Humility, Gratitude and Patience

 Humility

Our society encourages navel-gazing and celebrates entitlement and exuberance. Economic interests lie not in humility but in pride and hubris, while to call something or someone ‘humble’ most often connotes that the thing or person is simple, contemptible, or of little worth.

To distinguish it from modesty is the first step in finding humility. Like ‘humiliation’, ‘humility’ derives from the Latin humus, ‘earth’ or ‘dirt’. Modesty on the other hand derives from modus, ‘manner’ or ‘measure’, and means restraint in appearance and behaviour. It is the reluctance to flaunt, display, or otherwise draw attention to oneself.

Modesty often implies a certain artfulness or artificiality, perhaps even insincerity or hypocrisy. In Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), the character of Uriah Heep is notable for his obsequiousness, and often brings up his own ‘umbleness’ in a bid to disguise the true scale of his ambition. Modesty often poses as humility, but, unlike humility, is superficial and external rather than deep and internal. At best, modesty is no more than good manners.

True humility, on the other hand, derives from a proper perspective on our human condition: one person among billions on a small planet among billions, like a bacterium on a titbit of cheese. Of course, human beings cannot remain this level-headed for longer than three winks, but truly humble people are nonetheless far more aware of their cosmic insignificance, an insignificance that verges upon non-existence. A mote of dust does not consider itself superior or inferior to other motes of dust, or concern itself with their comings and goings. Enthralled by the miracle of existence, truly humble people live not for themselves or their image, but for life itself.

Drunk on their humility, humble people can sometimes come across as arrogant. In 399 BCE, at the age of 70, Socrates was indicted for offending the Olympian gods and breaking the law against impiety. He was accused of ‘studying things in the sky and below the earth’, ‘making the worse into the stronger argument’, and ‘teaching these same things to others’. At his trial, he gave a defiant defence, telling the jurors that they ought to be ashamed of their eagerness to possess as much wealth and reputation as possible, while not caring for or giving thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of their soul.

After being convicted and sentenced to death, Socrates turned around to the 501 jurors and said:

You think that I was convicted through deficiency of words—I mean, that if I had thought fit to leave nothing undone, nothing unsaid, I might have gained an acquittal. Not so; the deficiency which led to my conviction was not of words—certainly not. But I had not the boldness or impudence or inclination to address you as you would have liked me to address you, weeping and wailing and lamenting, and saying and doing many things which you have been accustomed to hearing from others, and which, as I say, are unworthy of me. But I thought that I ought not to do anything common or mean in the hour of danger: nor do I now repent of the manner of my defence, and I would rather die having spoken after my manner, than speak in your manner and live.

Throughout his long life, Socrates, who looked like a tramp, had been a paragon of humility. When his friend Chærephon asked the Delphic oracle if anyone was wiser than Socrates, the Pythian priestess replied that no one was wiser. To discover the meaning of this divine utterance, Socrates questioned a number of people with a claim to wisdom, and in each case concluded, ‘I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.’ From then on, he dedicated himself to the service of the gods by seeking out anyone who might be wise and, ‘if he is not, showing him that he is not.’

Was Socrates lacking in humility at his trial? Was he, paradoxically, being arrogant by bragging about his humility? Perhaps he put on an arrogant display because he wanted to die, because he was ill or infirm and knew that by dying the death of a martyr his thought and teachings would be preserved for posterity. Or perhaps genuine humility can seem like arrogance to those who are truly arrogant, in which case humble people may need to hide their humility under a cloak of… modesty—which, at his trial, Socrates was unwilling to do.

To be humble is to subdue our ego so that things are no longer all about us, whereas to be modest is to protect the ego of others so that they do not feel uncomfortable, threatened, or belittled, and attack us in return. Because humble people are in fact very big, they may need to slap on an extra thick veneer of modesty.

Socrates is not the only humble person who occasionally comes across as arrogant. In fact, there is a propensity for such ‘arrogance’ among celebrated thinkers and artists. Even doubting Descartes had his moments. In an appendix to his Discourse, he let slip: ‘I hope that posterity will judge me kindly, not only as to the things which I have explained, but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery.’

Erasmus said that ‘humility is truth’. Humble people are disinclined to conceal the truth because they are by nature truth seekers: it is often through philosophy that they found humility, and this humility in turn invites philosophy. Philosophy, the art of perspective, if carried out in earnest, eventually leads to clarity of thought, such that humble people are often highly productive or prolific. If a person is insightful and inspired, chances are good that he or she is also humble.

Religious traditions are keen to emphasize humility in their teachings. In Greek mythology, Aidos, the daimona of shame, reverence, and humility, held people back from doing wrong. In around the eighth century BCE, Hesiod wrote: ‘Aidos and Nemesis with their sweet forms wrapped in white robes, will go from the wide-pathed earth and forsake mankind to join the company of the deathless gods…’ Some of the most vivid Greek myths, like those of Tantalus, Sisyphus, Œdipus, Phæthon, Œdipus, and Icarus, who famously flew too close to the sun, can be read as warnings against hubris, which is the defiance of the gods from excessive pride, leading to downfall or nemesis.

In the Christian canon, pride is the original sin, since it is from pride that the angel Lucifer fell from Heaven to become Satan:

How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God… I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.

The Book of Numbers speaks of Moses as ‘a man exceeding [sic.] meek above all men that dwelt upon earth’, and the Book of Proverbs teaches that ‘God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble’. Similarly, Matthew says that ‘whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted’.

St Augustine (d. 430 CE) held that humility is the foundation for all the other virtues: without humility, one can have only the appearance of virtue, but not the thing itself. In one of his sermons, he preached: ‘Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.’

In the Buddhist tradition, humility is part of the spiritual practice, and an outcome of it: one cannot attain enlightenment unless one has perfected humility. In Taoism, humility is one of the Three Treasures, or basic virtues, along with compassion and frugality. As for Islam, the very word ‘Islam’ means ‘submission (to the will of God)’.

But not all of the canonical philosophers thought highly of humility. Aristotle omitted it from his list of virtues, and Hume and Nietzsche went so far as to condemn it.

(...)

There is much to chew upon in Nietzsche’s master-slave dichotomy, but he and Hume seem to confuse or confound humility with modesty or meekness. Both humility and modesty involve self-abnegation, but whereas modesty involves self-abnegation for the sake of others or for the sake of short-term ease and favour, humility involves self-abnegation for the sake of a higher truth and better self.

There is more and more evidence to suggest that, far from being inhibiting, humility is a highly adaptive trait. Researchers have linked it to pro-social dispositions such as self-control, gratitude, generosity, tolerance, and forgiveness; and associated it not only with better personal and social relationships, as might be expected, but also with better health outcomes, superior academic and job performance, and a more effective leadership style.

Because humility de-emphasizes the self, it diminishes the need for self-deception, which in turn frees us to admit to and learn from our mistakes; contemplate alternative perspectives and possibilities; recognize the qualities and contributions of others; and respect, value, and submit to legitimate authority.

In sum, humility could not be more different from mere modesty or meekness. If humility resembles anything, it is in fact the ancient concept of piety, or right relations, but stripped or abstracted of piety’s more concrete and sectarian religious dimensions.

Humility is the real religion.

Gratitude

Gratitude [Latin gratia, grace] never came easily to us men and women, and is a diminishing virtue in modern times. In our consumerist society, we tend to focus on what we lack, or on what other people have that we do not, whereas gratitude is the feeling of appreciation for what we already have. More than that, it is the recognition that the good in our life can come from something that is beyond us and beyond our control—be it other people, nature, or a higher power—and that owes little or nothing to us. Gratitude is not a technique or stratagem, but a complex and refined moral disposition. It has been defined poetically as ‘the memory of the heart’ or ‘the moral memory of mankind’.

It is easy enough, both for the debtor and the benefactor, to mistake indebtedness for gratitude. Indebtedness is a much more contained and restricted obligation, or perceived obligation, on the part of the debtor to recompense or otherwise compensate the benefactor, not because recompense is a pleasure but because obligation is a pain. Unlike gratitude, indebtedness can lead the debtor to avoid and even resent the benefactor.

As philosopher Seneca (d. 65 CE) put it:

In the case of certain men, the more they owe, the more they hate. A trifling debt makes a man your debtor; a large one makes him an enemy.

Gratitude should also be distinguished from appreciation, which is the recognition and enjoyment of the good qualities of a person or thing, but without the dimension of awe, reverence, and humility that is at the core of gratitude.

Gratitude is magnified if the conferred benefit is unexpected, or if the benefactor is of a higher social standing than the debtor. But if a benefit comes to be expected, both it and the benefactor tend to be taken for granted by the beneficiary—a common feature of tired relationships, and a rationale for doling out gifts and favours on a variable ratio schedule. Every Christmas, I give the refuse collectors in my street a bottle of wine. One year, the gift failed to materialize, and when it eventually did, some time in February, they accepted it only grudgingly.

Gratitude is also magnified if, in benefiting us, the benefactor touches our feelings. Unless our feelings are moved, we tend to respond not with gratitude but with mere appreciation—which is why a gift ought to be accompanied by a thoughtful card. By the same token, the teachers whom we hold dearest in our hearts are not those who assiduously taught us the most facts, or fastidiously covered every bulleted point on the syllabus, but those who inspired us and opened us up to the world.

In paying homage to something outside ourselves, gratitude enables us to connect with something that is not only larger than ourselves but also benevolent, even nurturing. By turning us outward, it opens our eyes to the miracle that is life, something to marvel at, revel in, and celebrate, rather than forget, ignore, or take for granted as it passes us by. Gratitude encourages us to joy, tranquillity, awareness, enthusiasm, and empathy, while removing us from anxiety, sadness, loneliness, regret, and envy, with which it is fundamentally incompatible. All this it does because it opens us up to a bigger and better perspective, shifting our focus from what we lack or strive for to all that we already have, to the bounty that surrounds us, and, above all, to life itself, which is the fount of all opportunity and possibility. This eagle or godlike perspective frees us to live life, no longer for ourselves, but for life itself.

