To be is to be contingent: nothing of which it can be said that "it is" can be alone and independent. But being is a member of paticca-samuppada as arising which contains ignorance. Being is only invertible by ignorance.

Destruction of ignorance destroys the illusion of being. When ignorance is no more, than consciousness no longer can attribute being (pahoti) at all. But that is not all for when consciousness is predicated of one who has no ignorance than it is no more indicatable (as it was indicated in M Sutta 22)

Nanamoli Thera

Monday, October 27, 2025

Mike Stone - Young Girls Now Must Defend Themselves


When are white men going to protect white girls?

A fourteen-year-old Scottish girl identified as Mayah Sommers was forced to defend herself and her little sister from a migrant rapist last week. When the would-be-rapist refused to leave the girls alone and threatened Mayah's twelve-year-old sister, the protective older sibling pulled out a knife and a hatchet.

The common people of Scotland praised Mayah for her actions and dubbed her the "Young Queen of Scots." Local media and local government took the opposite approach. They painted the migrant man who threatened the two girls as a "victim," and the police arrested the teenage heroine.

It's important to note that this is not an isolated incident. It just happens to be one that was caught on video and beamed across the world.

Non-White migrants threaten, assault, and rape girls every day. You just don't hear about it.

It's no different than black-on-White violence. You hear about seventeen-year-old Austin Metcalf being stabbed to death by a black at a high school track meet; little one-year-old Clay Weeks being pummelled and beaten by a black woman at a daycare center, and that couple in Cincinnati that was viciously beaten and almost killed by a mob of blacks.

But you don't hear about the hundreds of other attacks, beatings, carjackings, burglaries, rapes, and murders that blacks commit against Whites every day in the United States.

The same thing is happening in Europe. That fourteen-year-old Mayah was carrying a knife and a hatchet to begin with tells you that she and her sister were routinely harrassed and threatened by migrant rapists.

All of this raises the question: Where are the men?

Well, the men see what's happening, but they refuse to do anything about it.

That's not surprising when you look at how the men of the world responded to the recent virus hoax. They did nothing.

Men who refused to fight during the recent fake pandemic - and by fight I mean refused to wear a face diaper, refused to take the clot shot, and refused to let anyone promoting the clot shot near their children, while simultaneously boycotting every person, place, and organization that helped promote the entire pandemic - are not  going to lift a finger to help defend their women, even when teen and preteen girls are being attacked and raped by foreign invaders.

Crisis reveals character, and the phony pandemic showed us exactly who everyone around us really was. How you acted during "covid" is exactly who you are.

Make no mistake, black-on-White violence, migrant rapes of White girls, and every other form of violence and crime against White people is only going to increase. White people who defend themselves will be arrested - just like young Mayah. White men and White women watching on the sideline will continue to do nothing.  

We can blame the media, the government, the Jews, the Illuminati, and everyone else we can think of, but until we ourselves say, "Enough is enough," and do something about it, nothing is going to change.
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Mike Stone is the author of the new book REAL or FAKE: The Donald Trump Assassination Attempt and Teen Boy's Success Book: the Ultimate Self-Help Book for Boys; Everything You Need to Know to Become a Man

Related- Scottish Girl Arrested For Using Knife And Axe To Ward Off Migrant Stalker

Just this week an American man visiting Dresden, Germany was stabbed in the face while bravely preventing two migrants from assaulting a pair of women on a tram.  One of the man's attackers, a Syrian refugee, was arrested by police and then immediately released by prosecutors back onto the streets.

https://www.renegadetribune.com/scottish-girl-arrested-for-using-knife-and-axe-to-ward-off-migrant-stalker/

"The systematic and engineered destruction of Europe through "multicultural" invasion is heartbreaking to watch.  It is clear, beyond any doubt, that this program spearheaded by progressive politicians (and fake conservative politicians) is designed to crush the spirits of predominantly white, native born citizens still retaining a sense of national pride and cultural heritage.  That is to say, they have become the targets of a government funded terror campaign to subjugate the west.

Starting around 2014, millions of third world migrants have been allowed to flood into Europe's borders, often encouraged by globalist NGOs, the UN and leftist political leaders within the host countries.  The effects of this decade long campaign have been devastating.

Violent crime has skyrocketed and migrant "grooming gangs" have spread, targeting underage girls for sexual exploitation.  Rape has become a common problem, which local governments have chosen to ignore.

https://henrymakow.com/2025/08/mike-stone---young-girls-now-m.html

Banking System is Responsible for Our Enslavement

 


We already have a digital currency. “Money” is just digits on a ledger kept by the Rothschilds.

Occasionally they will produce coupons i.e. currency, to make it all seem real.

Chinese-style social credit is planned. They will control us by controlling our money.

The covid scam and deadly “vaccines” have told us that politicians and cops don’t work for us, but for the central banking cartel that wishes to lock down humanity permanently.

The same applies to the mass media and most professions. Everyone dances to the money tune, and Rothschild is the Pied Piper.

BLOOD POISONING

We suffer from blood poisoning. “Money” is the blood supply of society. This “medium of exchange” circulates like blood in a human body. With it, everyone is sanguine; without it, you have a corpse.

Unfortunately, our feckless ancestors gave control over the money supply to Cabalist Jews and Freemasons who find excuses (wars, scamdemics) to produce it in the form of a debt to themselves.

They profit at both ends. They charge interest on debt they create out of thin air; and their shares in “defence” and pharmaceutical corporations also increase, due to the phoney wars and pandemics they start.

Their goal is to expand their monopoly over money creation into a monopoly over literally everything, (e.g. thought, “wokeness”) inducting humanity into their satanist sex-and-death cult. They weaponized the common cold as a pretext to decimate and enslave humanity.

MONEY IS A MIND GAME

In March 2022, a half dozen US regional banks went bankrupt losing $500 billion in deposits.

It’s all black magic. Money is just digits on a ledger kept by the Rothschilds.

Did these depositors lose their money? No. The Fed just created another $500 billion out of thin air. These Satanists finagled the US national credit card and are maxing it out until the USD collapses.

In the last few years, banks have become increasingly active in pushing the globalist agenda. For example, my bank is all for “diversity” — homosexuality and migration. (It’s rare to find a white male teller at a Canadian bank who is not a homosexual.)

Similarly, most corporations sing from the same globalist hymn book.

Banks are all franchises of the Rothschild world central banking system, much like some MacDonald’s stores are independently owned. But banks all depend on the central bank for “money.” That’s why banks and the corporations dependent on them promote bizarre agendas like gender dysfunction, family breakdown, gun control, sodomy, miscegenation and minority status for Caucasians.

WHAT DOES ‘MONEY? LOOK LIKE? (When it’s not currency)

When I write a cheque to the gas company, an armored car does not pull up to my bank, collect the cash from my account and deliver it to the gas company’s bank. All that REALLY happens is some digits change at the two banks.

My bank account is not a little letterbox with cash sitting in it. My account is just a number in their books signifying what they owe me should, God forbid, I decide to withdraw the cash.

When we use our credit cards or when we buy a stock, the only thing that happens is that accounts are adjusted.

We are really banking with the Rothschilds. Our little nest egg is actually their magical “credit,” a slice of the national “debt” owed to them, “money” which they created from nothing and “loaned” to the government. It is a reflection of the government’s ability to repay, although it never will.

The banking system is a vast system of accounts. Money doesn’t actually exist except for a small amount in paper coupons (currency). “Money” is an abstract concept denoting value.

MEDIUM OF EXCHANGE

Money is a medium of exchange. Think of it as electrical current instead of currency. It is basically a virtual credit system that is the lifeblood of every economy.

Who owns this franchise? This system of accounts? Who adds or subtracts credit?

Who decides who gets to play?

A syndicate of mostly cabalist (Masonic) Jewish banking families led by the Rothschilds.

Unfortunately, these Cabalists are Satanists. They are determined to protect and extend this banking monopoly to a monopoly over everything — real wealth, political power, knowledge, media, education, culture, religion, law etc.

They want to own us and our children as well. (We are collateral on the national debt.) This is the essence of Communism and New World Order which is largely in place. The goal is to gradually enslave humanity. When they finally get rid of cash, they can cut off our “credit” at a moment’s notice.

How do they maintain control? They control the corporate cartels who are all dependent on banks. These corporations fund the politicians who follow bankers’ orders.

Many of these politicians are Freemasons. Organized Jewry and Freemasonry are accomplices in the banking racket. In general, complicity in the banking fraud is the price of success today.

Why is it a fraud? Because sovereign governments could “generate their own electricity” interest-and-debt-free. We wouldn’t need to sell our soul and our children’s Birthright.

THE DEEP STATE

The “Deep State” is the secret network dedicated to protecting the fraudulent banking system and advancing its satanic agenda. Most of the players belong to Freemasonry or Organized Jewry. Intelligence agencies like the CIA, Mossad, and MI-6, the police and the army are the bankers’ enforcers. Mass surveillance (the NSA etc.) ensures that nobody gets any ideas.

Mankind is doomed unless the central bank is nationalized, “debt” is disowned and money is created debt-and-interest free.

It’s a question of whether mankind will be dedicated to making satanist trillionaires even richer, or lifting everybody up to where they can begin to fulfill their Divine potential.

ILLUMINATI 4 Genocide & War

Henry Makow Ph.D

Flattery - The First Principle of Mind Control

 If a patient does not regard himself as sick he cannot submit to a cure. The arrogant man does not need to see-he already sees almost everything and what he thinks he has yet to learn, he believes "the experts" will one day show him. Who are these "experts"? They are not really doctors of the soul. They do not have the man's interest at heart. They are in fact his worst enemies, his most cunning manipulators who lead him to do their bidding like any slavemaster since Egypt.

Nature Or Gnosis? Divine Creation and Its Counterfeit

A description of Anthony Shaeffer's protagonist in the film The Wicker Man: "…tearing around in dizzying circles trying to solve it, never able to guess the true plot beyond it although the evidence of it lies all around him."

Cinefantastique

"Almost all people of all eras are hypnotics. Their beliefs are induced beliefs. The proper authorities saw to it that the proper belief should be induced, and people believed properly."

