Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity - review

 

DOOMSDAY IS SUCH A RELIEF!

W.D. James reviews Paul Kingsnorth’s new book.

Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity is one of the books we’ve been needing.

The book is the record of a personal journey toward a reckoning with Western modernity and the polycrisis it has engendered. Kingsnorth adopts the term, ‘The Machine,’ to identify the origin of that crisis and all it now encompasses. The book is less original contribution (though it does make that) than the outlining of a tradition of anti-Machine thinking and the account of a personal journey into that tradition to attempt to make sense of the world we now inhabit.

It is useful for presenting the issue in a broad outline which is good for facilitating decision making: are you basically on board with the interpretation or not? I, for one, am largely with him. Even if you are not, understanding why not should still be helpful in the work of clarifying the contemporary. Another strength is a needed emphasis on askesis (asceticism; self-discipline) as a major part of our personal and collective response. Finally, his ‘doable’ prescriptions point in the direction of a hopeful response.

Criticisms

However, my view of the work is not without criticism. As I intend this to be a basically positive review, I will deal with my criticisms upfront and get them out of the way.

Against the Machine will not convert a lot of skeptics to the basic picture Kingsnorth lays out. Though it draws on a number of philosophers, it is neither a philosophical nor strictly theoretical text. There are a number of significant points the author makes which I wish he had nailed down a bit more conclusively. Also, it is noticeable that major strands of anti-technological thinking are absent: especially any reference to Heidegger, the broader German critical tradition, and contemporary Chinese philosophy of technology. To a large extent, I think this is due to the decision to present the ideas as personal reflections (each chapter begins with an account of a personal experience). So, to that extent, it’s simply a trade-off which all authors make when choosing their approach. The absences also seem like a conscious choice. That is perhaps more questionable, but there is more than a wealth of material and thinkers that are drawn upon, so, again, one makes one’s choices.

The absence of any mention of Ernst Jünger seems like a more problematic issue. His conceptions of ‘the forest rebel’ and ‘the anarch’ would fit in well with Kingsnorth’s attempts to formulate a path forward. Further, Jünger is strong where Kingsnorth is comparatively weak (and the reverse could also be said). Specifically, Jünger’s exploration of the spiritual aspects of rebellion against technocracy could have added depth to the analysis.

Also significantly, Kingsnorth seems to have chosen to position himself largely as a sort of conservative. That’s fine, but it leads him to an unnuanced view of the historical left. Given the contemporary abysmal condition of leftist thought, that is understandable. However, it leads him to miss two potential sources of fruitful thought. First, he equates all socialist thought with statist versions of that vision. Given that he is critical of capitalism throughout, one senses that the more bottom-up form of socialist thought of people like William Morris and even Pope Benedict XVI’s appreciation of democratic socialism could be helpful.

Secondly, he significantly mischaracterizes the counterculture of the 1960s. Though he qualifies this somewhat in the last chapter of the book, he largely adopts the popular contemporary rightwing view that the 60s represents a continuation and deepening of the general problems of modernity (possibly he takes this view from people like Roger Scruton). That is not exactly wrong, but it is a partial picture and in such times one would do well to be a bit more thorough and nuanced. For instance, nearly 60 years ago, Theodore Roszak, in The Making of a Counter-Culture (1969), presents the youth ‘counterculture’ (a term he apparently coined) as primarily motivated by concerns very similar to Kingsnorth’s. Roszak himself does a nice job of articulating the intellectual sources of that movement, which includes several Kingsnorth would benefit from acquainting himself with. Further, Kingsnorth several times brings up the positive role of traditional folk music. He would understand the potential role of that better if he weren’t somewhat ideologically blinded to these strands of thought.

A final substantive criticism is that, due to his fear of ‘revolution’ (not ungrounded), he rules out direct assaults on the Machine. “The Machine cannot be fought head-on…,” he asserts (p. 289). Given the prospective large-scale social and economic crises soon to be wrought by AI and AI-integrated robotics (to mention just one crisis), something like syndicalism (and socialism and anarchism more broadly) seem to have a bright near-term future to me. Further, drawing on movements like the Luddites (whom he discusses positively and at length), sabotage does not seem to be theoretically off the table. Of course, one can get into trouble stating such obvious facts, but I’m not sure we have the moral luxury of not stating them.

The Machine

Kingsnorth, understandably, has a bit of trouble nailing down exactly what ‘the Machine’ is. That’s because, as he elucidates, it is not one thing (at least conceptually). On the one hand it is the global web of interconnected technologies, especially digital technologies, which aims to create a “Total System.” It is also something within us: the impulse toward control, dominance, and greed. It is also a worldview, what he is happy to simply term ‘modernity.’ Finally, it is something spiritual. It is all these at once, but if the last one holds, that is probably its essence and the other aspects are simply manifestations of that spirit at different levels.

He characterizes it as “This triumph of the mechanical over the natural, the planned over the organic, the centralized over the local, the system over the individual and the community….” (p. xvi). Anyway, at this late date, I don’t think we’ll have too much trouble formulating a sense of what he means.

Provocatively, he asserts: “…some force has been unleashed in our world which we are struggling to contend with” (pp. xvi-xvii). Clearly, he thinks of this as something more than a discrete phenomenon. It is something virtually all-encompassing.

“We should simply call this process modernity,” he says, “which is not a time period so much as a story we tell ourselves. But I prefer to call it the Machine…” (p. 18). Amen, brother! He does certainly get that whatever it is exactly, it represents a fundamental reorientation of humans to nature or reality which has been characteristic of Western history for the past 4 or 5 centuries.

Following Oswald Spengler, he also speaks of it as “the Faustian fire.” The temptation to become as gods. He manages to see the roots of this modern Western stance in certain tendencies of medieval theology. However, he never uses the term ‘nominalism.” Why not? I can’t for the life of me figure that out. Ultimately, his account is not a metaphysical one. When I noted that his was one of the books we’ve been needing I was thinking another is a clear, concise, metaphysical account of the same phenomenon updated to our current situation and a third might be something like a political program.

This extension of the mechanical vision and the avaricious will to all of reality (for there is no internal limit to the process) leaves no room for either humanity nor the forests and the oceans to survive – we will use up everything, including ourselves, by the logic of the case as everything is turned into grist for the techno-capitalistic mill.

Ultimately the Machine aims at the “abolition of home;” (p. 183) the end of transcendence and the uprooting of everything – all must be absorbed within and used by the Machine. In fact, the Machine is a spiritual (or, perhaps better, anti-spiritual) reality on Kingsnorth’s view.

The Anti-Machine Tradition

A real strength of the book is as a resource for connecting to a wealth of other thinkers whom we are in dire need of approaching yet again, with our current tasks in mind.

On Kingsnorth’s telling, the West was Christendom and then the Enlightenment came along. It set in process the modern revolutions – intellectual, cultural, social, and political, all of which destroy sacred order. As a result of the destruction of everything that could be considered genuinely cultural, we “commodify the ruins” and become the slaves of wealth and “worshippers of the self” (p. 11).

This leads to one of his more controversial positions. “We are not,” he wants to insist, “in an existential fight for the future of ‘Western civilization’. Western civilization is already dead…”. (p. 12) Hence, the culture war is merely a symptom of our situation, not the main issue.

Following René Guénon, he is happy to present the modern West as representing the Kali Yuga, the anti-spiritual condition, par excellence. In fact, Guénon seems to be his main spiritual guide throughout. The main empirical guide is Lewis Mumford, whose analysis of the ‘mega-machine’ provides the central analytical concept. These two inform everything in the book.

Additional guides include Simone Weil (the need for roots), Oswald Spengler (civilizational decay), GK Chesterton (for a picture of a healthy society), Ned Ludd (for, well, Luddism), Karl Marx (strictly as an analyst of capitalism, not a prescriber of socialism), Jacques Ellul (for an understanding of Technique), Christopher Lasch (for an understanding of our horrible elites – Lasch is way under read these days), Augusto Del Noce (for an understanding of the anti-transcendent aspect of modernity), Ian McGilchrist (for a cognitive and imaginal analysis of our illness), Craig Calhoun (whose The Question of Class Struggle provides a non-Marxist view of radical politics he is nearly willing to adopt as his own), James C. Scott (whom he looks to for models of society operating outside of structures of domination), and John Moriarity (whose odd mystical philosophy he sees great hope in). And there are plenty of others.

For the most part this seems like a great list of characters. I probably am not ready to try to get something of worth out of Moriarity yet, but Calhoun sounded great, and I didn’t know him, so I ordered a very expensive copy, in ‘acceptable’ shape (it seems to have been out of print for some time), from some bookshop in England – which I am now working my way through. Fortunately the ‘acceptable’ reflected a couple of library marks on the jacket; the pages are crisp and clean. One cannot underestimate the value of someone linking together a tradition of thought that so happens to be essential to our current situation.

It is worth noting that Kingsnorth’s ‘reactionary radicalism’ (the label he adopts form Calhoun) is structurally similar to my own ‘egalitarian anti-modernism’ and Paul Cudenec’s ‘organic radicalism.’ All look toward a more organic, and sacral, pre-modern inspiration on the one hand, coupled with a radical response to the disorders of modernity on the other. Further, all are critical of modern political centralization.

Doomerism

In a key insight, Kingsnorth realizes that the Machine possesses its own “telos”. Since the Machine is not a natural kind (species), I would qualify that as ‘dark telos’ or something along those lines. I don’t think he would disagree.

He notes that modernity is a Machine for destroying all limits. Everything is reduced to matter, to quantity, to resource, to commodity.

Surely, once we sense its inner, totalizing logic, we can just reject it, eh? Yet, Kingsnorth observes that “The Machine, at some level, is popular. There will be no popular revolution against it.” (p. 119). As it prepares to use us utterly up, it at the same times aims to provide every sensual pleasure. There is a contradiction. I’m not at all sure that Kingsnorth is correct on this. Of course he is at some level. As long as the material comforts keep coming, most will acquiesce. But what happens when Artificial Intelligence throws hundreds of millions into unemployment in the near future? What happens when many of those are highly educated people who had done what they were supposed to have done to be guaranteed a comfy spot in the system? I think at that point all bets are off. I think Kingsnorth is right that we’re all about to be royally screwed (technologically, socially, culturally, environmentally). However, I think he underestimates how pissed-off that might make people and how vulnerable a system that depends on huge, identifiable, server-farms may be.

His shorthand for the things he is for and which we would do well to recover is The Four Ps: Past (history and ancestry; rootedness), People (a culture, sense of being a people), Place (nature in its local manifestation), and Prayer (religious tradition) (p. 131).

These, he argues, are assaulted by The Four Ss: Science (with its non-mythic story and reduction of all of reality to the measurable and quantitative), Self (the new highest good which ironically both wields technology to make the world as it likes but also applies that technology to itself with the promise of a post-human immortality), Sex (sacral pleasure and affirmation of individual identity), and Screen (mediated, hyper-, reality) (p. 133).

With the Four Ps having been overcome by the Four Ss, we are no longer ‘the West;’ we in fact have no existing culture. We are best thought of as the ‘not-West’ (p. 140). In this non-cultural present we are left with “the progressive left” ideology wed to corporations and global power: equality (the traditional North Star of the left) has been traded for equal “market access” (p. 153).