For this reason, the philosopher Cicero (d. 43 BCE) called gratitude the greatest of the virtues, and, more than that, the mother of all the other virtues. Today, science has begun to catch up with Cicero. Studies have linked gratitude with increased satisfaction, motivation, and energy; better sleep and health; and reduced stress and sadness. Grateful people engage much more with their environment, leading to greater personal growth and self-acceptance, and stronger feelings of purpose, meaning, and connectedness.

We can be grateful not only for past and present benefits but also for likely future benefits. Forward gratitude promotes optimism, and optimism faith. So it can be no surprise that both Western and Eastern religious traditions strongly emphasize gratitude. In many Christian denominations, the most important rite is Holy Communion or Eucharist—a word that derives from eucharistia, Greek for ‘thanksgiving’. Luther himself spoke of gratitude as ‘the basic Christian attitude’. More than a mere feeling, Christian gratitude is a virtue, or disposition of the soul, that shapes our thoughts, feelings, and actions, and that is developed and exercised through a remembered relationship with God and His Creation.

In contrast, ingratitude—which can range from mere lack or absence of gratitude to Brutus’ murder of Cæsar—is hurtful because it ignores the efforts and sacrifices of the benefactor, thereby affronting him or her, and, by extension, life itself.

In Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606), Lear cries out:

Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend,

More hideous when thou show’st thee in a child

Than the sea monster!

…

How much sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is

To have a thankless child!

Hume maintains that ‘of all the crimes that human creatures are capable of committing, the most horrid and unnatural is ingratitude…’ For Kant, ingratitude is, quite simply, ‘the essence of vileness’. Ingratitude, which, of course, has become the norm, corrodes social bonds and undermines public trust, leading to societies built on rights and entitlements rather than duties and obligations, on me rather than us, and in which every aspect of human life has to be regulated, recorded, and monitored.

Despite the great and many benefits that it confers, gratitude is hard to cultivate. It is opposed to some deeply ingrained human traits, in particular, our need to feel in control of our destiny, our propensity to credit ourselves for our successes while blaming others for our setbacks, and our unconscious belief in some kind of cosmic equality or justice—that is, our refusal to accept that life is fundamentally unfair. Today, we seek more and more to exist as independent individuals rather than as a social collective, and gratitude undermines our ego illusion.

As human nature does not leave much place for it, gratitude is an attainment of maturity, or, to be more precise, emotional maturity, which can arrive at any age or, more commonly, not at all. Children who are taught to parrot ‘thank you’ mean it even less than their parents do. Many people express gratitude, or a semblance of it, simply because doing so is useful or the ‘done thing’. Gratitude is good manners, and good manners aim at aping profundity when profundity is lacking.

Real gratitude, in contrast, is a rare and accomplished virtue. There is a fable in Æsop about a slave who extracts a thorn from the paw of a lion. Some time later, the slave and the lion are captured, and the slave thrown to the lion. The starved lion bounds and roars towards the slave, but upon recognizing his friend fawns upon him and licks his face like a lapdog. ‘Gratitude’ concludes Æsop, ‘is the sign of noble souls.’

Like all virtues, gratitude requires constant cultivation, until such a day as we can say, ‘Thank you for nothing.’

Patience

An old man shared his deepest regret. ‘I wish’ he said, ‘that I had understood the unfolding of time.’ Patience (or forbearance) comes from the Latin patientia, ‘patience, endurance, submission’, and, ultimately—like ‘passivity’ and ‘passion’—from patere, ‘to suffer’. It can be defined as the quality of endurance or equanimity in the face of adversity, from simple delay or provocation to tragic misfortune and excruciating pain.

Being both adaptive and difficult, patience is often thought of as a virtue, but it can also be understood as a complex of virtues including self-control, humility, tolerance, generosity, and mercy, and is itself an important aspect of other virtues such as hope, faith, and love. Patience is, therefore, a paradigm for the ancient notion of the unity of the virtues.

In Buddhism, patience is named as one of the Six Perfections [paramitas] and extends to the non-return of harm. The Book of Proverbs, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, speaks very highly of patience: ‘He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.’ This is echoed in Ecclesiastes, which teaches, ‘The patient in spirit is better than the proud of spirit. Be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry: for anger resteth in the bosom of fools.’

The opposite of patience is impatience, which can be defined as the inability or disinclination to endure perceived imperfection. Impatience is a rejection of the present moment on the grounds that it is tainted or marred, and ought to be replaced by some more ideal imagined future. It is a rejection of the way things are, a rejection of reality. Whereas patience recognizes that life is a struggle for each and every one of us, impatience takes umbrage at people for being the way they are, betraying a kind of disregard, even contempt, for human nature in its finitude.

Impatience implies impotence, that is, lack of control or command over a situation, and this impotence gives rise to frustration. Like anger (Chapter 16), impatience and frustration are as misguided as they are miserable, and as sterile as they are self-defeating. They can lead to rash and destructive action, and also, paradoxically, to inaction, or procrastination, since to put off a demanding or boring task is also to put off the frustration to which it is bound to lead.

Today more than ever, patience is a forgotten virtue. Our individualistic and materialistic society values ambition and action (or, at least, activity) above all else, whereas patience involves a withdrawing and withholding of the self. And things are only getting worse: In a study of millions of Internet users, researchers found that, within just ten seconds, about half of users had given up on videos that had not yet started to play. What’s more, users with a faster connection were fastest to click away, suggesting that technological progress is actually eroding our patience.

Waiting, even for a very short time, has become so unbearable that much of our economy is geared at eliminating ‘dead time’. In The Art of Failure, I argue that such restless impatience is an expression of the manic defence, the essence of which is to prevent feelings of helplessness and despair from entering the conscious mind by distracting it with opposite feelings such as euphoria, purposeful activity, and omnipotent control.

Even in pre-modern, pre-technological times, the so-called egocentric predicament made it difficult to exercise patience. Because I have privileged access to my own thoughts, I blow them out of all proportion and, as a result, lose perspective over a situation. For example, if I am impatient in the checkout line, this is largely because I am under the impression that my time is more valuable, and my purpose greater, than that of the mugs standing in front of me, about whom I know nothing at all. In a belief that I could be doing a better job at the till, I give dagger eyes to the cashier—failing to recognize that he or she is coming at it from a different angle and with different skills and abilities. In the end, my frustration in itself becomes a source of frustration as I vacillate between biding my time in the queue, switching queues, and even abandoning my shopping.

Patience can be regarded as a decision-making problem: eat up all the grain today, or plant it into the ground and wait for it to multiply. Unfortunately, human beings evolved not as farmers but as hunter-gatherers, and have a strong tendency to discount long-term rewards. This ancestral short-sightedness is borne out by the Stanford marshmallow experiment, a series of studies on delayed gratification led by Walter Mischel in the late 1960s and 1970s. Conducted on hundreds of four- and five-year old children, Mischel’s studies involved a simple binary choice: eat this marshmallow or hold back for fifteen minutes to be given a second one. Having explained this choice to a child, the experimenter left the child alone with the marshmallow for fifteen minutes. Follow-up studies carried out over forty years found that the minority of children who had been able to hold out for the second marshmallow went on to enjoy significantly better life outcomes, including higher test scores, better social skills, and less substance misuse.

Even so, patience involves much more than the mere ability to hold back for some future gain, as some of the children did. Exercising patience (note the use of the verb ‘to exercise’) can be compared to dieting or growing a garden—or, indeed, writing a book. Yes, waiting is involved, but one also needs to have a plan in place, and to work at that plan. And so, when it comes to others, patience amounts not to mere restraint or toleration, but to an active, almost complicit, engagement in their struggle and welfare. In that much, patience is a form of compassion, which, rather than disregarding and alienating people, turns them into friends and allies.

If impatience implies impotence, patience implies power, power borne out of understanding. Rather than make us into a hostage to fortune, patience frees us from frustration and its ills, and affords us the calm and perspective to think, say, and do the right thing in the right way at the right time—while still enabling us to enjoy all the other things that are good in our life. Faced with a long checkout line, I might choose to abandon my shopping, but, even then, I can do so without losing my cool and ruining my day.

Exercising patience need not mean never protesting or giving up, but only ever doing so in a considered fashion: never impetuously, never pettily, and never pointlessly. Neither need it mean withholding, just like ageing a case of fine wine for several years need not mean withholding from wine during all that time. Life is too short to wait, but it is not too short for patience.

Last but not least, patience enables us to achieve things that would not otherwise have been possible to achieve. As the philosopher Jean de La Bruyère (d. 1696) put it, ‘There is no road too long to the person who advances deliberately and without undue haste; there are no honours too distant to the person who prepares himself for them with patience.’ Michelangelo compressed this thought into just four words when he said: ‘Genius is eternal patience.’

Patience is much easier, maybe even pleasant, to exercise if one truly understands that it can and does deliver much better outcomes, not just for ourselves but for others too. In 2012, researchers at the University of Rochester replicated the marshmallow experiment. But before doing so, they split the participating children into two groups, exposing the first group to unreliable experiences in the form of broken promises, and the second group to reliable experiences in the form of kept promises. What they found is that the children in the second group (exposed to reliable experiences) waited an average of four times longer than those in the first group.

In other words, patience is largely a matter of trust, or, some might say, faith—including in our political, legal, and financial systems.

Heaven and Hell The Psychology of the Emotions

Neel Burton

Claims About Holocaust Revisionists

Untrue and wrong:

They deny that Jews were persecuted
They deny that Jews were persecuted
They deny that Jews were deprived of civil rights
They deny that Jews were deported
They deny the Jews were herded into ghettos
They deny the existence of concentration camps
They deny that Jews were put to forced labor
They deny the existence of crematoria in concentration camps
They deny that Jews died for a great number of reasons: epidemics, malnutrition, diseases, mistreatment
They deny that other minorities were also persecuted as well, such as gypsies and political dissenters
They deny that the treatment of the Jews was unjust
They deny the victims their dignity
They deny the victims to be remembered
They deny to show compassion for the victims

This is what they claim:

They deny that there was a plan to murder all Jews
They deny that Jews were murdered systematically
They deny the existence of gas chambers for mass murder
They deny that six million Jews died in the Holocaust

Source
https://germarrudolf.com/germars-views-2/101-false-claims-about-revisionism/

Ego defences

 Abstraction

Abstraction involves trying to ignore or suppress the source of anxiety so that it no longer seems to exist.