Charles Fort

"As the mountebank delivered his harangue, the clown would repeatedly poke his head out from behind the curtain, making fun of everything his master said, parodying his patter and twisting the meaning of his words. The mountebank played the perfect straight man, meanwhile. Here he was, trying so hard to hawk his wares, and his own assistant was doing everything possible to undermine sales.

"The merriment was of course intentional. While the clown seemingly encouraged the public not to buy the proffered merchandise, the mountebank knew full well that the bystanders would easily be converted into customers as soon as they forgot that they were, in fact, supposed to be buying. Once the audience had been effectively hypnotized, once its judgment and willpower had been weakened, the real sales pitch could begin…"

J.H. Towsen, Clowns

"Hoodwink: A symbol of the secrecy, silence and darkness in which the mysteries of our art should be preserved from the unhallowed gaze of the profane." Dr. Albert Mackey, 33rd Degree Freemason, The Encyclopedia of Freemasonry

In a study of mind control and psychological warfare, it is not enough to simply review the latest technology of coercion, the most recent gadgetry and techno-junk littering the hardware and supply depots of governments and cults.

Far more dangerous than these appliances is the praxis behind them, the underground current which informs the modern project and this modern era. For life in our modern era is little more than life in an open-air mind control laboratory where a form of human alchemy has emerged to transform the mass of targeted percipients-targeted merely by virtue of their being urban dwellers plugged into the electronic and digital pageantry of the Establishment's system-of-things.

And what sort of creature inhabits the modern domain? Who is the modern man? The puppet-masters say he is the smartest, most advanced individual to ever strut the planet, the most relatively liberated being in history. But Louis-Ferdinand Celine said it well, "What does the modem public want? It wants to go down on its knees before money and before crap!"

The public have been trained to do this by two principle methods: direct "speaking" archetypal messages of pure terror ("psychic driving" as the CIA's Dr. Ewan Cameron termed it), encoded in massively publicized "lone nut" mass murders, and the sinister flattery heaped upon them by their masters in the cult of civilization and progress.

The acid test of a human being's freedom and will to protect the quality of his life, lies in a person's attitude toward his oppressor. What is modem man's attitude toward Wall Street and the bankers, toward Dan Rather and the ignorance-bestowing media and advertising man, toward Lincoln and Truman, FDR and Reagan, George Bush and Johnny Carson, Exxon and Monsanto?

As one writer has observed, "The most amazing thing about the American people is that they are constantly defending their worst betrayers." Who then is the modern man? He is a mindbombed patsy who gets his marching orders from "twilight language" key words sprinkled throughout "his" news and current events. Even as he dances to the tune of the elite managers of human behavior, he scoffs with great derision at the idea of the existence and operation of a technology of mass mind control emanating from the media and government. Modem man is much too smart to believe anything as superstitious as that!

Modern man is the ideal hypnotic subject: puffed up on the idea that he is the crown of creation, he vehemently denies the power of the hypnotist's control over him, even as his head bobs up and down on a string.

What we observe in the population today are the three destructive symptoms of persons whose minds are controlled by alien forces: 1. Amnesia, i.e. loss of memory. 2. Abulia, i.e. loss of will. 3. Apathy, i.e. loss of interest in events vital to one's own health and survival. Amnesia, abulia and apathy are nearly-universal among us today and gaining a greater foothold with each passing day.

Japanese philosopher George Ohsawa stated that there was only one incurable sickness--arrogance. If a patient does not regard himself as sick he cannot submit to a cure. The arrogant man does not need to see-he already sees almost everything and what he thinks he has yet to learn, he believes "the experts" will one day show him. Who are these "experts"? They are not really doctors of the soul. They do not have the man's interest at heart. They are in fact his worst enemies, his most cunning manipulators who lead him to do their bidding like any slavemaster since Egypt.

Flattery The First Principle of Mind Control

Why then does he revere them? Because they flatter him. This is the first secret of mass mind control and can be observed as the foundation stone of virtually every false religion, party, cult, philosophy, system and training. How can modern man free himself when he is told that he is already a demi-god, that the problem lies only in finding a pure enough economic or political system worthy of his high-minded brilliance?

If we look closely we will see that this mind control principle is so basic and simple it is almost stupidly so, to the point that we marvel that anyone would be seduced by it. But it is all a matter of attention, as we saw in the parable of the mountebank and the clown. Arrogant hypno-patsies have been told by their masters that they are "Demigods" and demi-gods are never deceived or distracted. They're too smart! And by their arrogant self-satisfaction they blind themselves to the simplicity of the device that ensnares them and that is when "the real sales pitch begins."

What the Alchemical managers have bred over a millennia is a human race of the most wretched stupidity and ignorance unrivaled in thousands of years. These blind slaves are told they are "free" and "highly educated" even as they march behind signs that would cause any medieval peasant to run screaming away from them in panic-stricken terror. The symbols that modern man embraces with the naive trust of an infant would be tantamount to billboards reading, "This way to your death and enslavement," to the understanding of a traditional peasant of antiquity.

I doubt any medieval man would have much difficulty in feeling a sense of overwhelming foreboding in the face of the Soviet hammer and sickle symbol. Yet most modern, literate people obviously don't know a thing about what that symbol actually represents except on the most profane level as the implements of the farmer and the worker.

Michael A. Hoffman II

SECRET SOCIETIES AND PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE

Sunday, October 26, 2025

War Is a Racket!

  The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier 

Brigadier General Smedley Darlington Butler

CHAPTER ONE

War Is a Racket!

WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their income tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dugout? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried the bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few—the self-same few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

And what is this bill?

This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.

For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds again gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out.

Again they are choosing sides. France and Russia met and agreed to stand side by side. Italy and Austria hurried to make a similar agreement. Poland and Germany cast sheep’s eyes at each other, forgetting, for the nonce, their dispute over the Polish Corridor. The assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia complicated matters. Yugoslavia and Hungary, long bitter enemies, were almost at each other’s throats. Italy was ready to jump in. But France was waiting. So was Czechoslovakia. All of them are looking ahead to war. Not the people—not those who fight and pay and die—only those who foment wars and remain safely at home to profit.

There are 40,000,000 men under arms in the world today, and our statesmen and diplomats have the temerity to say that war is not in the making.

Hell’s bells! Are these 40,000,000 men being trained to be dancers?

Not in Italy, to be sure. Premier Mussolini knows what they are being trained for. He, at least, is frank enough to speak out. Only the other day, II Duce in “International Conciliation,” the publication of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said:

And, above all, Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility for the utility of perpetual peace... War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energyand puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it.

Undoubtedly Mussolini means exactly what he says. His well trained army, his great fleet of planes, and even his navy are ready for war—anxious for it, apparently. His recent stand at the side of Hungary in the latter’s dispute with Yugoslavia showed that. And the hurried mobilization of his troops on the Austrian border after the assassination of Dollfuss showed it too. There are others in Europe too whose sabre-rattling presages war, sooner or later.

Herr Hitler, with his rearming Germany and his constant demands for more and more arms, is an equal if not a greater menace to peace. France only recently increased the term of military service for its youth from a year to eighteen months.

Yes, all over, nations are camping on their arms. The mad dogs of Europe are on the loose.

In the Orient the maneuvering is more adroit. Back in 1904, when Russian and Japan fought, we kicked out our old friends the Russians and backed Japan. Then our very generous international bankers were financing Japan. Now the trend is to poison us against the Japanese. What does the “open door” policy in China mean to us? Our trade with China is about $90,000,000 a year. Or the Philippine Islands? We have spent about $600,000,000 in the Philippines in 35 years and we (our bankers and industrials and speculators) have private investments there of less than $200,000,000.

Then, to save that China trade of about $90,000,000, or to protect these private investments of less than $200,000,000 in the Philippines, we would be all stirred up to hate Japan and go to war—a war that might well cost us tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives of Americans, and many more hundreds of thousands of physically maimed and mentally unbalanced men.

Of course, for this loss, there would be a compensating profit—fortunes would be made. Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up. By a few. Munitions makers. Ship builders. Manufacturers. Meat packers. Speculators. They would fare well.

Yes, they are getting ready for another war. Why shouldn’t they? It pays high dividends.

But what does it profit the masses?

What does it profit the men who are killed? What does it profit the men who are maimed? What does it profit their mothers and sisters, their wives and their sweethearts? What does it profit their children?

What does it profit anyone except the very few to whom war means huge profits?

Yes, and what does it profit the nation?

Take our own case. Until 1898 we didn’t own a bit of territory outside the mainland of North America. At that time our national debt was a little more than $1,000,000,000. Then we became “internationally minded.” We forgot, or shunted aside, the advice of the Father of our Country. We forgot Washington’s warning about “entangling alliances.” We went to war. We acquired outside territory. At the end of the World War period, as a direct result of our fiddling in international affairs, our national debt had jumped to over $25,000,000,000. Therefore, on a purely financial bookkeeping basis, we ran a little behind year for year, and that foreign trade might well have been ours without the wars.

It would have been far cheaper (not to say safer) for the average American who pays the bills to stay out of foreign entanglements. For a very few this racket, like bootlegging and other underworld rackets, brings fancy profits, but the cost of operations is always transferred to the people—who do not profit.

CHAPTER TWO

Who Makes the Profits?

The World War, rather our brief participation in it, has cost the United States some $52,000,000,000. Figure it out. That means $400 to every American man, woman, and child. And we haven’t paid the debt yet. We are paying it, our children will pay it, and our children’s children probably still will be paying the cost of that war.

The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes even twelve per cent. But wartime profits—ah! that is another matter—twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent—the sky is the limit. All that the traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let’s get it.

Of course, it isn’t put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and “we must all put our shoulder to the wheel,” but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket—and are safely pocketed. Let’s just take a few examples:

Take our friend the du Ponts, the powder people—didn’t one of them testify before a Senate committee recently that their powder won the war? Or something? How did they do in the war? They were a patriotic corporation. Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 was $6,000,000 a year. It wasn’t much, but the du Ponts managed to get along on it. Now let’s look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918.

Fifty-eight million dollars a year profit, we find! Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good. An increase in profits of more than 950 per cent.

Take one of our little steel companies that so patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials. Well, their 1910–1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war. And, like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making. Did their profits jump—or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain? Well, their 1914–1918 average was $49,000,000 a year!