To the extent that he offers a positive political response, it is rooted in Calhoun’s ideas. He observes that the counter to the progressivist-corporate complex is a localized “populism.” While he may well be positive toward current populist movements, it seems he means that as the concept was developed by Calhoun. In The Question of Class Struggle, he begins with: “The most widespread, powerful, and radical social movements in the modern world have been of a type we may call ‘populist.’ They have been born and nurtured of attachments to tradition and community; they have seen an intimate connection between the immediate and local motivations of their actions and the less clear but larger and more lasting results at which they aimed” (Calhoun, p. vii). There is a lot I like in Against the Machine, but I’m sensing getting turned on to this work that I was not familiar with is worth the price of admission all by itself.

Post-humanism and techno-optimist advocates of the singularity are also a prime target for Kingsnorth. He presents post-humanism as the religion of the Machine; the internet of Things and Bodies is the New Jerusalem of this crowd. He quotes one of them as saying “we are making God.” Yes, well… In response he does not hesitate to call the iteration of the Machine taking form in our digital age as a “golem;” a demon, and an “Anti-Christ.”Forebodingly, he warns “Something is coming. Be ready” (p. 261).

Humorously, I think, he laments: “Perhaps I would be more popular if I could remain reasonable about all this” (p 243). Yes, ‘doomer’ is the latest pejorative. But, if you’re paying attention….

Prescription

So, the Machine is inexorably grinding up the planet, enslaving us, assimilating us, and once it finishes creating the internet of things and bodies, it will probably reveal itself to be the incarnation of a demon or the Anti-Christ.

Sounds pretty reasonable to me.

So, what is to be done?

I really appreciated the final section of Against the Machine, where he gets down to the prescription.

How does one face DOOM?

He’s remarkably humble and down to earth. Basically, rebuild the Four Ps. Start, he says, by “learning to be adults again: building families and communities” (p. 147).

“To me, the dissolution of the modern nation-state into smaller, more anarchic, less centralized units would be welcome,’ he opines (p. 205). I suppose that would be the work of reactionary radicalism. He is not specific there, but that leaves some work for the rest of us to do, or at least theorize. He does borrow Calhoun’s terminology of presenting this as the project of creating a “moral economy,” the antithesis of the Machine, in which economic and social decisions are made based on human well-being, not the insatiable logic of the technological and capitalist Machine (p. 280).

Further, we need to create a faith “appropriate to the times” (p. 237). Not sure exactly what that means, but sounds like a good idea.

A la McGilchrist, we need to recover cognitive and cultural balance through imagination, counter-revolution, and rebuilding a culture from the roots up.

Drawing on James C. Scott, he develops a view of local communities that have avoided assimilation into states as possible models of how to remain disentangled with the Machine. These communities have engaged in “deliberate ‘self-barbarization’” (p. 290). If we engage in that process, we must choose between being “cooked” or “raw” ascetics. The ‘asceticism’ here is that of withdrawing from the Machine – no easy feat! Raw ascetics are those who go all the way outside. Minimal connectivity, ruthless self-sufficiency – think living in a hut you built and growing or foraging your food. The cooked ascetic has mentally and spiritually separated themselves and set some limits to their incorporation into the Machine, but to some extent remain within it and to an extent appear as if though they are fully integrated – ‘nothing to see here Mr. Machine!’ That is probably the most viable option for most of us in the heart of Machine territory.

Ultimately, to the extent we depart the Machine, it becomes a question of “…learning how to be indigenous again in the age of the Machine” (p. 312). That is, as my native and native-connected associates put it, how to be a human being again. Just a plain old human being.

Though mostly disparaging of the 1960s’ counterculture, Kingsnorth does raise the question of a counterculture, understanding that this will be essential as we move forward. But, again, he is not detailed about what a contemporary anti-Machine counterculture would look like. Bet it includes Bluegrass music though! Bet it also entails askesis in the form of anti-materialism. In fact, I bet it looks a lot like the 60s’ counterculture on its positive side with the 60s transgressive aspects replaced with their opposite – a recovery of limits, commitments, and virtue. Yep, bet that is what a viable anti-Machine counterculture looks like.

What struck me, personally, as most significant though, was that facing up to how disastrous our current situation is can be oddly liberating. Kingsnorth observes, “If we don’t have an endgame – ‘saving the world’, say – then everything gets easier” (p. 316). Think of it this way; if there was just this one thing that threatened our existence and our humanity, how would we justify not devoting our whole attention and every effort to rigorously confronting it? That could be stressful. Given the number, magnitude, and strength of the forces that confront us, it oddly becomes simpler. What can we do really? Nothing that is guaranteed of success. We’re probably done for, so what are we to do? Be human. Stubbornly and militantly human. That I can start to wrap my mind around. I felt a sense of relief in him simply stating that.

According to Kingsnorth, the goods we are left to quest after are the same goods we have always had to quest after, when we had our senses about us: “Human community, roots in nature, connection to God, memories passed down and on. These are the eternal things” (p. 317). Yes, indeed! I think I even know where to start.

Being quite unorthodox, I’ll be using Against the Machine in my ‘Dystopia’ class in the Spring and working through it with a group of students.

https://wdjames.substack.com/
https://winteroak.org.uk/2025/11/06/doomsday-is-such-a-relief/

The Occupation

 

A lot of very clever people – economists, historians, sociologists and so on – spend their lives devising very clever theories about why our society is the way it is today.

But none of their analysis will ever get anywhere near to the truth if it ignores the forbidden insight that our societies are under occupation by a hostile external power.

Over the last few years I have demonstrated in undeniable and interlocking detail that we are now under the full-spectrum domination of what I first called the global criminocracy but have more lately been terming the zio-satanic imperialist mafia.

Everywhere that I have looked – from the Rockefeller Foundation to the WEF, from UNESCO to BRICS, from Nazism to Communism – I have found irrefutable evidence of control by ZIM and its judeo-supremacist networks.

Taking a step back from the detail, I would now like to provide an overview of how I see The Occupation as functioning.

i. Hiding its own existence

It is extremely important for ZIM that people do not know that its Occupation exists.

This is because only 0.2% of the world’s population is even Jewish – let alone Jewish supremacist (Zionist) – and obviously the remaining 99.8% (minus Christian Zionists but plus anti-Zionist Jews) would not consent to ZIM’s domination of their lives if they knew about it.

While various people will inevitably become aware of, and oppose, various aspects of The Occupation, it is crucial for ZIM that:

a. These people do not become aware of ZIM’s overall existence and role.
b. They do not unite with others opposed to different aspects of its activities in order to resist The Occupation as a whole.

Because ZIM controls the world’s money supply and thus has unlimited amounts of cash to throw around, via its vast labyrinthine network of banks, businesses, foundations, institutions, “think tanks” and NGOs, it has taken control of academia and publishing so as to create and maintain a falsified version of history that totally ignores its Occupation.

It also owns pretty much all the mainstream media and so any full exposure of its existence and activities can be prevented from achieving mass circulation.

But even if journalists were not kept in rein by the owners of their outlets, via their managers, they still probably would never refer to The Occupation.

This is because powerful taboos have been carefully erected to make people reluctant to even consider the existence of The Occupation, let alone talk or write about it.

This is partly a moral taboo in that anyone even hinting at the existence of The Occupation is regarded as a Bad Person – an “anti-semite” or a “Nazi”.

But it is also an intellectual taboo in that it is considered dim-witted and simplistic to identify one single tightly-knit criminal group as wielding global power.

The gullibility of those who swallow the official narrative is flipped around and projected on to those who “fall for” so-called “conspiracy theories”, particularly if these remind people of documents that have previously been shown to be forgeries (and which may well have been manufactured for that very discrediting purpose!).

Censorship is also used to silence exposure of The Occupation, with social media increasingly regarded as a major threat by our global overlords.

If taboos and censorship prove insufficient to prevent people from pointing a finger at The Occupation, the next line of defence is activated – ZIM’s agents (sayanim) go on the offensive and attack the person involved.

This may be invisibly, by the use of whispering campaigns to isolate the individual, or openly, by public denunciations of their “anti-semitism”.

If they are in paid employment, sayanim will be dispatched to launch complaints against them and seek to have them fired.

We have seen a lot of this in recent years, as the Gaza Genocide makes it impossible for many people of conscience to remain silent.

In the UK, for instance, academic David Miller and doctors Rahmeh Aladwan and Ellen Kriesels have been targeted in this way for calling out Jewish supremacism.

The next stage after that is legal warfare, whether in the form of private prosecutions or charges of “hate crime” made by occupied states, fronted by puppet “leaders” (in fact actors) more or less acceptable to the population in question.

As awareness of the reality of The Occupation spreads, ZIM’s agents are drawing up plans not just for more censorship of opinions and revelations that they consider a danger to their domination, but also for new laws to criminalise dissent.

ii. Misrepresenting The Occupation’s impact

An important historical achievement of The Occupation has been to distort – indeed to invert – general understanding of its impact on our lives.

Its activities in fact amount to pillage and plunder, desecration and destruction, exploitation and enslavement.

It regards human beings and nature alike as nothing but resources which it can use to increase its own wealth and power.

But it has managed to depict this horrific process, which has ripped a hole in the heart of humanity and our sacred world, as a positive thing!

We are taught to regard the relentless and disastrous deterioration in the quality of our lives as “progress”, an inevitable step on a marvellous journey to some ill-defined industrial utopia.

The crumbs of convenience and comfort meant to compensate us for the loss of free and healthy lives are elevated to the status of supreme benefits, inalienable rights even, which nobody in their right mind could wish to remove.

The construction of this myth of goodness around its industrial pillaging allows The Occupation to again paint any critics of the process as morally bad, as blockers and impeders of humankind’s self-fulfilment.

Having rendered us helplessly dependent on its demonic Technik, it likes to claim that life outside its industrial prison would be literally impossible, regardless of the fact that our ancestors lived and flourished in that way for hundreds of thousands of years.

iii. Imposing a system.

The Occupation’s ongoing exploitation and enslavement is not carried out in a spontaneous and haphazard manner, but according to an intergenerational Big Plan.

This involves ensuring that the infrastructure and mechanisms of the process are deeply embedded in the administration of the occupied societies, to the extent that they sit beyond the reach of democratic challenge or debate.

Founded on the lie that “economic growth” (the expansion of its own wealth and power) is a good and necessary thing, The Occupation has ensured that this “development” has become the backbone of our collective purpose, the “need” for which is written into the rules by which our societies operate.

I myself have written about The Occupation’s “modernisation” and “planning” machine, of which the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and their insidious impact slavery project, are merely the latest phase.

And for expert and detailed analysis of how this all-pervading systematic control has been set up, I heartily recommend the Escapekey blog.

iv. Destroying indigenous culture

UThe first task of any colonial force is to destroy the culture of the occupied people. Their sense of identity has to be shattered, their shared references destroyed, their awareness of having something important to defend ripped away from them.

The Occupation’s cultural war entails pouring derision on all that is authentic, traditional and grassroots – the promotion of generational splits has proved highly useful in that respect.