All the ego defences discussed in this section aim, or aim primarily, at abstraction.

1

Denial

Denial, probably the most basic of ego defences, is the simple refusal to admit to certain unacceptable or unmanageable aspects of reality, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.

An example of denial is a physician who ignores the classic signs and symptoms of a heart attack—crushing central chest pain radiating into the left arm, associated with sweating, shortness of breath, and nausea—and casually carries on with his game of golf.

(...)

In her classic of 1969, On Death and Dying, the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced a model of bereavement commonly referred to as the Five Stages of Grief. The model describes, in five discrete stages, a process by which people react to grief and tragedy, especially terminal illness or catastrophic loss.

The five stages are:

Denial

Anger

Bargaining

Depression (or grieving), and

Acceptance.

Just as people might move back and forth between the stages, often at speed, so they might get stuck in one of the earlier stages, failing to come to terms with their loss.

The model has been criticized on a number of grounds, but Kübler-Ross did emphasize that all five stages need not occur, or occur in the given order, and that reactions to illness, death, and loss are as diverse as the people experiencing them.(...)

It is none other than Sigmund Freud (d. 1939) who first formulated the concept of denial as an ego defence. His daughter Anna Freud (d. 1982) thought of it as an immature ego defence, first, because it is mostly used in childhood and adolescence, and, second, because its continued use into adulthood leads to unhealthy or unhelpful behaviours and a complete failure to engage or come to terms with reality.(...)

An ego defence that is closely related to denial is negative hallucination, which is the failure to register uncomfortable sensory stimuli, for instance, the failure to see something that ought to have been seen, hear something that ought to have been heard, or feel something—like crushing chest pain—that ought to have been felt. Thus, a common occurrence in conversation or in a social setting is for a person to ‘edit out’ a challenging or contradictory remark. The person momentarily goes blank, and then carries on as though the thing had never been said. The ability to hear, or at least register, painful truths is one of the many pre-requisites of being a good listener.

2

Repression

Repression can be thought of as ‘motivated forgetting’: the active but unconscious forgetting of unacceptable drives, emotions, ideas, or memories.

Unsurprisingly, repression is often confused with denial: but whereas denial relates to external stimuli, repression relates to internal, that is, mental, stimuli. Nonetheless, the two ego defences often work hand in hand, and may be difficult to disentangle—as in the following, harrowing case. (...)

Freud thought of repression as the basic ego defence, since it is only when repression is fragile or failing that other ego defences come into play to reinforce and rescue it. In other words, repression is an essential component or building block of the other ego defences. To understand this better, let’s look at an example of the ego defence of distortion, which is the reshaping of reality to suit one’s inner needs. A teen who got dumped by her boyfriend no longer recalls this episode (repression), and comes to believe that it was she who dumped him (distortion). As you can see, the distortion not only builds upon but also buttresses the repression.

Repressed material, though out of the conscious mind, is no less present, and can (and usually does) resurface in disturbing forms. Beyond an obvious lack of insight and understanding, the inability to process and come to terms with repressed material is associated with a range of psychological issues such as anxiety, irritability, insomnia, nightmares, and depression; maladaptive and destructive patterns of behaviour such as anger and aggression in the face of reminders—such as Tumbling Woman—of the repressed material; and any number of superimposed ego defences.

‘Neurosis’ is an old-fashioned term that describes the various forms in which repressed material can resurface (anxiety, irritability, and so on). In Studies on Hysteria (1895), Freud with his colleague Josef Breuer formulated the theory according to which neuroses have their origins in deeply traumatic and consequently repressed experiences..(...)

The mental operation of suppression is similar to repression but with one critical difference, namely, that the ‘forgetting’ is conscious rather than unconscious. Thus, suppression is the conscious and often rational decision to put an uncomfortable (although, clearly, not totally unacceptable) stimulus to one side, either to deal with it at a more opportune time or to abandon it altogether on the grounds that it is not worth dealing with.

As it is a conscious operation, suppression is not, strictly speaking, a form of self-deception, but rather the conscious analogue of repression. Needless to say, suppression is much more mature than repression, and, as with all conscious operations, tends to favour much more positive outcomes.

Let’s look at a concrete example of suppression. A pair of friends who are holidaying in a larger group start arguing, so ferociously that they fall out with each other. The next day, they put their differences to one side and behave as though nothing had happened so as not to cast a cloud over the group and ruin everyone’s holiday. That day, they share some good times and special moments, and, by evening, it has become safe enough to bring up the argument and put it behind them. By dealing with their argument in this way, the pair have deepened rather than undermined their friendship.

3

Dissociation

The basic form of dissociation, isolation of affect, involves a separation (or ‘dissociation’) of thoughts and feelings, with the feelings (the ‘affect’) then removed from conscious attention to leave only the thoughts.

Isolation of affect is probably most evident when someone refers to an emotionally loaded event or situation in a casual, matter-of-fact, or otherwise dispassionate way. This can be called for in certain circumstances, for example, in providing the distance and objectivity that a physician needs to make optimal decisions about the care of her patients. But too much detachment neither makes for a good physician, and, as with most psychological processes, detachment is best if it can be conscious and pragmatic rather than rigid and defensive.

Isolation of affect is very common. When I catch it in conversation, I often find myself interjecting with something like, ‘Wait, hang on, what did you just say?’ Other forms of dissociation, while much more dramatic, are also much less common, and can take one of several sometimes overlapping forms such as amnesia, possession trance, or stupor. These rarer forms are serious enough to count as mental disorders, and are referred to in diagnostic manuals as ‘dissociative disorders’. They are usually precipitated by a highly traumatic event, leading to a disruption in the normally integrated functions of consciousness, memory, and identity.

In dissociative amnesia, the person suffers a loss of memory, most commonly for the period surrounding the traumatic event. Dissociative amnesia, or something closely resembling it, has long been recognized.

Already in the first century, the naturalist Pliny the Elder remarked:

Nothing whatever, in man, is of so frail a nature as the memory; for it is affected by disease, by injuries, and even by fright; being sometimes partially lost, and at other times entirely so.

In possession trance, the person reacts to the traumatic event by entering into a dissociative state, in which her identity is replaced by that of another agency such as a ghost, spirit, or deity. In many cultures, certain forms of trance are recognized and even exalted as expressions of religious fervour or manifestations of the divine. Therefore, possession trance should only be seen as problematic, or potentially problematic, if it is not a normal feature of the person’s culture or sub-culture.

In dissociative stupor, the person reacts to the traumatic event by becoming mute (speechless) and stuporous (motionless), failing to respond to stimuli such as the human voice, bright lights, or extremes of hot and cold. Dissociative stupor—that is, stupor in reaction to a traumatic event—is but one form of stupor, and the medical team ought to consider and rule out other causes of stupor such as severe depression, schizophrenia, and organic brain disease.

A fourth kind or pattern of dissociative disorder is dissociative fugue, in which the person embarks on an unexpected journey that may last for up to several months. During this journey, there is memory loss and confusion about personal identity or even assumption of another, entirely different identity. When the fugue comes to an end and the person returns to her normal self, the memory of the journey is usually lost.

* * *

Denial is, of course, an important element of any dissociative disorder. Although often described in the psychiatric literature in terms of a ‘compartmentalization of experience’, dissociative disorders are, arguably, no more than an extreme form of denial. As our journey into self-deception has begun to reveal, ego defences do not, for the most part, exist in splendid isolation, but involve a great deal of overlap between mutually reinforcing ego defences. Ours is a very dirty business.

4

Intellectualization

Isolation of affect—the dissociation of thoughts and feelings, followed by the removal of the feelings from conscious attention—is closely related to intellectualization.

In intellectualization, the uncomfortable feelings associated with a problem are kept out of consciousness by thinking about the problem in cold, abstract, and esoteric terms.

A ambitious medical student once asked me whether she should take up a career in academic medicine, despite (or so it seemed) having already made up her mind on the matter. After raising some arguments in favour, I raised some arguments against, including that the vast majority of people engaged in medical research never go on to make a significant breakthrough. As she did not seem to be taking this argument on board, I asked her to name just one major breakthrough in psychiatric research in the past fifty years. Instead of naming one, or accepting that there had not been any, she resorted to questioning the definition of a breakthrough and even the value of making one—which may have been legitimate things to do, had she first accepted, or at least entertained the idea, that there had not been any.

Here’s another example of intellectualization. After being discharged from hospital, a middle-aged man who had almost died from a heart attack spent several hours a day on his computer researching the various risk factors for cardiovascular disease. He typed out long essays on each of these risk factors, printed them out, and filed them in a large binder with colour-coded dividers. After that, he became preoccupied with the vitamin and mineral contents of various kinds of food and devised a strict dietary regimen to ensure that he took in the recommended amounts of each and every micronutrient. Despite living on a shoestring budget, he spent a great deal of money on a high-end steamer on the basis that it could preserve vitamins through the cooking process. But not once did he consider cutting back on his much more harmful thirty-a-day smoking habit..

* * *

The focus on abstract notions, trivial footnotes, and peripheral digressions belies a sort of ‘flight into reason’. The emotionally loaded event or situation is thought of in terms of an interesting problem or puzzle, without any appreciation of its emotional content or personal implications. Instead of coming to terms with the problem, or just having a good cry, the person may split hairs over definitions; undermine reasonable assumptions, facts, and arguments; and cloud her mind with nebulous arguments and abstruse minutiæ. But by failing on purpose to see the bigger picture, she also fails to reach the appropriate conclusion or conclusions—which, as with our medical student or heart attack victim, may hit her very hard in five, ten, or thirty years’ time.

Intellectualization is typically associated with poor reasoning, especially informal fallacy. The person may, for example, raise irrelevant or trivial objections, reject an argument on the basis of a bad example or exceptional case, or use exact numbers to talk about inexact or abstract notions. I discuss formal and informal fallacies at much greater length in Hypersanity—but from our discussion here it is already clear that sound reasoning is not simply a matter of intelligence.

