On Jacob Burckhardt

Life Burckhardt was born in 1818 into a family which was a minor branch of one of the great burgher clans of Basle: the name of Burckhardt had been prominent in the city since the fifteenth century.2 His father was a Protestant minister who had been much influenced by Schleiermacher’s theology.

Basle was a patrician city, conservative and increasingly prosperous, at the same time as being detached from the turbulence of European political events; Burckhardt belonged to its intelligentsia. He completed a degree in theology at Basle, but ceased to be religious, having become convinced by his youthful studies that the life of Christ was a myth. In 1839 he went to Berlin to study history under Ranke, Boeckh and Droysen; but his closest friend and greatest influence was Franz Kugler, the bohemian professor in    the new subject of art history. In another friend, Gottfried Kinkel, he found one of the last of the great Romantics; he moved into the circle of Kinkel’s mistress, the divorced Johanna Matthieux, and of Bettina von Amim, who had once loved Goethe and who lived in Berlin with her sister, the widow of the great legal historian F. C. von Savigny. Burckhardt was Kinkel’s best man at his wedding with Johanna in 1844; but he distanced himself from him during Kinkel’s subsequent career as a revolutionary. Kinkel was con- demned to death in 1848, and escaped with his wife’s help to exile in London, where Johanna finally committed suicide.

Burckhardt was safely back in Basle in 1844, where he served for eighteen months as editor of the main conservative newspaper, the Basler Zeitung.

He was already lecturing at the university on the history of painting, where he caused offence in religious circles by criticizing the dominant Nazarene School, a group of German religious painters in Rome who served as a model for the later pre-Raphaelites. In 1852 he resigned from the university and left for Italy, where he wrote the immensely popular Cicerone (1854), ‘a guide to the enjoyment of art in Italy’, which remained the standard guidebook to Renaissance Italian architecture, sculpture and art for three generations and went through seven editions during his lifetime. On the basis of this he was given a post at the Zürich Polytechnic. In 1858 he was appointed Professor of History at Basle, where he was required to lecture both at the university and at the high school; from 1874 he was also Professor of the History of Ar t. The first post he held until 1885, and the second until 1893. He was a conscientious and assiduous lecturer in both history and history of art, who taught as much as ten hours weekly, and also gave many lectures for the general public.

Burckhardt never married (although as a young man he was in love and wrote poetry to a girl whose parents disapproved); his youthful German friends drifted away, and in his thirties he confessed to being lonely beyond all expectations. He had a few close friends with whom he corresponded, and lived a regular and uneventful life in two rooms above a baker’s shop, devoting himself to his lectures, his books and his travels.

Politically Burckhardt was a natural conservative, who disliked and despised the new industrialization and the development of the national state: he foresaw in the course of his own lifetime the coming of an age of ‘terribles simplificateurs’ and demagogues, who would control the masses and bring ruin to Europe. This pessimistic conservatism is characteristic of a reflective historian, who cultivated irony and distance from the enthusi- asms of contemporary nationalist historians. In so far as he foresaw the development of industrial society towards the totalitarian popular regimes of National Socialism and Marxism, he was of course a prophet out of his time, standing against the tide of history. But he was not a political thinker; and these prejudices, however clear-sighted, are merely the regrets of a marginal observer over the decline of the patrician order to which his own family so clearly belonged. Hence his attack on the vice of reading news- papers and concerning oneself with the agitations of the present in the introduction to the present book.3 It is not Burckhardt’s political views or his pessimism in regard to the future which matter, but his conception of historical method; as he wrote already in 1846:

But, my dear friend, Freedom and the State have lost nothing in me. States are not built with men like me; though as long as I live I mean to be kind and sympathetic to my neighbour; I mean to be a good private individual, an affectionate friend, a good spirit; I have some talent in that direction and mean to develop it I can do nothing more with society as a whole; my attitude towards it is willy-nilly ironical; the details are my affair. . . we may all perish, but at least I want to discover the interest for which I am to perish, namely the ancient culture of Europe.4 So he developed the mask of a dilettante, immersed in his work and his few friends, and devoted to the study of European culture, by which he meant the artistic, literary and spiritual achievements of the past, placed in their context and explained as the result of the forces of history. History was the contemplation of the past: ‘leisure, the mother of contemplation and of the inspiration that springs from it’ (writing from London); ‘Listen to the secret of things. The contemplative mood.’ ‘How is the collector of inscriptions to find time for contemplative work? Why, they don’t even know their Thucydides! Don’t bother about others.’5

Early Works

In the 1840s, while still a student, Burckhardt rebelled against the prevailing conception of history, ‘the one-sidedness of the present that only wants to have a biassed history (Tendenz-Geschichte), just as it has a biassed poetry and a biassed art’.6 ‘For me the background is the chief consideration, and that is provided by cultural history, to which I intend to dedicate myself,’ Burckhardt wrote in 1842.7 From the start his conception of history was concerned, not with actions and events or the great men who appeared to have caused them, but with the cultural context in which such events occurred, a context which might explain the changes far more satisfactorily than by ascribing them to the actions of individuals or the workings of chance. How had Constantine converted the Roman Empire to Christianity, and what did that mean to contemporaries? This was the subject of his first book, The Age of Constantine (1852); it was translated into English a century later (1949),8 and had an enormous effect on my generation of historians, who were in the process of discovering, for the first time in the Anglo-Saxon world since Gibbon, the inexhaustible fascination of late antiquity; for he taught us how to see the age as a cultural phenomenon, rather than in terms of its politics and power structures, or its governmental organization, as more recent historians had interpreted it.

In this book the arrangement is already around three thematic centres - politics, religion and culture. Politics in this period is a necessary evil, a defence against barbarian invasion and internal anarchy. Culture is in decline: literature is reduced to dependence on power (in panegyric) or religion; art is an adjunct of religion: ‘the relevant myths were represented as symbolic husks of general ideas, and the separation between kernel and shell could in the long run only be injurious to art’.9 Philosophy is a solitary pursuit, even if as Themistius said, ‘the value of a philosopher’s discourse is not diminished if it is delivered under a solitary plane tree with none but cicadas to hear’.10 The Christian Church was already a powerful corpor- ation. In this picture Constantine is simply a man of his age, almost irrel- evant to the revolution in consciousness which he brought about; he belongs firmly in a world of mixed pagan and Christian beliefs, and his conversion simply ratified a formal division of equality between two cultures which already existed. The core of the argument lay in Burckhardt’s portrayal of the dominance of religious modes of thought. Late antique paganism was an immensely complex set of rituals and beliefs trying to make sense of the spiritual world:

Christianity was bound to conquer in the end because it provided answers which were incomparably simpler, and which were articu- lated in an impressive and convincing whole, to all the questions for which that period of ferment was so deeply concerned to find solutions.11

Burckhardt’s most famous book, on which his reputation still rests, was The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Lord Acton, the founder of modern historical studies in Cambridge, described it as ‘the most pen- etrating and subtle treatise on the history of civilization that exists in literature’.1 2 It is indeed this book which still shapes and challenges all subsequent attempts to explain the central phenomenon in European history. Burckhardt set out to present an analysis of the new forces at work in the period, and how they interrelate. The first part treats of politics and warfare under the provocative heading, ‘The State as a Work of Art’. That is to say, political life was no longer determined by traditional forms of government or by underlying forces revealed by the modem historian, but by the conscious knowledge of protagonists that there existed a science or art of government, which could be discovered either by experiment or by reflection. The catalogue of murder, treachery and tyranny which ensues shows the consequences of believing in the power of reason rather than tradition: it is a view of the history of events which places the new political science of Machiavelli at its centre; yet whatever its consequences in terms of anarchy and suffering, Burckhardt showed how politics had never before or since been conducted at such a high intellectual level by leaders with such practical and theoretical talents.

The second part describes ‘The Development of the Individual’. This was a constant preoccupation of nineteenth-century post-Hegelian thought: how had the modem idea of the individual arisen from the tribal and religious stages of history? Burckhardt does not explain: he simply describes the forces which separated individuals from their communities, the creation of the ideal of ‘the universal man’ and the modem conception of fame, together with its antithesis, the modem idea of wit and satire:

Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation - only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the state and of all the things of this world became possible. The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such.13

So Burckhardt establishes that ‘it was not the revival of antiquity alone, but its union with the genius of the Italian people, which achieved the conquest of the western world’.1 4 His third section concerns ‘The Revival of Antiquity’ and the education of this new man through contact with ancient literature and culture. The discovery of the New World is treated in a section which relates it to the inner exploration of the psyche, to the development of poetry and biography, and to descriptions of the external world, in ‘The Discovery of the World and of Man’.

Under ‘Society and Festivals’, Burckhardt treats of how men and women actually lived in this new world, the principles of courtesy, good manners and outward refinement, styles of language and conversation, lovemaking, physical exercise and music, the equality of men and women within a masculine ideal of the courtier, and the development of a style of official popular festival, which was modelled on conceptions of ancient triumphs and bacchanals. Finally ‘Morality and Religion’ seeks to relate this new age to the medieval religious forces which it never wholly superseded, so that the last chapter concerns the mixture of ancient and modem superstition which led towards the inevitable disintegration of belief.