Or, let’s take United States Steel. The normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $105,000,000 a year. Not bad. Then along came the war and up went the profits. The average yearly profit for the period 1914–1918 was $240,000,000. Not bad.

There you have some of the steel and powder earnings. Let’s look at something else. A little copper, perhaps. That always does well in war times.

Anaconda, for instance. Average yearly earnings during the pre-war years 1910–1914 of $10,000,000. During the war years 1914–1918 profits leaped to $34,000,000 per year.

Or Utah Copper. Average of $5,000,000 per year during the 1910–1914 period. Jumped to average of $21,000,000 yearly profits for the war period.

Let’s group these five, with three smaller companies. The total yearly average profits of the pre-war period 1910–1914 were a$137,480,000. Then along came the war. The yearly average profits for this group skyrocketed to $408,300,000.

A little increase in profits of approximately 200 per cent.

Does war pay? It paid them. But they aren’t the only ones. There are still others. Let’s take leather.

For the three-year period before the war the total profits of Central Leather Company were $3,500,000. That was approximately $1,167,000 a year. Well, in 1916 Central Leather returned a profit of $15,500,000, a small increase of 1,100 per cent. That’s all. The General Chemical Company averaged a profit for the three years before the war of a little over $800,000 a year.

Then came the war, and the profits jumped to $12,000,000. A leap of 1,400 per cent.

International Nickel Company—and you can’t have a war without nickel—showed an increase in profits from a mere average of $4,000,000 a year to $73,500,000 yearly. Not bad? An increase of more than 1,700 per cent.

American Sugar Refining Company averaged $200,000 a year for the three years before the war. In 1916 a profit of $6,000,000 was recorded.

Listen to Senate Document No. 259. The Sixty-Fifth Congress, reporting on corporate earnings and government revenues. Considering the profits of 122 meat packers, 153 cotton manufactures, 299 garment makers, 49 steel plants, and 340 coal producers during the war. Profits under 25 per cent were exceptional. For instance, the coal companies made between 100 per cent and 7,856 per cent on their capital stock during the war. The Chicago packers doubled and tripled their earnings.

And let us not forget the bankers who financed this great war. If anyone had the cream of the profits it was the bankers. Being partnerships rather than incorporated organization, they do not have to report to stockholders. And their profits were as secret as they were immense. How the bankers made their millions and their billions I do not know, because those little secrets never become public—even before a Senate investigatory body.

But here’s how some of the other patriotic industrialists and speculators chiseled their way into war profits.

Take the shoe people. They like war. It brings business with abnormal profits. They made huge profits on sales abroad to our allies. Perhaps, like the munitions manufacturers and armament makers, they also sold to the enemy. For a dollar is a dollar whether it comes from Germany or from France. But they did well by Uncle Sam too. For instance, they sold Uncle Sam 35,000,000 pairs of hobnailed service shoes. There were 4,000,000 soldiers. Eight pairs, and more, to a soldier. My regiment during the war had only a pair to a soldier. Some of these shoes probably are still in existence. They were good shoes. But when the war was over Uncle Sam had a matter of 25,000,000 pairs left over. Bought—and paid for. Profits recorded and pocketed.

There was still lots of leather left. So the leather people sold your Uncle Sam hundreds of thousands of McClellan saddles for the cavalry. But there wasn’t any American cavalry overseas! Somebody had to get rid of this leather, however. Somebody had to make a profit on it—so we had a lot of those McClellan saddles. And we probably have those yet.

Also somebody had a lot of mosquito netting. They sold your Uncle Sam 20,000,000 mosquito nets for the use of the soldiers overseas. I suppose the boys were expected to put it over them as they tried to sleep in the muddy trenches—one hand scratching cooties on their backs and the other making passes at scurrying rats. Well, not one of these mosquito nets ever got to France!

Anyhow, these thoughtful manufacturers wanted to make sure that no soldier would be without his mosquito net, so 40,000,000 additional yards of mosquito netting were sold to Uncle Sam.

There were pretty good profits in mosquito netting in war days, even if there were no mosquitoes in France.

I suppose, if the war had lasted just a little longer, the enterprising mosquito netting manufacturers would have sold your Uncle Sam a couple of consignments of mosquitoes to plant in France so that more mosquito netting would be in order.

Airplane and engine manufacturers felt they, too, should get their just profits out of this war. Why not? Everybody else was getting theirs. So $1,000,000,000—count them if you live long enough—was spent by Uncle Sam in building airplanes and airplane engines that never left the ground! Not one plane, or motor, out of the billion dollars’ worth ordered, ever got into a battle in France. Just the same the manufacturers made their little profit of 30, 100 or perhaps 300 per cent.

Undershirts for soldiers cost 14 cents to make and Uncle Sam paid 30 cents to 40 cents each for them—a nice little profit for the undershirt manufacturer. And the stocking manufacturers and the uniform manufacturers and the cap manufacturers and the steel helmet manufacturers—all got theirs.

Why, when the war was over some 4,000,000 sets of equip-ment—knapsacks and the things that go to fill them—crammed warehouses on this side. Now they are being scrapped because the regulations have changed the contents. But the manufacturers collected their wartime profits on them—and they will do it all over again the next time.

There were lots of brilliant ideas for profit making during the war.

One very versatile patriot sold Uncle Sam twelve dozen 48-inch wrenches. Oh, they were very nice wrenches. The only trouble was that there was only one nut ever made that was large enough for these wrenches. That is the one that holds the turbines at Niagara Falls! Well, after Uncle Sam had bought them and the manufacturer had pocketed the profit, the wrenches were put on freight cars and shunted all around the United States in an effort to find a use for them. When the Armistice was signed it was indeed a sad blow to the wrench manufacturer. He was just about to make some nuts to fit the wrenches. Then he planned to sell these, too, to your Uncle Sam.

Still another had the brilliant idea that colonels shouldn’t ride in automobiles, nor should they even ride horseback. One had probably seen a picture of Andy Jackson riding on a buckboard. Well, some 6,000 buckboards were sold to Uncle Sam for the use of colonels! Not one of them was used. But the buckboard manufacturer got his war profit.

The shipbuilders felt they should come in on some of it, too. They built a lot of ships that made a lot of profit. More than $3,000,000,000 worth. Some to the ships were all right. But $635,000,000 worth of them were made of wood and wouldn’t float! The seams opened up—and they sank. We paid for them, though. And somebody pocketed the profits.

It has been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000. Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was expended in the actual war period. This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits. That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way. This $16,000,000,000 profits is not to be sneezed at. It is quite a tidy sum. And it went to a very few.

The Senate (Nye) committee probe of the munitions industry and its wartime profits, despite its sensational disclosures, hardly has scratched the surface.

Even so, it has had some effect. The State Department has been studying “for some time” methods of keeping out of war. The War Department suddenly decides it has a wonderful plan to spring. The Administration names a committee—with the War and Navy Departments ably represented under the chairmanship of a Wall Street speculator—to limit profits in war time. To what extent isn’t suggested. Hmmm. Possibly the profits of 300 and 600 and 1,600 per cent of those who turned blood into gold in the World War would be limited to some smaller figure.

Apparently, however, the plan does not call for any limitation of losses—that is, the losses of those who fight the war. As far as I have been able to ascertain there is nothing in the scheme to limit a soldier to the loss of but one eye, or one arm, or to limit his wounds to one or two or three. Or to limit the loss of life.

There is nothing in this scheme, apparently, that says not more than twelve per cent of a regiment shall be wounded in battle, or that not more than seven per cent in a division should be killed.

Of course, the committee cannot be bothered with such trifling matters.

CHAPTER THREE

Who Pays the Bills?

WHO provides the profits—these nice little profits of 20, 100, 300, 1,500, and 1,800 per cent? We all pay them—in taxation. We paid the bankers their profits when we bought Liberty Bonds at $100 and sold them back at $84 or $86 to the banker. These bankers collected $100 plus. It was a simple manipulation. The bankers control the security marts. It was easy for them to depress the price of these bonds. Then all of us—the people—got frightened and sold the bonds at $84 or $86. The bankers bought them. Then these same bankers stimulated a boom and government bonds went to par—and above. Then the bankers collected their profits.

But the soldier pays the biggest part of the bill.

If you don’t believe this, visit the American cemeteries on the battlefields abroad. Or visit any of the veterans’ hospitals in the United States. On a tour of the country, in the midst of which I am at the time of this writing, I have visited eighteen government hospitals for veterans. In them are a total of about 50,000 destroyed men—men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago. The very able chief surgeon at the government hospital at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home.

Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to “about face”; to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed.

Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another “about face”! This time they had to do their own readjusting, sans mass psychology, sans officers’ aid and advice, sans nation-wide propaganda. We didn’t need them any more. So we scattered them about without any “three-minute” or “Liberty Loan” speeches or parades.

Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final “about face” alone.

In the government hospital at Marion, Indiana, 1,800 of these boys are in pens! Five hundred of them in a barracks with steel bars and wires all around outside the buildings and on the porches. These already have been mentally destroyed. These boys don’t even look like human beings. Oh, the looks on their faces! Physically, they are in good shape; mentally, they are gone.

There are thousands and thousands of these cases, and more and more are coming in all the time. The tremendous excitement of the war, the sudden cutting off of that excitement—the young boys couldn’t stand it.

That’s a part of the bill. So much for the dead—they have paid their part of the war profits. So much for the mentally and physically wounded—they are paying now their share of the war profits. But the others paid, too—they paid with heartbreaks when they tore themselves away from their firesides and their families to don the uniform of Uncle Sam—on which a profit had been made. They paid another part in the training camps where they were regimented and drilled while others took their jobs and their places in the lives of their communities. They paid for it in the trenches where they shot and were shot; where they went hungry for days at a time; where they slept in the mud and in the cold and in the rain—with the moans and shrieks of the dying for a horrible lullaby.

But don’t forget—the soldier paid part of the dollars and cents bill too.