5

Rationalization

Intellectualization, with its barrage of pseudo-rational activity, is easy to confuse with rationalization, which is the use of feeble or far-fetched arguments to skirt over something that is difficult to accept, or to make it more palatable.

A person who has been rejected by a love interest convinces herself that he rejected her because he did not feel up to her standards, and, moreover, that the rejection is a blessing in disguise insofar as it has freed her to find a more suitable partner.

The first rationalization—that her love interest rejected her because he did not feel up to her standards—is a case of skirting over something that is difficult to accept, sometimes called ‘sour grapes’. The second rationalization—that the rejection has freed her to find a more suitable partner—is a case of making it more palatable, also called ‘sweet lemons’.

Here’s another example. A teenager who fails to secure a place at a leading university tells herself that the university is sexist (sour grapes), and that taking a gap year to re-apply is a precious opportunity to travel and see the world (sweet lemons).

The teenager uses these rationalizations to reduce the psychological discomfort of holding contradictory beliefs or thoughts (‘cognitions’), on the one hand the cognition that she is smart and ready enough to get into the university of her choice, and on the other hand the cognition that she failed to do so.

Alternatively, she could have reduced this so-called cognitive dissonance by revising her self-image (‘I am not so smart or prepared as I thought’), but, on the whole, finds it less disturbing to rationalize, that is, to undermine or discount, the cognition that is inconsistent with her self-image.

In When Prophecy Fails (1956), Leon Festinger, a social psychologist, discusses his experience of infiltrating a UFO doomsday cult whose leader had prophesied the end of the world. When the end of the world predictably failed to materialize, most of the cult members dealt with the dissonance that arose from the cognitions ‘the leader said that the world would end’ and ‘the world did not end’ not by ditching the cult or its leader, as you might expect, but by rationalizing that the world had been saved by the strength of their faith.

Smokers typically experience a high level of cognitive dissonance with respect to their habit. To decrease this tension, they might (1) quit smoking, or (2) deny the evidence that links smoking to life-threatening conditions such as emphysema and lung cancer, or (3) rationalize their smoking so as to make it compatible with competing cognitions such as ‘I want to live a long and healthy life’ or ‘I am a rational person who makes sound, evidence-based decisions’.

Here are some of the rationalizations that smokers commonly use:

Smoking’s my only way of coping.

There’s nothing else to do.

What’s the point of living if I can’t enjoy life?

Only heavy smokers are at any real risk.

That’s fine, everyone’s got to die someday.

Everyone’s got to die from something or other, so it might as well be this.

The first three rationalizations are instances of sour grapes, and the last three of sweet lemons.

* * *

For the story, ‘sour grapes’ derives from one of the fables attributed to Æsop (d. 564 BCE), The Fox and the Grapes.

One hot summer’s day a Fox was strolling through an orchard till he came to a bunch of Grapes just ripening on a bine which had been trained over a lofty branch. ‘Just the thing to quench my thirst,’ quoth he. Drawing back a few paces, he took a run and a jump, and just missed the branch. Turning round with a One, Two, Three, he jumped up, but with no greater success. Again and again he tried after the tempting morsel, but at last had to give it up, and walked away with his nose in the air, saying: ‘I am sure they are sour.’

For the poor fox, the cognitive dissonance arises from the cognitions ‘I’m an agile and nimble fox’ and ‘I can’t reach the grapes on the branch’; and the rationalization—which is, of course, a form of sour grapes—is ‘I’m sure the grapes are sour’. Had the fox gone for sweet lemons instead of sour grapes, he might have said something like, ‘In any case, there are far juicier grapes in the farmer’s orchard.’

* * *

Rationalization is used to great comedic effect in Voltaire’s satirical masterpiece, Candide (1759). The novella is an attack on Leibniz’s philosophy that the world is the best of all possible worlds, embodied by Candide’s tutor Professor Pangloss, who rationalizes a succession of tragic events so that they are in keeping with Leibniz’s philosophical optimism.

In Chapter 4, Candide chances upon Pangloss, now reduced to the condition of a beggar. Pangloss, it turns out, contracted a venereal disease, leaving him covered in scabs and coughing violently.

Upon seeing his old tutor in so diminished a state, Candide ‘inquires into the cause and effect, as well as into the sufficing reason that had reduced [Pangloss] to so miserable a condition’.

P: Alas ... it was love; love, the comfort of the human species; love, the preserver of the universe; the soul of all sensible beings; love! Tender love!

C: Alas ... I have had some knowledge of love myself, this sovereign of hearts, this soul of souls; yet it never cost me more than a kiss and twenty kicks on the backside. But how could this beautiful cause produce in you so hideous an effect? ...

P: Oh my dear Candide, you must remember Pacquette, that pretty wench, who waited on our noble Baroness; in her arms I tasted the pleasures of paradise, which produced these hell torments with which you see me devoured. She was infected with an ailment, and perhaps has since died of it; she received this present of a learned Franciscan, who derived it from the fountainhead; he was indebted for it to an old countess, who had it of a captain of horse, who had it of a marchioness, who had it of a page, the page had it of a Jesuit, who, during his novitiate, had it in a direct line from one of the fellow adventurers of Christopher Columbus...

C: O sage Pangloss ... what a strange genealogy is this! Is not the devil the root of it?

P: Not at all ... it was a thing unavoidable, a necessary ingredient in the best of worlds; for if Columbus had not caught in an island in America this disease, which contaminates the source of generation, and frequently impedes propagation itself, and is evidently opposed to the great end of nature, we should have had neither chocolate nor cochineal...

* * *

Human beings are not rational, but rationalizing animals. They find it frightening to think and painful to change, because thought and change threaten the beliefs that make up their sense of self.

Given this state of affairs, any tectonic shift in a person’s outlook, any major realignment with the truth, is only ever going to occur, if at all, by small increments.

A possible accelerator is, in fact, a deterioration in the person’s life circumstances, so severe that it overwhelms her ego defences and leaves her in the depressive or undefended position..

Hide and Seek

The Psychology of Self-Deception

Neel Burton

The Roads to Sata - Alan Booth

 Author's Note

Few people (warns the publisher, grumbling) are likely to know where Sata is, so I had better locate it in this note. Sata is the name of the southernmost cape of the southernmost of the four main islands of Japan. I walked there from Soya, the northernmost cape of the northernmost island, and the roads between, and the things I saw and heard and did along them, are the subjects of this book.

Japan is a long country. If I had walked the same distance across the same latitudes in North America, the trek would have taken me from Ottawa to Mobile, Alabama; and if I had started in Europe, I would have marched from Belgrade through the Middle East to the Gulf of Aquaba. The distances I walked are given here in kilometers, not miles, because it is in kilometers that most Japanese think, and that I thought every morning, noon, and evening of my journey.

If I could, I would individually thank the men, women, and children who populate these pages, but I never knew the names of most of them, and I have thought it in their interests to alter those names I did know. Where names are used, they are used in the Japanese manner: family name first, given name last.

I have tried to avoid generalizations, particularly "the Japanese." "The Japanese" are 120,000,000 people, ranging in age from 0 to 119, in geographical location across 21 degrees of latitude and 23 of longitude, and in profession from emperor to urban guerrilla. This book is about my encounters with some twelve hundred businessmen, farmers, grandmothers, fishermen, housewives, shopkeepers, schoolchildren, soldiers, policemen, monks, priests, tourists, journalists, professors, laborers, maids, waiters, carpenters, teachers, innkeepers, potters, dancers, cyclists, students, truck drivers, Koreans, Americans, bar hostesses, professional wrestlers, government officials, hermits, drunks, and tramps.

***

A light went on in the hut. Through the condensation on the window I could see the wood stove the old man had burning. I saw his shadow move across the dry wall and watched him peer out through the lighted window and stare at me lying on his step. Then I heard him move to the door. The door opened a little and, by turning an inch, I could see his face silhouetted in the doorway. He stood there for what seemed a very long time and I tried to think of something to say, but in the end, I was spared the necessity of saying anything. Quietly but firmly he closed the door of his hut and turned the key in the lock.

It was light by five and the rain had stopped. I got up, shivering, retrieved my groundsheet from the beach, beat the sand off it with a sodden branch, and began to pack my rucksack. The caretaker sat staring at me through the window of his lodge. He looked as though he had been sitting there all night. His old face was tired but his eyes were remarkably sharp. I knew he was staring at me as I rolled up my sleeping bag and strapped it to the pack and as I folded the groundsheet and laced my boots.

"Sayonara," I said as I got up to leave.

I expect he was still staring when I reached the trees.

The man who told me about bears had lived on the shore of the lake for thirty years. He had been a prisoner of the Russians on Sakhalin, and the Russians had told him that he would never go home again. In the end they had released him after two years, and he had gone back to Sapporo where he had found no one he knew, he said, and no way of making a living. So he had settled here on the shore of Lake Shikotsu, a wiry brown-faced hermit, and an amiable one.

Like most Hokkaido people, he knew the value of hot water. He had an oil stove going now, in mid-July, and he poured the water that he had pumped up out of the ground very carefully into his small metal teapot and set it on the stove to boil.

Bears, he said, are the most predictable of animals—far more predictable than human beings, whom he confessed he had not much interest in and whom he thought overrated as a species.

"There are dozens of bears in the hills around the lake. They come down almost daily to the road over there."

He pointed at the road I had just walked along, and I said "Oh really?" with a great deal of nonchalance.

"You want to whistle or sing when you walk," he said, "or have a bell and ring it from time to time, or bang a stick. They won't come near you unless they're really hungry, and then it's only your food they'll want."

I nodded pleasantly, having no food.

"If you turn a corner and you see a bear and it's thirty meters away from you, you've no need to worry. The bear will run away. It'll be far more frightened than you are."

"Well, well!" I said, and sipped my tea.

"If you turn a corner and you see a bear, say, twenty meters away, there's still a good chance it won't bother you. It'll roar a bit just to let you know it's there, but if you stand quite still it'll probably get bored and go back into the forest."

"Mm," I said, giving the forest a very uncursory glance.

"And then, of course, if you turn a corner and you see a bear and it's five or ten meters away from you..."