It is this work which marks the definitive establishment of a new form of history, which has come to be known in German as Kulturgeschichte, ‘cultural history’.15 Each theme is seen from an entirely new viewpoint, which is on the one hand descriptive and concerned with the details, and on the other corresponds to an underlying view of the basic elements which through their interrelation make up the idea of a culture. In this book Burckhardt was able to discard the determinism inherent in the philosophical problem of the meaning of history for the development of the human spirit, as Hegel had formulated it, while using contemporary philosophical concepts (such as the State, religion and the individual) to structure his description of reality. At the same time he avoided the trap of historical positivism, which consists in believing that the meaning of history is con tained in a chain of cause and effect, and in the certification of the truth or falsehood of alleged events or facts. For Burckhardt the explanation of events lies not in their causes but in the interrelations between them, of which the idea of cause is only a partial and pseudo-scientific two-dimensional reflection. Societies are not linear series of events, but highly complex and interconnected systems, where a change in any element may provoke multiple effects elsewhere. Moreover what people believe and how they behave are far more important than whether their beliefs are true or usefu l: it is not the event which matters, but the perception of that event as a ‘fact’, which is neither true nor false, but simply believed.

It is a valid criticism of Burckhardt’s view of culture that he concerned himself essentially with high culture, with the expression of values contained in the activities and beliefs of an educated elite. His concept of cultural history is therefore fundamentally different from that prevalent in modem universities, where ‘cultural studies’ means the investigation of popular culture and especially minority cultures. Even so the appropriation of the nineteenth-century term by this new modern discipline points to the fact that the tradition begun by Burckhardt opened the way to the study of gestures, customs and behaviour patterns, festivals and other forms of popular expression. Even if Burckhardt might not have relished it, he is in a sense also the father of this discipline, derived from a multicultural and egalitarian conception of society. But it is important to realize that the techniques, concepts and archival materials necessary to make this leap into the future were not available in Burckhardt’s day; and that the great strength of his own reliance on the elite culture is that it was this culture which was self-conscious and fully realized, recorded in the literature and art of the period.

At one time the Constantine and the Renaissance had been intended to be the beginning and end of a great study of the development of European culture from antiquity to the start of the modem age.16 But The Civilization of the Renaissance was the last book published by Burckhardt during his lifetime. Burckhardt came to believe that teaching was far more important:

‘in my experience learned authorship is one of the most unhealthy, and mere teaching (however troublesome it may be and however detailed the studies and preparations need to be) one of the healthiest activities in the world’.17 Behind this ironic withdrawal from the duty to publish, and his refusal to accept that teaching and writing are part of a continuous process of communicating ideas, lay a deeper distaste for the activities of his academic contemporaries, with their unreadable multiple volumes, their obsession with detail and facts, and the pompous arrogance of ‘the viri eruditissimi in their professorial chairs’ whom he refused to join in 1872, when he turned down the offer of Ranke’s chair in Berlin. Heinrich von Sybel proclaimed the programme for the first number of the new historical journal Historische Zeitschrift in 1859: it was to be devoted to the true method of historical research, which was to be combined with a special place for modern history rather than older history and German history rather than the history of other peoples.18 Increasingly Burckhardt could accept neither the political purpose nor the conceptual method of this new history. He no longer believed in the way positivist historicism was going, and could not bring himself to betray his vision of history as contemplation.

The lecture hall in Basle was the one place where it was still possible for a professor to meditate on history rather than making political propaganda or writing boring books designed to kill the interest in his subject. As he said in conversation with his successor Heinrich Wölfflin:

A teacher cannot hope to give much. But in the first place he can keep alive belief in the value of spiritual things. And secondly he can awaken the conviction that there is real happiness to be found in such things.19

The Greeks and Greek Civilization Lectures
Jacob Burckhardt
Edited and translated by
Oswyn Murray and Sheila Stern

Hell, natural destination of treacherous women?

 Parental alienation is a part of divorce steeped in maddeningly nebulous psychological jargon rendering the underlying information impenetrable. For instance, the WHO describes parental alienation as “substantial and sustained dissatisfaction within a caregiver-child relationship associated with significant disturbance in functioning.” 

I learned that parental alienation is sometimes referred to as “malicious mother syndrome” because women are more often found to engage in its behaviors. The diagnostic criteria for divorce-related malicious mother syndrome reads as a veritable blueprint for Dana’s successful assault on me:

A mother who unjustifiably punishes her divorcing or divorced husband by:attempting to alienate their mutual child(ren) from the father;

involving others in malicious actions against the father;

engaging in excessive litigation.22

A mother who specifically attempts to deny her child(ren):regular, uninterrupted visitation with the father;

uninhibited telephone access to the father;

paternal participation in the child(ren)’s school life and extracurricular activities.

The mother’s behavior is pervasive and includes malicious acts towards the husband, such as:telling the child(ren) lies about the father;

telling others lies about the father;

acting against the father in ways that violate the law.

The syndrome is not specifically due to another mental disorder, but another disorder may coexist (in Dana’s case, panic disorder).

Chills assemble at the base of my spine when I read this clinical, nearly academic description of precisely what happened to me. Translated into plain English, parental alienation is where a spiteful and/or mentally ill parent brainwashes a child to reject and hate the other parent.

Dana conscripted our boys into every single one of these targeted attacks on me, and there was nothing I could do because the professionals of the family law system were either inadequately trained to spot the signs, or would simply turn a blind eye to them.

I endured systematic alienation from Smith and Charlie as Dana hijacked my relationship with them. Week after agonizing week, I was a forced participant in the process of being dissociated from my boys. They would arrive for a visit, chaperoned by the desultory monitor, and for the ensuing two hours it would become clear that Dana had enlisted all three as agents in her war against me. The boys would ask strange, pointed questions, clearly at Dana’s instruction and with the understanding that the answers would be reported back to her—with the monitor serving as a would-be court reporter, recording every word. 

“I just want to live a normal life. A mom and dad, in a home,” Smith had told me. This comment was made during the same visit where Smith had informed me that, “Mum got a trained Germen shepherd attack dog. She said it’s to kill you if you come to the house.” Upon arrival for the following week’s visit I was shocked to see bruises, scars and stitches on Smith’s face. The dog had apparently pinned Smith down and mauled him, causing unspeakable psychological trauma. (At the hospital he had to be held down by restraints because he was so hysterical. Dana chose not to inform me.) 

“We’re scared for Mosely,” said Smith. Mosely was our family dog, a boxer puppy I’d brought home when the boys were six and four years old. The new dog didn’t like her.

Dana had been ordered by the judge to allow Mosely to join the boys on our visits, but after only a few occasions she put an end to that. Four years later, at the bottom of an email from her attorney, was a p.s. Mosely died. This news, and the method of delivery, was another emotional blow that was hard to recover from. Having been denied access to my boys, as well as my dog, I was now forced to imagine how Mosely had died, how much pain she may have been in, and where she was finally laid to rest.

(...)

The scope of this diplomatic deception was profound, but to extend the metaphor to its logical conclusion, this is precisely the form of deception that Dana inflicted on me, and which is the foundation of the family law system. Deceive and subdue your spouse (soon to be the enemy) to complacency during the prelude to hostilities while setting in motion an attack at the same time.

The Six Silver Bullets of High Conflict Divorce

No one I know who has endured this process has not come out the other side deeply traumatized. The Silver Bullet in this maze of madness is the false allegation that I have spoken so much about.

My journey into the dystopian nightmare of high conflict divorce actually included six Silver Bullets speeding at me in quick succession, like that infamous scene in The Matrix—except with me displaying reaction times akin to those of the dead guy in Weekend at Bernie’s, as opposed to the magic bullet-dodging game of Neo. 

These collective munitions of high-conflict divorce have become the battle-tested superweapons for disgruntled spouses who want to get rid of their primary partners immediately, and men in particular are vulnerable to their force. They debilitate husbands and can prove deadly to fathers. Such is their lethality that I have read of many men who, facing the crosshairs, have taken their own lives as a result.

Fathers, husbands, and men in crisis who have or may unwittingly become the Respondent are branded the familial black sheep, the proverbial systemic scapegoat, targeted by a Reputation Savage and shot through with these Silver Bullets.

Scape·goat: a person blamed for the faults of others, especially for reasons of expediency.

At their conceptual core, the six Silver Bullets are projectiles forged with innate, deeply ingrained psychological compounds; primed with the incendiary intergenerational dogma of the shooter’s family system of origin; encased in the human kryptonite of anticipatory shame and propelled by reputation savagery—word of mouth, hearsay, made-up stories, and spoken truth inversions.

In the hands of one devoted to destruction and retribution, the chamber unloads like this:

Silver Bullet 1: The Incarcerating Incident

This is the false allegation at the core of my story. A menace to every Respondent, the incarcerating incident is the moment when the stealth attack is revealed in the sunlight. The unsuspecting perpetrator, bathed in smug ignorance, becomes the victim, tagged with a defining mark that will haunt him for the remainder of the proceeding. No amount of context, explanation, or exculpatory evidence can overcome the emotional impact of the incarcerating incidence. Once a perp, always a perp. And the “perp” rarely expects the opprobrium that comes with his newfound title—he is blind to the coming tsunami of both legal and figurative contempt and thus cannot reconcile himself to the inverted circumstances in which he finds himself. By the time he regains his footing, he is swept under a ferocious current and the only imperative is bare, raw survival. All else must give way. 

Mine was a particularly apropos example of this principle. Dana’s swiftness and efficiency in having me detained and designated a threat to the boys placed me in a legal canyon that I could never traverse. My ability to contest the divorce—or meaningfully fight for my rights as a father—were effectively exterminated before I ever walked into a courtroom.

Silver Bullet 2: The Order of Restraint

This is the legal equivalent of a film treatment, the moment when the basic morality play of every divorce is scripted in short form. The Respondent is a danger, threatening to his spouse, and thus is eternally condemned. Then comes the second sucker punch. The whole dynamic shifts once the scarlet letter of a protection order is seared on your chest. There is now a paper trail indicating that you are dangerous or unworthy. You have been made the villain, and it’s now incumbent upon you to prove otherwise. Temporary restraining orders abound, obtained quickly and easily—but only 15 percent of temporary orders are replaced with permanent orders after further examination by the courts, and that might tell you all you need to know about the validity of the temporary ones. Protection orders rip you from your home, your worldly possessions, your routine, your friends and neighbors, and your children. The firing of Silver Bullet 2 increases the potency and lethality of Bullets 3, 4, and 5 exponentially. 