Up to and including the Spanish-American War, we had a prize system, and soldiers and sailors fought for money. During the Civil War they were paid bonuses, in many instances, before they went into service. The government, or states, paid as high as $1,200 for an enlistment. In the Spanish-American War they gave prize money. When we captured any vessels, the soldiers all got their share—at least, they were supposed to. Then it was found that we could reduce the cost of wars by taking all the prize money and keeping it, but conscripting the soldier anyway. Then the soldiers couldn’t bargain for their labor. Everyone else could bargain, but the soldier couldn’t.

Napoleon once said,

“All men are enamored of decorations... they positively hunger for them.”

So, by developing the Napoleonic system—the medal business—the government learned it could get soldiers for less money, because the boys like to be decorated. Until the Civil War there were no medals. Then the Congressional Medal of Honor was handed out. It made enlistments easier. After the Civil War no new medals were issued until the Spanish-American War.

In the World War, we used propaganda to make the boys accept conscription. They were made to feel ashamed if they didn’t join the army.

So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it. With few exceptions our clergymen joined in the clamor to kill, kill, kill. To kill the Germans. God is on our side . . . it is His will that the Germans be killed.

And in Germany, the good pastors called upon the Germans to kill the allies . . . to please the same God. That was a part of the general propaganda, built up to make people war conscious and murder conscious.

Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the “war to end wars.” This was the “war to make the world safe for democracy.” No one told them that dollars and cents were the real reason. No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United States patents. They were just told it was to be a “glorious adventure.”

Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month!

All they had to do for this munificent sum was to leave their dear ones behind, give up their jobs, lie in swampy trenches, eat canned willy (when they could get it) and kill and kill and kill . . . and be killed.

But wait!

Half of that wage (just a little more in a month than a riveter in a shipyard or a laborer in a munitions factory safe at home made in a day) was promptly taken from him to support his dependents, so that they would not become a charge upon his community. Then we made him pay what amounted to accident insurance—something the employer pays for in an enlightened state—and that cost him $6 a month. He had less than $9 a month left.

Then, the most crowning insolence of all—he was virtually blackjacked into paying for his own ammunition, clothing, and food by being made to buy Liberty Bonds at $100 and then we bought them back—when they came back from the war and couldn’t find work—at $84 and $86. And the soldiers bought about $2,000,000,000 worth of those bonds!

Yes, the soldier pays the greater part of the bill. His family pays it too. They pay it in the same heart-break that he does. As he suffers, they suffer. At nights, as he lay in the trenches and watched shrapnel burst about him, they lay home in their beds and tossed sleeplessly—his father, his mother, his wife, his sisters, his brothers, his sons, and his daughters.

When he returned home minus an eye, or minus a leg or with his mind broken, they suffered too—as much as and even sometimes more than he. Yes, and they, too, contributed their dollars to the profits that the munitions makers and bankers and shipbuilders and the manufacturers and the speculators made. They, too, bought Liberty Bonds and contributed to the profit of the bankers after the Armistice in the hocus-pocus of manipulated Liberty Bond prices.

And even now the families of the wounded men and of the mentally broken and those who never were able to readjust themselves are still suffering and still paying.

CHAPTER FOUR

How to Smash this Racket!

WELL, it’s a racket, all right.

A few profit—and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can’t end it by disarmament conferences. You can’t eliminate it by peace parlays at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can’t wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war.

The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before the nation’s manhood can be conscripted. One month before the Government can conscript the young men of the nation—it must conscript capital and industry and labor. Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our steel companies and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted—to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.

Let the workers in these plants get the same wages—all the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers—yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians and all government office holders—everyone in the nation to be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches!

Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and

mayors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds.

Why shouldn’t they?

They aren’t running any risk of being killed or of having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered. They aren’t sleeping in muddy trenches. They aren’t hungry. The soldiers are!

Give capital and industry and labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war. That will smash the war racket—that and nothing else.

Maybe I am a little too optimistic. Capital still has some say. So capital won’t permit the taking of the profit out of war until the people—those who do the suffering and still pay the price—make up their minds that those they elect to office shall do their bidding, and not that of the profiteers.

Another step necessary in this flight to smash the war racket is a limited plebiscite to determine whether war should be declared. A plebiscite not of all the voters but merely of those who would be called upon to do the fighting and the dying. There wouldn’t be very much sense in having the 76-year-old president of a munitions factory or the flat-footed head of an international banking firm or the cross-eyed manager of a uniform manufacturing plant—all of whom see visions of tremendous profits in the event of war—voting on whether the nation should go to war or not. They never would be called upon to shoulder arms—to sleep in a trench and to be shot. Only those who would be called upon to risk their lives for their country should have the privilege of voting to determine whether the nation should go to war.

There is ample precedent for restricting the voting to those affected. Many of our states have restrictions on those permitted to vote. In most, it is necessary to be able to read and write before you may vote. In some, you must own property. It would be a simple matter each year for the men coming of military age to register in their communities as they did in the draft during the World War and to be examined physically. Those who could pass and who would therefore be called upon to bear arms in the event of war would be eligible to vote in a limited plebiscite. They should be the ones to have the power to decide—and not a Congress few of whose members are within the age limit and fewer still of whom are in physical condition to bear arms. Only those who must suffer should have the right to vote.

A third step in this business of smashing the war racket is to make certain that our military forces are truly forces for defense only.

At each session of Congress the question of further naval appropriations comes up. The swivel-chair admirals of Washington (and there are always a lot of them) are very adroit lobbyists. And they are smart. They don’t shout that “We need a lot of battleships to war on this nation or that nation.” Oh, no. First of all, they let it be known that America is menaced by a great naval power. Almost any day, these admirals will tell you, the great fleet of this supposed enemy will strike suddenly and annihilate our 125,000,000 people. Just like that. Then they begin to cry for a larger navy. For what? To fight the enemy? Oh my, no. Oh, no. For defense purposes only.

Then, incidentally, they announce maneuvers in the Pacific. For defense. Uh, huh.

The Pacific is a great big ocean. We have a tremendous coastline on the Pacific. Will the maneuvers be off the coast, two or three hundred miles? Oh, no. The maneuvers will be two thousand, yes, perhaps even thirty-five hundred miles, off the coast.

The Japanese, a proud people, of course will be pleased beyond expression to see the United States fleet so close to Nippon’s shores. Even as pleased as would be the residents of California were they to dimly discern, through the morning mist, the Japanese fleet playing at war games off Los Angeles.

The ships of our navy, it can be seen, should be specifically limited, by law, to within 200 miles of our coastline. Had that been the law in 1898 the Maine would never have gone to Havana Harbor. She never would have been blown up. There would have been no war with Spain with its attendant loss of life. Two hundred miles is ample, in the opinion of experts, for defense purposes. Our nation cannot start an offensive war if its ships can’t go farther than 200 miles from the coastline. Planes might be permitted to go as far as 500 miles from the coast for purposes of reconnaissance. And the army should never leave the territorial limits of our nation.

To summarize: Three steps must be taken to smash the war racket.

We must take the profit out of war.

We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war.

We must limit our military forces to home defense purposes.

CHAPTER FIVE

To Hell With War!

I AM not such a fool as to believe that war is a thing of the past. I know the people do not want war, but there is no use in saying we cannot be pushed into another war.

Looking back, Woodrow Wilson was re-elected president in 1916 on a platform that he had “kept us out of war” and on the implied promise that he would “keep us out of war.” Yet, five months later he asked Congress to declare war on Germany.

In that five-month interval the people had not been asked whether they had changed their minds. The 4,000,000 young men who put on uniforms and marched or sailed away were not asked whether they wanted to go forth to suffer and to die.

Then what caused our government to change its mind so suddenly?

Money.

An allied commission, it may be recalled, came over shortly before the war declaration and called on the President. The President summoned a group of advisers. The head of the commission spoke. Stripped of its diplomatic language, this is what he told the President and his group:

There is no use kidding ourselves any longer. The cause of the allies is lost. We now owe you (American bankers,American munitions makers, American manufacturers, American speculators, American exporters) jive or six billion dollars.

If we lose (and without the help of the United States wemust lose) we, England, France and Italy, cannot pay back this money...and Germany won’t.

So...

Had secrecy been outlawed as far as war negotiations were concerned, and had the press been invited to be present at that conference, or had the radio been available to broadcast the proceedings, America never would have entered the World War. But this conference, like all war discussions, was shrouded in the utmost secrecy.

When our boys were sent off to war they were told it was a “war to make the world safe for democracy” and a “war to end all wars.”

Well, eighteen years after, the world has less of a democracy than it had then. Besides, what business is it of ours whether Russia or Germany or England or France or Italy or Austria live under democracies or monarchies? Whether they are Fascists or Communists? Our problem is to preserve our own democracy.

And very little, if anything, has been accomplished to assure us that the World War was really the war to end all wars.

Yes, we have had disarmament conferences and limitations of arms conferences. They don’t mean a thing. One has just failed; the results of another have been nullified. We send our professional soldiers and our sailors and our politicians and our diplomats to these conferences. And what happens?

The professional soldiers and sailors don’t want to disarm. No admiral wants to be without a ship. No general wants to be without a command. Both mean men without jobs. They are not for disarmament. They cannot be for limitations of arms. And at all these conferences, lurking in the background but all-powerful, just the same, are the sinister agents of those who profit by war. They see to it that these conferences do not disarm or seriously limit armaments.

The chief aim of any power at any of these conferences has been not to achieve disarmament in order to prevent war but rather to endeavor to get more armament for itself and les s for any potential foe.

There is only one way to disarm with any semblance of practicability. That is for all nations to get together and scrap every ship, every gun, every rifle, every tank, every war plane. Even this, if it were at all possible, would not be enough.

The next war, according to experts, will be fought not with battleships, not by artillery, not with rifles and not with guns. It will be fought with deadly chemicals and gases.

Secretly each nation is studying and perfecting newer and ghastlier means of annihilating its foes wholesale. Yes, ships will continue to get built, for the shipbuilders must make their profits. And guns still will be manufactured and powder and rifles will be made, for the munitions makers must make their huge profits. And the soldiers, of course, must wear uniforms, for the manufacturers must make their war profits too.

But victory or defeat will be determined by the skill and ingenuity of our scientists.

If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destruction, they will have no time for the constructive job of building a greater prosperity for all peoples. By putting them to this useful job, we can all make more money out of peace than we can out of war—even the munition makers.