"Then, presumably, I should start to worry," I said, chuckling my most British chuckle.

"Not really," he said. "You've no need to worry. Bears are the most predictable of animals. If it's five meters away it'll certainly kill you. There's no point in worrying at all."

*

The offshore island of Sado—the largest of japan's many minor islands—was notorious from the twelfth century as a place of exile, and its rocky shores and misty valleys have furnished a prison for some of the glummest characters in Japanese history.Mongaku was one—a sort of twelfth-century Japanese Rasputin. He began his career by lusting after his cousin and killing her by mistake (he had meant to kill her husband), for which piece of carelessness he shaved his head, became a monk, and religiously persuaded the powerful general Yoritomo to wage all-out war against his rivals at court. Yoritomo was successful, and for a while Mongaku enjoyed the fruits of victory. But, alas, not content with provoking mere war, he went on to hatch a plot against the emperor Gotoba, and when his protector Yoritomo died in 1199, Mongaku was whisked off to Sado, where he fretted away the rest of his life.

The other famous clergyman to suffer in Sado was the militant evangelist Nichiren, less a Rasputin than a thirteenth-century Ian Paisley. Nichiren insisted on a firm bond between church and state—so long as it was his church, and his alone, that the state paid any attention to. So vehemently did Nichiren denounce all other Buddhist sects (he once exclaimed that the government would have done better to execute the "heretic" priests than the emissaries of Kublai Khan) that he was packed off" to Sado in 1271, where he passed two years in a mud hut and suffered from chronic diarrhea.

The highest-ranking exile was the emperor Juntoku, sent to Sado in 1221 for attempting to overthrow the military regents. He spent 20 years there, died on a hunger strike, and had 650 years to wait before he was officially reinstated. The founder of the Noh theater, Zeami Motokiyo, lived eight of the last years of his life in Sado. The courtier Hino Suketomo, who had tried to raise an army on behalf of the powerless emperor Godaigo, was shipped to Sado in 1324 and assassinated there by the glum governor. And as late as the mid-nineteenth century a penal colony was working the dreary Sado gold mines.

The afternoon grew overcast. I sat on the beach at Teradomari—the beach from which all these exiles had set sail—and stared across at the gray mounds of the island, remembering my walks there, the meadows and caves and the lingering snows of Mount Kimpoku in May, and thinking of my own seven-year exile in Tokyo.

Ah, toward Sado

the trees and the grass bend.

Ar'ya ar'ya ar'ya sa.

Near Izumosaki a bent old woman was scrubbing out a dusty little wayside shrine and lighting candles. The houses in the villages had been battered by the wind and salt to a uniform gray-brown. They were fenced off from the sea by gray bamboo palisades, the tops of which were rough and frayed, and the houses were so patched and weatherblown that they looked as if they had been camouflaged for an invasion. Between the oily, littered beaches the sea pounded on high stone walls and in the first shower of rain I went for a swim and cut my foot on a broken whiskey bottle.

The shops in the town of Izumosaki displayed four or five sticks of baked flyblown fish in each of their windows and little else. Down the coast towards Kashiwazaki a solitary gas rig straddled a small patch of rain-pocked sea, and in one tiny village an incongruous Hotel Japan loured over its own private bit of beach where three young girls paddled aimlessly about under torn, wind-whipped umbrellas.

"What are you doing, arubaito?" asked a toothless woman pushing a wheelbarrow. (Arubaito is the German word arbeit, which the Japanese have commandeered to mean a part-time job.) The rain had blown over and I was sitting on a beer crate under the awning of a grocer's shop.

"No, I'm not doing arubaito. I'm having a rest."

The woman stopped, and the three dogs that were following her lurched, yapping and sniffing, into the grocer's rubbish bins.

"You speak good hyojungo (orthodox Japanese). Where did you learn it?"

"I live in Tokyo."

"Ah!"

The woman brushed away a bluebottle that was caught in her head-scarf

"I was born in Tokyo. In Toyo-cho. I bet you don't know where that is."

"I bet I do. I had a friend who owned a futon shop there. We used to go drinking at a folk-song bar in Asakusa."

The woman's mouth dropped open so wide I thought she was trying to catch the bluebottle.

"Maa! Asakusa! Natsukashii! (Ah! Asakusa! That brings back memories!) I haven't heard anyone talk about Asakusa for more than seventeen years. That's how long I've lived here. Seventeen years and four months. Asakusa, ah! Have you seen the Sanja Festival?"

"All three days of it."

"Maaaa! Natsukashii! And the log-rolling festival on the Sumida River? And the old Tokyo firemen's dances...?"

She pulled back her headscarf and grinned me a toothless grin that was half rueful, half delight.

"My husband comes from Kashiwazaki though."

"And you've never been back to Tokyo?"

"Never. Not once."

She shifted from foot to foot and I patted one of the dogs that was trying to scrape an empty sausage skin out from under the crate I was sitting on.

"Asakusa, ahhh...!"

"Don't you like it here?"

She nodded once, perfunctorily.

"I like it." And she looked at the sea as though it had just materialized. "Oh, I like it. Kashiwazaki's all right..."

She called to the dogs and lifted her barrow, smiling the same wide toothless smile.

"Yes... oh, yes... and you knew Asakusa..."

The exile walked on with her barrow and dogs.

Above the city of Kashiwazaki a layer of mist sliced Mount Yoneyama in half like an orange. Sado had disappeared, hidden in the rain clouds, and the column of smoke from the city rose to merge with the dense pall of the sky. On an empty beach a solitary painter sat, daubing his canvas with the grays of cloud, the brown-gray of the smoke, the white-gray of the mist, the pink-gray of the buildings.

*

Eiheiji is a vast, beautiful temple, its rooms and halls connected to each other by corridors and long flights of covered wooden steps. Black-robed monks with shaven heads and trainee monks in loose black jackets and trousers sauntered through the corridors and halls with little smirks on their scrubbed faces, ignoring the tourists who were being ushered about, shuffling and whispering; and as the rain still fell, the rustle of robes, the ring of curious fingers brushing a gong, the patter of slippered feet on the cold, smooth boards or the shush of silk tabi socks over soft straw matting—all rose and fell in volume like the gasps of air in a bamboo flute and left in their wake a greater silence than before.The churches of Europe—the great ones—soar up in dizzying verticals at the sky. Eiheyi hugs the contours of the earth. When the sun strikes the stained-glass windows of a cathedral they explode in primary colors like a carousel. But the colors of Eiheiji are earth colors—the somber greens of the garden, the browns and grays of smooth polished wood and slate, the soft gold color of old tatami. The builders of the Christian churches of Europe―churches in which a religion of humility is preached—seem often boastful, often to be saying to us: "Now, look here, this is the House of God. It is here—here—not over the road with those dingy Presbyterians but here in this church that God dwells." The builders of Eiheiji were a lot less strident: "Oh, God dwells in our temple, if you like. But then, he dwells in everything else as well—in clods of earth, in the eyes of the blind, in the pebbles of the seashore as well as in our shrines."The landscape of the mountains,

the sound of streams—

all are the body and voice of Buddha.

Eiheiji was founded in the middle of the thirteenth century by the author of that poem, a priest named Dogen. Dogen had spent four of his most formative years in China, being trained in Zen at Mount T'ien-t'ung, and because the Chinese are a practical people, his revelations, when they came, were of a practical kind. Dogen did not look for spirits in the air or worship an arcane, invisible Buddha who moved only in mysterious ways. "The truth is everywhere," he insisted. "The truth is where we are. One small step separates earth from heaven."

Despite the comparative sobriety of its architecture, Zen often seems to inspire in its adherents a supercilious attitude to the rest of mankind; an attitude that delights in one-upmanship, in riddles, puzzles, and the power of extraordinary experience. But Dogen maintained that in order to grasp the meaning of existence it was not necessary for a per-son to be unusually clever or to spend his life doing remarkable things. Simply by "sitting still and doing nothing" a man could discover what there was to be learned about life. Prayer and ritual .were important to Dogen, but not much more so than cooking or sweeping the yard. All functions of the body, including the most basic, became, in the temple he founded, limbs of Zen. The toilet in Eiheiji contains an altar to Ususama Myo-o (The Guardian of the Impure), and together with the bath and the meditation hall, it is one of the three places in the temple where speech is forbidden and where a particularly strict code of contemplative behavior is observed by everyone who enters. It was Dogen's intention to make of Zen not an abstract philosophy, but a practice. The advice he gave his meditating disciples was blunt, straightforward, and mind-wrenchingly practical:

Think of not thinking.

How do you think of not thinking?

By not thinking.

The rain had stopped when I left Eiheiji and began the long descent of the mountain. Blue dragonflies danced over the grass by the road-side and parched brown grasshoppers with lemon-colored wings flitted with soft clicks from stalk to stalk. I imagined the dragonflies dancing around Dogen on his trips to and from the temple, and his seeing in them, as he saw in all things, an endlessly renewable shard of the Buddha.

Costica Bradatan on Cioran

 The Philosopher of Failure

For some, he was one of the most subversive thinkers of his time—a twentieth-century Nietzsche, only darker and with a better sense of humor. Many, especially in his youth, thought him to be a dangerous lunatic. Others saw him just as a charmingly irresponsible young man who posed no dangers to others—only to himself, perhaps. When his book on mysticism went to press, the typesetter (a good, God-fearing man), realizing how blasphemous it was, refused to touch it. The publisher washed his hands of the matter and the author had to publish his blasphemy elsewhere, at his own expense.

Emil Cioran was a Romanian-born French thinker and author of some two dozen books of savage, unsettling beauty.5 He is an essayist in the best French tradition, and though French was not his native tongue, some think him one of the finest writers in that language. His writing style is whimsical, unsystematic, fragmentary; he is celebrated as a master of aphorism. For Cioran, however, the “fragment” was more than a writing style: it was a way of life. He called himself un homme de fragment. He was deeply suspicious of systematic philosophy; to concoct “philosophical systems” was a charlatan’s job, he thought. He wanted to be a thinker pure and simple—Privatdenker, he called himself, reaching out for a better word—not “philosopher.”