Feelings, social preferences, ethical stances and spiritualities belonging to the occupied population are systematically marginalised.

Through its control of centralised culture and communication, The Occupation seeks to replace these with an outlook conducive to its own agenda.

However, because indigenous ways of thinking and feeling are innate, they keep resurfacing with each new generation and The Occupation has to constantly reinforce its cultural indoctrination.

Every people, in every generation, throws up spokesmen and spokeswomen, bearers and renewers of its culture and its thinking.

The Occupation will do all it can to either corrupt or suppress these voices.

It does not want the indigenous population to follow its own moral compass, its own values, its own aesthetics, its own collective heart.

So it promotes and imposes its own “cultural” leaders, its own art and music, its own philosophers and ideologues, even its own “dissidents” and “rebels”.

These are the only people anybody has heard of. You choose your own personal favourites from amongst them.

Anybody outside The Occupation’s cultural convoy is deemed not to exist.

v. Resorting to sheer violence

In the last few years, and especially the last few months, there have been encouraging signs that all of this is not working as it used to.

Thanks to Covid and then Gaza, increasing numbers of people are noticing that they are living under The Occupation and daring to say so.

But when the natives get restless, colonial powers know only one response – they deploy sheer force to put us back in our place.

Violence has always been an essential part of The Occupation, alongside all the propaganda and gaslighting.

Whenever we see images of riot cops weighing into protesters protecting the countryside from destruction, calling for justice and freedom, or opposing genocide, we are watching the mercenary thugs of the colonial Occupation in action.

The Occupation loves violence, in fact.

It revels in the mass bloodshed of its manufactured wars and its false-flag terror attacks.

And we all know that it would not hesitate to launch a third world war to dispel growing opposition to its rule and to “reset” the world for the next phase of its Big Plan.

We also know that it would have no moral qualms in switching everywhere to the totalitarian mode of governance which it used in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

We can well imagine the dawn raids, show trials and Gulags it could happily unleash against its opponents.

But if and when it feels forced to do so, this will mark a new phase in history.

The Occupation will have become visible to everyone.

The reality of its venal domination will be there for all to see.

And, as I noted at the start of this piece, this is the very last thing that The Occupation can allow to happen…

Paul Cudenec

http://paulcudenec.substack.com/
https://winteroak.org.uk/2025/10/07/the-acorn-106/

The Kids-for-Cash-Racket

 

How Family Courts Monetize the Bonds They Break

In a nondescript lobby in Los Angeles, under the steady hum of fluorescent lights, Marcus Hale waited with a fast-food bag in hand. It was a Tuesday afternoon in April 2025, and Hale, a 38-year-old dockworker whose broad frame spoke to years of manual labor, had scraped together $150 for two hours with his six-year-old daughter, Lila.

The Happy Meal inside included a small toy pony she’d mentioned on their last video call—a modest gesture in a system that exacted a steep price for such moments, a fleeting bid to reclaim the everyday intimacy of fatherhood. The monitor, a woman named Carla with a clipboard and a neutral demeanor, checked him through security. “No toys today,” she said firmly, removing the pony per policy. Hale nodded, a familiar ache settling in his chest; protest could invite another fee, another barrier between him and the child who once fell asleep in his arms.

Lila arrived moments later, her face brightening briefly before registering the disappointment, her small features clouding with the confusion that had become her new normal. They settled at a plain table for coloring and puzzles, with Carla noting every interaction from the corner. In those minutes, Hale searched for glimpses of the life they’d lost—the unscripted laughter, the unmonitored trust. Forty-seven minutes in, a crayon rolled under her chair. As Hale reached for it, his sleeve shifted, exposing a faded tattoo—a heart drawn by Lila as a toddler, a relic of simpler days. “Inappropriate contact,” Carla noted into her phone. Security appeared swiftly, ending the visit 23 minutes early. Hale was billed the full amount, plus $200 for the incident, and handed papers for a custody review. Through the glass door, he glimpsed Lila’s tear-streaked face, her small hand pressed against the pane, her eyes wide with the silent plea that pierced him deepest: the fear of abandonment, etched in a child’s gaze.

Hale wouldn’t see her for 14 months. The episode escalated into restrictions, additional monitors, and costs that drained his earnings, leaving him hollowed out, nights haunted by the echo of her unanswered calls. Lila ended up in a foster group home, where her Social Security benefits—stemming from her mother’s earlier overdose—were redirected to county expenses. Hale pursued remedies late into the nights, filing motions on his own, driven by a paternal resolve that no ledger could quantify, but the machinery of the system proved relentless, grinding down the very bonds it purported to protect.

Hale’s experience, drawn from documented cases including the tragic death of 17-month-old Justin Bulley during a supervised visit that same April, and the plight of San Diego siblings whose orphan benefits vanished into administrative accounts, illustrates a deeper malaise in family law. In California’s courts, where parental access can cost more than a premium hotel stay, the phrase “kids-for-cash” evokes not just isolated corruption but a structural incentive that turns guardianship into a revenue model. Unregulated visitation services charge exorbitant rates for oversight, counties intercept federal aid intended for vulnerable children, and the oversight mechanisms lag far behind the human toll. By late 2025, amid mounting lawsuits and legislative tweaks, this framework continues to strain families already at their breaking point.

The Precedent: Pennsylvania’s Judicial Betrayal

The term “kids-for-cash” traces to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in the early 2000s, where a once-unremarkable Rust Belt courthouse became synonymous with institutional failure. Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan presided over juvenile matters with an efficiency that masked ulterior motives. Children as young as 10 faced disproportionate consequences for minor infractions: a girl detained three months for a school altercation; a boy sentenced to a year for a petty harassment claim over a spurned invitation; a teenager confined for an online parody of school staff.

Ciavarella, handling the bulk of cases, expedited proceedings—often without legal representation—and directed youths to private facilities linked to associates Robert Powell and Robert Mericle. The arrangement yielded $2.8 million in concealed payments through leases and untaxed contracts. Exposure began in 2007 with a parent’s inquiry to the Juvenile Law Center, escalating to federal investigations and the erasure of tainted records.

Former Luzerne County Court Judges Michael Conahan, front left, and Mark Ciavarella, front right, leave the United States District Courthouse in Scranton, Pa., in 2009.

Penalties followed: Ciavarella received 28 years for racketeering, partially reduced on appeal, with disbarment in 2019. Conahan’s 17.5-year term drew controversy in late 2024 when President Biden commuted it, prompting outcry from victims and advocates. Powell and Mericle served shorter terms for tax offenses. The state established the Interbranch Commission on Juvenile Justice to dissect the incentives at play, and a 2022 class-action settlement awarded $206 million to over 500 affected individuals, with distributions ongoing for counseling and education. A further $17.75 million resolution in May 2025 addressed remaining claims. The legacy endures in elevated rates of trauma among survivors, a quiet testament to the enduring wounds inflicted when justice bends to profit.

This episode laid bare how judicial discretion could commodify youth. In California, the model has adapted, shifting from overt exchanges to embedded fees and asset diversions, amplified by the scale of a $12 billion family court apparatus.

California’s Variant: The Economics of Supervised Access

In the Golden State, supervised visitation—mandated in contentious custody disputes comprising 10-15% of cases but absorbing the lion’s share of resources—functions as a regulated yet opaque enterprise. Intended to safeguard children, it often extends indefinitely, with parents covering costs that rival executive salaries. Family Code Section 3200.5 stipulates background verifications and minimal annual training, but lacks licensing, fee ceilings, or routine audits. Judicial Council programs subsidize provider education, blending welfare principles with operational guidance on assessments and professional networking.

Rates range from $80 to $550 per hour, with two-hour floors and surcharges for holidays, travel, and evaluations. Biweekly sessions can exceed $6,000 monthly, compounding other obligations. A Bay Area parent documented $175,000 over three years for limited interactions, according to a June 2025 report. In Santa Clara County, weekly outlays approach $1,000 for brief encounters directed to affiliated services. For those of modest means, county options offer weekday slots in austere settings, where minor discrepancies can terminate access.

Oversight lapses have surfaced repeatedly. In Los Angeles, the April 2025 fentanyl-related death of Justin Bulley during supervision led to a $75 million claim against the county, alleging neglected hazards. Sonoma provider Beth Wanamaker faced scrutiny for undisclosed judicial connections, opaque billing, and alleged report manipulations. Santa Clara’s Nicole Ford case, revived in 2025, revealed coordinated efforts to favor costly providers. In San Diego, Monika Konia’s biased communications settled discreetly after prolonged, expensive sessions for one parent.

The interplay is systemic: Attorneys recommend associates, judges endorse without scrutiny, and monitors—frequently former law enforcement or social services personnel—earn substantial sums while reports sustain the cycle. State funding totals a mere $655,000, insufficient for scale.

A Case Study in Oversight Failures: The Tragic Death of Justin Bulley

The Justin Bulley case exemplifies the perils embedded in these supervised arrangements, where the system’s focus on restricting biological parents often overlooks far greater threats lurking elsewhere. In February 2024, the 17-month-old toddler died from an accidental fentanyl overdose during a court-mandated supervised visit with his mother, Jessica Dominique DarThard, at a Lancaster home facilitated by the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS). The medical examiner determined the cause as ingestion of the drug, with allegations that DarThard and her father, Jesse Darthard—Justin’s grandfather—exposed him to fentanyl; reports indicated DarThard smoked from a glass pipe in proximity during the session.

By March 2025, prosecutors charged both with murder, a landmark first for LA County in a child fentanyl case, highlighting DCFS’s inadequate vetting of the appointed monitor—a family friend—despite DarThard’s documented history of substance issues. Justin’s father, Montise Bulley, initiated a $65 million lawsuit against DCFS in June 2024 for negligence in safeguarding his son, followed by an escalated $75 million claim in April 2025. As of October 2025, the criminal proceedings continue, amid county-wide declines in overdose fatalities but persistent calls for enhanced protocols in high-risk visitations.

This incident underscores a profound irony in family court practices: While biological fathers like Bulley or Hale face stringent scrutiny and financial barriers to access, data reveals they pose minimal risk compared to the mother’s new partners. Evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, in their seminal work Child Abuse and Other Risks of Not Living with Both Parents, found child abuse rates surge dramatically—up to 40 times higher—when single mothers introduce new live-in boyfriends or partners, often due to the absence of genetic investment incentives. A 2005 University of Chicago study echoed this, showing that children killed by abuse were far more likely to live with a mother’s boyfriend or stepfather (23% of cases) than two biological parents (37%), with unrelated males in the home correlating strongly to fatal maltreatment. Federal surveys from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services further confirm: Among nearly 900,000 reported abuse incidents in 2005, nontraditional family structures—particularly those involving unrelated adults—elevated risks, yet courts routinely prioritize paternal alienation over vetting these external figures.

In Bulley’s aftermath, advocates argue this misallocation not only endangers children but perpetuates a bias that treats fit fathers as inherent threats, funneling resources into profit-driven monitoring while blind spots for paramours widen. The case, still unfolding, demands a reckoning: True child welfare requires evidence-based safeguards, not presumptions that fracture safe bonds.