So ... I say, “TO HELL WITH WAR!”

Saturday, October 25, 2025

“12 Angry Men” and the Truth Movement


12 Angry Men was a classic, well-acted 1957 film about a jury deciding the verdict in a murder trial. Because some of my readers won’t have seen it, I’ll leave a link at the bottom to a site where it can be watched for free, and I’ll avoid writing “spoilers.”

This film, which still holds up after 60 years, features many themes that resonate —for me, at least—with relevance to today’s Truth Movement. These include:

· Not caving in to peer pressure, even if it means standing alone. I don’t think I know a Truther who doesn’t identify with this challenge.
· Reaching a verdict based solely on objective evidence, not prejudicial thinking. How many battles have we fought on this basis, not only with others, but with ourselves? Often these prejudices are ones implanted by the mainstream media.
· Having the courage to change one’s mind and admit having been wrong. This is  difficult to do, but it’s vital to navigating a path of truth.
· Using critical thinking to establish facts, and going where the evidence leads, instead of simply relying on authorities. In 12 Angry Men, the jury works out many truths about the case, rather than depending on the authority of the judicial system’s paid attorneys­—and they do a better job. Likewise, even though we disagree among ourselves on some details, we in 9/11 Truth have labored toward analytically establishing the facts of September 11, 2001, instead of blindly accepting the government’s explanation.
· Caring about others. In the film, one character, played by Jack Warden, is willing to vote either way, just so long as he can make a baseball game he has tickets for. The game is more important to him than the fate of the accused, whose life is hanging in the balance. He reminds me of people we encounter today, who are far more concerned with sports scores than with the growing surveillance state, or the victims and trillion-dollar expense of the contrived wars we are waging in the Middle East.
· Upholding the Constitution. 12 Angry Men specifically cites Constitutional principles. Today, few people seem to know, or care, about their own rapidly eroding Constitutional rights.
· Validating the jury system itself. While I can’t prove it, I suspect that certain inordinately high-profile jury cases, such as the Casey Anthony trial, might have been tampered with in order to outrage the public into concluding that “the jury system doesn’t work” and “we should leave verdicts in the hands of judges (after all, they’re legal experts) instead of laymen.” THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT THE DEEP STATE WANTS: POLITICALLY APPOINTED JUDGES, BOUGHT AND PAID FOR, HAVING AUTHORITY TO INCARCERATE ANYONE UPON WHIM OF THE STATE. The jury approach not only ensures that both sides of a case are heard, but that a verdict is decided by individuals with no ulterior motives. This system may not be perfect, but it sure beats whatever’s in second place.

Trivia notes: According to the Internet Movie Database, screenwriter Reginald Rose became inspired to script this film after he himself was a member of a jury that battled for eight hours to reach a verdict.

Of course, not everyone will enjoy 12 Angry Men; younger viewers may consider it too old or talky. Perhaps some of the film’s depictions of prejudice are slightly overdrawn, subtly hinting of political correctness. (Twenty years later, however, Rose wrote the script for one of the most politically incorrect films to fly under Hollywood’s radar screen: The Wild Geese. No one would ever guess the same man wrote both films, since The Wild Geese—on the surface—was a violent action/adventure flick. But the action concealed some geopolitical undercurrents, including a scheming Rothschild-like international banker, who betrays the men attempting to rescue an African leader based on Moise Tshombe, ill-fated Christian president of the breakaway state of Katanga.)

I would love to embed 12 Angry Men right here, but to avoid any copyright issue, I refer my readers to the version which you can click-and-play at archive.org. The sound and image quality are good.

James Perloff

https://jamesperloff.net/12-angry-men-truth-movement/

Thursday, October 23, 2025

Self-observation in recovering sanity


Perceval broke into a spiritual promised land, the pinnacle of the psychotic achievement, for short periods when he would feel “transported to heavenly places.” In this realm of the Gods, he felt he experienced eternity and that he lived beyond birth and death. He sensed a separation between his consciousness and his physical being. Doubt was almost completely gone, but when it flashed he saw what he called the realm of pure imagi-nation, or the divine mind. It led to a kind of numbness in which he became absorbed, fascinated in spiritual pleasure. But at times it wavered like a mirage, and a fear was sown—that he might lose it.

Fear became a rush of energy. He looked back in envy at the height of his spiritual bliss and knew that it had gone. He became more aggressive in his attempt to win spiritual success from the powers. He overturned doubt easily, and any moment of it he saw as a demonic influence. The voices continually issued conflicting commands, but always they demanded further spiritual submission from him. He was in the realm of Paranoia, where he had to protect himself “against attacks from all directions.” He felt that only the exertion of greater energy, speed, and effi-ciency could save him from the nightmarish world that was coming.

On entering the realm of Hell he experienced the full fury of his own projections. He could not tell if he was committing acts of destruction or creation. His speed of mind was tremendous and in a constant momentum of change between giving birth and dying. He was given to feelings of hatred and of being hated, and, while fighting against the projections, he began to strike inward. Voices now ordered him to destroy himself. When the “crack” occurred he was at a peak point of being overwhelmed, alternately burning or being frozen in an environment of terror.

When Perceval first became ill he went through this cycle in about three months. After that, he recycled through it many times. In the last stages of his illness, he would recycle through the six intensified realms in a matter of minutes. It seems that, once done, it became progressively easier to do. He might have a moment or two of rest, or even clarity—particularly during his most despairing moments of the Hell realm—and then it would begin again. There appears to be a significant natural gap, or break, in the Hell realm, where one is open to learning things, to seeing things in a new light—and most importantly, where one is open to human intimacy and friendship. All those possibilities, of course, were absent in Perceval's dismal life at the madhouse.

In his loneliness he often thought of biblical Prophets and many other mystics and saints. They might understand his suffering, he believed, for they had lived through similar experiences; they also had been commanded about, and had been cast from the bliss of heaven into the abyss of the “dark night of the soul.” As do many people in psychosis, Perceval struggled with the ageless question of the subtle distinction between a tempestuous spiritual journey and true madness, and he was certain that he was being acted upon by the same power that had influenced the Prophets and the Apostles.

S TA G E S  O F  R E C O V E R Y

There is a silent despair in the modern world about the possibility of recovery from psychosis. Only occasionally is the despair publicly acknowledged, but privately, for the vast majority of psychiatrists and psychologists, recovery does not exist. They have become accustomed to seeing patients “relapse”—make a temporary adjustment to life and then fall apart under the pressures of life into the same psychotic world as before. They have seen this so often that they have come to believe that relapse is inherent in the illness, the expectable natural history of the disease. This professional belief system has been accepted and has passed into the general culture. Most people have become acclimatized to a belief that psychosis is a terminal illness, and have thus become unconscious and numb to their own despair. When Perceval declared himself recovered, he was met with tremendous scorn. He had been in the madhouse many months by then, and everyone around him believed he was still dangerous to himself and others. The miseries of his treatment persisted. In the course of proclaiming his recovery, he wrote over a hundred letters (some of which the hospital never sent), petitioning his mother, brothers, sisters, friends, lawyers, and the courts for his release from strict confinement and to be given a freedom commensurate with the abilities he had recovered. At first he addressed his mother; she, as his legal guardian, held the key to his confinement. He tried to explain his improvement and his wish for freedom: “After I began to recover from my frightful dream . . . I understood both things and persons to be really what they were—though not always, nor for sometime . . . though in a dream my behavior was still more moderate.” But all of his petitions were denied. He once tried to run away but was caught and restrained. Several famous psychiatrists of the time visited him and prescribed continued asylum treatment. One of them refused his petition, stating that because he wore his hair long and in ringlets (which Perceval called “natural and manly”) in knowing defiance of the hospital code of behavior, and because he refused to simply be a good patient and do what might be necessary for his quick release (like being kinder to his worthy family and less accusatory of his physicians), his judgment was obviously impaired and his mind required continued treatment.

How he longed to be away from the excitement and provocation of asylum life and to be in a more simplified environment where he might work at stabilizing his mind. Although he was held in confinement for another two years, he kept his longing for freedom alive.

Almost incredibly, during this time and while utterly alone Perceval was discovering a pathway to recovery from psychosis. It is difficult for us to know just how unique that discovery was or to appreciate how often and silently such an event may currently be happening in our hospitals and asylums. Clearly, Perceval had no scheme to do it, at least at first.

Recovery was an evolution in process: He had decisions to make at each step of the way, and there were many side roads and environmental obstructions. Although it is now popularly believed that recovery is improbable for people who are as ill as Perceval, not only did Perceval fully recover—and only the course of his life can demonstrate that—but he did so under the conditions of madhouse care!

The hectic course of his recovery reveals some basic principles, which apply to anyone during the cyclic journey of psychosis. When these insights made it clear to him just what he had to do to recover, he set an iron determination in that direction. It is through these principles that the story of Perceval's recovery can best be told.

The Wisdom of Recovery

There are experiences of sudden “shock” or “astonishment,” momentary “islands of clarity” and awakening. At such a moment Perceval said “scales fell from my eyes.” Often these moments are accompanied by horror at the self-deception in which one has been immersed.

There is also a more gradual awakening that occurs in the intervals between the sharp points of clarity. This happens bit by bit, sometimes agonizingly slowly, sometimes bitterly. But it also includes moments of delight and confidence. Although this sequence happens over and over again and its progression is cumulative, an active, continuous effort is required on the part of the one recovering from psychosis.

Each stage of recovery has its own particular danger. The danger of being drawn back into the whirlpool dream of psychosis is powerful, beckoning, and even irresistible. One can become enamored with the sudden awakenings and easily miss the point by turning them into self-aggrandizements or by attempting to create them at will. And during the periods of gradual awakening, one sometimes feels exquisitely precarious, combining what Perceval called a “child's sensitivity and an imbecile ability to control wild thoughts.'' There is a continual undertow of grief and nostalgia to relax back into the dream. Compared to the vivid display of losing one’s mind, recovery feels boring and hopeless. One’s intention and effort may give way. There is no other way to describe what is needed to accomplish the dangerous journey of recovery other than calling it courage.

