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Nov. 18, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
57:54
1790 The Origins of War in Child Abuse - Chapter 10 - Patriarchal Families and National Wars

Chapter 10 of 'The Origins of War in Child Abuse' by Lloyd DeMause.

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The Origins of War in Child Abuse by Lloyd DeMoss read by Stephen Molyneux of Freedomain Radio Chapter 10 Patriarchal Families and National Wars Let me have a war, say I. It exceeds peace as far as day does night.
William Shakespeare Coriolanus The evolution of the family, from the medieval killer mother-dominated Gynarchy, to the punishing patriarchal dominated nuclear family, took place during the 16th to 18th centuries.
Because mothers began to abuse their children somewhat less by the sixteenth century, men could grow up less afraid of females, and need not fear approaching the kitchen full of women.
So fathers stopped living in separate quarters, and reduced their having sex with concubines, and established for the first time constant patriarchal dominance of wives and children.
Paternal love was still missing, but fathers spent much more time with their wives and children, beating and torturing them daily, but also eating meals with them and teaching them that fathers are divinely chosen to rule the family and the nation.
The historical connections between paternal dominance and national dominance are detailed by psychohistorian Christian Lackner.
Maternal infanticide continues into modern nations.
Although the facts of maternal infanticide are widely denied by most family historians, my research into early modern diaries, letters and census figures on boy-girl ratios shows that infanticide was still routine for families until the 19th century.
As late as nineteenth-century England, children regularly reported things like, My mother confessed she was under a strong temptation to cut my throat with her scissors.
And children like Leopardi said his mother, quote, Experienced a deep happiness when she saw the death of one of our infants approaching.
Since infants were still routinely given to wet nurses and foundling homes that had death rates of up to 70%, the usual claim that society tried to stop infanticide is quite incorrect.
Doctors of the time agreed that, quote,"...the most profound cause of the terrific waste of infant life is neglect, by their own mothers and by the nurses to whom they were abandoned." In many Italian cities in the 19th century, up to 40% of the newborn were abandoned to foundling homes.
Laws against infanticide were rarely prosecuted, and wealthy families actually had higher infant mortality rates than farmers and craftsmen.
Parents regularly said, Ah, when children die, there's no need to get excited.
One is born every year.
Crushing the head of a newborn wasn't thought wrong since it, quote, wasn't really born, it wasn't human yet.
Even by the nineteenth century, it was not uncommon to see the corpses of infants lying in the streets or on the dunghills of London and other large cities.
Infanticide by exposure was not a criminal offence in most areas.
Adrienne Rich calls maternal infanticide, quote, the most common crime in Western Europe down to the end of the 18th century.
The results of the slowing of infanticide during the 18th century can be seen by the increase in population growth during the century.
In response, by the early 19th century, measurable European infant mortality rates had dropped to under 5%.
That sending one's newborn to what were called killing nurses was equivalent to infanticide as proven, by studies showing as high as 80% of wet-nursed French children died during the 19th century, and by census figures showing less than 10% of the children born in Paris were nursed by their own mothers, the rest being picked up by child peddlers who strapped them into carts like sardines and carried them off without food to distant peasant families.
Fathers, too, backed the sending of newborns to wet nurses, especially since it was believed that nursing mothers should not have sexual intercourse because it spoiled their milk.
After they were sent out to a wet nurse, the parents, quote, seldom inquired about the survival of their infants.
Wet nursing was so pervasive among all classes that cities like Paris and Lyon literally became cities without babies.
Since the wet nurses had to make a living, they tightly swaddled the babies and hung them on a peg in the kitchen while they worked in the fields.
When children were returned in a few years from a wet nurse, mothers are regularly reported as saying things like, quote,"'What have you brought me here, this goggle-eyed, splatter-faced, gabbard-mouthed wretch is not my child?
Take her away!' John Locke praised a mother who, when she first saw her daughter return from a wet nurse, was, quote,"...forced to whip her little daughter eight times successively the same morning upon coming home from nurse, before she could master her stubbornness." Even supposed reformers abandoned their children.
Rousseau, who became famous for saying that mothers should nurse their children, sent all five of his own children to foundling homes, He also declared that, quote, Woman is made specially to please man and to be subjugated.
Plus, after the child was returned to its family, it was usually sent, after a few years, to other abusive families for fosterage, adoption, apprenticeship, or service.
Nelson reported in 1752, in his essay on the government of children, quote, Parents, especially fathers, who do not love the noise or any other of the inconveniences attending the care of children, send them at once into the country.
Talleyrand wasn't that unusual in stating that he, quote, had never slept under the same roof with his father and mother.