The Deeper Diversion: Foster System Asset Management

Beyond visitation, foster care presents another layer of fiscal redirection. Among California’s 50,000 placements, many qualify for federal supports like survivor benefits or disability payments—funds designed as lifelines. Historically, counties as payees have appropriated these to offset operational expenses, amassing millions annually while beneficiaries receive none.

In 2021, collections reached $39 million, with Los Angeles claiming $5.4 million from 600 children, Kern $313,000 from 56, and San Diego $137,000 from 13. Cases like the San Diego siblings, who forfeited $30,000 over two years, highlight the impact; their guardian appealed unsuccessfully for educational allocations. Humboldt litigation in 2023 addressed barriers for tribal youth.

Reform arrived with Senate Bill 310, signed in 2024 and effective January 2025, prohibiting such uses and mandating prompt eligibility checks, notifications, and dedicated accounts; aligned with models in Hawaii and Oregon. Assembly Bill 1080, refined in April 2025, compels proactive benefit pursuits, potentially expanding access. By November 2025, implementation has begun, though counties cite fiscal adjustments amid broader rate reforms slated for 2027. States like Illinois and Maryland preceded this shift, signaling a national reevaluation.

Toward Accountability: Incremental Steps in a Complex Arena

The threads from Pennsylvania to California reveal a pattern where efficiency and revenue intersect at the expense of equity. For those navigating these systems - often respondents in custody matters - the burdens compound: financial depletion, eroded connections, diverted resources. Yet 2025 has brought scrutiny: Investigative reports, the Bulley litigation, and bills like SB 310 indicate momentum. Proposals include hourly caps at $100, subsidized access, and rigorous audits; a statewide commission, akin to Pennsylvania’s, could illuminate the $10 billion ecosystem.

This is not merely policy; it is the architecture of family resilience, where the true cost is borne by the children caught in the crosscurrents—Lila’s silent pleas, the siblings’ lost futures, the quiet unraveling of innocence amid administrative ledgers. What price do we assign to a child’s sense of security, the unquantifiable ache of separation that lingers long after the courtroom doors close? For Hale, and countless others, reform represents not vindication but a path to restoration, a chance to mend what has been frayed. In sharing these accounts, the aim is clarity: When courts prioritize process over people, the cost is measured in lives, not ledgers—lives like Lila’s, whose every missed birthday whispers the urgent need for change.

* Marcus Hale and Lila are fictional composites inspired by real California family court cases, including Justin Bulley’s supervised visitation death and the San Diego foster siblings’ seized benefits, to illustrate systemic issues. The Justin Bulley case is an actual case.

Greg Ellis

https://substack.com/redirect/e95c498f-99cb-4345-afbc-c4feaf0a0851?j=eyJ1IjoiMXBvcTY0In0.bpX_Ri4UrVVzEcwn2tPJZmntoRqzSx0aLRc9mOX6Iw8

Exposing the Cartel, Rebuilding the Family: Poetry, Philosophy, and a Fight for Justice.

One should not attack one who has abandoned viewpoints

 

(...)

“In the past, Brahmin Dhammika, there was a teacher named Sunetta, the founder of a spiritual sect, one without lust for sensual pleasures. The teacher Sunetta had many hundreds of disciples. He taught a Dhamma to his disciples for companionship with the brahmā world. When he was teaching such a Dhamma, those who did not place confidence in him were, with the breakup of the body, after death, reborn in the plane of misery, in a bad destination, in the lower world, in hell; but those who placed confidence in him were reborn in a good destination, in a heavenly world.

(2) “In the past, there was a teacher named Mūgapakkha … (3) … a teacher named Aranemi … (4) … a teacher named Kuddālaka … (5) … a teacher named Hatthipāla … (6) … [372] a teacher named Jotipāla, the founder of a spiritual sect, one without lust for sensual pleasures…. When he was teaching such a Dhamma, those who did not place confidence in him were, with the breakup of the body, after death, reborn in the plane of misery, in a bad destination, in the lower world, in hell; but those who placed confidence in him were reborn in a good destination, in a heavenly world.

“What do you think, Brahmin Dhammika? These six teachers were founders of spiritual sects, men without lust for sensual pleasures who had retinues of many hundreds of disciples. If, with a mind of hatred, one had insulted and reviled them and their communities of disciples, wouldn’t one have generated much demerit?”

“Yes, Bhante.”

“If, with a mind of hatred, one had insulted and reviled these six teachers together with their communities of disciples, one would have generated much demerit. But if, with a mind of hatred, one reviles and insults a single person accomplished in view, one generates even more demerit. For what reason? I say, Brahmin Dhammika, there is no injury against outsiders like that against [your] fellow monks. Therefore, Brahmin Dhammika, you should train yourself thus: ‘We will not let hatred arise in our minds toward our fellow monks.’  Thus, Brahmin Dhammika, should you train yourself.”

Sunetta, Mūgapakkha,
the brahmin Aranemi,
Kuddālaka, and Hatthipāla,
the brahmin youth, were teachers.
And Jotipāla [known as] Govinda
the chaplain of seven [kings]:
these were harmless ones in the past,
six teachers possessed of fame.
Unspoiled, liberated by compassion,
these men had transcended the fetter of sensuality.
Having expunged sensual lust,
they were reborn in the brahmā world.
Their disciples too
numbering many hundreds
were unspoiled, liberated in compassion,
men who had transcended the fetter of sensuality.
Having expunged sensual lust,
they were reborn in the brahmā world.
That man who, with thoughts of hatred,
reviles these outside seers devoid of lust
[whose minds] were concentrated,
generates abundant demerit.
But the man who, with thoughts of hatred,
reviles a disciple of the Buddha,
a bhikkhu accomplished in view,
generates even more demerit.
One should not attack a holy person
one who has abandoned viewpoints.
This one is called the seventh person
of the Saṅgha of noble ones,
one not devoid of lust for sensual pleasures,
whose five faculties are weak:
faith, mindfulness, energy,
serenity, and insight.
If one attacks such a bhikkhu,
one first harms oneself;
then, having harmed oneself,
one afterward harms the other.
When one protects oneself,
the other person is also protected.
Therefore one should protect oneself;
the wise person is always unhurt.

AN 6: 54

We aren't murderers," Pinek said

Still drinking, the guests rolled from Shlomo's house and, in the darkness, 

past the 6,000-volt barbed wire. All had lost loved ones during the war, and though the Germans in the brown barracks were SS, Storm Section, Hitler Youth and Nazi suspects, to the guests it was quite enough that they were Germans. They willingly would have shot them dead, but a club provided a lot more emotional satisfaction, and the boys and girls brandished some as they marched on the dark brown barracks. At Auschwitz the SS had been forbidden to hurt a Jew for emotional satisfaction, and SS men who did this could, sometimes would, be imprisoned, but the guests didn't fear that the Office would punish them. Unlike the SS, the guests had genuine grievances.

They slammed open the brown-barracks door. They switched on the lights, and the Germans rose so precipitously that a lot of the bedboards cracked, the men and boards crashing down on the Germans below, the Germans then screaming, the evening beginning. "Sing the National Anthem!" Shlomo said for varietys sake. "Sing it!" 

"Germany, Germany, over everything...”
"Louder!"
"Over everything in the world...”
"Still louder!"
"Holding together fraternally...”
"Pigs!”
"For defense and defiance...” 
"Tall!"

Shlomo cried to a tall blond man. "Lie down right here! Tall!" to another tall man. "Lie down beside him! Tall!" to another one. "Lie beside bim!"As soon as the three were lined up, Shlomo cried, "You! Lie on top of them, crosswise! No!" he said, clubbing the man. "I said crosswise! You!" he continued, and he kept piling up Germans, three this way, three that, till he had a human cube as high as a hand could reach. "All right!" Shlomo said, and his guests started swinging the clubs, whacking away at the cube as if they were hunters and it were a pod of Canadian seals. The air was thick with the grunts of the guests and the thud! of the wood upon bones. In the high tiers the Germans cried, "Bitte! Please!" the Germans in the center tiers moaned, but the Germans in the low tiers were mute, for the weight of the two dozen people on top had pushed their viscera out and the Germans were dying. "Pigs!" cried the party guests, pounding away, but Shlomo just leaned on a bed, watching, laughing like a meshugganer—a nut, his code name in the Jewish partisans.

    At last the tired guests left, but Shlomo still wasn't satisfied. He had more bashes on Fridays, Saturdays, and Monday, May 7, the day the Germans surrendered—his guests, as they went through the wire, firing their guns at the midnight sky in lieu of Roman candles. On other nights, Shlomo and his

guards attacked the brown barracks themselves, asking the Germans, "How many blows?" "I want twenty," "Well, we'll oblige you,” and after inflicting the twenty, telling the Germans, "One more! You didn’t say, 'Thank you!"' The boys did this every night in May, June and July, until when the crewcut but kindly priest, the one who'd debated with Adam, came to Schwientochlowitz, the nights were as ritualistic as a "Please tuck me in." At around ten, a sergeant would shout "Attention!" and the Germans would leap out of bed like volunteers, raise their right arms, say "Heil Hitler!"sing the Horst Wessel Song, and in answer to "How many blows?" say "Fifteen," for if a German said "Ten," the guards would say "Coward!" and give the German fifty. The guards used clubs, bedboards, crowbars, and the Germans' own crutches to give the Germans their fifteen blows, and at times they blurred the distinction between corporal and capital punishment by seizing a German’s arms and legs and swinging his head against the wall like a battering ram. In the center ring, Shlomo used his pet birchwood stools on the Germans, but he was unsatisfied and his guards came back again and again on many marathon nights.

The dead bodies went to the morgue every morning. The broken stools went to the carpenter, a man who sat melting the glue-bars, muttering, -Mary and Joseph! More stools!" and the dead people’s names went to Shlomo. He tallied them up—he had twenty, sometimes, from the brown barracks, twenty from the other barracks—and he then mailed a notice to all the dead people's wives,

NOTICE. On July————-, 1945, the Prisoner ———— died of a heart attack.

The body count was enormous, but Shlomo was still aware of the six hundred brown-barracks men, the eighteen hundred "collaborator" men, and the six hundred "collaborator" women still alive. He himself didn’t touch them (he just touched the brown-barracks men) but the guards started beating them all: if they didn’t salute, if they didn’t say "Yes, sir" in Polish, if they didn’t pick up their hairs in the barber shop, if they didn't lick up their blood. The guards put the Germans into a doghouse, beating them if they didn’t say "Bow wow." They got the Germans to beat each other: to jump on each other's spines and to punch each other's noses, and if a German pulled his punches, the guards said, "I'll show you how," and hit the Germans so hard that they once knocked a German’s glass eye out. The guards raped the German women—one, who was thirteen years old, got pregnant—and trained their dogs to bite off the German men's genitals at the command of "Sic!" And still three thousand remained, and Shlomo hated them more than he had in February, hated them for not dying compliantly.

It seemed as though hate were a muscle and the longer he used it, the bigger it got—as though every day he had bench-pressed two hundred pounds and, far from being worn out, now could press 220.