Again, Dana proved a skillful practitioner of this component of the faux melodrama of divorce court. She quickly seized on my detention and nefarious designation—both based on falsehoods she perpetrated—and slapped a restraining order on me before my mind had cleared the cobwebs of the Del Amo nightmare, swiftly hammering another permanent nail into my coffin.

Silver Bullet 3: The Security Lock

After securing the family home, the securing of everything else must immediately follow. Change all the locks, passwords, and codes. Put a virtual lockbox around the world, cutting the cord to children, devices, and paperwork. No computer, no cell phone, no connection.

Chalk up another notch on Dana’s championship belt—she accomplished each of these with withering speed.

Silver Bullet 4: The Private Investigation

Now amateurs and professionals alike can commence the poking and prodding detective work. Knowledge is power and information is paramount. The Petitioner dispatches the CIA of family war, the “Untouchable Cartel” of private Investigators—third-party facilitators who seek to promote and propagate the conflict.

In my case, when it wasn’t Dana or her mother, professionals were deployed to do their dirty work. Private eyes float around the fringes of the courts, experts at exploiting the cracks in the system and more than willing to commit crimes for lawyers who don’t want dirt on their hands. Dana went for the jugular here, as she did at every opportunity in our case. She retained the services of a dark master of the marriage dissolution arts named John Nazarian, a private investigator who once created a series of YouTube videos with titles like, “How to Get Your Husband Arrested.” He is a California barracuda adept at helping disgruntled spouses fire off Bullets 1 and 2.

But Nazarian’s presence wasn’t merely nefarious in my case, it was genuinely bizarre because, alas, and in a particularly toxic “coincidence,” I eventually discovered he was related to the monitor whom Dana and Judy had asked the court to appoint to accompany me on my visits with Charlie and Smith.

You cannot make this stuff up. The monitor, Michael Valdavinos, was a dour young man who betrayed no apparent personality, but who routinely appeared at my doorstep—with the boys in tow—in new cars, typically tricked-out SUVs with a self-consciously meretricious look to them. I labored to forge some kind of relationship with him, but he would have none of it. Were that all of it, I would be sick to my stomach. But there’s more, amazingly. Valdavinos was . . . wait for it . . . the offspring of John Nazarian, the PI who Dana had hired to turn over every stone of my life. 

That extraordinary connection to Nazarian, Dana’s investigatory hitman, was never disclosed to me. I uncovered it doing a spot of my own amateur sleuthing, which I was prompted to do after three years of my visits with the boys being disrupted by Nazarian’s process servers handing me legal papers—in the boys’ presence—on Judy Bogen and Dana’s behalf. I initially was too overwhelmed to consider the fact that Nazarian always seemed, uncannily, to know my whereabouts while I was on these Valdavinos-monitored visits. But over time the frequency of these disruptions were simply too great to be a coincidence, and I became suspicious. That suspicion was compounded by Valdavinos’s arrogance and contempt for any sense of protocol and fair play. He unilaterally changed the means of my payment, announcing at one point that he would no longer accept checks. He would demand payment for amounts that were not yet due, under threat of canceling pending visits. After the infamous poppyseed muffin incident and the court prohibiting me from driving the boys myself, Valdavinos suddenly informed me that he would no longer drive me and the boys on any visits, blaming this inexplicable change on his insurance company—that change, notwithstanding that he had previously imposed a car cleaning fee on me by which I paid to have his various gangster SUVs cleaned after every visit, left me entirely captive to him during the visits. And, as if to emphasize the middle finger he so enjoyed directing my way, he would cancel visits minutes before the boys’ scheduled arrival and then charge me for the visits he had canceled.

All of which heightened my suspicion of what was transpiring, and facilitated my fleeting foray into the dark world of investigation. There I discovered not only Valdavinos’s paternity, but a great deal more about this obviously troubled individual whom Dana and Bogen had placed in charge of the boys. He apparently had a past criminal history, maintained a long series of aliases, and used to be a woman called Sonya. I repeat, this tale is beyond the capacity of the human imagination. It seems impossible, and yet it’s true. And while I’m not one to challenge the scruples of another man, if I were a wagering bloke I would lay down my life savings—an admittedly paltry sum after being almost cleaned out during my stint at Del Amo—on the proposition that Valdavinos reported everything he observed on my visits to Nazarian. An incestuously toxic stew, and Rod Serling would have rejected it as too outrageous for The Twilight Zone. But this was the man whom Dana wanted driving the boys around and monitoring my visits with them. Welcome to the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. 

So, be keenly sensitive to Silver Bullet 4, because the private investigation might not only entail your soon-to-be-ex-wife ripping through your computer files and performing all sorts of insidious actions with your finances, but additionally placing a veritable mole in your midst in the form of a monitor with a connection to the investigator, which brings me to Silver Bullet 5.

Silver Bullet 5: The Financial Recounting

Creative bookkeeping that would make even the hardened cynic whistle is central to the pre-packaged destruction at the core of the divorce strategy. A cunning divorcée gets to this early and finishes the job after you are kicked out of your home. She and a team of forensic accountants cook the books some more, slicing and dicing the spoils of a lifetime of work. With the proper team at work, a financial picture can be bent into any shape. This creative historical bookkeeping is done in preparation to slant the diss-o-master—the computer software program used in family law proceedings that generates support guidelines based primarily on a party’s earnings and time share with the children, often in favor of the Petitioner.

Dana, at the risk of repetition, made quick work of our finances, appropriating all our bank accounts and passwords while I desperately sought escape from Del Amo. I was, from that point on, at her financial mercy—and she showed me none.

Silver Bullet 6: The Legal Retention

While I put this bullet last, it often comes first—the Respondent does not feel the pain until the other five bullets land. It is a stealth team of pros that packages and presents the results of the onslaught. It is the most awe-inspiring inversion of victimhood, the ultimate offensive team pretending to play defense. By the time this team of legal gunslingers ties everything up in a twisted bow, the Respondent is bleeding out on the floor, riddled with subversive shots.

In my case, Dana hired Judy Bogen.

The new social currency is victimhood, and its economy is booming.

This weaponized blueprint is, theoretically, gender neutral on its face. But no matter what you’ve been led to believe, my direct experience—and my extensive research of the broader system—is that the majority of the violent destruction of a family is done by women. I can hear some say, “That’s correct, sir! Smart women have learned they don’t have to accept a bad situation. They are going to exercise their right to walk from the oppressive marriage institution if they’re not getting what they need.”

That sounds pretty lean-in-cool and girl-power-chic, but if this empowerment was at the heart of it all, then these strong, modern women would be willing to walk away from the marriage carrying only what they brought into it and agreeing to a 50/50 parenting arrangement for the good of the kids. They would not become the Petitioner, sheltering themselves in victimhood and blanket immunity. They would not explode from the line with minds full of premeditated subterfuge, preconscious betrayal, and dark visions of winning the gold medal in the Limbic Olympics of family law.

All of which is to say that women—particularly smart, educated women—may have won the battle while losing the broader war. They have harnessed the plentiful tools of the family law system to empower themselves in its peculiar vacuum and exact breathtaking retribution on their former partner’s life. But in doing so, they may be perpetuating the conceit of a victimhood culture, one conserving the very social presumptions the women’s movement has fought against for decades. The result is tragedy and victimhood for everyone. This name-blame-and-shame game is now pathologized in the institutional monster.

That said, the system provides little incentive for women to evolve their present strategy. Were it rooted in a genuine search for truth, and not rotting with institutional prejudice, perhaps the Petitioners would lay down the smoking gun and put their doomed relationship out of its misery humanely. But it instead facilitates a synthetic morality play, where the threat potential of men is metastasized into a virtually irrebuttable presumption of actual menace—hence, an imaginary crime immediately becomes, in the eyes of the authorities, true by mere virtue of a woman making a charge against a man. Due process is for chumps.

So it was for me, writ large. I had no history of violence, no criminal record, no prior arrests, and there were zero instances of physical abuse in our twenty years of marriage. Dana’s first Silver Bullet, the incarcerating incident, was purely a figment of her imagination—a fabrication with no morsel of evidence. And yet, the consequences to me were devastatingly incalculable.

•••

I am one of millions of men who have suffered this fate, a statistical blip in a system built on my destruction and that of others like me. The problem is not simply the mechanics of family law—it strikes deep into the core of social pathology, and how men have become this corroded patriarchal caricature. The “frenzy whip” of collective Munchausen-by-proxy is evident in our modes of relating. There is currently no event horizon of apology in our present public discourse, as echoed in the smoke-and-mirror chambers of the adversarial family law system and amplified in our cancel culture wars.

The Silver Bullets strategy exploits this convenient and dismissive generalization and is so successful because of the power of social conceits. It is the ultimate magic trick, where only the magician knows the secret to the hoodwink. Even if the magician chooses not to reveal the trick, the audience believes them. They never see where the cards really are. They know it cannot be magic, yet when the effect is presented perfectly, it works like a charm.

And, like all magic, it leaves you questioning what is real. After Dana fired the first Silver Bullet, I still believed in miracles. I still trusted Dana; I refused to believe she would betray that trust. I give her credit for that, but the speed with which she moved to destroy me has—despite its strategic and tactical merit—shattered any residual belief I had in the choices we’d made and the life we’d built. She had obliterated all of it with such a withering indifference to the consequences that I could no longer trust the propriety of anything we’d promised each other, or the boys.