Cioran often contradicts himself, but that’s the least of his worries. With him, self-contradiction is not even a weakness, but the sign of a mind alive. For writing is not about consistency, nor about persuasion or keeping the reader entertained. Writing is not even about literature. For Cioran, as for Montaigne several centuries earlier, writing has a performative function: you write to act upon yourself—to pick up the pieces after a personal disaster or to pull yourself out of a bad depression; to come to terms with a deadly disease or to mourn the loss of a close friend. You write not to go mad, not to kill yourself or others. In a conversation with the Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater, Cioran says at one point, “If I didn’t write, I could have become an assassin.”6 Human existence, at its core, is endless anguish and despair, and writing can make it a bit more bearable. One writes simply to stay alive and to stave off death: “un livre est un suicide différé,” Cioran writes in The Trouble with Being Born (De l’inconvénient d’être né), published in 1973.7Cioran wrote himself out of death over and over again. He composed his first book, On the Heights of Despair (Pe culmile disperării, published in 1934), when he was twenty-three years old, in just a few weeks, while suffering from a severe bout of insomnia. (Insomnia, he said repeatedly, was “the greatest drama of my life.”8) The book—which remains one of his finest—marked the beginning of a strong, intimate link in his life between writing and sleeplessness:

I’ve never been able to write otherwise than in the midst of the depression [cafard] brought about by my nights of insomnia. For seven years I could barely sleep. I need this depression, and even today before I sit down to write I play a disk of Gypsy music from Hungary.9That Cioran is an unsystematic thinker doesn’t mean his work lacks unity. In fact, it is kept tightly together not only by his singular writing style, but also by a distinct set of themes, motifs, and idiosyncrasies. Among them failure figures prominently. Cioran was in love with failure: its specter haunts his whole oeuvre. Throughout his life, he never strayed away from failure. He studied its many incarnations from varying angles and at different moments, as true connoisseurs do, and looked for it in the most unexpected places.

Not only individuals can end up as failures, Cioran believed, but also societies, peoples, and countries. Especially countries. “I was fascinated with Spain,” he said once, “because it offered the example of the most spectacular failure. The greatest country in the world reduced to such a state of decay!”10 Failure, for Cioran, is like the water of the Taoists: it seeps everywhere and permeates everything. Great ideas can be soaked with failure, and so can books, philosophies, institutions, and political systems.

The human condition itself is just another failed project: “No longer wanting to be a man,” he writes in The Trouble with Being Born, he is “dreaming of another form of failure.”11 The universe is one big failure, and so is life itself: “Before being a fundamental mistake,” he says, “life is a failure of taste which neither death nor even poetry succeeds in correcting.”12 Failure rules the world like the capricious God of the Old Testament. One of Cioran’s aphorisms reads, “ ‘You were wrong to count on me.’ Who can speak in such terms? God and the Failure.”13

**

A Modern Gnostic

There is something distinctly Gnostic about Cioran’s thinking. Gnostic insights, images, and metaphors permeate his work, as scholars have noticed. A Short History of Decay, The Temptation to Exist, and The New Gods, writes Lacarrière, are “texts which match the loftiest flashes of Gnostic thought.”87 Like the Gnostics of old, Cioran sees the creation of the world as an act of divine failure. Human history and civilization are nothing but “the work of the devil.” In A Short History of Decay, he deems the God of this world “incompetent.”88 The French title of one of his most influential works (which in English has been published as The New Gods) says it all—Le Mauvais demiurge: “the evil demiurge.” With unconcealed sympathy, Cioran calls the Gnostics “fanatics of the divine nothingness,” and praises them for having “grasped so well the essence of the fallen world.”89 His Romanian roots continued to trouble him late in life. To have come from the Balkans was a shame nothing could diminish—except perhaps the fact that it was there that Thracians and Bogomils also lived: “I cannot forget that I have haunted the same whereabouts as they, nor that the former wept over the newborn and the latter, in order to justify God, held Satan responsible for the infamy of Creation.”90One of Cioran’s greatest obsessions is “the catastrophe of birth,” to which much of The Trouble with Being Born is dedicated. He cannot stress enough the enormity of this disaster: “We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying: Everything.” Like the Gnostics, he is convinced that “the world came about through a mistake.” Yet for him our coming into existence is more than an error: it is a metaphysical affront. Not even in old age could he come to terms with “the affront of being born.” True freedom is the freedom of the unborn. “I long to be free—desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.” Cioran’s fascination with the unborn generates macabre aphorisms: “If I used to ask myself, over a coffin: ‘What good did it do the occupant to be born?’ I now put the same question about anyone alive.”91 This is the same man who, as a child, made friends with the village’s gravedigger, who supplied him with freshly dug skulls. He liked to play soccer with them.

In good Gnostic tradition, the cosmos is for Cioran in a “fallen” state, but so is the social and political world. Perhaps to transcend the political failures of his youth, the later Cioran sought to understand their deeper meaning, and to incorporate this understanding into the texture of his thinking. The result was a more nuanced philosophizing and a more humane thinker. His personal experiments with failure brought Cioran closer to a province of humanity to which he could not otherwise have had access: that of the ashamed and the humbled. In his French books you come across passages on failure of an inspired, drunken wisdom:

At the climax of failure, at the moment when shame is about to do us in, suddenly we are swept away by a frenzy of pride which lasts only long enough to drain us, to leave us without energy, to lower, with our powers, the intensity of our shame.92

A lifelong contemplation of his own limitations eventually changed Cioran. As he grew older, he seems to have become more tolerant, more accepting of other people’s flaws, follies, and oddities. Not, God forbid, that he ever ended up a “positive thinker.” He would remain, to the end, a prophet of decadence, a thinker of dark, apocalyptic apprehensions. In History and Utopia (Histoire et Utopie, published in 1960), he writes:

Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out every day: massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without destroying each other, without hating each other to death? As a matter of fact, they do hate each other, but they are not equal to their hatred. And it is this mediocrity, this impotence, that saves society, that assures its continuance, its stability.93

No, Cioran never became a defender of liberal democracy. But he may have learned to enjoy the comedy of the world—indeed, to take part in undermining the cosmic failure. His later thinking exhibits something that, for want of a better term, may be called joyous desperation (Cioran sees himself as un pessimiste joyeux). It’s the same pattern, over and over again: existence is found to be outrageous, plain awful, and yet somehow in that very awfulness there lies a promise of redemption. Life is unbearable, insomnia a killer, le cafard is eating at you slowly, and yet this is something that you can handle through writing. “Everything that is expressed becomes more tolerable.”94 Writing is a magnificent witchcraft that acts upon its practitioners and renders their lives a touch more livable. A catastrophe, to the extent that it is narratable, carries within itself the seeds of its own redemption.

**

Failing Better

One of the most refreshing things about Cioran’s later writings is his voice as a social critic. In History and Utopia, there is a chapter called “Letter to a Faraway Friend.” The open letter was published originally in La Nouvelle revue française in 1957. The “faraway friend,” living behind the Iron Curtain, was the Romanian philosopher Constantin Noica. Like Cioran, Noica had been a protégé of Nae Ionescu, and that must have brought them close. In this text, Cioran harpoons the political regime imposed on Eastern Europe by the Red Army for making a mockery of an important philosophical idea. “The capital reproach one can address to your regime is that it has ruined Utopia, a principle of renewal in both institutions and peoples.”104 A good Gnostic, Cioran believed that all power was evil, and he had no sympathy for any political regime; but one that needed Soviet tanks and secret police for its foundation and perpetuation was beyond the pale.

In his letter, Cioran subjects the West to an almost equally severe critique. “We find ourselves dealing with two types of society—both intolerable,” he writes. “And the worst of it is that the abuses in yours permit this one to persevere in its own, to offer its own horrors as a counterpoise to those cultivated chez vous.”105 The West shouldn’t congratulate itself for “saving” civilization. The decline is already so advanced, Cioran believes, that nothing can be saved any more—except perhaps for appearances. The two types of society are not that different from one another. In the final analysis, it’s only a matter of nuance:

The difference between regimes is less important than it appears; you are alone by force, we without constraint. Is the gap so wide between an inferno and a ravaging paradise? All societies are bad; but there are degrees, I admit, and if I have chosen this one, it is because I can distinguish among the nuances of trumpery.106For all its analytical and stylistic merits, Cioran’s open letter turned out to be a major gaffe. The addressee, who was trying to keep a low profile in the Romanian countryside, was an exceedingly well-mannered man, and in the habit of answering all letters, closed or open, regardless of where they came from. A superbly naïve man as well, Noica, upon completing his essay-response, addressed it to his friend in Paris and duly dropped the envelope in a mailbox. The Romanian secret police, which had its fingers everywhere, including in all the country’s mailboxes, didn’t miss it and didn’t like the exchange, and Noica had to pay with several years of political prison.

**

“I Used to Be Cioran”

E. M. Cioran died on June 20, 1995. In a sense, though, he had left well before then. For the last several years he suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and had been interned at the Broca Hospital in Paris. Fearing precisely such an ending, he had planned to commit suicide with his longtime partner, Simone Boué. They were to die together, like the Koestlers. But the disease progressed faster than he had anticipated, and the plan failed. Cioran had to die the most humiliating of deaths, one that took several slow years to do its work.

At first, there were just some worrying signs: one day he could not find his way back home from the city, which he—a consummate walker—knew as if he had been born there. Then he started losing his memory. His fabulous sense of humor, apparently, he lost last. One day, a passerby asked him in the street, “Are you Cioran by any chance?” His answer: “I used to be.”114 When someone brought to him—and read from—the newly published English translation of The Trouble with Being Born, he listened carefully and then exclaimed, “Ce type écrit mieux que moi!” (This guy writes better than I do!).115 But the signs became too many and too serious to ignore: he started to forget at such an alarming rate that he had to be interned. Eventually, even words failed him: he could no longer name the most basic things. Then, it was the mind’s turn. In the end, he forgot who he was altogether.

At one point during his long, final suffering, in a brief moment of lucidity, Cioran whispered to himself, “C’est la démission totale!”116 It was the grand, ultimate failure, and he didn’t fail to recognize it for what it was.