At last, in August, the lice came to Shlomo's aid. A man got typhus, the other men in his bed did too, and the 104-degree fever spread like a flash fire in Shlomo's camp. In their barracks the Germans lay sprawled in bed, stirring if any urine dripped from the bed overhead, babbling, "Josef!" or "Jacob!" or "Mommy! Please help me!" The rooms were like shell-shock wards, the body count rose to a hundred per day—one day 138—and the ascension crew was as busy as mailroom boys, chasing from barracks to barracks, from bed to bed. At every dead body, four of the boys took the arms and legs and,

saying, "Hou ... Ruk!" swung it onto a stretcher, though once a dead bodys arm came off and a legion of half-inch white worms came out. The boys then carried the stretcher (a wake of white worms behind it, once) to the morgue, dumped out the body, chalked it with calcium chloride, and as soon as they could, wearing handkerchiefs, saying the mightiest sort of "Hou ... Ruk!" swung it like something made of straw into a high-sided wagon. They then threw more bodies in, and a horse took the load to the grave by the Rawa River.

In time, three-fourths of the Germans at Shlomo's camp were dead, and Shlomo announced, "What the Germans couldn't do in five years at Auschwitz, at AuschwirL had killed just as many people in five short hours, and Shlomo still wasn’t satisfied with his Schwientochlowitz score. At parties now for the Kattowitz boys, Shlomo told Yiddish jokes but his heart wasn’t there. "Before the war, the best-known rabbi was Cadyk of Mount Kalwari," Shlomo would say. "He once went to visit the pope, and the people of Rome said, 'Who is the goy with Cadyk of Mount Kalwari?"' Some of Shlomo's guests would leave, some would go to Shlomo's bedroom for sex, but others would stay as Shlomo pulled out his mandolin, tuned and retuned it, and, his arms unaccustomedly heavy, began the sad ballad of Ai Lu Lu Lu.

In the cellar the mother was rocking her son
And was singing this song to put him to sleep,
"Sleep, my son, sleep.
My little one, sleep.
Ai lu lu 1u, li lu lu lu.

Then, Shlomo would pause, strumming some A chords. On his face was a look of great sadness, as though the "mother" were his and the "sons” were his partisan brother, the one who'd been killed on the horse-drawn sleigh. (...)

The Germans at Schwientochlowitz tried to get word out. One man went to the wire shouting, "This place is hell!" He was killed, one man who smuggled messages out was tortured, but one Hitler Youth from Gleiwitz escaped. At three in the morning he hid in the men's latrine, at six he escaped with a coal-mine crew, but Shlomo found him in Gleiwitz and personally drove him to Schwientochlowitz. "Am I allowed to smoke?" the boy asked in Shlomo's van. "Yes," Shlomo said, but when the boy pulled out a pouch of Crimean tobacco, Shlomo just laughed and told him, "You smoke better stuff than I do," and took his tobacco away. Back at Schwientochlowitz, Shlomo told him, "You swine, you should croak," the guards used the iron 

poles that the soup-tubs were carried with to beat the boy to a vegetable, and no one tried to escape after that. One man was released, however: a man who'd once been at Auschwitz and who said now, "I’d rather be ten years in a German camp than one day in a Polish one." 

Day and night, the civilians of Schwientochlowitz heard the Germans scream, and one Catholic priest tried to tell the world about them. An old, soft-spoken, softhearted man, the priest took a train to Berlin to look up a British officer and to unburden himself upon him. The officer then put a “melancholy account" in the pouch to London, 

A priest living in Silesia has been in Berlin. I have known [him] for many years, and I consider him absolutely reliable. He is a man who was always ready, day or night, to help a victim of the Nazi regime.

The officer passed along what the Office was doing to Germans,  Polish officials have [said],

"Why should they not die?" Concentration camps have not been abolished but have been taken over by the new owners. At Schwientochlowitz, prisoners who are not beaten to death stand up to their necks, night after night until they die, in cold water— 

a true report, for a cistern of water was Shlomo's punishment cell. His mission completed, the priest went back to Silesia, but other whistle-blowers came to Berlin and told the British and Americans of other concentration camps run by the Office of State Security.

The biggest wasn't in Schwientochlowitz but in Potulice, Poland, near the Baltic Sea. Built for Jews, it now was for thirty thousand suspected oppressors of Jews. Every night the commandant went to a barracks there, said, "Attention!" and "Everyone sing Everything Passes By!" and the Germans sang, 

Everything passes by,
Everything passes away,
My husband’s in Russia,
And his bed’s empty today.

"You pigs!" the commandant then cried, and he beat the Germans with their stools, often killing them. At dawn many days a Jewish guard cried, "Eins! Zwei! Drei! Vier!" and marched the Germans into the woods outside their camp. "Halt! Get your shovels! Dig!" the guard cried, and when the Germans had dug a big grave, he put a picture of Hitler in. "Now cry!" the guard said. "And sing All the Dogs Are Barking!" and all the Germans moaned, 

All the dogs are barking,
All the dogs are barking,
Just the little hot-dogs
Aren't barking at all 

The guard then cried, "Get undressed!" and, when the Germans were nude, he beat them, poured liquid manure on them, or, catching a toad, shoved the fat thing down a German’s throat, the German soon dying.

At Potulice more Germans died than Jews had died there during the war. At the camp at Myslowitz, near Kattowitz, the Jewish survivors of Auschwitz told the Germans, "Sing!" "Sing what?" "Sing anything! Or we'll shoot you!" and the Germans sang the one song theyd all learned in kindergarten:

Alle vögel sind schon da!
Alle vügel, alle!
Amsel, drossed, fink und star,
Und die ganze vogelschar!

All the birds are here already!
All the birds!
Blackbirds, thrushes, finches, starlings,
All the flock!

"You pigs!" the Jews cried, whipping the Germans, and one hundred died at Myslowitz every day. At Grottkau the Germans were buried in potato sacks, but at Hohensalza they climbed right into the coffins, where the commandant wasted them. At Blechhammer the Jewish commandant wouldn’t even look at the Germans, and they died sight unseen. The status of "suspect" wasn’t enough to grant any German a pardon in Poland and Poland-administered Germany. In that vast area, the Office of State Security ran 1,255 camps for Germans, and twenty to fifty percent of the Germans died in virtually every one.

But the word got out. Taking trains to Berlin, the whistle-blowers reported this to the British and Americans, who put the reports in fat canvas pouches to London and Washington. Apparently someone read them, for on Thursday, August 16, 1945, Winston Churchill rose in the House of Commons and said, "Enormous numbers [of Germans] are utterly unaccounted for. It is not impossible that tragedy on a prodigious scale is unfolding itself behind the Iron Curtain." Another member of Commons said, "Is this what our soldiers died for?" and in Washington an American senator put in the Congressional Record of Friday, August 2, "One would expect that after the horrors in Nazi concentration camps, nothing like that could ever happen 

again. Unfortunately..." The senator then told of beatings, shootings, of water tortures, of arteries cut, of "brains splashed on the ceiling" in the Office's concentration camps. The pouches then went to Warsaw, where the British ambassador felt that, like Nelson at Copenhagen, he should hold his telescope to his blind eye, and the American ambassador felt that the Germans were whining. But both ambassadors protested to the Polish government.

The loudest objection was by the Red Cross-not the International one, in Geneva, but the American one. Its people in Warsaw drove down to Kattowitz to speak with the Jewish boy who was Secretary of State Security: Pinek, but Pinek was not his cherubic self. He didn't rise for the three oliveclothed men, and his lips were like tight rubber bands as he asked them in German, "What do you want?" 
"To inspect the Silesian camps."
"Good. Go to Auschwitz. Why didn’t you go there during the war?"
"We are Americans."
"Why didn't the Red Cross in Geneva go?"
"We don't know."
"If you didn't go to Auschwitz, you won't go anywhere now," said Pinek, who, in the partisans, had once found a German radio, and who'd sent urgent messages out, "Dot dot dash... Urgent, urgent, hundreds of Jews being murdered," but who'd never gotten messages back. "You didn't help the Jews, and I won't oblige you now."
"We'll have to report that to Warsaw."
"So do it. I don't respect the Red Cross."
"For the record, then. We are asking you—"
"Go to hell!" Pinek shouted in English, and the men in olive hurried out. They then drove to Warsaw and made their complaint to Jacob, the Jew who was chief of the Office of State Security.

(...)

"But how are the Germans treated?" Gomulka asked.
"As if they're in heaven, compared to how they treated the Jews." "
We mustn’t mistreat them," Gomulka said.
"We don’t," Pinek said. He really believed this, for he hadn’t gone to Shlomo's bashes, and his kid brother, who had, had never described them to 

Pinek. "We aren't murderers," Pinek said.
"Well, I have a problem with the Red Cross."
"I don’t respect the Red Cross."
"But they're worried about the Germans."
"The Germans!" Pinek said angrily. "Who told the Germans to come to Poland? And destroy Polish towns? And kill Polish people? And commit genocide on the Jews? I told the Red Cross it should visit the Jews who came out of German camps!" "But comrade!" Gomulka protested. He acted, incredibly, as though he couldn't simply say, "I order you, Captain." His fist hit on Pinek’s desk, and the skin on his cheekbones stretched like the skin of a warpath-riding indian. "We must observe the Geneva Conventions!"
"If you tell me, 'Let in the Red Cross,' I'll do it."
Gomulka paused. "No, I won’t order you.”
"Comrade," said Jacob, at last speaking up. "We have your word that the Germans are treated well." Jacob spoke slowly, and, like the greatest actors, he didn’t gesture at all. His mother, father, one brother, and sister were dead, and he had little love for the Germans, but he was now forty-four and a power-that-be in Poland, and he didn’t want to derail himself by telling the Red Cross, "Beat it." He was happy to leave that to Pinek and carefully said, "As for the Red Cross—" Pinek waited.

"Do what seems best." "Thank you," said Pinek.

Then Pinek and his four comrades went to Pinek's apartment, where Pinek served vodka in Czechoslovakian crystal and, as hors d'oeuvres, herrings on crackers on Rosenthal gold-bordered china. After dinner Pinek played Russian songs like Apples and Pears on a Steinway piano, and the great men of Poland hopped like the Cossacks, singing along. Pinek called Jacob "Jacob," and Jacob called Pinek "Pawel," his alias in the Office of State Security. He said to Pinek quietly, “Amcha?"* the Hebrew for "People?" meaning, "Are you our People?" and Pinek answered him, "Ich bin ayn Yid, "the Yiddish for "Yes, I'm a Jew." Pinek then said to Gomulka, “Amcha?" but Gomulka answered, "What did you say?" and Jacob laughed decorously.

from the book An Eye for an Eye The Story of Jews Who Sought Revenge for the Holocaust John Sack

* Amcha - the word Jews used to recognise each other. In many cases it seems to be merely a formality:

Several examples of such deep feelings of Jewish solidarity were given in SAID (Ch. 1), and these feelings were found to be characteristic of Freud in Chapter 4. They are exemplified by the following comments of Clinton administration Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich (1997, 79), on his first face-to-face meeting with Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Alan Greenspan: “We have never met before, but I instantly know him. One look, one phrase, and I know where he grew up, how he grew up, where he got his drive and his sense of humor. He is New York. He is Jewish. He looks like my uncle Louis, his voice is my uncle Sam. I feel we’ve been together at countless weddings, bar mitzvahs, and funerals. I know his genetic structure. I’m certain that within the last five hundred years—perhaps even more recently—we shared the same ancestor.” As New York Intellectual Daniel Bell notes, “I was born in galut and I accept—now gladly, though once in pain—the double burden and the double pleasure of my self-consciousness, the outward life of an American and the inward secret of the Jew. I walk with this sign as a frontlet between my eyes, and it is as visible to some secret others as their sign is to me” (Bell 1961, 477). Theologian Eugene Borowitz (1973, 136) writes that Jews seek each other out in social situations and feel “far more at home” after they have discovered who is Jewish.147 Moreover, “most Jews claim to be equipped with an interpersonal friend-or-foe sensing device that enables them to detect the presence of another Jew, despite heavy camouflage.” These deep and typically unconscious ties of genetic similarity (Rushton 1989) and sense of common fate as members of the same ingroup lead to the powerful group ties among Jewish intellectual and political activists studied here.

