleeping for more than three or four hours a night. Nobody had the time to give Merzliakov proper attention. In the neurology section, however, where Merzliakov had been so suddenly transferred, he realized that a really close examination would begin.

All his desperate prisoner’s willpower had long been focused on one thing: to not unbend. And he didn’t. His body so very much wanted to straighten out, if only for a second. But he recalled the mine, the piercing breath of the cold air, the slippery frozen stones of the goldmine pit face, which shone from the sub-zero temperatures; the little bowl of soup, his dinner, which he devoured in one gulp, not needing any spoon; the rifle butts of the guards and the boots of the foremen—then he found the strength to stay doubled up. In any case, it was now easier than it had been in the first weeks. He didn’t sleep much, since he was afraid of unbending while he slept. He knew that the duty nurses had long ago been ordered to watch him and catch him faking. And if he was caught—Merzliakov knew this, too—he would immediately be send to the punishment mines, and what would a punishment mine be like, if the ordinary one left Merzliakov with such terrible memories?

The day after he was transferred, Merzliakov was taken to see the doctor. The chief of the section asked him briefly about the early stages of the illness and nodded in sympathy. The doctor told him, as if by the way, that even healthy muscles could get used to being in an unnatural position after many months, and that a man can turn himself into an invalid. Then Piotr Ivanovich started examining his patient. As the doctor inserted needles, tapped away with a rubber mallet, and pressed certain points, Merzliakov gave random answers to his questions.

Piotr Ivanovich devoted more than half of his working hours to exposing malingerers. Of course, he understood the reasons that induced prisoners to fake their symptoms. Piotr Ivanovich had been a prisoner not so long ago, and he wasn’t surprised by the childish stubbornness of malingerers, nor by the primitive and frivolous nature of their faked symptoms. Piotr Ivanovich, formerly a lecturer at a Siberian medical institute, had made his professional career in the same snowy world as the one where his patients tried to save their lives by trying to deceive him. One cannot deny that he felt sorry for people. But he was more a doctor than a human being and he was, above all, a specialist. He was proud of the fact that a year of manual labor in the camps had not destroyed the specialist doctor in him. He looked at the problem of exposing malingerers not from a lofty, statesmanlike point of view, and not morally. He saw this problem as a proper use of his knowledge, of his psychological skill in setting traps for hungry, half-insane, wretched people to fall into, to the greater glory of science. In this battle between doctor and malingerer, everything favored the doctor: thousands of subtle medicines, hundreds of textbooks, a wide array of equipment, the help of the guards, and the enormous experience of a specialist, while all the patient had on his side was his horror of the world that he had left for the hospital and was afraid of being returned to. It was this horror that gave the prisoner the strength to battle on. Exposing yet another malingerer gave Piotr Ivanovich deep satisfaction. Once more he had proof from real life that he was a good doctor, that instead of losing his skills, he had enhanced them, perfected them—in other words, that he still could. . . .

“What fools those surgeons are,” he thought, as he lit a cigarette after Merzliakov had left. “They don’t know topographical anatomy, or they’ve forgotten it, and they never have known what reflexes are. X-rays are their only answer. If they haven’t got an X-ray, they can’t be sure even about a simple fracture. Yet they’re so conceited.” Piotr Ivanovich, naturally, had no doubt that Merzliakov was a malingerer. “All right, he can stay in bed for a week. That week will give us time to do all the analyses, so we jump through all the hoops. We’ll stick all the right bits of paper in his notes.” Piotr Ivanovich smiled as he anticipated the theatrical effect of this, his next unmasking.

A week later the hospital would be getting a party of patients ready to be shipped home to the mainland. The papers were being drawn up in the ward and the chairman of the medical commission had come from the administration building to examine personally the patients whom the hospital had prepared for dispatch. The chairman’s job was limited to examining the documentation, checking that the proper formulas had been used—actual examination of a patient took only thirty seconds.

“I have in my lists a certain Merzliakov. The guards broke his back a year ago. I’d like to send him off. He’s recently been transferred to the neurology section. Here are his documents, all ready for dispatch.” The chairman of the commission turned to face the neurologist.