U.S. infanticide only declined in the 19th century as birth rates fell from over seven children per white couple in 1800 to less than four in 1900.
The earliest advanced nation in maternal breastfeeding was 18th century colonial America, where mothers began to listen to writers who, quote, harshly criticized women who declined their maternal duty, and, like Jefferson's mother, did not send their infants to a wet nurse, but raised them themselves.
The result was the closeness between U.S. parents and their children that made European visitors complain American children were, quote, spoiled domestic tyrants, and led to the world's first democratic revolution based on respect and human rights.
Swaddling of Children in Modern Times The basic problem with the tight swaddling of infants, which continued well into the 18th century, was not just that swaddled babies were trapped in their feces and urine and covered with parasites.
It was even more important that all infants from birth need to follow the eyes and movements of their caretakers in order to develop their mirror neurons so they can have empathetic interpersonal relations.
The brains of swaddled children are black holes and have a lifelong deficit of oxytocin and serotonin and an oversupply of cortisol, the stress hormone, such that for the rest of their lives they are in a continuous state of anxiety and rage and have a lack of social capabilities.
Since swaddled babies withdraw into themselves and require it, many physicians still advocate swaddling them, quote, if they are too demanding.
Parental love simply could not develop in families that swaddled.
Observers regularly noted that, quote, children could not hope for the slightest caress from the mother or father.
Fear was the foundation upon which the upbringing of children was based.
Particularly among aristocrats, the emotional relationship was very cold.
A caress is rare and seems a favour.
Children, generally, when with their parents, are silent, the sentiment that usually animates them being of deferential timidity.
Most parents agreed with the French musician and mathematician Van Darmand, in 1756, who admitted, One blushes to think of loving one's children.
Tight swaddling continued in Europe and America into the 18th century, in Central Europe into the early 20th century, and is still practiced in some parts of Eastern Europe and Russia.
Mothers claimed their newborn infants were, quote, so vicious that if you left them free they would rule their parents.
In France, quote, After 1760 publications abounded advising mothers to take care of their children personally and ordering them to breastfeed.
Gradually she abandoned the custom of swaddling clothes, the peasant classes maintained the practice longer.
Only when the infant was not swaddled could it begin to develop its relations with its mother.
Freed from this armor, the child could play with her, clutch at her, touch her, and get to know her.
Affection and physical contact between the mother and child were finally possible.
How Fathers Ruled the Patriarchal Family by Beating Pre-modern families existed primarily for the purpose of acquiring, holding, and transmitting property.
When fathers took over the family in early modern states, they began to spend more time with their families, donning masculinity masks to defend against their inner insecurities and dominating and physically abusing their wives and children.
The early modern father dominated his wife continuously, since everyone agreed that, quote, wives are the first servants in the household.
They plough the soil, care for the house, and eat after their husbands, who address them only in harsh, curt tones, even with a sort of contempt.
Patriarchal fathers considered their children from their earliest years as theirs to beat.
As with this British father, A gentleman was playing with his child of a year old, who began to cry.
He ordered silence.
The child did not obey.
The father then began to whip it, but this terrified the child and increased its cries.
The father thought the child would be ruined unless it was made to yield, and renewed his chastisement with increased severity.
On undressing it, a pin was discovered sticking into its back.
This need to hit babies for discipline still is often found in England.
Tony Blair recently admitted on television that he hit his one-year-old baby to discipline him, explaining that I had to hit him because he could not talk.
In patriarchal families it was often claimed that the father's task is to teach children to obey their mothers.
But more often it was instant obedience to the father that was the goal of his beatings.
Both wives and children were treated by fathers as slaves.
Fathers came out of their own abusive childhoods fearing they were not really men.
Until the nineteenth century, boys were dressed like girls in long gowns and petticoats until age six.
Men feared that women would again dominate them like their mothers did, and so they experienced both their relationship with their children and spouses as a masculinity crisis that required them to demonstrate their power, their toughness, just as going to war was a masculinity mask that allowed men to display our firmness with a stiffening of the national will.
As Kant declared, wars are needed because prolonged peace favors effeminacy.
Early American colonists enacted stubborn child laws which gave farthest the right to kill children who were beyond their ability to control.
Early Protestants rushed to impose patriarchal rule in the home and break the will of the child.
Beatings in the early modern period were usually done with instruments, whips, shovels, canes, iron rods, cat o' nine tails, and razor straps.
Only by the 1870s did it for the first time become unlawful in the U.S. to beat your wife.