THE CULTURE OF CRITIQUE:
....

KEVIN MACDONALD

Morality

 THE relation of the various peoples of the earth to the supreme interests of life, to God, virtue, and immortality, may be investigated up to a certain point, but can never be compared to one another with absolute strictness and certainty. The more plainly in these matters our evidence seems to speak, the more carefully must we refrain from unqualified assumptions and rash generalisations.

This remark is especially true with regard to our judgment on questions of morality. It may be possible to indicate many contrasts and shades of difference among different nations, but to strike the balance of the whole is not given to human insight. The ultimate truth with respect to the character, the conscience, and the guilt of a people remains for ever a secret; if only for the reason that its defects have another side, where they reappear as peculiarities or even as virtues. We must leave those who find a pleasure in passing sweeping censures on whole nations, to do so as they like. The peoples of Europe can maltreat, but happily not judge one another. A great nation, interwoven by its civilisation, its achievements, and its fortunes with the whole life of the modern world, can afford to ignore both its advocates and its accusers. It lives on with or without the approval of theorists.

Accordingly, what here follows is no judgment, but rather a string of marginal notes, suggested by a study of the Italian Renaissance extending over some years. The value to be attached to them is all the more qualified as they mostly touch on the life of the upper classes, with respect to which we are far better informed in Italy than in any other country in Europe at that period. But though both fame and infamy sound louder here than elsewhere, we are not helped thereby in forming an adequate moral estimate of the people.What eye can pierce the depths in which the character and fate of nations are determined?—in which that which is inborn and that which has been experienced combine to form a new whole and a fresh nature?—in which even those intellectual capacities, which at first sight we should take to be most original, are in fact evolved late and slowly? Who can tell if the Italian before the thirteenth century possessed that flexible activity and certainty in his whole being—that play of power in shaping whatever subject he dealt with in word or in form, which was peculiar to him later? And if no answer can be found to these questions, how can we possibly judge of the infinite and infinitely intricate channels through which character and intellect are incessantly pouring their influence one upon the other. A tribunal there is for each one of us, whose voice is our conscience; but let us have done with these generalities about nations. For the people that seems to be most sick the cure may be at hand; and one that appears to be healthy may bear within it the ripening germs of death, which the hour of danger will bring forth from their hiding-place.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the civilisation of the Renaissance had reached its highest pitch, and at the same time the political ruin of the nation seemed inevitable, there were not wanting serious thinkers who saw a connexion between this ruin and the prevalent immorality. It was not one of those methodistical moralists who in every age think themselves called to declaim against the wickedness of the time, but it was Macchiavelli, who, in one of his most well-considered works,[981] said openly: ‘We Italians are irreligious and corrupt above others.’ Another man had perhaps said, ‘We are individually highly developed; we have outgrown the limits of morality and religion which were natural to us in our undeveloped state, and we despise outward law, because our rulers are illegitimate, and their judges and officers wicked  men.’ Macchiavelli adds, ‘because the Church and her representatives set us the worst example.’

Shall we add also, ‘because the influence exercised by antiquity was in this respect unfavourable’? The statement can only be received with many qualifications. It may possibly be true of the humanists (p. 272 sqq.), especially as regards the profligacy of their lives. Of the rest it may perhaps be said with some approach to accuracy, that, after they became familiar with antiquity, they substituted for holiness—the Christian ideal of life—the cultus of historical greatness (see Part II. chap. iii.). We can understand, therefore, how easily they would be tempted to consider those faults and vices to be matters of indifference, in spite of which their heroes were great. They were probably scarcely conscious of this themselves, for if we are summoned to quote any statement of doctrine on this subject, we are again forced to appeal to humanists like Paolo Giovio, who excuses the perjury of Giangaleazzo Visconti, through which he was enabled to found an empire, by the example of Julius Cæsar.[982] The great Florentine historians and statesmen never stoop to these slavish quotations, and what seems antique in their deeds and their judgments is so because the nature of their political life necessarily fostered in them a mode of thought which has some analogy with that of antiquity.

Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that Italy at the beginning of the sixteenth century found itself in the midst of a grave moral crisis, out of which the best men saw hardly any escape.

Let us begin by saying a few words about that moral force which was then the strongest bulwark against evil. The highly gifted men of that day thought to find it in the sentiment of honour. This is that enigmatic mixture of conscience and egoism which often survives in the modern man after he has lost, whether by his own fault or not, faith, love, and hope. This sense of honour is compatible with much selfishness and great vices, and may be the victim of astonishing illusions; yet, nevertheless, all the noble elements that are left  in the wreck of a character may gather around it, and from this fountain may draw new strength. It has become, in a far wider sense than is commonly believed, a decisive test of conduct in the minds of the cultivated Europeans of our own day, and many of those who yet hold faithfully by religion and morality are unconsciously guided by this feeling in the gravest decisions of their lives.[983]It lies without the limits of our task to show how the men of antiquity also experienced this feeling in a peculiar form, and how, afterwards, in the Middle Ages, a special sense of honour became the mark of a particular class. Nor can we here dispute with those who hold that conscience, rather than honour, is the motive power. It would indeed be better and nobler if it were so; but since it must be granted that even our worthier resolutions result from ‘a conscience more or less dimmed by selfishness,’ it is better to call the mixture by its right name.[984] It is certainly not always easy, in treating of the Italian of this period, to distinguish this sense of honour from the passion for fame, into which, indeed, it easily passes. Yet the two sentiments are essentially different.

There is no lack of witnesses on this subject. One who speaks plainly may here be quoted as a representative of the rest. We read in the recently-published ‘Aphorisms’ of Guicciardini:[985] ‘He who esteems honour highly, succeeds in all that he undertakes, since he fears neither trouble, danger, nor expense; I have found it so in my own case, and may say it and write it; vain and dead are the deeds of men which have not this as their motive.’ It is necessary to add that, from what is known of the life of the writer, he can here be only speaking of honour, and not of fame. Rabelais has put the matter more clearly than perhaps any Italian. We quote him, indeed, unwillingly in these pages. What the great, baroque Frenchman gives us, is a picture of what the Renaissance  would be without form and without beauty.[986] But his description of an ideal state of things in the Thelemite monastery is decisive as historical evidence. In speaking of his gentlemen and ladies of the Order of Free Will,[987] he tells us as follows:—

‘En leur reigle n’estoit que ceste clause: Fay ce que vouldras. Parce que gens liberes, bien nayz,[988] bien instruictz, conversans en compaignies honnestes, ont par nature ung instinct et aguillon qui toujours les poulse à faitz vertueux, et retire de vice; lequel ilz nommoyent honneur.’

This is that same faith in the goodness of human nature which inspired the men of the second half of the eighteenth century, and helped to prepare the way for the French Revolution. Among the Italians, too, each man appeals to this noble instinct within him, and though with regard to the people as a whole—chiefly in consequence of the national disasters—judgments of a more pessimistic sort became prevalent, the importance of this sense of honour must still be rated highly. If the boundless development of individuality, stronger than the will of the individual, be the work of a historical providence, not less so is the opposing force which then manifested itself in Italy. How often, and against what passionate attacks of selfishness it won the day, we cannot tell, and therefore no human judgment can estimate with certainty the absolute moral value of the nation.

A force which we must constantly take into account in judging of the morality of the more highly-developed Italian  of this period, is that of the imagination. It gives to his virtues and vices a peculiar colour, and under its influence his unbridled egoism shows itself in its most terrible shape.

The force of his imagination explains, for example, the fact that he was the first gambler on a large scale in modern times. Pictures of future wealth and enjoyment rose in such life-like colours before his eyes, that he was ready to hazard everything to reach them. The Mohammedan nations would doubtless have anticipated him in this respect, had not the Koran, from the beginning, set up the prohibition against gambling as a chief safeguard of public morals, and directed the imagination of its followers to the search after buried treasures. In Italy, the passion for play reached an intensity which often threatened or altogether broke up the existence of the gambler. Florence had already, at the end of the fourteenth century, its Casanova—a certain Buonaccorso Pitti,[989] who, in the course of his incessant journeys as merchant, political agent, diplomatist and professional gambler, won and lost sums so enormous that none but princes like the Dukes of Brabant, Bavaria, and Savoy, were able to compete with him. That great lottery-bank, which was called the Court of Rome, accustomed people to a need of excitement, which found its satisfaction in games of hazard during the intervals between one intrigue and another. We read, for example, how Franceschetto Cybò, in two games with the Cardinal Raffaello Riario, lost no less than 14,000 ducats, and afterwards complained to the Pope that his opponent had cheated him.[990] Italy has since that time been the home of the lottery.

It was to the imagination of the Italians that the peculiar character of their vengeance was due. The sense of justice was, indeed, one and the same throughout Europe, and any violation of it, so long as no punishment was inflicted, must have been felt in the same manner. But other nations, though they found it no easier to forgive, nevertheless forgot more easily, while the Italian imagination kept the picture of the  wrong alive with frightful vividness.[991] The fact that, according to the popular morality, the avenging of blood is a duty—a duty often performed in a way to make us shudder—gives to this passion a peculiar and still firmer basis. The government and the tribunals recognise its existence and justification, and only attempt to keep it within certain limits. Even among the peasantry, we read of Thyestean banquets and mutual assassination on the widest scale. Let us look at an instance.[992]In the district of Aquapendente three boys were watching cattle, and one of them said: ‘Let us find out the way how people are hung.’ While one was sitting on the shoulders of the other, and the third, after fastening the rope round the neck of the first, was tying it to an oak, a wolf came, and the two who were free ran away and left the other hanging. Afterwards they found him dead, and buried him. On the Sunday his father came to bring him bread, and one of the two confessed what had happened, and showed him the grave. The old man then killed him with a knife, cut him up, brought away the liver, and entertained the boy’s father with it at home. After dinner, he told him whose liver it was. Hereupon began a series of reciprocal murders between the two families, and within a month thirty-six persons were killed, women as well as men.