“Bring Merzliakov,” said Piotr Ivanovich. They brought in the patient, bent nearly double. The chairman gave him a cursory glance.

“What a gorilla,” he said. “Yes, of course, there’s no point keeping men like that.” Picking up his pen, he reached for the lists.

“Personally, I’m not signing for him,” said Piotr Ivanovich in a clear, loud voice. “He’s a malingerer, and tomorrow I shall have the privilege of showing him up to you and to the surgeon.”

“Right, then we’ll leave him out,” said the chairman indifferently, and put his pen down. “Anyway, it’s time we stopped, it’s getting late.”

“He’s a malingerer, Seriozha,” Piotr Ivanovich said as he took the surgeon by the arm, when they were leaving the ward.

The surgeon freed his arm.

“He may be,” he said, frowning with distaste. “Good luck with exposing him. You’ll get an enormous amount of pleasure.”

The next day, at a meeting with the head of the hospital, Piotr Ivanovich reported in detail on Merzliakov’s case.

“I think,” he concluded, “that we can expose Merzliakov in two stages. First comes Rausch anesthesia, which you, Seriozha, have forgotten about,” he said triumphantly, turning to face the surgeon. “That should have been done straightaway. Then if Rausch anesthesia doesn’t work,” Piotr Ivanovich spread his arms, “it’s shock therapy. That’s a very intriguing procedure, I assure you.”

“Not too intriguing?” asked Aleksandra Sergeyevna, the manager of the biggest section in the hospital, the tuberculosis section. She was a stout, heavily built woman who had only recently arrived from European Russia.

“Well,” said the hospital chief, “for a bastard like that. . . .” The presence of ladies didn’t inhibit him much.

“Let’s see what the Rausch anesthesia does,” said Piotr Ivanovich in a conciliatory tone.

Rausch is short-term anesthesia administered by an overwhelming dose of ether. The patient goes to sleep for fifteen or twenty minutes, enough time for a surgeon to manipulate a dislocation, amputate a finger, or lance an infected boil.

The hospital chiefs, dressed in white gowns, surrounded an operating table on which a submissive, half-bent Merzliakov had been put. Male nurses picked up the linen straps that usually tie patients down on the operating table.

“No need, no need,” shouted Piotr Ivanovich, as he ran forward. “Straps are the last thing we need.”

Merzliakov’s face was turned upward. The surgeon placed an anesthesia mask over it and picked up a bottle of ether.

“Start, Seriozha!”

The ether began dripping.

“Breathe in deeper, deeper, Merzliakov! Count aloud!”

“Twenty-six, twenty-seven,” Merzliakov counted in a lazy voice; then, suddenly stopping counting, he started saying broken phrases, making no sense at first, some of them obscene curses.

Piotr Ivanovich was holding Merzliakov’s left hand. After a few minutes, that hand relaxed and Piotr Ivanovich let go of it. The hand fell gently, like a dead object, onto the edge of the table. Piotr Ivanovich slowly and solemnly unbent Merzliakov’s body. Everyone gasped with amazement.

“Now tie him down,” Piotr Ivanovich told the nurses.

Merzliakov opened his eyes and saw the hospital chief’s hairy fist.

“How about that, you reptile?” the chief was rasping at him. “You’ll be charged and tried.”

“Congratulations, Piotr Ivanovich, congratulations!” repeated the chairman of the commission, clapping the neurologist on the shoulder. “To think that only yesterday I was about to give that gorilla his freedom!”

“Untie him!” ordered Piotr Ivanovich. “Get off the table.”

Merzliakov hadn’t fully regained consciousness. His temples throbbed, and he could still taste the sickeningly sweet ether in his mouth. Even now he didn’t understand whether he was awake or dreaming, and it may be that he’d had dreams like this before.

“To hell with the lot of you!” he suddenly yelled out, and bent himself double, as he had been.

Broad-shouldered, bony, his thick long fingers almost touching the floor, his eyes clouded, and his hair disheveled, Merzliakov really did look like a gorilla. He left the bandaging room and Piotr Ivanovich was told that the patient Merzliakov was lying on his bed in his usual posture. The doctor ordered him to be brought to his office.