It is still lawful, 130 years later, to beat your children in most nations around the world, including the U.S. Fathers particularly were convinced that their children must be made tough,
so they inflicted many brutal, hardening practices on them to assure this, dipping them in ice-cold baths, throwing them into snowbanks and icy rivers, making them wear iron collars around their neck with backboards strapped over their shoulders, forcing girls to wear exceptionally tight corsets, etc. All, quote, to conquer their will and bring them to an obedient temper.
Early Protestant fathers were especially dominating.
Calvin decreed,"'Those children who violate parental authority are monstrous.
Therefore the Lord commands all those who are disobedient to their parents to be put to death.' Luther may have been one of the first fathers to spend time with and to teach his children, but because his mother had thrashed him, quote, until his blood flowed, he also beat his own children, and his teaching goal was mainly to show them, from the Bible, how sinful their every act was.
The same goal of undoing sinfulness was seen in the 18th century in the relationship between spouses.
Luther claimed his wife Kate only existed as a housewife and mother, saying, quote, Take women from their housewifery, and they are good for nothing.
Nor did women ask for any rights for themselves.
Hannah Moore warned in 1799 that, quote, If the rights of women were demanded, next we will be bombarded by the rights of youth, the rights of children, and the rights of babies, and the family would quickly fall apart.
It became an issue in England by the eighteenth century.
What to call your spouse?
The adoption of first names between spouses rather than sir and madam was practiced for the first time.
Saying, I love you, was first allowed, and the term companionate marriage was introduced as a possibility.
Although upper-class husbands still kept mistresses and lower-class men still visited prostitutes regularly, during the late eighteenth century wives began to be less indifferent to the adulteries of their husbands.
Fathers were instructed not to act in anger when beating their children and wives, and should precede their blows with a clear explanation of their offense and God's opposition to their behavior.
Even children of nobility were beaten daily.
Louis XIII was, quote, beaten mercilessly on waking in the morning.
He was beaten on the buttocks by his nurse with a bush or a switch.
His father whipped him himself when in a rage.
Children were also regularly beaten by their teachers, since it was believed that fear is good for putting the child in the mood to hear and to understand.
A child cannot quickly forget what he has learned in fear.
A nineteenth-century teacher described classes of the time.
Whoever taught the children to read would grab their shirts about the shoulders, then hold the book in one hand, the rod in the other, ready to flail away at the slightest oversight.
British schools were particularly famous for their erotic flagellation beatings, where a teacher forces students to unbutton their trousers, push them down, show everything, and receive the whip in the middle of the class.
One German teacher bragged he had given 911,527 strokes with the stick, 124,000 lashes with the whip, and 136,715 slaps with the hand.
It is not until late in the nineteenth century, with the advent of the socializing mode of child-rearing, that Elizabeth Pleck, in her massive study of American family violence, could find a few parents who did not hit their children.
Mothers in nineteenth-century America were urged by John Abbott to smile, care, and reward their children.
But when kindness fails, let not the mother hesitate for a moment to punish as severely as is necessary.
In America and Britain recently, the majority of children are still hit in their early years, with mothers doing the hitting far more often than fathers.
By 1992, over 90% of Americans hit their young children, dropping to 57% by 1999.
Over 20 other nations have recently passed laws outlawing the hitting of children, even by parents.
Family historians carefully record all the daily beatings and tortures, but then conclude, like Colin Haywood in his book A History of Childhood, historians have come to the conclusion that practices that appear abusive today, such as repeated whippings, were motivated by love.
Other family historians have simply denied that what they repeatedly discovered was representative.
As Alan Valentine concluded after examining six hundred years of letters from fathers to sons without finding a single piece of evidence of warmth or empathy, doubtless an infinite number of fathers have written to their sons letters that would warm and lift our hearts if we could only find them.
The happiest fathers leave no history.
Whippings came, of course, from what parents felt was a moral necessity to form their character, not only from anger.
If the mother could not spare the time to beat her child, she could hire a professional flagellant who advertised their child beating services in newspaper ads.
Or she could hire a Gardeville to whip her three children once a week, naughty or not.
It is no surprise that most people agree that the dominant personality type in early modern times was the depressive, and literature from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy to Shakespeare's Hamlet told how melancholy is the malaise of the age.
What I call intrusive mode parents actually felt closer to their children than previous mode parents.
Rather than mostly rejection, they convey to their children the message that, you are bad and I must beat you, but if you admit it and subject your inner life to total control by me, I will allow you to feel closer to me.
In paternal families, both wives and children were allowed, for the first time, to eat at the same table as their fathers, rather than just being made to wait upon them, as in earlier periods.
Family dinners were occasions for family prayer, where fathers reviewed at length the sins of each of his children.
Fathers routinely beat their wives until well into the twentieth century, even in more advanced nations.