Recovery is neither a distinct event nor a border to cross over. Moments of recovery are happening all the time, even in the midst of losing mind. Insanity and sanity are occurring together. Wildness of mind and clarity of intelligence are arising side by side. Spontaneous insights about how to recover actually present themselves as veiled messages within a delusion itself, and they are either recognized or lost.

If any stage of the natural unfolding of recovery is thwarted, frustrated, or actively opposed by the environment, the effort is either abandoned com-pletely or it becomes as it did with Perceval, a grim struggle for survival.

The implication of these principles is enormous, for it means that everyone has the capacity to recover from psychosis and that it might be done in similar stages: a virtual unwinding of psychosis. The following stages are described from the point of view of Perceval's experience. Each stage involved a recognition or insight into the nature of his own psychosis. Each stage is a quality of mind, not in the sense of an intensified realm but a particular moment of sanity within a realm, having its own emotions, logic, and serious dilemmas. Although they do not always follow in sequential order, they can be something of a guide through the predicaments inherent to the recovery process.

Detachment From Delusion

Within the first months in the madhouse, Perceval admitted to himself that nothing could deter him from attempting to comply with the commands of his delusion short of his own death. All his determined efforts at spiritual submission in the past had only led to this. He now openly acknowledged his total enslavement.

But then, as early as one month after the “crack,” he had startling glimpses of recovery:

A kind of confidence of mind came in me the evening after I had been threatened (by voices), and saw the thunderbolt fall harmlessly by my side . . . nothing ensuing, confidence again came in me, and this night a change took place in the tone of the voices.

Then, this kind of event happened several more times. That is what it took. He said that only “repeated experience of the falsehood of the promises made to me in delusion could succeed in making me relinquish altogether my attempts to comply.” Whatever this “confidence” was, it had the effect of also altering the delusion itself.

Doubt was returning. It spelled the beginning of the end of his bondage to delusion. But recovery beyond this point he said was “long in coming,” taking six months to complete, because soon after the episode of the failed thunderbolt Perceval was strapped to his bed and “became here again a sport of the wildest delusion.”

The shock of doubt allowed doubt to gain a foothold. Memories and reminders of that doubt lingered. But each moment of clarity was opposed by a recoil or aftershock, a rapid alternation between clarity and delusion. Gradually, the delusion itself was affected; with each moment of clarity there appeared a new edition of the delusion—a compromise delusion—which took into account his increased awareness and still exhorted him to maintain an allegiance to miraculous powers.

I have so long been deceived by my spirits that I now did not believe them when they told the truth. I discovered at last that I was on earth, in natural, although very painful circumstances, in a madhouse . . . and I knew I was looked upon as a child.

He slowly concluded, from the incessant contradictions within the commands of the voices, that the voices were as confused as he was. In this way, the voices were gradually weakened and eventually terminated— and Perceval makes a point of this—one at a time.

Discipline And Effort

Frustratingly, shortly after each successful “disobedience” to the spirits, he would again unconsciously relapse into reckless obedience. Only further discipline and effort could counteract that kind of deterioration of his willpower.

Voices sporadically occurred (at first making no sense) that urged him to “recollect” himself; that is, to become more aware of his situation and prevent “going into a wrong state of mind . . . by keeping my head to my heart and my heart to my head.” He repeated this slogan to himself over and over again throughout his recovery as a means of reminding himself to keep his body and mind together: “Without that, my head wandered from my heart and my heart turned from my head all through the day.” Voices told him he was “ruminating all day long,” and a “moving white light appeared as a guide” and would indicate to him when he was lost in thought.

A distinct kind of effort was required to recollect himself and bring himself back to the details of his physical world. When he could do that there came a synchronization of body and mind that strengthened his ability to resist the temptations of delusion. For example, on attempting to write letters, every syllable of these letters

I saw by illusion before I wrote them, but many other sentences also appeared besides which those I chose; and often these sentences made light of or contradicted what went before— turning me to ridicule and that ridicule goading me to anger and mad-ness, and I had great labor and difficulty to collect myself to seize those that were at all consecutive—or not too violent—or not too impassioned. This was extremely painful.22

Any sudden bursting of an illusion or of a glaring self-deception would “stupefy” him. At that moment his wild thoughts would cease and allow him to see things clearly. It took an effort to utilize that moment and not be distracted from it:

I caught the reflection of my countenance in the mirror. I was shocked and stood still; my countenance looked round and unmeaning. I cried to myself, ‘Ichabod! my glory has departed from me’; then I said to myself what a hypocrite I look like! So far, I was in a right state of mind; but the next thought was, 'How shall I set about to destroy my hypocrisy'; then I became again a lunatic.23

Puncturing a delusion, he realized, might come from simple sensations or even a scattered fact, and he began to seek them out. Once, he wrote to his brother to check out a memory as to the correct date of the death of his dog (which figured largely in one of his delusions), and its contradiction to the delusion once again “astonished” him. Another time, by requesting a copy of his baptismal certificate, he instantly dissolved his belief in the spirit voices who told him that he was not really his mother's son. “To confirm the suspicion I had of being deluded my mind needed these circumstantial evidences to be corrected entirely of its errors.” He noticed that there were perceptions whose sudden impact he had been avoiding, as if by a reflex. When he saw his face: “I observed on catching my face in the pane of glass that my head involuntarily turned away and I turned back to observe what had struck me.” It looked disfigured and moronic, and it “recollected” him. After this event, Perceval always carried a pocket mirror with him, so that he could quickly check and see if he looked like a madman or not. Finding “errors” everywhere within his delusions, a defiance against the voice of delusion rose up in him. He would hold himself back from action: “I began to hesitate before I acted and joked inwardly at the absurdities of my delusions.” Then, he habitually disobeyed the voices:

"It was usually a reason now for me to do anything, if I heard a spirit forbid it. I was sorry I had not done so before, being prevented by superstitious fear, for it seemed to bring me to my senses and make me calm and reasonable.” But even as his conviction in the delusions was eroding, “new delusions suc-ceeded those that were dissipated.” The effort had to begin again.

Discovery

His loneliness was profound. While living in a split world, where delu-sion existed side by side with reality, his sense of detachment from people was alarming: “They were dead to me, and I dead to them, and yet with that painful apprehension of a dream, I was cut off from them by a charm, by a riddle I was every moment on the point of guessing.”

His curiosity was engaged. The presence of other people called him out from self-absorption, even when this put him at the risk of being punished for it by the voices. “A beautiful servant girl whom I called Louisa” had such an effect:

The sight of a female at all beautiful was enchanting to me. I now began to recover my reflection rapidly and to make observations upon character and people around me.24

The spirit voices themselves “directed my attention with greater rapidity” to the “variety of situation and ornament.” Then he could make many distinctions and discriminations between reality and that which took place within the thick veil of illusion: “As I came gradually to my right mind I used to burst into fits of laughter at the discovery of the absurdity of my delusion.”

He “experimented” and played with his delusory perceptions. What he discovered intrigued him, and he began to further examine the nature of his strange perceptual processes. He discovered that he had an exaggerated tendency to “dream” even while awake; that is, to pull back from see-ing outward sensations and to see instead the images of memory.

These “investigations” were carried out during brief periods when he pushed himself to stand at the mental precipice between dream and reality, a precarious position. Such an episode might begin by accident: He would be struck by the sudden appearance of a voice or a vision, and then quickly decipher it down to its component parts, as one can sometimes do on awakening from a night dream. In doing this, Perceval first saw a simple “illusion,” like an afterimage, echo, or misperception. Built upon that, a hallucination rapidly took form by an elaboration on the ordinary illusion, which had only been a “trick” of the eye or ear: “I saw and discovered the slight that was played upon me. A trick, which until I became stronger in health, made me doubt that the objects around me were real.”

Immediately upon that, he noticed a second trick, which changed the meaning of the perception. This second overlay was caused by what Perceval called the “power of resemblance.” This function reshaped the illusion to the likeness of a memory. Then a third trick created a sense of conviction, by a power to personify the illusion or grant it the privilege of independent existence. When a newly created existence arose it would begin to act for, against, or indifferent to him. The delusion became solidified beyond doubt when he engaged it in dialogue.

As Perceval's discipline of self-observation became sharpened, he saw that all these steps occurred very quickly and outside his awareness. He was astonished by the speed at which a delusion could be put together and that he could even track that degree of speed. In short, he discovered that wildness of thought and disordered sensations together create hallucination, but only when one enters into dialogue with it does one become truly insane.

This self-observation and many of Perceval's further observations about the nature of psychotic perception are some of the most insightful ever made and are central to understanding the process of recovery. The examples that follow demonstrate an accumulation of insight about his own wildness of mind, all of which he needed in order to cut through his intoxication with delusion. They are presented in the same order as they occurred to him.

1. I discovered one day, when I thought I was attending to a voice that was speaking to me, that, my mind being suddenly directed to outward objects—the sound remained but the voice was gone; the sound proceeded from a neighboring room or from a draught of air through the window or doorway. I found, moreover, if I threw myself back into the same state of absence of mind, that the voice returned, and I subsequently observed that the style of address would appear to change according to the mood of mind I was in; still later, while I was continuing these observations, I found that although these voices usually come to me without thought on my part, I had sometimes a power, to a certain extent, to choose what I would hear.²⁵

2. The thunder, the bellowing of cattle, the sounds of a bell, and other noises, conveyed to me threats, or sentences of exhortation and the like; but I had till now looked at these things as marvelous and I was afraid to examine into them. Now I was more bold.²⁶

3. Prosecuting my examinations still further, I found that the breathing of my nostrils also, particularly when I was agitated, had been and was clothed with words and sentences. I then closed my ears with my fingers, and I found that if I did not hear words—at least I heard a disagreeable singing or humming in the ears—and that those sounds, which were often used to convey distinct words and sentences, and which at other times seemed to the fancy like the earnest cries, or confused debating, or expostulations of many spirits, still remained audible; from which I concluded that they were really produced in the head or brain, though they appeared high in the air, or perhaps in the cornice of the ceiling of the room; and I recognized that all the voices I had heard in me, had been produced by the power of the Deity to give speech to sounds of this nature produced by the action of the pulses, or muscles, or humours, &c. in the body—and that in like manner all the voices I had been made to fancy outside of me, were either formed from or upon different casual sounds around me; or from and upon these internal sounds.²⁷

4. Upon discovering the nature of an illusion caused by the projection of an afterimage; I drew from this the following inferences: that neither when I had seen persons or ghosts around me—neither when I saw visions of things—neither when I dreamt—were the objects really and truly outside of my body; but that the ghosts, visions, and dreams are formed by the power . . . in reproducing figures as they had before been seen on the retina of the eye—or otherwise to the mind—or by arranging minute particles in the visual organs, so as to form a resemblance or pic-ture of these figures—or by combining the arrangements of internal particles and shades with external lines and shades and etc. so as to produce such a resemblance and then making the soul to conceive, by practicing on the visual organs, that what it perceived really within the body exists outside, throwing it in a manner out as the specter is thrown out of a magic lantern.²⁸

5. Though I still occasionally heard these voices and saw visions, I did not heed them more then I would my own thoughts, or than I would dreams, or the ideas of others. Nay, more than that, I rather acted diametrically opposed to them.²⁹

The strength to face one's delusion comes from all such insights into the simple deceptions that go into creating a psychotic perception. Once, a magnificent vision of a naked woman, said to be his eldest sister, suddenly arose before him from the bushes in the garden and beckoned him. Just choose her, the voices told him. Recollecting how he had been so deceived by visions, he turned away, saying, “She might come up if she would, or go down if she would—that I would not meddle with the matter! At this rude reply the vision disappeared.