And such ‘vendette,’ handed down from father to son, and extending to friends and distant relations, were not limited to the lower classes, but reached to the highest. The chronicles and novels of the period are full of such instances, especially of vengeance taken for the violation of women. The classic land for these feuds was Romagna, where the ‘vendetta’ was interwoven with intrigues and party divisions of every conceivable sort. The popular legends present an awful picture of the savagery into which this brave and energetic people had relapsed. We are told, for instance, of a nobleman at Ravenna, who had got all his enemies together in a tower, and might have burned them; instead of which he let them out, embraced  them, and entertained them sumptuously; whereupon shame drove them mad, and they conspired against him.[993] Pious and saintly monks exhorted unceasingly to reconciliation, but they can scarcely have done more than restrain to a certain extent the feuds already established; their influence hardly prevented the growth of new ones. The novelists sometimes describe to us this effect of religion—how sentiments of generosity and forgiveness were suddenly awakened, and then again paralysed by the force of what had once been done and could never be undone. The Pope himself was not always lucky as a peacemaker. ‘Pope Paul II. desired that the quarrel between Antonio Caffarello and the family of Alberino should cease, and ordered Giovanni Alberino and Antonio Caffarello to come before him, and bade them kiss one another, and promised them a fine of 2,000 ducats in case they renewed this strife, and two days after Antonio was stabbed by the same Giacomo Alberino, son of Giovanni, who had wounded him once before; and the Pope was full of anger, and confiscated the goods of Alberino, and destroyed his houses, and banished father and son from Rome.’[994] The oaths and ceremonies by which reconciled enemies attempted to guard themselves against a relapse, are sometimes utterly horrible. When the parties of the ‘Nove’ and the ‘Popolari’ met and kissed one another by twos in the cathedral at Siena on Christmas Eve, 1494,[995] an oath was read by which all salvation in time and eternity was denied to the future violator of the treaty—‘an oath more astonishing and dreadful than had ever yet been heard.’ The last consolations of religion in the hour of death were to turn to the damnation of the man who should break it. It is clear, however, that such a ceremony rather represents the despairing mood of the mediators than offers any real guarantee of peace, inasmuch as the truest reconciliation is just that one which has least need of it.

This personal need of vengeance felt by the cultivated and highly placed Italian, resting on the solid basis of an analogous  popular custom, naturally displays itself under a thousand different aspects, and receives the unqualified approval of public opinion, as reflected in the works of the novelists.[996] All are at one on the point, that, in the case of those injuries and insults for which Italian justice offered no redress, and all the more in the case of those against which no human law can ever adequately provide, each man is free to take the law into his own hands. Only there must be art in the vengeance, and the satisfaction must be compounded of the material injury and moral humiliation of the offender. A mere brutal, clumsy triumph of force was held by public opinion to be no satisfaction. The whole man with his sense of fame and of scorn, not only his fist, must be victorious.

The Italian of that time shrank, it is true, from no dissimulation in order to attain his ends, but was wholly free from hypocrisy in matters of principle. In these he attempted to deceive neither himself nor others. Accordingly, revenge was declared with perfect frankness to be a necessity of human nature. Cool-headed people declared that it was then most worthy of praise, when it was disengaged from passion, and worked simply from motives of expedience, ‘in order that other men may learn to leave us unharmed.’[997] Yet such instances must have formed only a small minority in comparison with those in which passion sought an outlet. This sort of revenge differs clearly from the avenging of blood, which has been already spoken of; while the latter keeps more or less within the limits of retaliation—the ‘jus talionis’—the former necessarily goes much farther, not only requiring the sanction of the sense of justice, but craving admiration, and even striving to get the laugh on its own side.

Here lies the reason why men were willing to wait so long for their revenge. A ‘bella vendetta’ demanded as a rule a combination of circumstances for which it was necessary to wait patiently. The gradual ripening of such opportunities is described by the novelists with heartfelt delight.

There is no need to discuss the morality of actions in which plaintiff and judge are one and the same person. If this Italian thirst for vengeance is to be palliated at all, it must be by proving the existence of a corresponding national virtue, namely gratitude. The same force of imagination which retains and magnifies wrong once suffered, might be expected also to keep alive the memory of kindness received.[998] It is not possible, however, to prove this with regard to the nation as a whole, though traces of it may be seen in the Italian character of to-day. The gratitude shown by the inferior classes for kind treatment, and the good memory of the upper for politeness in social life, are instances of this.

This connexion between the imagination and the moral qualities of the Italian repeats itself continually. If, nevertheless, we find more cold calculation in cases where the Northerner rather follows his impulses, the reason is that individual development in Italy was not only more marked and earlier in point of time, but also far more frequent. Where this is the case in other countries, the results are also analogous. We find, for example, that the early emancipation of the young from domestic and paternal authority is common to North America with Italy. Later on, in the more generous natures, a tie of freer affection grows up between parents and children.

It is in fact a matter of extreme difficulty to judge fairly of other nations in the sphere of character and feeling. In these respects a people may be developed highly, and yet in a manner so strange that a foreigner is utterly unable to understand it. Perhaps all the nations of the West are in this point equally favoured.

(...)

In the imagination then, which governed this people more than any other, lies one general reason why the course of every passion was violent, and why the means used for the gratification of passion were often criminal. There is a violence which cannot control itself because it is born of weakness; but in Italy what we find is the corruption of powerful natures. Sometimes this corruption assumes a colossal shape, and crime seems to acquire almost a personal existence of its own.

The restraints of which men were conscious were but few. Each individual, even among the lowest of the people, felt himself inwardly emancipated from the control of the State and its police, whose title to respect was illegitimate, and itself founded on violence; and no man believed any longer in the justice of the law. When a murder was committed, the sympathies of the people, before the circumstances of the case were known, ranged themselves instinctively on the side of the murderer.[1005] A proud, manly bearing before and at the execution excited such admiration that the narrator often forgets to tell us for what offence the criminal was put to death.[1006] But when we add to this inward contempt of law and to the countless grudges and enmities which called for satisfaction, the impunity which crime enjoyed during times of political disturbance, we can only wonder that the state and society were not utterly dissolved. Crises of this kind occurred at Naples during the transition from the Aragonese to the French and Spanish rule, and at Milan, on the repeated expulsions and returns of the Sforzas; at such times those men who have never in their hearts recognised the bonds of law and society, come forward and give free play to their instincts of murder and rapine. Let us take, by way of example, a picture drawn from a humbler sphere.

When the Duchy of Milan was suffering from the disorders which followed the death of Giangaleazzo Sforza, about the year 1480 (pp. 40, 126), all safety came to an end in the provincial cities. This was the case in Parma,[1007] where the Milanese Governor, terrified by threats of murder, and after vainly offering rewards for the discovery of the offenders,  consented to throw open the gaols and let loose the most abandoned criminals. Burglary, the demolition of houses, shameless offences against decency, public assassination and murders, especially of Jews, were events of everyday occurrence. At first the authors of these deeds prowled about singly, and masked; soon large gangs of armed men went to work every night without disguise. Threatening letters, satires, and scandalous jests circulated freely; and a sonnet in ridicule of the Government seems to have roused its indignation far more than the frightful condition of the city. In many churches the sacred vessels with the host were stolen, and this fact is characteristic of the temper which prompted these outrages. It is impossible to say what would happen now in any country of the world, if the government and police ceased to act, and yet hindered by their presence the establishment of a provisional authority; but what then occurred in Italy wears a character of its own, through the great share which personal hatred and revenge had in it. The impression, indeed, which Italy at this period makes on us is, that even in quiet times great crimes were commoner than in other countries. We may, it is true, be misled by the fact that we have far fuller details on such matters here than elsewhere, and that the same force of imagination, which gives a special character to crimes actually committed, causes much to be invented which never really happened. The amount of violence was perhaps as great elsewhere. It is hard to say for certain, whether in the year 1500 men were any safer, whether human life was after all better protected, in powerful, wealthy Germany, with its robber knights, extortionate beggars, and daring highwaymen. But one thing is certain, that premeditated crimes, committed professionally and for hire by third parties, occurred in Italy with great and appalling frequency.

So far as regards brigandage, Italy, especially in the more fortunate provinces, such as Tuscany, was certainly not more, and probably less, troubled than the countries of the North. But the figures which do meet us are characteristic of the country. It would be hard, for instance, to find elsewhere the case of a priest, gradually driven by passion from one excess to another, till at last he came to head a band of robbers. That  age offers us this example among others.[1008] On August 12, 1495, the priest Don Niccolò de’ Pelegati of Figarolo was shut up in an iron cage outside the tower of San Giuliano at Ferrara. He had twice celebrated his first mass; the first time he had the same day committed murder, but afterwards received absolution at Rome; he then killed four people and married two wives, with whom he travelled about. He afterwards took part in many assassinations, violated women, carried others away by force, plundered far and wide, and infested the territory of Ferrara with a band of followers in uniform, extorting food and shelter by every sort of violence. When we think of what all this implies, the mass of guilt on the head of this one man is something tremendous. The clergy and monks had many privileges and little supervision, and among them were doubtless plenty of murderers and other malefactors—but hardly a second Pelegati. It is another matter, though by no means creditable, when ruined characters sheltered themselves in the cowl in order to escape the arm of the law, like the corsair whom Massuccio knew in a convent at Naples.[1009] What the real truth was with regard to Pope John XXIII. in this respect, is not known with certainty.[1010]The age of the famous brigand chief did not begin till later, in the seventeenth century, when the political strife of Guelph and Ghibelline, of Frenchman and Spaniard, no longer agitated the country. The robber then took the place of the partisan.

In certain districts of Italy, where civilization had made little progress, the country people were disposed to murder any stranger who fell into their hands. This was especially the case in the more remote parts of the Kingdom of Naples, where  the barbarism dated probably from the days of the Roman ‘latifundia,’ and when the stranger and the enemy (‘hospes’ and ‘hostis’) were in all good faith held to be one and the same. These people were far from being irreligious. A herdsman once appeared in great trouble at the confessional, avowing that, while making cheese during Lent, a few drops of milk had found their way into his mouth. The confessor, skilled in the customs of the country, discovered in the course of his examination that the penitent and his friends were in the practice of robbing and murdering travellers, but that, through the force of habit, this usage gave rise to no twinges of conscience within them.[1011] We have already mentioned (p. 352, note 3) to what a degree of barbarism the peasants elsewhere could sink in times of political confusion.

A worse symptom than brigandage of the morality of that time was the frequency of paid assassination. In that respect Naples was admitted to stand at the head of all the cities of Italy. ‘Nothing,’ says Pontano,[1012] ‘is cheaper here than human life.’ But other districts could also show a terrible list of these crimes. It is hard, of course, to classify them according to the motives by which they were prompted, since political expediency, personal hatred, party hostility, fear, and revenge, all play into one another. It is no small honour to the Florentines, the most highly-developed people of Italy, that offences of this kind occurred more rarely among them than anywhere else,[1013] perhaps because there was a justice at hand for legitimate grievances which was recognised by all, or because the higher culture of the individual gave him different views as to the right of men to interfere with the decrees of fate. In Florence, if anywhere, men were able to feel the incalculable con sequences of a deed of blood, and to understand how insecure the author of a so-called profitable crime is of any true and lasting gain. After the fall of Florentine liberty, assassination, especially by hired agents, seems to have rapidly increased, and continued till the government of Cosimo I. had attained such strength that the police[1014] was at last able to repress it.