That notion of trust is critical, because trust is a basic biological necessity. It is impossible to imagine functioning as living organisms if we live in mistrust of each other. We could not only not make a choice, but we could not act effectively. Before we can make a choice and act, some degree of surety and faith must exist.

Once shattered, however, reconstructing the psychology necessary to trust is an immense challenge. If you’re a husband or father jettisoned into the noxious firestorm of high-conflict divorce, hold on tight to your faculties, dig deep into your emotional resources, and prepare to be pulverized in ways you could never conceive if your life depended on it (which it does). I have been in your positional purgatory; I have experienced the unrelenting death squads of family law, who pile up the bodies and line their pockets for their needy, greedy “greater good.” The system has scant mercy for good fathers and offers little, if any, meaningful relief to any male Respondent. I have endured, and continue to endure, the trust crisis that naturally accompanies this pathological system.

Rest assured, you are not mad. You are not insane. You are just stuck in an adversarial system whose sole purpose is to represent you as insane. Family law is, in that regard, a reflection of our society’s collective shadow self, and currently suffers from a pathogen of madness perspective.

per·spec·tivo mad·ness: an attitude or point of view that someone else is severely mentally ill.

Greg Ellis

The Respondent

The Data That Doesn’t Exist. Autism.

"J.B. is arguably the world’s most thoughtful, sophisticated, knowledgeable, and indefatigable activist for children’s health.” – RFK, Jr.

J.B. Handley is the proud father of a child with Autism. He spent his career in the private equity industry and received his undergraduate degree with honors from Stanford University. His first book, How to End the Autism Epidemic, was published in September 2018. The book has sold more than 75,000 copies, was an NPD Bookscan and Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller, broke the Top 40 on Amazon, and has more than 1,000 Five-star reviews. Mr. Handley and his nonspeaking son are also the authors of Underestimated: An Autism Miracle and co-produced the film SPELLERS, available now on YouTube.

The Data That Doesn’t Exist

ACIP VOTED TO UN-RECOMMEND THE HEP B BIRTH DOSE, BUT HERE’S THE PROBLEM: THEY STILL CAN’T WEIGH THE OTHER SIDE OF THE LEDGER

ATLANTA, Georgia—Yesterday, something happened that has never happened in the history of American public health: ACIP voted 8-3 to un-recommend the universal birth dose of hepatitis B for babies born to mothers who test negative for the virus. After 34 years of jabbing every American newborn within hours of taking their first breath—regardless of whether their mother had hepatitis B—the committee finally acknowledged what 25 European countries figured out decades ago: it doesn’t make sense.

But watching this vote unfold, I couldn’t help but notice the absurdity of the debate itself. Committee members who opposed the change kept saying variations of the same thing: “We’ve heard ‘do no harm’ as a moral imperative. We are doing harm by changing this wording.” Another said “no rational science has been presented” to support the change.

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And therein lies the fundamental problem with ACIP—and with the entire vaccine regulatory apparatus in America. They literally cannot weigh risk versus benefit because they only have data on one side of the scale.

The Missing Side of the Ledger
When ACIP debates adding or removing a vaccine from the schedule, they can produce endless data on disease incidence. They can show you charts demonstrating how hepatitis B cases in infants dropped from thousands to single digits after 1991. They can model projected infections if vaccination rates decline. They have this data at their fingertips because tracking infectious disease is something our public health apparatus actually does.

But ask them to produce equivalent data on vaccine injury, and you’ll get silence. Not “the data shows injuries are rare.” Not “here’s our comprehensive tracking of adverse events.” Just… nothing. A void where information should be.

This is not an accident. This is by design.

The safety trials for Engerix-B and Recombivax HB—the two hepatitis B vaccines given to American newborns—monitored adverse events for four to five days after injection. That’s it. If your baby developed seizures on day six, or regressed into autism over the following months, or developed autoimmune disease in the following year—none of that would appear in the pre-licensure safety data.

And the post-market surveillance? VAERS is a voluntary reporting system that the CDC itself acknowledges captures only a tiny fraction of adverse events. A Harvard-funded study found it captures perhaps 1% of actual vaccine injuries. Vaccine court has paid out over $5 billion in claims while simultaneously being structured to make filing nearly impossible for average families.

So when Dr. Cody Meissner voted against removing the Hep B birth dose and said he saw “clear evidence of the benefits” but “not the harms,” he was accidentally revealing the entire rotten structure. Of course he doesn’t see the harms. Nobody is systematically looking for them.

The Invisibility of Vaccine Injury
Here’s what most people don’t understand about vaccine injury: it’s nothing like a gunshot wound.

If you shoot someone, the cause is obvious. There’s a bullet, a wound, blood, a clear mechanism of action visible to any observer. Even a medical examiner who’s never seen the victim before can determine cause of death.

Vaccine injury doesn’t work that way. When aluminum nanoparticles from a vaccine cross the blood-brain barrier via macrophages, when they lodge in brain tissue and trigger chronic neuroinflammation, when a child slowly regresses over weeks or months—there’s no bullet. There’s no smoking gun. There’s just a before and an after, and a desperate parent trying to explain to doctors that something changed.

This invisibility is the vaccine program’s greatest protection. Because the injury mechanism is complex and delayed, because it doesn’t leave an obvious wound, because it requires actually looking to find—and because no one in authority is looking—the injuries simply don’t exist in the official record.

I watched my own son Jamie regress after his vaccines. A healthy, developing toddler who lost his words, stopped making eye contact, and retreated into a world we couldn’t reach. My wife and I know what happened. Thousands of other parents know the same thing happened to their children. But because this type of injury doesn’t show up on a simple blood test, because there’s no autopsy finding that says “vaccine-induced encephalopathy,” ACIP members can sit in a room and say with straight faces that they don’t see evidence of harm.

They’re not lying. They literally can’t see it. Because no one is measuring it.

The Chicken Pox Conundrum
Here’s an example that illustrates the insanity of our current approach.

The varicella (chicken pox) vaccine was added to the schedule in 1995. It definitely reduces chicken pox cases. The data is clear on that front. Mission accomplished, right?

But what about the other side of the ledger?

Emerging research suggests that wild chicken pox infection provides some protective effect against brain cancers—particularly glioma, the most common type of primary brain tumor. Multiple studies have found that people who had chicken pox as children have significantly lower rates of brain cancer later in life. The hypothesis is that the immune response to wild varicella provides lasting immunological benefits that extend far beyond preventing itchy spots.

Meanwhile, the vaccine itself has been associated with increased rates of autoimmune conditions. Studies have linked varicella vaccination to higher rates of herpes zoster (shingles) outbreaks in younger age groups, to autoimmune disorders, to various adverse events that weren’t captured in the original short-term safety trials.

So what’s the true risk-benefit of the chicken pox vaccine? Does preventing a week of itchy discomfort in childhood justify potentially increased rates of brain cancer and autoimmune disease later in life?

ACIP can’t answer this question. They literally don’t have the data. They can show you chicken pox cases going down. They cannot show you a comprehensive analysis of long-term neurological and immunological outcomes in vaccinated versus unvaccinated populations, because that study has never been done.

And so they keep recommending the vaccine based on the only data they have—the disease prevention data—while remaining willfully blind to consequences they’ve never bothered to measure.

The ACIP Paradox

Yesterday’s vote was historic, but it also revealed the fundamental paradox of vaccine regulation in America.

The committee members who voted to remove the universal Hep B birth dose recommendation did so largely based on comparative evidence from Europe, parental concerns, and the basic logic that vaccinating a 12-hour-old baby for a sexually transmitted disease their mother doesn’t have makes no medical sense. They were right to do so.

But the committee members who voted against the change weren’t wrong either, from their perspective. They looked at the only data they have—disease prevention data—and concluded that removing the recommendation could lead to more hepatitis B cases. And within their limited framework, they’re correct.

The problem is the framework itself.

True risk-benefit analysis requires data on both risks AND benefits. ACIP has comprehensive data on benefits (disease prevention) and virtually no data on risks (vaccine injury). So every decision they make is fundamentally flawed from the start.

When Dr. Joseph Hibbeln complained that “no rational science has been presented” to support changing the recommendations, he was inadvertently indicting the entire system. Of course no comprehensive vaccine injury data was presented—such data doesn’t exist because no one has been willing to collect it.

This is like asking someone to make an informed financial decision while only showing them potential profits and hiding all possible losses. Of course the decision will be skewed. Of course you’ll end up with a bloated portfolio of high-risk investments that look great on paper.

The Real Reform

If RFK Jr. and the new HHS leadership want to actually fix the vaccine program, they need to understand that removing individual vaccines or making them “optional” is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

The real reform is creating the data infrastructure that should have existed from the beginning.

We need a comprehensive, long-term, vaccinated-versus-unvaccinated health outcomes study. Not a five-day safety trial. A multi-decade tracking of neurological, immunological, and developmental outcomes across populations with varying vaccination status. Florida just eliminated all vaccine mandates—that state alone could provide the data we need within ten years if someone had the courage to actually collect it.

We need a vaccine injury surveillance system that actually captures adverse events. Not a voluntary reporting system that misses 99% of injuries. An active surveillance system with trained clinicians looking for the kinds of delayed, complex injuries that vaccines actually cause.

We need accountability for manufacturers. The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act removed all liability from vaccine makers—and predictably, the vaccine schedule exploded afterward while safety research stagnated. Why would any company invest in safety when they can’t be sued for injuries?

Without this data, every ACIP meeting will be the same performance we watched this week: members confidently citing disease prevention data while admitting they can’t see evidence of harm—not because harm doesn’t exist, but because no one is looking for it.

What Comes Next

Yesterday’s vote was a crack in the wall. For the first time, an American regulatory body acknowledged that perhaps vaccinating every newborn within hours of birth for a disease primarily transmitted through sex and IV drug use doesn’t make sense when the mother has already tested negative.