“You’ve been exposed, Merzliakov,” said the neurologist. “But I’ve asked the chief, and you won’t be charged, you won’t be sent to a punishment mine. You’ll simply be discharged from hospital and go back to your mine to do what you were doing. You’re a hero, man. You’ve pulled the wool over our eyes for a whole year.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” said the gorilla, not lifting his eyes.

“What do you mean, you don’t know? We’ve only just straightened you out!”

“Nobody straightened me out.”

“Look, dear man,” said the neurologist. “There’s no need for all this. I wanted to do it the nice way. Otherwise, watch out, because in a week’s time you yourself will be asking to be discharged.”

“What do I care what’s going to happen in a week’s time?” Merzliakov said quietly. How could he explain that just one extra week, an extra day, an extra hour spent somewhere that was not the mine was his idea of happiness. If the doctor couldn’t understand that, how could he explain it? Merzliakov said nothing and stared at the floor.

Merzliakov was taken away; Piotr Ivanovich went to see the hospital chief.

“Well, you could do it tomorrow, instead of in a week,” said his boss after he’d listened to Piotr Ivanovich’s proposal.

“I promised him a week,” said Piotr Ivanovich. “It won’t bankrupt the hospital.”

“All right,” said the chief. “In a week, then. But bring me along. Are you going to tie him down?”

“You can’t tie him down,” said the neurologist. “He’d dislocate an arm or a leg. He’ll be held down.” Taking Merzliakov’s notes with him, Piotr Ivanovich wrote in the treatment column “shock therapy” and named a date.

Shock therapy consists of intravenously injecting the patient with a quantity of camphor oil several times higher than the dose used subcutaneously for maintaining a seriously ill patient’s cardiac activity. The camphor oil acts by causing a sudden attack, like an attack of violent madness of epilepsy. A rush of camphor causes a sharp increase in all of the patient’s muscular activity and motor forces. Muscles are tensed as never before and the patient’s strength, although he has lost consciousness, is increased tenfold. The attack lasts several minutes.

Several days passed without Merzliakov thinking of unbending of his own free will. The morning named in his notes came and he was taken to see Piotr Ivanovich. Any entertainment is highly appreciated in the north, so the doctor’s office was crowded. Eight burly male nurses were lined up against the wall. A divan was placed in the middle of the office.

“We’ll do it here,” said Piotr Ivanovich, getting up from his desk. “We shan’t bother the surgeons. Where’s Sergei Fiodorovich, by the way?”

“He’s not coming,” said Anna Ivanovna, the sister on duty. “He said he was busy.”

“Busy, busy,” repeated Piotr Ivanovich. “It would do him good to watch me doing his job for him.”

Merzliakov’s sleeve was rolled up and the paramedic rubbed some iodine on his arm. Taking a syringe in his right hand, the paramedic pierced a vein near the patient’s elbow joint. Dark blood flowed through the needle into the syringe. With a gentle movement of his thumb the paramedic pressed the plunger and a yellow solution began entering the vein.

“Get it in as fast as you can!” said Piotr Ivanovich. “And then stand aside quickly. As for you,” he told the male nurses, “hold him.”

Merzliakov’s enormous body leapt up and writhed in the nurses’ hands. Eight men were holding him down. He rasped, he struggled, he kicked, but the nurses were holding tight and he started quieting down.

“You can restrain a tiger like that, a tiger,” shouted Piotr Ivanovich in his delight. “On the other side of Lake Baikal that’s how they catch tigers by hand. Now watch closely,” he told the hospital chief, “see how Gogol exaggerated. Do you remember the end of Taras Bulba? ‘Almost thirty men were hanging on to his arms and legs.’ Well, this gorilla is rather bigger than Taras Bulba. And he only needs eight men.”

“Yes, yes,” said the chief. He didn’t remember Gogol, but he did like the shock therapy enormously.

The next morning Piotr Ivanovich did his rounds and stopped at Merzliakov’s bed.

“Well, then,” he asked, “what’s your decision?”

“You can discharge me,” said Merzliakov.

1956

From: KOLYMA STORIES

Volume One

VARLAM SHALAMOV

Translated from the Russian and with an introduction by

DONALD RAYFIELD