IN PRAISE OF FAILURE

Four Lessons in Humility

COSTICA BRADATAN

The Gas Vans A Critical Investigation

 Preface

The present study is the result of a confluence of several coincidences. As a matter of fact, its author never intended to write a book on the topic. He merely wanted to translate the book written by another author, and maybe edit it and update it a little where required. But that was not meant to be.

At the beginning there was the idea in early 2010 of translating into English Pierre Marais’s French study Les camions à gaz en question (The Gas Vans Scrutinized), which had been published as early as 1994. This was meant to fill a gap in the series Holocaust Handbooks, which at that point did not have a monograph on the topic of the elusive “gas vans.” In 2008, Marais’s study had been translated to German by Swiss translator Jürgen Graf, who made some minor updates to the text.1 At that time, I was supplied with both Graf’s German translation as well as the French original. The text part itself had only some 100 generously formatted pages, and together with the recent updates prepared for the German edition, it looked like a project which could be wrapped up swiftly, or so I thought.

Although initially by far no expert regarding the “gas vans” of the Third Reich, I had read several papers about this issue in the past permitting me to have a fairly good grasp of the state of the art. Hence, while translating Marais’s work, I noticed numerous errors of facts, flawed and missing arguments, and, worse still, so many omissions of important documentary and anecdotal material, a great deal of which had become generally accessible only during the past 15 years, that I decided to give it a complete work over. Well, the more I worked on it, the more material turned up, so I ended up both increasing the book’s volume by at least 100%, and rewriting, replacing or even deleting sizeable sections of Pierre’s own text, which had become in need of revision and updating due to the added content and the many corrections.

At what I thought was the end of my editing efforts, I had in front of me a book that by 80% of its content was no longer Pierre’s, but mine, and in which the parts that still were Pierre’s at times read like alien remnants clearly written in the style of a different author and sometimes awkwardly misplaced by the book’s new structure. There could be no doubt that this would have to be smoothed out as well.

Under these circumstances, could the book still be presented to the original French author – or the public – as a translation of his work? Hardly. Would he accept all the changes made? Well, I was afraid to ask, and when getting in touch with Pierre’s literary agent, he balked and suggested to not even submit this typescript to the then 90-year-old Monsieur Marais, as he might have a hard time getting over this unscrupulous gutting and rewriting of his work. Therefore, the decision was made to make the rewrite complete and publish it under my name instead.

Yet in spite of all the rewriting done, this present book still owes a lot to Pierre’s original work. First it is the very reason for its existence. Next, some of the basic structure of this book still follows Pierre’s lead, and many of his arguments can still be found in it, even if they have been rearranged, rephrased, and at times reevaluated. And last but not least, Pierre’s book was a trail blazer at its time, a foundation upon which the present study erects its larger, more thoroughly argued edifice. Pierre’s book has been my stepping stone to the present study; his tome is the giant, the pioneer work of the first hour, without which this present book would not be.

Although this book may be regarded as a clear improvement in comparison to Pierre’s work – a natural progress to be expected after almost two decades have passed – it is still far from complete, as much archival material held by the Zentrale Stelle in Ludwigsburg, Germany, is currently difficult, if not impossible, to access by critical researchers due to German censorship laws. Hence any of this study’s conclusions must necessarily be considered provisional in character, and the discussion will remain open.

In addition to Pierre Marais, the present study owes much to the support by Thomas Kues, who tirelessly supplied me with all kinds of documents, some of them on my request, but also many which had been hitherto unknown to me.

Carlo Mattogno helped to improve the book as well by critically reading an earlier version of it, and indirectly by his own research for his book on the Chełmno Camp, about which I was continually informed, so that the present book could profited considerably from this.

I also thank all my other helpers, who for safety reasons will remain unnamed.

Introduction

When it comes to the “Holocaust,” the alleged mass murder of European Jews by the Third Reich, most people think they “know.” Of course we all “know” that it happened. We “know” that six million died. We “know” that the Nazis pushed the Jews into the gas chambers and gas ovens, that they burned them, dead or alive, in gigantic crematories and on huge pyres. Our knowledge is so certain that anyone uttering disbelief is swiftly ostracized. In many countries people even call the police and have doubters arrested, prosecuted, and sent to prison. He who doubts what everybody knows to be true must be evil, indeed.

Most readers perusing the above sentences might not even notice that it contains a typical error, a falsehood even acknowledged by orthodox historians. This error has to such a degree become a fixed part of the cliché which we consider to be “knowledge” that it passes unnoticed.

There were no gas ovens.

The term makes no sense.

Mainstream historians claim that there were gas chambers on the one hand, designed to quickly asphyxiate hundreds, if not thousands of people at a time within mere minutes.2 On the other hand everybody agrees that there were crematory ovens, designed to reduce deceased camp inmates to ashes (although the inmates’ cause of death and the crematories’ capacities are disputed3). In the mind of the public at large, though, gas chambers and crematory ovens have merged to some ominously sounding “gas ovens.” The public discourse about the Holocaust is replete with that nonsensical term, even though what it describes never existed.

So much about “we know.”

Listing and explaining all the false clichés prevailing in the public about the “Holocaust” would fill a separate book, so I will abstain from doing it here. The point I was trying to make is that, although we all have some basic grasp about what is meant by “the Holocaust,” most people are quite unfamiliar with even general aspects of the topic.

While gas chambers dominate the public’s mind when the specter of the “Holocaust” is raised, “gas vans” are usually absent from the discourse. What percentage of the general populace has ever heard that the Nazis are said to have deployed mobile gas chambers as well, which historians usually call “gas vans”?

This lack of knowledge is excusable, because even in orthodox historiography the “gas vans” have played only a minor role. To this date no monograph has appeared on the topic written by a mainstream historian. Mere articles published in journals or anthologies exist, and most of them do not even focus on the gas vans themselves but instead on some location like the Chełmno Camp in Poland or the Semlin Camp in Serbia, on certain German armed units, in particular the German anti-partisan Einsatzgruppen behind the Russian front, or events where they are said to have been used, like the euthanasia action, to name a few. We will encounter many of these papers in the present study. But before doing this, I want to discuss the one mainstream paper which comes closest to a study of the gas vans as such. By so doing we will recognize the dire need for a much more thorough and critical study.

In 1987 German historian Mathias Beer published a paper whose German title translates to “The development of the gas vans for the murder of the Jews.” In it he tries to describe, based on 14 documents and many more testimonies, how National Socialist Germany developed this murder weapon. Right at the beginning of his paper he admits that all extant documents are from a late phase of these vans’ deployment, hence could elucidate little about their development. To remedy this, he resorts to verbal claims made by various persons asserting to have witnessed something, most of whom were interrogated during some criminal investigation or trial. Knowing that by relying on such statements Beer enters shaky territory, he declares that “due to their peculiarities testimonies” need to always be linked to, that is to say supported by, some documents, and that those documents themselves need to be “subject to thorough source criticism” (all on p. 404).

I agree with this, as this is a standard method of historiography. Yet Beer has missed two important issues here: first of all, each testimony, whether supported by a document or not, needs to be subjected to criticism as well. A medieval testimony claiming that the devil rode by on a broom stick having sex with a witch, supported by a medieval document claiming to document that very “fact,” might fulfill Beer’s criteria, but it does not constitute truth. The creator of a document can err and lie just as much as a witness. Next, Beer completely omits the most important group of evidence: physical, tangible evidence. Where is the flying broomstick? Where is the devil? Did the devil leave his semen in the witch?, etc. are all very important questions to be asked.

In our context these questions would be: Where are the vans? Where are the corpses? Where is the poison in their body?

Beer is completely mute on all accounts: no scrutiny of the witness testimony performed, no material traces requested, no questions asked about the construction and operational mode of these vehicles. And worse still: he fails his own criterion that document criticism is pivotal, because his paper does not contain any critical discussion of any of the documents he cites or at least a reference to such a discussion (which does not exist among orthodox historians, I may add).

Hence Beer’s paper is a complete failure already on formal grounds. But that is not the end. His self-defined goal to trace the development of the gas vans within the framework of documents falls flat as well. As Mattogno has shown (2017, Chapter 1), Beer’s lengthy “reconstruction” of how the gas vans allegedly came into being is not based on any documents, as Beer himself admitted. What remains are the testimonies on which Beer relies heavily. We will encounter most of them in this study, where we will subject their statements to critical scrutiny. The result is shocking: many of the important witness statements used by Beer can be demonstrated to be highly implausible (see, for instance, two of the persons allegedly responsible for the vans’ development: August Becker, Chapter 3.7.3.3., and Albert Widmann, Chapter 3.7.4.6.).

While doing his research for his own 1994 study on the gas vans, Pierre Marais had noticed Beer’s complete lack of a critical attitude, as a result of which he wrote him a letter with several questions, to which Beer responded accordingly. I have reproduced this exchange with Marais’s comments in Appendix 10 (p. 368). Although Marais’s questions to Beer weren’t as hard-hitting as I would have formulated them, Beer’s subsequent refusal to continue the exchange shows who of the two is a dogmatic ideologue and who a critical freethinker.

Any decent researcher would have taken such critical inquiry as a reason to look into his own research again and to amend it where necessary. But such an open-minded approach does not seem to be Beer’s cup of tea, for when he had a slightly abridged and updated version of his 1987 paper published in a 2011 anthology (Morsch/Perz/Ley, pp. 154-165), it exhibited the same deficiencies of superficiality. Here again, Beer’s references to documents and witness accounts serve only to once more uncritically repeat what he has read. In addition, this new version of Beer’s paper also lacks any reference to – and discussion of – any topical criticism made during the past two decades (mainly Marais 1994 and Weckert 2019). Hence Beer, like most mainstream Holocaust authors, has proved to be impervious to critique, which means that he is insusceptible to the scientific method.4In view of the total failure of orthodox historiography to appropriately address the issue of the “gas vans,” Pierre Marais 1994 monograph on the “gas vans” was a sorely needed study indeed. Unfortunately it remained without any reaction from the historiographic establishment.

The present study will start by including and summarizing what Marais has already revealed and by carrying the topic farther and deeper.