But the forces of institutional inertia are already mobilizing. The American Academy of Pediatrics is “disappointed.” The American Medical Association is calling for the CDC to reject the recommendation. The pharmaceutical industry—which collects over $225 million annually from Hep B birth doses alone—will fight to restore the universal recommendation.

They will cite the same data they always cite: disease prevention data. Cases prevented. Infections avoided. Lives saved—theoretically.

They will not cite vaccine injury data, because that data doesn’t exist in any comprehensive form. They will not present long-term health outcomes in vaccinated versus unvaccinated children, because those studies have been actively avoided for decades. They will not acknowledge the thousands of families who have watched their children regress after vaccination, because those injuries aren’t captured in any official database.

And this is why ACIP will always be hamstrung. Until we build the data infrastructure to actually measure vaccine injury—to put real numbers on the other side of the ledger—every vaccine decision will be based on incomplete information. Every “risk-benefit analysis” will be a fraud, because we’re only measuring half the equation.

The hepatitis B birth dose vote was a small victory. But the larger battle—for actual science, for complete data, for true informed consent—that battle is just beginning.

And until we win it, ACIP will continue making decisions in the dark, confidently citing evidence of benefits while remaining deliberately blind to the harms they’ve never bothered to measure.

J.B. Handley

Profiteering From War After War

There was a period in the 19th century when the Rothschilds gained a certain reputation for defending the peace in Europe, but with hindsight this appears to have been yet more expediency on their part.

When their self-interest in the form of their investments required stability, they were against the disruption caused by war, but this was never a moral principle.

Indeed, the whole success of their dynasty was founded on the way in which they exploited the opportunities presented to them by the wars that followed the French Revolution of 1789.

Ferguson writes that “the Rothschilds were presented with undreamed-of business opportunities by the revolutionary wars”, [60] while Bouvier defines the Rothschilds as “that family of merchants made rich by the long European war of 1792 to 1815”. [61]

According to historian Egon Caesar Corti, “it was in the profits made from war at that time that we can find the real origins of the subsequent enormous fortune of the House of Rothschild”. [62]

The Rothschilds made money out of war in a range of different ways, not all of which were entirely legal. “The disruption of established patterns of trade and banking created room for ambitious risk takers”, as Ferguson puts it. [63]

In their home city of Frankfurt they took advantage of food shortages and spiralling prices to operate on the black market and sold provisions to armies at a considerable profit. [64]

From 1808 onwards, Nathan Rothschild exported English guineas to the continent. Ferguson describes this as a “lucrative line of business” [65] and Bouvier adds that “the profits were no doubt proportionate to the risks”. [66]

British goods, including cotton fabric, sugar, indigo and tobacco, were also transported across the Channel, via the Rothschilds’ warehouses, in defiance of Napoleon’s blockade. [67]

Close to Wilhelm IX, the Elector of Hesse-Kassel, Mayer Amschel Rothschild was involved in his purchase of thousands of mercenaries to join the British-led fight against the French forces. [68]

Wars are expensive affairs and the financing has to come from somewhere.

“As the scale and cost of the conflict between France and the rest of Europe rose, so too did the borrowing needs of the combatant states”, says Ferguson. [69]

“The defeat of France in the Napoleonic Wars had been financed to a large extent by British loans and subsidies to Austria, Russia and Prussia. With their establishments in Frankfurt, London and Paris, the Rothschilds had been in a uniquely good position to facilitate these transfers”. [70]

He says that their activities at this time ushered in a new era in financial as well as political history.

“The Rothschilds stretched their credit to breaking point, sometimes losing sight altogether of their assets and liabilities, gambling everything they owned for the sake of govern-mental commissions, interest payments and speculative gains from exchange rate and bond yield fluctuations. In 1815 alone, Nathan’s account with the British government totalled close to £10 million, a huge sum at that time”. [71]

Particularly striking is the way in which Nathan Rothschild used funds entrusted to him by Wilhelm IX as if it was his own capital, investing in hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of British government bonds and thereby securing the proximity to the British state for which his family is still known. [72]

The Rothschilds’ network of agents across Europe also famously enabled them to be the first in London to have news of Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815, which, says Bouvier, perhaps enabled Nathan Rothschild to pull off a spectacular coup at the Stock Exchange. [73]

Writes Ferguson: “The Rothschilds emerged in 1815 as sterling millionaires. Almost at once, Nathan embarked on perhaps the most successful transaction of his career: a huge investment in British government bonds (consols) whereby he rode the upswing caused by the government’s postwar financial stabilization, taking his profits just before the market peaked. This was Nathan’s supreme Meistergeschäft, realizing profits of more than £250,000 at a stroke”. [74]

Financing wars became something of a speciality for the Rothschilds; they loaned £1 million to Brazil to fund its war with Argentina and Uruguay in 1851, for example. [75]

A couple of years later, they were back in action floating the British Government’s Crimean War Loan, [76] a reflection of the near monopoly enjoyed by Rothschilds over British war finance. [77]

Their involvement in this 1853-1856 conflict torpedoes the idea that they had a vested interest in maintaining the peace.

Ferguson insists: “Far from weakening the Rothschilds’ position, the Crimean War had precisely the opposite effect in that it emphatically reasserted the Rothschild houses’ primacy in the field of public finance.

“Indeed, it demonstrated that the Roths-childs had for years been exaggerating the financial dangers of war. In reality, wars – and especially short wars of the sort which characterised the period from 1854 to 1871 – created financial opportunities which they, with their distinctive multinational structure, were especially well placed to exploit”. [78]

As well as lending Britain a total of £26 million for the Crimean War, which was added to the £782 million existing national debt subsequent to the Napoleonic Wars, [79] they also lent money to France and Turkey. [80]

While those two powers were both British allies in that conflict against Russia, between 1859 and 1870 the Rothschilds “would find themselves repeatedly on both sides of decisive conflicts which were to recast the map of Europe”, writes Ferguson. [81]

“The wars of the 1850s and 1860s were fought by states which were, by and large, strapped for cash; this more than anything else explains the importance of the role played by bankers in the period – and the substantial profits they could make”. [82]

He adds that their internal communications 19 reveal that the Rothschilds “were calculating carefully to ensure that both sides in the conflict paid them for their financial services”. [83]

Ferguson stresses that it would be absurd to argue that there was no connection between the overall profitability of the period for the Rothschilds and the recurrence of military conflict.

“Far from damaging their position as the world’s leading multinational bank, the wars of the mid nineteenth-century generated unprecedented business for the Rothschilds, just as fifty years before it had been war which had set them on their way to fortune and notoriety”. [84]

I will mention later the political Rothschild-linked machinations behind the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, but suffice to say here that they were involved with both sides and as a result their power in France and Europe was further enhanced. [85]

Having been lured into launching the war, which they lost, the French were landed with hefty reparations.

Of course, the Rothschilds were on hand to provide loans to the French state to pay off Prussia. “It was, quite simply, the biggest financial operation of the century, and arguably the Rothschilds’ crowning achievement”, [86] writes Ferguson.

“As a percentage of GDP, French public debt was already 44 per cent in 1869, before the war, and 59 per cent in 1871, before most of the indemnity had been paid. So the total internal and external debt burden in 1871 was in the vicinity of 80 per cent of GDP”. [87]

It was an “immense risk” [88] for the Rothschilds in France to be identified with paying such large sums of money to Berlin, he adds, and it is “extraordinary” how little criticism was levelled at Alphonse de Rothschild for his “great operation”, as the family termed it. [89]

“Great racket” would be nearer the truth!

I have already described [90] the Rothschild connections to South Africa, where the Boer War of 1899-1902 was essentially a grab of gold and diamond resources for Rothschild interests including De Beers.

It is worth recalling that this conflict saw the first use of concentration camps, in which the families of Dutch-origin settlers were shockingly imprisoned. A few years later the Rothschilds semi-secretly helped finance the Japanese in their war against Russia in 1904-1906 and then openly loaned a further £48 million issue to help build back the post-war Japanese economy. [91]

They performed the same role on the other side of the conflict, when “Russian industry recovered spectacularly thanks to the Rothschilds and other international bankers who poured massive loans into the country”, [92] as Docherty and Macgregor note.

The Rothschilds’ role in the conspiracy to start and prolong the First World War is of utmost importance, but since I have already examined it in detail elsewhere, I will not repeat myself here.

I will simply remind readers that the Rothschilds and their associates were able to profit from the bloodbath in multiple ways – through loans to finance the war and subsequent “build back better” projects, yes, but also very directly through their heavy involvement in the arms trade.

One important player in this respect was wealthy international arms dealer Basil Zaharoff, deeply involved in both munitions and international politics at the time and “a Rothschild man”, in Docherty and Macgregor’’s words. [93]

By 1914, Zaharoff sat on the boards of Vickers and Le Nickel, both Rothschild-financed and influenced. [94] He would no doubt have agreed with James de Rothschild, who proudly told his nephews in 1866: “In a war there is money to be made from having money”. [95]

The Enemies of the People
Paul Cudenec

Greg Ellis - The Respondent

 PRELUDE

Fate is fickle.

A simple, three-word cliché that describes the fragility of our lives and the speed with which everything we think is real can become an illusion. Before March 5, 2015, this simple truth was little more than a philosophical abstraction for me. I appreciated its implications. But I’d never experienced it, never endured a dramatic and unforeseen shift in fortune that I could not navigate—until that fateful day six years ago. 

One moment I was a successful actor and producer living in an expansive Hollywood home with my wife of twenty years and two young sons I adored. But everything changed with a knock on the door by police, the first engagement in a battle with America’s unscrupulous and unstoppable family law cartel that has raged on for years and left me with scars, my family in ashes, and my boys without a father.