This response to a vision became Perceval's second most important slogan for recovery. It became his mental practice for recovery: a way of saying no to internal fascinations.
Anyone awakening from a night dream, a daydream, or even a moment of absentmindedness “comes to.” This is usually a moment of sudden expansion of awareness into one's environment. It is this kind of environmental awareness that Perceval tried to cultivate in himself. He studied the mechanism in himself: “Having to recollect myself, I became more aware of my real position, my thoughts being called out from myself to outward objects.” He pinpointed the sensation of being “called out” from delusion as being a kind of passionate energy toward the world—shot out like an arrow to sensory objects—and he tried to train himself to recognize it more quickly. But there was a major obstacle. He found that this sudden openness to his sensory environment was chronically being interrupted and covered over by a mechanism that felt like a “film,” or a fog, insidiously descending over his mind and clouding his awareness. Inevitably, he found himself projecting images onto this film, images that became animated, thus cutting him off from external sensory awareness. He finally solved this riddle by practicing at becoming quick enough to recognize the subtle sensation of the film as it first came to him, and then cutting through it. Thus, the sensation of the film itself became his moment of “recollection,” the reMinder To Wake Himself Up.

Courage

Each time Perceval woke up to the “barbarous circumstance” of asylum life, he became morbidly dejected with guilt, grief, and “a deep sense of self-disgust and degradation.” He noted that when this happened to himself or any of the other inmates, the response was to “become wild or apa-thetic.” He tells of “the gradual destruction of a fine old man who was placed in exactly similar situations as my own.” He watched how the old man's behavior became progressively more slovenly until he became unconcerned with even the slightest dignities of living. The elderly man had been stripped of humanity. Then, with amazement, Perceval saw all his own behavior in the same light. He, too, was deteriorating, was becoming animal! At this point he knew fully that he was as much a victim of his malignant environment as he was of his delusions. He called this shock of awareness “a mercy”; for the old man it was a tragedy, but for Perceval it was an insight that had been mercifully granted to him.

A dreadful sympathy awakened in him, for himself and for all the other patients around him. He was filled with an energy of compassionate outrage. For the first time, Perceval committed himself to follow a plan of action: He would direct himself toward “health” in every aspect of his life. He then devoted himself to becoming well, to being strong enough to speak for all the others who would never leave the asylum—to tell the truth about the horrors of their treatment. He took a vow:

I resolved—I was necessitated—to pit my strength and abilities against that system, to fail in no duty to myself and to my country; but at the risk of my life, or my health, and even my understanding, to become thoroughly acquainted with its windings, in order to expose and unravel the wickedness and the folly that maintained it, and to unmask the plausible villainy that carries it on.³⁰

This singular event of the awakening of compassion was a quantum leap in Perceval's course of recovery from psychosis. It is the case for many other people as well; a compassionate interest and even a dedication to be of service to other people is crucial to the later stages of recovery.

There was a shift of allegiance toward health in everything he did, and he resolved to “follow a plan calculated to compose and strengthen me, to arouse and cheer me—if I had not had resolution to adhere to such a plan, there might have been risk of return of illness, perhaps of insanity . . .. I braced up my mind also to courageous and virtuous efforts.”

He experimented with new efforts at bringing his body and mind into harmony to overcome the physical and mental torpor of asylum life:

“Whenever my thoughts and hands were most occupied I became, I suppose, nearest to sound state of mind, and consequently more aware of my situation,” and he also remarked “that all, or many of the faculties of mind and body should be called into play at one time, and above all things that the body should be occupied.” He also experimented with his breathing and discerned a peculiar interdependence of mind and breath, finding that his mind could be calmed and controlled by “regulated respirations.”

He tried to watch more closely how he ate his food, finding that the rate at which he ate and the qualities of food and their effect on him were all interrelated to his state of mind. He tested his ability to exercise by walking fast and was overcome with grief at the extent of his physical deterioration. He became concerned with his general health, and wrote to his mother to send him (which she did) the “dental materials” he needed to care for his teeth. He fought the hospital authorities to the end and finally was allowed to have some religious books sent to him.

Whenever he could be alone in his hospital room he stealthily wrote about these efforts and kept his journal hidden from the staff. He knew that they were especially interested in his notations about abusive treatment and his eventual plans for malpractice accusations. Because they would sometimes find his notes, he often wrote sensitive material in Portuguese.

Only after many letters, and what the legal establishment called his relentless badgering, did Perceval gain his release from Dr. Fox's asylum. His aged mother and his brothers gave in, and two of his elder brothers came for him. All the time while riding away in a coach from the asylum, he thought they were bringing him home. It was not until they got to the doors of Dr. C. Newington’s madhouse at Ticehurst, in Sussex, did Perceval realize what had happened. The new madhouse turned out to be more humane, and at least allowed him to take walks in the enclosed garden. His treatment here was not nearly as harsh, but he resisted it as best he could, and he continued his letter writing! Now, more often, he wrote to the Metropolitan Commission of Hospitals, to certain judges and members of Parliament, and in all the letters he demanded an immediate examination of his sanity.

He insisted to his family that they remove him from the madhouse and place him in a private home with a family or with attendants to care for him.

I needed quiet, I needed tranquility; I needed security, I needed even at times seclusion—I could not obtain them. At the same time I needed cheerful scenes and lively images, to be relieved from the sad sights and distressing associations of a madhouse; I required my mind and my body to be braced, the one by honest, virtuous, and correct conversation, the other by manly and free exercise; and above all, after the coarse and brutal fellowship I had been reduced to, I sighed for the delicacy and refinements of female society.³¹ At the same time that he was becoming more outwardly defiant of the hospital authorities, he was also mentally rejecting and just saying “No!” to visionary commands. The hallucinations became forgiving, softer, and at times encouraged him toward health. But he painfully discovered that he had to stand fast even against voices that called themselves friends. He had to forcibly take command of his own thought processes. This, he said, was the greatest effort of all. It meant assuming the power to direct his thinking—the very same power that, when he was losing his mind, he had attacked and abandoned. His previous practices of turning away doubt, spiritual submission, and nonhesitation had to be reversed. He did this by actively renouncing his emotional attachment to the the voices—neither fearing threatening voices nor taking pleasure in hopeful voices. Soon, his fascination with the presences, voices, and spirits ceased.

R E E N T R Y

Soon after Perceval was transferred to the second asylum he wrote to his mother and her attorney to inform them that he held them legally responsible for their having submitted him to
abusive treatment, and for holding him in the hospital against his will; he wished to be immediately released to a family lodging. He had heard that this method of treatment was being done by two doctors in London, and he requested that he be put under their supervision. Again, there was a round of visiting doctors and inane interviews. Once again, they urged him to remain at the Ticehurst madhouse and not to cause further grief to his family, who had suffered enough by his illness.

But something new was apparent in the behavior of the examining doctors and magistrates—they were fearful of his being released. He saw their professional greed at wanting to keep him as a patient. He saw their fear at his potentially exposing them to investigation. He suspected that they were also under the influence of his family, who wanted him to remain in the hospital. But he came to the conclusion that the greatest influence on their rejection of his appeal was that they were unworldly people, conventional and deeply prejudiced—merely “exceedingly simple” and fearful.

Finally, at the age of thirty-one, after three years in the madhouses, Perceval's intimidation of his family and the doctors forced his discharge. Physically ill, mentally exhausted, and vulnerable to becoming quickly overexcited, he moved to London and spent some time recuperating at a home-care lodging in Seven Oaks. He needed a great deal of rest!

In the following year, he married a woman named Anna Gardner, and two years later the first of their four daughters was born. They lived mostly in a home in the Kensington area of London, and it was there that Perceval made his fateful decision to write a book describing his experience. The book was to contain all the notes and letters that he wrote while in the asylums, including his accusations against his doctors and his own family. His friends argued against it; they said he would be bitterly attacked for such an expose, that it would only harm himself and his fam-ily and children, and that he should put those terrible years behind him.

He recalled the vow he had made to himself to speak in the name of the other inmates and how it had been the mainstay of his recovery: to use all his energy and his sanity to expose and break the system of madhouse care.

I reflected how many were in the same predicament as myself . . . and I said, who shall speak for them if I do not—who shall plead for them if I remain silent? How can I betray them and myself too by subscribing to the subtle villainy, cruelty, and tyranny of the doctors?³² He moved to Paris for the next year and during that time, largely from memory, wrote of his illness and his confinement. The writing itself frightened him. He feared that by vividly bringing back all his memories he might once again put himself on the verge of madness. He was also rightly apprehensive that he might overwhelm his readers in his flood of painful and accusatory words. While writing, he sometimes felt a return of insanity—an upsurge of a living memory, like the voracious eating of chained madmen—but then he would clear his mind “by pausing and drawing a deep breath, sobbing or sighing, as the cloud of former recollections has passed over me.” On the front page of the book he added a quote from the Aeneid. An aged warrior is requested to recount the siege and rape of Troy:

Oh Queen—too terrible for tongues, the pain you ask me to renew, the tale of how the Damaians could destroy the wealth of Troy, that kingdom of lament: for I myself saw these sad things, I took large part in them.