The Toxicity of Diesel Exhaust Gas

As mentioned before, it was repeatedly mentioned during Soviet show trials that in the gas vans used by German units in the East, murder was committed by means of exhaust gases from diesel engines. During this study, we will encounter this claim repeatedly. 

Before investigating the question what type of vehicles with what kind of engines are said to have been used, we need to clarify first why this matters.

Whether one can commit murder with Diesel engine exhaust within the time spans claimed is a forensic question. U.S. engineer Friedrich P. Berg has done thorough research about this, which he first published in 1984 and, in his latest revised and expanded form, in 2019. Berg also elaborated in detail about the toxic effects of carbon monoxide and other constituents of Diesel engine exhaust gases. I will not repeat any of this here, as it would be repetitive and would lead us too far afield. The interested reader might either consult Berg’s paper or any handbook of toxicology from any library directly.

Whereas gasoline engines operate with a dearth of oxygen and therefore produce rather high amounts of toxic carbon monoxide, Diesel engines always operate with a huge excess of oxygen, as a result of which its exhaust gases contain only minor amounts of carbon monoxide, the lethal compound in engine exhaust gases.13 Although not impossible, it is rather difficult to increase the amount of carbon monoxide in Diesel exhaust gases. If a Diesel engine runs idly or with only a minor load, it must even be considered impossible to produce an exhaust gas whose composition can become acutely dangerous to persons with an average health within the time span of interest here (up to half an hour).

In contrast to this stands the drastically larger carbon monoxide content in the exhaust gases of gasoline engines, which can be manipulated in various ways to increase it even more, for instance by closing the idle-mixture adjustment screw of the carburetor. For this reason gasoline engines would have been the self-evident choice for the construction of “gas vans” (as also for the generation of carbon monoxide for the stationary “gas chambers”).

Did the Germans know about the difference between Diesel and gasoline engine exhaust? Both engines had been invented in Germany,14 and the record shows that German engineers and scientists were very well aware of that difference long before World War Two. Once again it was Berg who has documented the use of Diesel engines early on in coal mines in Germany exactly because their exhaust gases were relatively harmless (Berg 2019, pp. 453-456). Mattogno and Graf have shown in turn that German scientists had made thorough exhaust gas composition analysis of a broad variety of gasoline engines, which was for instance published in a 1930 book dedicated to the toxicology of gasoline engine exhaust gases (Mattogno/Graf 2020, pp. 123-125; cf. Keeser/Froboese/Turnau 1930).

In 1994 Berg drew attention to a forensic study conducted by British scientists who had conducted a test gassing of rabbits, mice, and guinea pigs with Diesel engine exhaust gases. They “succeeded” in killing all their animals only after going to the engine’s limit and after more than three hours of exposure (Pattle et al. 1957; Berg, in Gauss 1994, p. 333; Berg 2019, pp. 458f.). In this context it deserves emphasis that Diesel exhaust gases have other features than delivering small amounts of carbon monoxide which need to be considered. In particular old engines produced a lot of smoke (particulate matter; see Berg 2019, pp. 451f.), which consisted not only of soot but also of a mixture of highly irritating, smelly chemicals. And like all exhaust gases, Diesel exhaust gases are hot when exiting the tail pipe: well beyond 100°C (200°F). Although the toxic effect of Diesel exhaust gas is moderate at worst, the combined effect of irritating chemicals, smoke, heat, noxious gases and oxygen deprivation will kill most people locked up in an enclosed space filled with such gases after an extended period of time. But as the above experiment shows, it would take hours of horrific suffering.

This proves that attempts at mass gassings with Diesel engines would have been a disaster at best.

Friedrich Paul Berg has not only pointed out that the use of Diesel engine exhaust gases for mass murder would have been absurd, but that the use of any exhaust gas is absurd when considering that the Germans, suffering from lack of petroleum during WWII, had retrofitted almost their entire truck fleet during the war, step by step, with so-called producer-gas generators. I will elaborate on this more in Chapter 2.4. when discussing wartime documents, as the extant documentation about this technology stems primarily from that era.

Surprisingly, this finding of the general unsuitability of Diesel engines for a swift and efficient mass murder was recently confirmed by an orthodox anthology on the Holocaust, where the toxicologist Achim Trunk writes in a paper entitled “The lethal gases” (Morsch/Perz/Ley 2011, pp. 35f.):

“It can be derived from the animal experiments [by Pattle et al.] that it is possible in principle to murder human beings with Diesel exhaust gases – even many simultaneously. In order to generate highly toxic exhaust gases which kill within a maximum of 20 minutes, however, Diesel engines in the facilities for gas murder would have had to be operated under heavy load, i.e., they had to be slowed down. Such a slowing, power-consuming device (such as a dynamometer) was much less simple and cheap to obtain than the large engine from a destroyed vehicle wreck. Slowing down a powerful Diesel inside a gas murder facility would have meant moreover that the engine would have become much noisier and would have vibrated much more intensively. Its exhaust gases would have contained a lot of soot. Whether such features have been observed (or whether clues to power consuming devices exist) is no longer a question to toxicology but rather to the sources and source criticism. According to this author’s knowledge, no clues in that direction exist.

A different explanation is more likely, according to which the murder weapons were all gasoline engines. […] That gasoline engines were indeed deployed in the extermination camps of the ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ derives from reliable sources. Rudolf Reder, for instance, one of the very few survivors of the Belzec extermination camp, spoke of an engine fueled with gasoline located in a small room next to the gas chamber. It is said to have consumed 80 to 100 liters of gasoline daily. For the later-day extermination camp Sobibór, where one could apply the experiences gained in Belzec, exact statements by the perpetrators exist that the murder device was a gasoline engine; […] In the case of Treblinka, which was the latest of the extermination camps of the ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ to be built (and the biggest), science has so far assumed that a Diesel engine was used. This raises the question why, from the point of view of the murdering institution, a successful method should have been replaced by a different, technically much more difficult.”It is worth noting in this context that Reder, in his testimony about Belzec, expressly and in various ways stated that the engine’s exhaust gases were not used for murdering the victims, but that it was vented directly outside (see Mattogno 2021b for details). The other star witness of orthodox historiography for the alleged exhaust gas mass murders in Belzec, the mining engineer Kurt Gerstein, speaks repeatedly of a Diesel engine providing the poisonous gas.15 He, as a mining engineer, certainly knew to tell a Diesel from a gasoline engine. However, contrary to what Trunk wants us to believe, neither Reder nor Gerstein are reliable witnesses, as both their testimonies are riddled with absurdities and impossibilities (see Mattogno 2021b).

With regard to the Sobibór Camp, the situation is by no means as clear-cut as Trunk would have his readers believe, for in this regard there are statements concerning both a gasoline and a diesel engine (see Berg 2019, pp. 439). Finally, one must not forget that in German colloquial language used by laymen, the terms “gasoline” (“Benzin”) and “gasoline engine” (“Benzinmotor”) are sometimes used summarily for all types of internal-combustion engines, regardless of whether they run on alcohol, gasoline, diesel, or kerosene, just as in English a “gas engine” certainly includes a Diesel engine. Hence, while one can be fairly certain that someone means a Diesel engine when they use the word Diesel, it is not at all clear that someone means a gasoline-fueled, spark-plug-equipped carburetor engine when they refer to a Benzin engine.

I may also mention in passing that it is not at all trivial to run a stationary gasoline engine, as they – in contrast to Diesel engines – tend to overheat quickly. They require special cooling devices to be kept operational.

Trunk’s last sentence quoted above about the anachronistic reversal to an imperfect method is of course valid. It also applies to the gas van issue. Here the first generation of gas vans consisting of a mixture of makes, models and equipment with usually undefined engine types, some of which may have been gasoline engines, are said to have been replaced with a more sophisticated “second generation” of vans which, judging by the brand, were most likely equipped with Diesel engines (more on this in the next section) This fact is glossed over by Trunk who erroneously or deceptively writes (Morsch/Perz/Ley 2011, p. 37):

“Reports about the killings with gas vans explicitly give gasoline engines as the source of the lethal gas.”

Trunk is definitely disingenuous when he writes (ibid., p. 37):

“The claim by revisionists is wrong that it is impossible in principle to commit mass murder with Diesel engines.”

Trunk, who quotes Fritz Berg’s 1984 paper on Diesel gas chambers (his footnote 27, p. 33), hence knows about Berg’s work, has used many of the sources and arguments from Berg’s various papers, yet he has failed to acknowledge that Berg’s claim is not that mass murder with Diesel exhaust engines is impossible, but rather that it is extremely cumbersome and absurd, especially when considering the available alternatives – just as Trunk has concluded.

[←1]      It was published by an Italian publisher; see Marais 2008.

[←2]      Revisionists contest that notion, though, see primarily the numerous entries for Mattogno in the bibliography.

[←3]      On the only existing scientific-technical study of the cremation furnaces at Auschwitz see Mattogno/Deana.

[←4]      Beer has added an inconspicuous deception to this paper which is common among mainstream Holocaust authors: He quoted Becker’s letter to Rauff with “since December 1941, for example, 97,000 were processed with 3 deployed vehicles” (Morsch/Perz/Ley, p. 164), i.e. with a lower case “since,” thus giving the false impression that this statement is to be found somewhere in the middle of the letter, whereas it is actually its very (absurd) beginning. See Chapter 2.2.4.1.

[←13]      It must be kept in mind that the CO contained in the exhaust gases is an incompletely combusted item resulting from a lack of oxygen.

[←14]      The four-stroke gasoline engine was first patented by the German watchmaker Christian Reithmann on 26 October 1860 (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Reithmann); today these engines are frequently called Otto engines due to the first car engine built by Nikolaus Otto of the Deutz engine factory in Cologne, employing as technical directors for engine construction Gottlieb Daimler (later of Daimler-Benz) and Wilhelm Maybach; the Diesel engine was patented in 1893 by German engineer Rudolf Diesel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_engine)

[←15]      On this see next to Mattogno 2021b also Roques’s PhD thesis 1985, two volumes, plus: Roques 1986 & 1989, Chelain 1989.

Santiago Alvarez

The Gas Vans A Critical Investigation

With major contributions by Pierre Marais