This book emerged from this devastating experience. Part memoir, part meditation, part manifesto, The Respondent is the story of my fall from grace—including the many ways I was the author of my own demise—and my consequent descent into despair and confusion as I was ushered through the gauntlet of the suffocating family law system. 

But it’s also the story of a slow emergence and rising. An awakening, both intellectually and emotionally, and ultimately, a catharsis. James Hollis, in opening The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other, describes this journey from tragedy to self-awareness like this: “In Greek tragedy, one feels the earth shudder when a protagonist claims complete self-knowledge. At that moment one may be certain that the gods begin their work—to stun the person back to the proper humility of Socratic questioning.”

The spirit in those words lit in me a fire of curiosity that has brought me to uncomfortable truths, not only about myself, as I exorcise many of the demons that have clipped at my heels for decades, but about society at large. I believe America is in the grips of an epidemic that rages in plain sight and yet remains invisible to so many. The shocking reality is that 4,000 children are being ripped from their parents in American courtrooms every day, 1 in 3 children doesn’t live with their biological father in the home, and 40 percent of those children haven’t seen their fathers in more than a year. The fabric of society fraying as an unfeeling $60-billion-a-year family law system perpetuates the tragedy. 

Fathers have a reputation for stoicism that belies a more complex reality in which we feel the pain of family separation every bit as deeply as mothers, a reality made clear by a grim statistic I restate more than once in The Respondent. Fathers who have become ensnared in the divorce system kill themselves eight times more than mothers. Pause and let that sink in for a moment. For every child who loses their mother to suicide during or after divorce, eight children lose their father. This is nothing short of a national health emergency demanding an honest accounting of the conditions driving such despair.

The Respondent is not intended as a vehicle for vindictiveness. But I believe we are all willing participants in a shameful, social kabuki dance, mindlessly fortifying the most destructive narrative of our era—that women, merely by virtue of being women, are the fairer sex. I realize this is provocative to many in our current social climate. But before jumping to judgment, I hope you’ll come with me as I visit not only the darker side of my story but also the shadow of our collective psyche in an attempt to answer this question: What is driving us to devalue fathers and family and perpetuate such a draconian divorce system?When I walked into a dreary courtroom in downtown Los Angeles for the first time more than half a decade ago, I passed from a world of rights and justice to a star chamber of withering and reflexive judgment where due process is extinct and the presumption of innocence is an illusion. In crossing the legal Rubicon from citizen to pre-judged villain, I no longer occupied the skin of a complicated human being. Greg Ellis was dead, and in his place stood the nameless Respondent, present only to receive the slings and arrows of a society determined to exact its pound of flesh in retribution for male sin writ large. 

The Respondent is my humble submission to the struggling dialogue. My hope is that you find it to be many things at once: a white-knuckled ride through a dirty swamp, an intimate inquiry into love and separation, an exploration of my failings as a modern man and my trauma as a boy, and a helpful (if incomplete) map pointing to a more humane and collaborative future, not only for forsaken fathers searching for redemption and justice, but for the whole village of people who love them: aunts, uncles, cousins, grandmas, and grandpas. If we are to fashion a better world for our children, there is no more urgent project than rebuilding divorce court, revitalizing the image of family, and recasting fatherhood as the foundational and heroic role of a lifetime.

We have all been The Respondent—the person summoned to respond to the allegations of a petitioner or the provocations of our times. This book is my legacy petition. I am The Respondent. And this is my story.PART ONE

Fear

“I’m sick of this shit. 

I’m gonna harm the children.”

CHAPTER 1

THE NOCTURNAL

TERRORIST

“If the eyes have no tears, the soul has no rainbow.”

My body is limp and naked but for a thin, sullied sheet strewn around my waist. I’m on my back, my arms hang outstretched in a submissive crucifixion. My hair is matted and caked with dried blood around my right ear, my eyes clenched shut with fear.

The downpour is relentless.

Then my body flinches, my nostrils flare. Small expressions pop and twitch as I recover consciousness. The invisible straitjacket of sleep paralysis loosens. The dream recedes. 

And then my nightmare begins.

Desperately parched, I pry open my cracked lips to take in the water, only to be shocked by its bitterness. My senses now tripped into awareness, I peer up and shock turns to disgust as it dawns on me that the rain is cascading from a penis protruding from a tangled forest of pubic hair. A naked man is pissing on my face.

I can’t avoid the gruesome reality confronting me any longer. I am no longer a man with a family and a career forged over forty years of toil and triumph. I am now but an inmate sprawled in a bed of a dark holding cell, a scrap of tissue stuck to the boot of a legal system as foreign to me as a distant universe.

What a difference a day makes. I wouldn’t blame you for not believing that—a mere twenty-four hours before my unwitting experience as a human toilet—I was pitching a project to a Hollywood studio head, meeting with Joe Pesci and Andy Garcia, chatting it up with Sharon Stone and playing golf with Adam Levine, all before strumming my two sons to sleep on a ukulele in my beautiful Los Angeles mansion. You also could be forgiven for not understanding why—instead of striking back at the unspeakable violation with all the fury I could muster to reclaim at least a shard of dignity—I lay my head back down, shut my eyes, and submitted to the degradation in full.

Reclamations would come, but only after many years of my self-respect being starved, stripped, and assaulted, and endless efforts to uncover who I really am and how I wound up here.

But for the moment, with no reserves left, I would accept the piss.

•••

My fall into oblivion had started eight hours earlier at around 3:30 PM on March 5, 2015. My wife, Dana, was out of state on a business trip and I had given the nanny the afternoon off so I could spend quality time with our two boys. Charlie was ten at the time, Smith eight. Everything seemed so normal. We were laughing and joking in the playroom when the doorbell rang. I walked down the stairs, opened my front door, and found myself face to face with two police officers from the LAPD.

“We received a call about your sons. Are they here?”

What a strange question, I recall thinking. Why would the police be at my doorstep, seemingly randomly, asking about my sons?

“We just need to know they are safe.”

“Yes. They are upstairs. I can assure you they are safe.”

“Sir, we received a call that you threatened to harm your sons.”

“That’s nonsense. Who called you?”

“That’s confidential information. We just need to know they are safe, sir.”

“Confidential? If I’m to be accused of making threats to my sons, I’d like to know who’s making the allegation. Who called you? What danger are they supposed to be in?”

They were silent. I was baffled and unsettled—who could possibly have called the police to report that I’d threatened my boys? We stood there for a moment, locked in a bizarre standoff, an ominous look in the eyes of the officers garrisoning my door. Hoping to break the impasse, I moved again to defuse the situation, reassuring them that my sons were fine and that there was no reason for concern. Uncomfortable with the simmering hostility and sensing there was nothing left to discuss, I reached to shut the door. But one of the cops stepped on the threshold to keep the door from fully closing, and the first pangs of genuine anxiety struck. I didn’t know it then, but I had already migrated miles away from the world of suburban comfort that was mine just minutes before.

A shudder moved through me. Like midnight canaries in a coal mine, my mind went cold and my heart darkened. Panic was setting in, and I responded by gripping ever tighter to routine. I began making dinner for the boys, hoping that the act of domestication would calm the gathering storm. It didn’t. The police did not enter through the open door; instead, they meandered around my lawn in what felt like a predatory sortie. I thought, if I remained calm and measured and demonstrated normalcy, the police would surely realize their time was better spent elsewhere.

As the police began circling, my friend Patrick Fabian arrived, and I took immediate solace in the fact that someone else would assure the police of my benevolence. Patrick checked on the boys upstairs and reported to the officers that both Charlie and Smith were fine. But his reassurance fell on deaf ears—the officers responded with barely a shrug.

My stomach tightened. In the kitchen, I discussed the situation with Patrick and, after a few minutes, returned to the front door, determined to reason with the police. But there would be no reason, no negotiation. To the contrary, at that moment a sergeant walked up the garden path to join his fellow officers, bringing the assembly of law enforcement crowding my front door to five officers in total.

The newly arrived sergeant took his turn interrogating me about Charlie and Smith’s physical wellbeing, and my plaintiff response betrayed a mounting frustration.

“Sergeant, I’ve made no threats to my sons. They are safe, playing upstairs, and there’s a witness who’s corroborated that fact. You have no warrant, so please leave my property. I would like to know who called and lied about me threatening them.”

The sergeant cleared his throat. “Sir, we received a call. You were reported to have said, “I’m sick of this shit, I’m gonna harm the children.”

Ten short words—barely a sentence. And yet, strung together they formed a horrendous falsehood that was about to change my life forever.

It defied belief. Someone couldn’t seriously have called the police and told them I was a threat to my children. It has to be a big mistake, I tried to tell myself. And yet, beneath the shock, I sensed that someone had called the police and had lied about me. Not just any lie, but the worst, most carefully manufactured deceit.

The slowly developing interrogation continued, and, after a few hours of probing, the veneer of civility collapsed and the assembled force of officers broke the line and entered the house. They questioned me further, but that was a mere pretense. Before long, I was informed that a SMART (Systemwide Mental Assessment Response Team) from the DCFS (Department of Children and Family Services) was on their way. 

Then I was handcuffed.

Somehow, I felt as if I was both wide awake and sleepwalking through this surreal moment. I stood in the living room of my California dream home that represented four decades of labor. My children were upstairs. Did they witness any of this?

My front door yawned at the manicured lawns, the bright lights of the interior spilling out past the handful of officers and onto the street where neighbors were doing a half-hearted job at hiding their morbid curiosity as they moved along the sidewalk at a snail’s pace.

Then the DCFS arrived and supplemented the existing police force, establishing a preposterously large crew to restore law and order to a situation lacking in neither. They evaluated me for approximately half an hour. I answered all their questions honestly—too honestly, it would turn out. Suffice to say that the right to remain silent is pointless unless you keep your mouth shut, and anything you say will be misquoted, then used against you.