While still in Paris, he met at the Salpetriere Hospital with Dr. Jean-Etienne Esquirol, a giant of French psychiatry and soon to become a leading figure in the reform of asylum abuses. Esquirol helped Perceval and advised him as to the political actions he might take in England. But he was disturbed by the extremity of Perceval's conviction that all private madhouses should be abolished, feeling that the only innovations possible within psychiatry would come from the private sector.

Without realizing it, Perceval had stepped into the great debate then taking place in French psychiatry, one that repeats itself right down to our present time: Is psychosis a disorder of the intellect and will, as Esquirol argued, or is it a hereditary and degenerative brain disease, as championed at the Rouen asylum (which Perceval also visited) by Dr. Jacques Joseph Moreau?
Back in London, Perceval felt he also had something to say about this issue. He concluded that the study of a mystery like that of insanity—a study that to him was the “most grand and terrible”—was too important and instructive to be left in the hands of the physicians. He titled his book A Narrative of the Treatment Experienced by a Gentleman, During a State of Mental Derangement: Designed to Explain the Causes and the Nature of Insanity (and to Expose the Injudicious Conduct Pursued Towards Many Unfortunate Sufferers Under that Calamity). He published it anonymously in 1838, and it had immediate consequences on the course of his life.

Outrage

Living with barely controlled outrage is the experience of many people who return from the asylums. As for Perceval, he felt himself to be a lonely survivor and witness to an atrocity, one that was continuing without public awareness and that would continue far into the future. There were few, he believed, who could genuinely speak for the insane other than himself.

“And yet who is on my side? where shall I find the energy to reform these abuses?” His situation was not unlike those early escapees from the concentration camps who told of what was being done but were met with crit-icisms of “exaggeration” and hysteria.³³ Perceval always seemed to provoke the criticism of being too “excessive, intemperate, or over-indulgent” in describing his experiences. To this he answered:

I consider this one of the cruellest trials of the lunatic—that on their recovery, by the formality of society, they are not allowed to utter their sentiments in the tone and manner becoming their situation... in expect-ing from such as have been insane, and are sensible of their misfortune, the same tone, gesture, cadence, and placidity, that meets them in persons who have not been through any extraordinary vicissitudes.³⁴

When Perceval learned that one Richard Paternoster, a civil service clerk, was being unjustly confined at Dr. Finch's madhouse in Kensington, he helped to create the public pressure that led to Paternoster's discharge. When he was freed from confinement, Paternoster advertised in the Times of London “for fellow sufferers to join him in a campaign to redress abuses in the madhouse system.”³⁵ Perceval joined him immediately, and together they began to petition the city magistrates for an investigation into asylum treatment. They were soon joined by William Baily (an inventor and veteran of five years in a mad-house), Richard Saumarez (a surgeon who had two insane brothers), and Dr. John Parkin (another former patient).

In 1840 Perceval published a second, expanded volume of his Narrative, and this book was even more clearly dedicated to social action. One of the spearheads of action was to be his legal prosecution of his mother and Dr. Fox. No action of Perceval's met with so much suspicion of his judgment, doubt about his sanity, and accusations of his being a traitor to his class and country than his declaration to prosecute his own mother.

Could this be outrage running wild? Many people recovering from psychosis have been known to get stuck in a sense of justifiable outrage, feeling the energy of outrage to be an essential ingredient of their health.

Certainly, Perceval felt this way. He especially became impatient with people who could not see, or would not see, the abuse of power taking place in the asylum and the world around them.

The Assassination

He understood that it could happen again at any time. He might be labeled insane by his family or the lunatic doctors, and he might once again fall into the snare of the madhouse. He was already under suspicion by the Home Office for distributing literature that they said was calcu-lated to inflame the lower classes. Paternoster himself had been whisked away by the police in the middle of the night following a financial dispute with his father. Perceval and his group of former patients worked in an atmosphere of potential violence; the age of Victoria was also the age of wrongful confinement.

Perceval's immediate family, which included a number of prominent gentry in politics and the ministry, was appalled at the public exposure of his insanity, but much more so at the legal action he was directing against his mother. To them, it was surely an act of uncalled-for revenge. To him, it was the most precise and cutting action possible to present his case: His mother, just like the public, was being duped into believing the heartless advice of the lunatic doctors. Only later did Perceval find out that, from the beginning, one of his brothers had wanted to have him released from the asylum and brought to a private lodging next to his brother's home; but his mother (on the advice of the asylum) vetoed this plan. Before his discharge, he asked his mother to join with him in a suit against Dr. Fox; she refused.

Now, he felt he had no choice but to proceed alone. The malpractice prosecution might arouse public attention to asylum treatment, help provoke investigative hearings, and reduce the plight of those wrongfully confined. Also, he hoped this legal action would secure the rightful inheritance from his father, which his mother had withheld from him since his internment.

It is a strange irony that Perceval must have come to appear to his family as a haunting replica of the man who, many years before, had murdered his beloved father. The story is as follows: In 1812, when John was nine years old, his father was shot to death in the lobby of the House of Commons. The assassin, John Bellingham, was noted to be insane (as Bellingham's father had been) and was summarily hanged one week after the event. One report said: “It was one week from homicide to homicide.

This trial was called a case of judicial murder of an insane man and was explicitly rejected as having no legal precedential authority.”³⁶ Bellingham had lived a life of misfortune and bankruptcy and had been imprisoned for embezzlement. After that, he never ceased to petition and harass members of the government for compensation for what he felt was a wrongful imprisonment. He began to feel that he had to kill someone in order to bring his grievances to public attention, and Spencer Perceval—a man known for his generosity and aid to the poor—was the one*. When John Perceval, twenty-six years later, began his incessant letters and petitions for asylum reform, his family heard echoes and rumors of a dangerous person, a chronic complainer against the system, an avenger, possibly violent.

Throughout this his mother pleaded ignorance. She had no idea how badly he was being treated. In any case, she felt that the doctors knew what they were doing. They told her that John might become violent if he were removed from their treatment. That was enough for her, she had experienced enough violence in her family.

Soon after the publication of his second book, Perceval abandoned his threats of prosecution, possibly because his writings and activities were already achieving his goals.

Recovering Sanity
A Compassionate Approach to Understanding and Treating Psychosis

Edward M. Podvoll, M.D.

* The war against France lasted from 1792 until 1815. Among the principal objectives of this pointless bloodletting was to destroy Napoléon’s debt- and interest-free system of finance. (See Chapter III). During this period England also waged a war against the United States from 1812 until 1814. This war, as was the case with the war against France, was instigated by England at the behest of banker Mayer Amschel Rothschild (real name Bauer) after the United States Congress refused to renew the charter of the Rothschild-controlled[60] Bank of the United States, which had been the central bank of America from 1791 until 1811.[61] Mayer Amschel Rothschild is famously credited with having said: “Give me control of the economics of a country, and I care not who makes her laws. The few who understand the system, will either be so interested from its profits or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class.” British Prime Minister Spencer Perceval (1809-12) tried to stop this completely futile war, but was assassinated on 11 May 1812 in the lobby of the House of Commons by John Bellingham, a political radical, who had been set up by Rothschild.[62]

[62] www.tomatobubble.com/fh1.html NWO Forbidden History (1765-1816). Concurrent with his appointment as prime minister on 4 October 1809, Perceval also served as Chancellor of the Exchequer, to which office he was appointed on 28 March 1807. He was thus fully acquainted with intricacies of high finance. During his chancellorship his Secretary to the Treasury was John Charles Herries, a personal friend and secret confidant of Nathan Rothschild. See N. Ferguson, The House of Rothschild, Money’s Prophets 1798-1848, Vol. 1, Penguin Books, London, 1999, 86. (Professor Ferguson is an insider, who attended the 2012 Bilderberg conference held in Chantilly, Virginia, USA). (...)

Concurrently Perceval was facing increased pressure from Nathan Rothschild to make a declaration of war on the United States. He refused. The British army was already bogged down in a stalemate situation in Spain and Portugal (The Peninsular War 1808-1814) with Napoléon’s forces, and he had no desire to commit more troops and treasure, financed by more interest- bearing bank loans, simply in order to save Rothschild’s sinking banking interests in America.

The assassin of Spencer Perceval, John Bellingham, was born about 1769 in St Neots, Huntingdonshire. From 1800-1802 he worked in Archangelsk as an agent for importers and exporters. He returned to Russia in 1804, and in November of that year he was falsely accused of having reneged on a debt of 4,890 roubles which subsequently led to his imprisonment for four years. On his release Bellingham took up residence in Duke Street, Liverpool. He unsuccessfully petitioned the government for compensation.

Bellingham, a bitter and aggrieved man, fell into company with two dissolute American merchants, Thomas Wilson and Elisha Peck, who were both keen to have Orders in Council, which forbade neutral nations from trading with France abrogated. These Orders in Council had been introduced by Perceval in response to Napoléon’s Continental Blockade which the latter had instituted in 1806 and prohibited trade with Britain and Ireland. Their continuation was due to be debated in parliament on that fateful evening. Thus we observe a confluence of interests, a disturbed and resentful man, two greedy merchants and the puppet master Rothschild pulling the strings in the background.

At 5.15 p.m. on 11 May 1812 as Perceval entered the lobby of the House of Commons, Bellingham stepped forward and shot him in the heart. Perceval collapsed uttering “Murder...... oh my God”[110] and within minutes was dead. Four days later Bellingham was put on trial at the Old Bailey. The trial lasted three days. A plea of insanity was rejected. The brevity of the trial was presumably related to the necessity of preventing any untoward disclosures. As is customary with this type of political assassination the “lone assassin” theory has to be preserved at all costs. On 18 May 1812 Bellingham was hanged. A few weeks later after Perceval’s murder the Orders in Council forbidding neutral nations trading with France were revoked.

A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind

Stephen Mitford Goodson