Elsewhere in Italy paid crimes were probably more or less frequent in proportion to the number of powerful and solvent buyers. Impossible as it is to make any statistical estimate of their amount, yet if only a fraction of the deaths which public report attributed to violence were really murders, the crime must have been terribly frequent. The worst example of all was set by princes and governments, who without the faintest scruple reckoned murder as one of the instruments of their power. And this, without being in the same category with Cæsar Borgia. The Sforzas, the Aragonese monarchs, the Republic of Venice,[1015] and later on, the agents of Charles V. resorted to it whenever it suited their purpose. The imagination of the people at last became so accustomed to facts of this kind, that the death of any powerful man was seldom or never attributed to natural causes.[1016] There were certainly absurd notions current with regard to the effect of various poisons. There may be some truth in the story of that terrible white powder used by the Borgias, which did its work at the end of a definite period (p. 116), and it is possible that it was really a ‘velenum atterminatum’ which the Prince of Salerno handed to the Cardinal of Aragon, with the words: ‘In a few days you will die, because your father, King Ferrante, wished to trample upon us all.’[1017] But the poisoned letter which Caterina Riario sent to Pope Alexander VI.[1018] would hardly have caused his death even if he had read it; and when Alfonso the Great was warned by his physicians not to read in the ‘Livy’ which Cosimo de’ Medici had presented to him, he told them with justice not to talk like fools.[1019] Nor can that poison, with which the secretary of Piccinino wished to anoint the sedan-chair of Pius II.,[1020] have affected any other organ than the imagination. The proportion which mineral and vegetable poisons bore to one another cannot be ascertained precisely. The poison with which the painter Rosso Fiorentino destroyed himself (1541) was evidently a powerful acid,[1021] which it would have been impossible to administer to another person without his knowledge. The secret use of weapons, especially of the dagger, in the service of powerful individuals, was habitual in Milan, Naples, and other cities. Indeed, among the crowds of armed retainers who were necessary for the personal safety of the great, and who lived in idleness, it was natural that outbreaks of this mania for blood should from time to time occur. Many  a deed of horror would never have been committed, had not the master known that he needed but to give a sign to one or other of his followers.

Among the means used for the secret destruction of others—so far, that is, as the intention goes—we find magic,[1022] practised, however, sparingly. Where ‘maleficii,’ ‘malie,’ and so forth, are mentioned, they appear rather as a means of heaping up additional terror on the head of some hated enemy. At the courts of France and England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, magic, practised with a view to the death of an opponent, plays a far more important part in Italy.

In this country, finally, where individuality of every sort attained its highest development, we find instances of that ideal and absolute wickedness which delights in crimes for their own sake, and not as means to an end, or at any rate as means to ends for which our psychology has no measure.

Among these appalling figures we may first notice certain of the ‘Condottieri,’[1023] such as Braccio di Montone, Tiberto Brandolino, and that Werner von Urslingen whose silver hauberk bore the inscription: ‘The enemy of God, of pity and of mercy.’ This class of men offers us some of the earliest instances of criminals deliberately repudiating every moral restraint. Yet we shall be more reserved in our judgment of them when we remember that the worst part of their guilt—in the estimate of those who record it—lay in their defiance of spiritual threats and penalties, and that to this fact is due that air of horror with which they are represented as surrounded. In the case of Braccio, the hatred of the Church went so far that he was infuriated at the sight of monks at their psalms,  and had thrown them down from the top of a tower;[1024] but at the same time ‘he was loyal to his soldiers and a great general.’ As a rule, the crimes of the ‘Condottieri’ were committed for the sake of some definite advantage, and must be attributed to a position in which men could not fail to be demoralised. Even their apparently gratuitous cruelty had commonly a purpose, if it were only to strike terror. The barbarities of the House of Aragon, as we have seen, were mainly due to fear and to the desire for vengeance. The thirst for blood on its own account, the devilish delight in destruction, is most clearly exemplified in the case of the Spaniard Cæsar Borgia, whose cruelties were certainly out of all proportion to the end which he had in view (p. 114 sqq.). In Sigismondo Malatesta, tyrant of Rimini (pp. 32, 228), the same disinterested love of evil may also be detected. It is not only the Court of Rome,[1025] but the verdict of history, which convicts him of murder, rape, adultery, incest, sacrilege, perjury and treason, committed not once but often. The most shocking crime of all—the unnatural attempt on his own son Roberto, who frustrated it with his drawn dagger,[1026]—may have been the result, not merely of moral corruption, but perhaps of some magical or astrological superstition. The same conjecture has been made to account for the rape of the Bishop of Fano[1027] by Pierluigi Farnese of Parma, son of Paul III.

If we now attempt to sum up the principal features in the Italian character of that time, as we know it from a study of the life of the upper classes, we shall obtain something like the following result. The fundamental vice of this character was at the same time a condition of its greatness, namely, excessive individualism. The individual first inwardly casts off the  authority of a state which, as a fact, is in most cases tyrannical and illegitimate, and what he thinks and does is, rightly or wrongly, now called treason. The sight of victorious egoism in others drives him to defend his own right by his own arm. And, while thinking to restore his inward equilibrium, he falls, through the vengeance which he executes, into the hands of the powers of darkness. His love, too, turns mostly for satisfaction to another individuality equally developed, namely, to his neighbour’s wife. In face of all objective facts, of laws and restraints of whatever kind, he retains the feeling of his own sovereignty, and in each single instance forms his decision independently, according as honour or interest, passion or calculation, revenge or renunciation, gain the upper hand in his own mind.

If therefore egoism in its wider as well as narrower sense is the root and fountain of all evil, the more highly developed Italian was for this reason more inclined to wickedness than the member of other nations of that time.

But this individual development did not come upon him through any fault of his own, but rather through an historical necessity. It did not come upon him alone, but also, and chiefly by means of Italian culture, upon the other nations of Europe, and has constituted since then the higher atmosphere which they breathe. In itself it is neither good nor bad, but necessary; within it has grown up a modern standard of good and evil—a sense of moral responsibility—which is essentially different from that which was familiar to the Middle Ages.

But the Italian of the Renaissance had to bear the first mighty surging of a new age. Through his gifts and his passions, he has become the most characteristic representative of all the heights and all the depths of his time. By the side of profound corruption appeared human personalities of the noblest harmony, and an artistic splendour which shed upon the life of man a lustre which neither antiquity nor mediævalism either could or would bestow upon it.

The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, 

by Jacob Burckhardt

Leon Battista Alberti

 But among these many-sided men, some who may truly be called all-sided, tower above the rest. Before analysing the general phases of life and culture of this period, we may here, on the threshold of the fifteenth century, consider for a moment the figure of one of these giants—Leon Battista Alberti (b. 1404? d. 1472).[306] His biography,[307] which is only a fragment, speaks of him but little as an artist, and makes no mention at all of his great significance in the history of architecture. We shall now see what he was, apart from these special claims to distinction.

In all by which praise is won, Leon Battista was from his childhood the first. Of his various gymnastic feats and exercises we read with astonishment how, with his feet together, he could spring over a man’s head; how, in the cathedral, he threw a coin in the air till it was heard to ring against the distant roof; how the wildest horses trembled under him. In three things he desired to appear faultless to others, in walking, in riding, and in speaking. He learned music without a master, and yet his compositions were admired by professional judges. Under the pressure of poverty, he studied both civil and canonical law for many years, till exhaustion brought on a  severe illness. In his twenty-fourth year, finding his memory for words weakened, but his sense of facts unimpaired, he set to work at physics and mathematics. And all the while he acquired every sort of accomplishment and dexterity, cross-examining artists, scholars, and artisans of all descriptions, down to the cobblers, about the secrets and peculiarities of their craft. Painting and modelling he practised by the way, and especially excelled in admirable likenesses from memory. Great admiration was excited by his mysterious ‘camera obscura,’[308] in which he showed at one time the stars and the moon rising over rocky hills, at another wide landscapes with mountains and gulfs receding into dim perspective, and with fleets advancing on the waters in shade or sunshine. And that which others created he welcomed joyfully, and held every human achievement which followed the laws of beauty for something almost divine.[309] To all this must be added his literary works, first of all those on art, which are landmarks and authorities of the first order for the Renaissance of Form, especially in architecture; then his Latin prose writings—novels and other works—of which some have been taken for productions of antiquity; his elegies, eclogues, and humorous dinner-speeches. He also wrote an Italian treatise on domestic life[310] in four books; various moral, philosophical, and historical works; and many speeches and poems, including a funeral oration on his dog. Notwithstanding his admiration for the Latin language, he wrote in Italian, and encouraged others to do the same; himself a disciple of Greek science, he maintained the doctrine, that without Christianity the world would wander in a labyrinth of error. His serious and witty sayings were thought worth collecting, and specimens of them, many columns long, are quoted in his biography. And all that he had and knew he  imparted, as rich natures always do, without the least reserve, giving away his chief discoveries for nothing. But the deepest spring of his nature has yet to be spoken of—the sympathetic intensity with which he entered into the whole life around him. At the sight of noble trees and waving corn-fields he shed tears; handsome and dignified old men he honoured as ‘a delight of nature,’ and could never look at them enough. Perfectly-formed animals won his goodwill as being specially favoured by nature; and more than once, when he was ill, the sight of a beautiful landscape cured him.[311] No wonder that those who saw him in this close and mysterious communion with the world ascribed to him the gift of prophecy. He was said to have foretold a bloody catastrophe in the family of Este, the fate of Florence, and the death of the Popes years before they happened, and to be able to read into the countenances and the hearts of men. It need not be added that an iron will pervaded and sustained his whole personality; like all the great men of the Renaissance, he said, ‘Men can do all things if they will.’

And Lionardo da Vinci was to Alberti as the finisher to the beginner, as the master to the dilettante. Would only that Vasari’s work were here supplemented by a description like that of Alberti! The colossal outlines of Lionardo’s nature can never be more than dimly and distantly conceived.

[306] For what follows compare Burckhardt, Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien, Stuttg. 1868, esp. p. 41 sqq., and A. Springer, Abhandlungen zur neueren Kunstgeschichte, Bonn, 1867, pp. 69-102. A new biography of Alberti is in course of preparation by Hub. Janitschek.

[307] In Murat. xxv. col. 295 sqq., with the Italian translation in the Opere Volgari di L. B. Alberti, vol. i. pp. lxxxix-cix, where the conjecture is made and shown to be probable that this ‘Vita’ is by Alberti himself. See, further, Vasari, iv. 52 sqq. Mariano Socini, if we can believe what we read of him in Æn. Sylvius (Opera, p. 622, Epist. 112) was a universal dilettante, and at the same time a master in several subjects.

[308] Similar attempts, especially an attempt at a flying-machine, had been made about 880 by the Andalusian Abul Abbas Kasim ibn Firnas. Comp. Gyangos, The History of the Muhammedan Dynasties in Spain (London, 1840), i. 148 sqq. and 425-7; extracts in Hammer, Literaturgesch. der Araber, i. Introd. p. li.

[309] Quidquid ingenio esset hominum cum quadam effectum elegantia, id prope divinum ducebat.

[310] This is the book (comp. p. 185, note 2) of which one part, often printed alone, long passed for a work of Pandolfini.

The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, by 

Jacob Burckhardt