The DCFS agents, having interrogated me, left the room to compare notes with the police. I awaited their verdict, still holding onto a sliver of hope that this would end peacefully with me bidding the cadre of officials a good evening. Soon they returned, set three items in front of me, and told me to pick one to take with me.

Take with me where? They wouldn’t tell me.

I was presented with a stark choice, one I had to make immediately. I could take my wallet, my phone, or a drink coaster with an image of my wife as a baby (a Christmas gift to her the previous year). I chose the coaster, and was soon ushered out of my home, essentially for the last time.

As I was led to an unmarked police car, my wrists burning from the shackles and my back in considerable pain from a recent surgery, Patrick agreed to watch my sons until Dana got home from the airport. I glanced up at Charlie’s bedroom window to see his silhouette. I wondered if he would sleep, what nightmares might haunt him, and what he must have been thinking as he watched his father being led away in handcuffs.

•••

Without offering a seatbelt, they drove me at breakneck speed, siren blaring, weaving through the Thursday night rush hour traffic of Highway 101, in and out and off and on the hard shoulder. The wild maneuvering buffeted me around so relentlessly that I eventually slid off the backseat and onto the floor. Wedged between the seat and the floor in the footwell, I was in agony, both physically and psychologically. I let out a guttural cry. The glass partition slid open.

“Please pull over and help me up.”

No response.

“Where are you taking me? I did not and have never threatened my sons,” I said from the floor.

“We’re nearly there.”

The glass partition slid shut.

I was jammed on the floor for another ten minutes until, mercifully, we stopped. As I was yanked out of the back, I caught a glimpse of a sign—UCLA Medical Center. 

I was pulled to my feet and led inside like a common criminal. One of the officers checked in with reception while the other remained at my side. I continued pleading my innocence and asking why I had been detained. 

The DCFS’ silence, in the wake of my plea, was chilling. We sat for an excruciating hour before they led me to the emergency room area and told me to sit in the hallway, which I did for yet another hour with not another shred of information.

My thoughts turned to my wife, Dana, who suffered from panic attacks and was due back from her trip. She would find the allegations ridiculous and fight for my release. I worried about what our young sons would go through without Dad to sing them to sleep and make them feel safe. It was my responsibility, as their father, to provide them with a sense of security, and I was now powerless to protect them. How could a single phone call and its lie unleash all this damage in just a matter of hours? 

As I waited for some sort of clarity or explanation, things only worsened. Instead of receiving enlightenment from someone—anyone—I was stripped of my clothing, told to put on a gown, and led to a tiny room to give a urine sample. I looked at myself in the mirror. What stared back at me was a broken man, defeated and depleted, wrists red and bruised from the handcuffs, back spasming in pain, eyes animated by terror. The night caught up with me and I collapsed, slamming my head on the porcelain sink and crumpling onto the cold tile floor.

I lay semi-conscious on the ground, my head split open, blood trickling along the floor into a puddle. The timed light in the room clicked off and I fell into darkness. I peered hazily through the crack at the bottom of the door where the light shone through. My vision slid in and out of focus as I teetered on the brink of consciousness. There was loud banging on the door, but it faded as I struggled to stay awake. I rolled onto my back, pushed myself toward the corner of the room and, using the wall as leverage, willed myself upright. I swung my hands up in front of me toward the sink. I managed to get close enough for my fingers to grip the porcelain, and I pulled myself to a standing position, my body protesting the forced rigidity of being upright.

“What are you doing in there?” a DCFS officer yelled. The banging outside intensified.

I staggered, fell toward the door, and, in the same motion, turned the knob to unlock it before stumbling out. I was led to a nearby cubicle and instructed to sit and wait.

After an hour or so, still handcuffed, I was led to the rear entrance of the hospital and strapped to a gurney by two nameless men in white uniforms, who slid me unceremoniously into the back of an ambulance. I protested again.

“Where are you taking me? I have a right to know where you’re taking me.”

Again, silence.

The doors slammed shut and darkness descended on me, both inside and out. I was terrified beyond thought, stripped of clothing and control. My head pounded. My back ached. My wrists burned.

The ambulance eventually slowed to a stop. The back doors swung open and I saw a dimly lit compound with perimeter security fencing. They unloaded me from the ambulance and wheeled me toward the front gates. One of the orderlies swiped his security card over a keypad at the front door, and I was ushered into the stark building, through two more sets of doors, and down multiple cavernous corridors. It was deathly quiet but for the squeaking of the gurney’s wheels. We passed through one last set of security doors, then turned into a mess room with tables and chairs. They finally removed the handcuffs and a rakish man with a clipboard appeared, suggesting he was about to take control of my forced incarceration. 

I was petrified.

My protests continued, though their force waned as I faltered. “Where am I? Why am I here? I need to know my sons are all right. You can’t just lock me up!”

“5150. Threatened his children,” the DCFS officer casually remarked to the rakish man, who pushed the clipboard into my midriff and ordered me to sign.

There is something uniquely punitive about the burden of paperwork amid a personal trauma of this magnitude. I had been forcibly removed from my home, falsely accused of threatening my children, and I was about to be involuntarily admitted into what was clearly a mental facility. And yet, somehow there were still forms to complete, and the dreariness of its normalcy only emphasized the extraordinary circumstances—the bureaucratic state, in all its bland menace, taunting me, forcing me to stipulate my own subjugation.

For all that, I was too incoherent to decipher what was written on the document and far too traumatized to care. The orderlies in white took all my personal belongings (the coaster, my watch, and my wedding ring), and gave me a pillow and a bed sheet.

“Please, tell me where I am,” I pleaded. Finally, an answer came.

“You’re being admitted to Del Amo Psychiatric Hospital.”

I had no idea where that was or why I was there. I had lost my orientation in the world, forgotten my place in it. I felt extinguished.

But the orders continued. I was told to stand. Through another door stood a short, robust man awash in facial hair, armed with a chunky set of keys hanging from his belt strap. I shuffled behind him wearing only the itchy, bloody gown, clutching my pillow and bedsheet. He led me into a stark, sterile holding space with two tiny, thick, barred windows and six beds that bore the look and feel of mortuary slabs. The one in the left corner was mine.

This small, rotund man in whose charge I was now placed—and who literally held the key to my fate—placed the plastic bag with my clothing into a little cubby in the wall. With that, he left the room and shut the thick, steel door behind him. I heard the jingle of his keychain, then the turning of the lock. He looked back through the frosted glass of the watch window. A flashlight assaulted my eyes.

“Go to sleep,” he commanded.

I placed my pillow on the slab and lay down, unruffling the bedding over the bottom half of my body. I tried to slow my racing thoughts and my breathing so that I might settle in for sleep inside the nightmare.

But the terror and disbelief and confusion would not relinquish their hold. My senses were raw and heightened, but my mind was dull and confused in an unfamiliar way. When I had awakened that morning, I could never have imagined the day would lead me here, alone in a psych ward, considered some sort of menace by faceless authorities and trapped in a legal spiderweb I’d never dreamed of. I knew I wasn’t crazy or a danger to myself or others—especially my children. Yet here I was, like R.P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the sane man trafficking among the ill, more convinced by the minute that this place could drive anyone to an emotional apocalypse.

Why? That nagging question persisted.

Why would someone make up such a story about me? I attempted to reconcile the impossible. Who hated me so much that they were willing to perpetuate this monstrous falsehood to the police and try and tear apart my family and career, and, most importantly, leave my sons without a father? I was with them on the day of their births, cutting their umbilical cords, embracing them, sharing the love and unbridled joy with my family and friends.

“I’m sick of this shit, I’m gonna harm the children.”

Those ten words kept ringing in my ears. Their author had used them like a weapon and condemned me in the process. I wondered where he or she was on this same night, probably sleeping comfortably in their own bed.

Harm my children? Is there a greater assault on a man’s integrity? 

I finally, gratefully, fell into slumber. 

It wasn’t long after that I woke to that rain of piss, and fresh horrors beyond.

I want to say that this ‘West’ is not a thing to be ‘conserved’

 So if you ask me to help ‘defend the West’ now, I will reply that, though this place is my home and the home of my ancestors, I can’t avoid the reality that the modern ‘West’ birthed the Machine, and is building that inhuman future. Something in our way of seeing contained a seed that unmade the world. I have been examining this seed now for hundreds of pages. Do I want it to grow? No. I want to uproot it. I want to say that this ‘West’ is not a thing to be ‘conserved’: not now. It is a thing to be superseded. It is an albatross around our necks. It obstructs our vision. It weighs us down.

Sometimes, you have to know when to let go.

‘The West’ has become an idol; some kind of static image of a past that maybe once was but is now inhabited by a new force: the Machine. ‘The West’ today thinks in numbers and words, but can’t write poetry to save its life. ‘The West’ is the kingdom of Mammon. ‘The West’ eats the world, and eats itself, that it may continue to ‘grow’. ‘The West’ knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. ‘The West’ is exhausted and empty.

Maybe, then, just maybe, we need to let ‘the West’ die. Let it die so that we can live. Maybe we need to let this concept fall away. To let it crumble so that we can see what lies beneath. Stop all the ‘fighting’ to preserve something nobody can even define, something which has long lost its heart and soul. Stop clinging to the side of the sinking hull as the band plays on. We struck the iceberg long ago; it must be time, at last, to stop clinging to the shifting metal. To let go and begin swimming, out towards the place where the light plays on the water. Just out there. Do you see? Beyond; just beyond. There is something waiting out there, but you have to strike out to reach it. You have to let go.

Forget, then, about ‘defending the West’. Think instead about rebuilding a real human culture, from the roots. If we have gone down a blind alley, then we need to back up, to turn around and discover where we went wrong. We need a counter-revolution: a restoration. We need to overthrow the emissary and put the real master back in his place. If we are attending to the world wrongly—if our way of seeing is up the spout—well, then we are going to have to start seeing differently. But first we have to try and unmoor ourselves from this one.

Where would we start?

McGilchrist would tell us that we should start by changing our quality of attention. This may sound nebulous, but it is anything but. If our left-hemisphere-dominated minds cause us to pay attention to the world in one way, then we need to train them, bit by it, to pay attention in another. ‘Attention changes the world’, he writes. ‘How you attend to it changes what it is you find there’.

What would this mean in practice? I think we know already. It would mean attending to the ways of seeing that were central to past cultures, but that Western modernity relentlessly dismisses or downplays as unprofitable, unrealistic, romantic and all the rest. Perhaps central to this is an effort to see the world as an organism rather than a mechanism, and then to express it that way, through art, through creativity, through writing, through our conversations. The last part is the hardest, very often, but maybe the most important too. If we refuse to see the world or its inhabitants as machines, if we are suspicious of rationalisations and dogmatic insistence and easy answers and false divisions, even for a moment, then we are making a start.

This is in effect a rebellion against a whole way of seeing, but that rebellion is also well established by now. I think that, at some unconscious level, we want to win it. Emotional, cultural and spiritual resistance to the Machine has been going on for centuries, and the need for it only grows more urgent. We can take part by going outside and praying beneath the moon, or just sitting in the grass and really experiencing the rain. We can seek to be reasonable rather than rational, and to distinguish intelligence from wisdom.

Once you try to view the world through McGilchrist’s hemispheric understanding of culture, you will probably find that it looks quite different. Look at the world of politics, for example, and you’ll soon notice that both ‘left’ and ‘right’ are, in McGilchrist’s hemispheric terms, both very much on the left. Compare a modern skyscraper and an old cottage, or a Byzantine icon and a Picasso. Or consider contemporary language compared to its older equivalent: nature versus biodiversity, mothers versus chestfeeders, people versus human resources. Consider countries, religions, stories, communities or families from both right- and left-hemisphere viewpoints. How do they look? How do they feel? Like complex, delicate networks of relationship—or like mechanisms to be deconstructed and rebuilt at will?

The attempt to live without the rest of nature, to conquer the world, to rationalise and remake it from the top down and bottom up: this began here, in ‘the West’. So here’s a thought: the alternative needs to come from here too. We started the revolution, so we need to start the restoration. We understand the Machine better than anyone, because it’s in us. We unmade the world. Now we are going to have to remake it again.

We Western people: we have to learn how to inhabit again. We have to learn how to live sanely in our lands. How to write poems and walk in the woods and love our neighbours. How to have the time to even notice them. How to take an interest in the parts without detaching them from the whole. How to remember that the Earth is alive and always was, and that no ‘culture’ which forgets that can last, or deserves to.

Beyond ‘the West’ there might just be another way of seeing. An older way. Beyond the West, we might find Europe. We might find Albion. We might find Cockayne, or Doggerland. We might find the mind that painted the cave walls. We might find hunters and clear rivers and countries and saints and spirits and painted churches. We might find shrines and pilgrim routes and folk music and fear of the sea. We might find ourselves again.

Could we even find home?

Paul Kingsnorth

Against the Machine. On the Unmaking of Humanity 

From Winter Oak page

 

Elite pedophilia is the world’s best protected secret. And it makes sense, because the perpetrators need to ensure that you, the reader, will never focus on them. They prefer that we all keep busy with the many distractions they throw at us to keep us divided: dysfunctional siblings of the global family, with psychopaths and narcissists for parents. We should do anything but look to the source of Western society’s ills, which is the utter selfishness of the leadership, so extreme that it is an emotional disease, of which symptoms such as heartlessness and superiority turn its hosts into monsters. Those who do what it takes to belong to the power establishment are the most lost, the most emotionally infantile, the most broken, and the most evil among us. They do not deserve our trust, our confidence, our acceptance of their political savvy and expertise, or our admiration for their power or wealth—it is all smoke and mirrors. If we can absorb the reality that many of the most rich and famous rape and kill children with impunity, how can we possibly continue arguing and vilifying each other over differences of opinion?

from the book Quest for Love: Memoir of a Child Sex Slave
Anneke Lucas

All of us suffer, on a permanent basis, from the evil inflicted upon this world by the psychopaths in power. [1]

It is in the very air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the society in which we are caged.

But most of us do not encounter members of the global mafia in our personal lives – they remain abstract, even slightly unreal, figures whom we merely read about.

This is not the case for Anneke Lucas, (pictured below) [2] a Belgian woman who, between the ages of six and eleven, was used as a sex slave by what she calls “the secret gang that forms the world’s elite, who put their own slaves and puppets in roles at the top of the global power structure of privilege and entitlement”. [3]

Her abusers were, she explains in her 2022 book Quest for Love: Memoir of a Child Sex Slave, “the most elite crowd in the country – aristocrats, famous politicians, doctors, judges, lawyers, top businessmen”. [4]

It cannot have been easy for her to speak about what happened, in view of “network rule number one: Never Challenge the Absolute Power of the Bosses”. [5]

Lucas and I were born in the same year, 1963, and so, while reading her account of events happening in 1973 or 1974, I pictured who I was and what I was doing at that age and at that time.

And the contrast between my own unremarkable English suburban upbringing – protected by the basic decency of all the adults around me – and her experience is, well… simply mind-blowing.

If I had heard her account a decade ago, when she first went public, I am not sure I would have believed her, so far removed is what she describes from anything I have personally encountered or imagined.

But in the meantime I have, like so many of us, become aware of the vast scale of systematic child abuse in this wretched world and the way in which it forms part of the system’s control of politicians and other key individuals.

I have read all about Jimmy Savile (pictured below on the left) – that great friend of the current British monarch – as well as about Ted Heath, Greville Janner, Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, with his links to that same monarch’s brother Andrew. I have also watched, and written about, the 2024 film Les Survivantes, which includes Lucas’s testimony. [7]

THE REIGN OF THE BEAST →
https://winteroak.org.uk/2025/10/24/the-reign-of-the-beast/

What can we do when our societies have been taken over by a gang of murderous psychopaths who, rather than stalking the corridors of power, should be confined in padded cells in high-security mental institutions?

The first step is to tear away the mask of respectability, even “superiority”, with which they hide their true character and agenda from the rest of us.

Says Anneke Lucas, whose book I presented in the second part [1] of this trilogy: “If we see the insanity of what is happening in the world, we have a duty to also see the insanity of those who are behind it”. [2]

“We regard these people as either better than us or as powerfully evil, but both of these viewpoints give them power, and hide their utter insanity”. [3]

“They do not deserve our trust, our confidence, our acceptance of their political savvy and expertise, or our admiration for their power and wealth – it is all smoke and mirrors”. [4]

Andrew M. Lobaczewski stresses, in the book on psychopaths that I have already described, [5] that such manipulative people have a need for self-concealment: “The pathological face must be hidden from the world somehow”. [6]

BREAKING THE EVIL SPELL
https://winteroak.org.uk/2025/10/27/breaking-the-evil-spell/

Something is smelling decidedly ‘off’ in today’s world, with nauseating levels of corruption, mass murder, lies, hypocrisy and repression. These three essays are based on three books I happen to have recently read, each of which provides fascinating but necessarily limited insights into the reality of contemporary society. Placed alongside each other, however, they can help us to identify the source of the odour.

“The French government has been totally captured by Israel. The president behaves like a Zionist agent. The mass media are controlled… I am astonished by the power of the Jewish lobby. It practically dictates the Middle East policies of France and of Europe”. [1]

“Here are people who control most of the mainstream media, who have at their disposal intermediaries in the highest spheres of the state, not to speak of considerable financial clout, and they cannot tolerate the existence of a little rebel group… These people have decided to attack all forms of pro-Palestinian expression. They are everywhere, they are powerful and above all are diabolically efficient. They must certainly be working with intelligence services”. [2]

The two statements above are fictional. Or rather, they are fictional in that they have been put into the mouths of fictional characters in a work presented as a fiction.

However, author Jacob Cohen clearly does not want his readers to imagine that the contents of Le Printemps des Sayanim (‘The Sayanim Spring’) bear no relation at all to real life.

He chooses to describe his book as an “account” (récit) rather than a novel and his double-edged disclaimer declares: “Despite the troubling proximity to reality of the related facts, all resemblance to existing persons would only be the product of a coincidence”. [3]

One such coincidence concerns the central fictional character Youssef El Kouhen, the history teacher of Moroccan background who becomes involved in Freemasonry in France and whose support for Palestine provokes reprisals from the Zionist sayanim who play a leading role in the organisation.

No connection here, obviously, to Moroccan-born Jacob Cohen (pictured), with a degree from Science-Po in Paris, author of a book exposing the activities of those same networks.

Cohen’s “fiction” begins with a page of non-fictional quotes describing the existence and activities of the sayanim, a volunteer force of millions of Jewish Zionists across the world who are deployed by Mossad to defend and advance Israel’s interests.

Here former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky states that this is the Israel intelligence service’s key asset – whereas a branch of Russian intelligence in any given country might need a staff of at least 100 people, Mossad can function with six or seven, the rest of their personnel being from civilian sayanim. [4]

Cohen has his fictional alter ego muse over the psychology of these fanatic Zionists, for whom Israel is the most wonderful country in the world.

THE STENCH OF THE SYSTEM: SAYAN
https://winteroak.org.uk/2024/11/04/the-stench-of-the-system-sayanim/

Paul Cudenec