Jean Baudin spoke of the husband's power over the wife as the source and origin of every human society.
The wives were brought up to expect being beaten without complaining.
As the mother in Little Women puts it, I am angry nearly every day of my life, but I have learned not to show it.
John Wesley told wives, they must constantly think, my husband is my superior, he has the right to rule over me, God has given it to him.
Kuntz convincingly shows that only by the late 19th century were girls encouraged to marry for intimacy rather than for obedience.
Some girls were given education earlier than this, but not until the late 19th century were most females taught to read more than a few Psalms and a bit of Holy Scripture.
In fact, most females were barred from regular attendance in grammar schools and universities in European nations until well into the 19th century.
The first public elementary schools in England were in 1833, and only in 1880 was attendance compulsory.
Nineteenth-century books for girls taught, You must submit yourselves to your husbands as unto the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church.
In schools, girls were mainly taught wife work, how to do housekeeping and weaving, how to keep her place, and how to avoid making her spouse feel less clever than her.
The father's main task was to teach his boys that, to become a man, he must shift his attachment away from his mother, and eventually learn the disparage qualities that are feminine.
The Ubiquity of Sexual Assault of Children When Freud found that so many of his patients reported to him having been sexually abused in childhood, he himself remembered being seduced by his nurse when he was two, he was only rediscovering what was well known, although rarely discussed, in earlier times.
From the widespread paternal incest and pimping of sons of 15th century Italy to the excuse given by British abusers in 1900 that they simply have to have intercourse with little children because that was the only way they could be cured of venereal disease.
The sexual abuse of children was rarely objected to, and even more rarely, prosecuted.
When Beatrice Webb wrote that sexual abuse of young girls by their fathers and brothers was so common that British girls often joked with each other about their babies being products of incest, they were confirming what most knew—that paternal incest was quite common well into the nineteenth century.
Even when a British study in 1991 found 45% of girls and 30% of boys admitting to remembering having been sexually abused as children, the actual rates being much higher due to underreporting and repression.
British doctors surveyed at that time said they thought the sexual abuse rate was probably less than 1%.
Similarly, US rates derived from Russell's careful interviews, when corrected for underreporting, was 40% for girls and 30% for boys, almost half directly incestuous for girls and about a quarter incestuous for boys.
About half of the perpetrators lived under the same roof as their victims, as fathers, uncles, brothers and stepfathers, With about half the assaults being perpetuated on children under seven.
Sexual abuse of little children is still routine in the rest of the world, starting with Asian maternal masturbation of little children from India to Japan.
The diary of Louis XIII's pediatrician makes it clear that, as Philippe Arise puts it, quote,"...the practice of playing with children's privy parts formed part of a widespread tradition." Arise, of course, like most historians, called the routine sexual use of little Lewis only a game whose scabrous nature we should beware of exaggerating.
Family beds were the usual practice everywhere in the world until well into the nineteenth century, so children were always in some measure part of parental intercourse.
When in 1908 incest was finally made a criminal offense in England, it was considered a minor felony, rarely prosecuted.
In addition, the widespread practice of parents choosing the spouses of their little girls was in fact a very popular form of sexual abuse, since forcing them to marry a stranger at ages 10 to 12 was actually rape.
Most U.S. states until the end of the 19th century set the age of legal marriage at 10 to 12.
Fathers in the past were the main perpetrators of rape.
The figure given by Debbie Taylor that today over 100 million young girls are, quote, being raped by adult men, usually their fathers, often day after day, year in, year out, is staggering, but is dwarfed by the billions of children raped and otherwise sexually molested around the world over the past few centuries.
The sexual abuse of children is less motivated by erotic desires than by the need to assault, to hurt, to dominate.
For instance, gang rapes of girls were commonly considered public performances and thought by others to be harmless initiation rites.
Parents freely allowed and even encouraged servants, nursemaids, nannies and teachers to use their children sexually.
Louis XIII entire court would sometimes line up at his bed and, quote, kiss his cock.
The king and queen and their servants would undress him and his sister and bring them naked in bed for sexual games.
So that Louis could accurately report, quote, Mercier has a cunt as big as that, showing his two fists, saying, there's a lot of water inside.
Many schools allowed the rape of boys, as in British public schools into the nineteenth century, where the rape of boys with the full knowledge and collusion, even the approval of their elders, where older boys and even teachers had younger boys as their bitches to use sexually.
Most child-raping was done with the collusion of parents.
Mothers rented out rooms to boarders and offered their daughters to sleep with them.
Children were loaned to overnight guests as an act of hospitality.
Children in London were sent out by the thousands by their mothers onto the streets as prostitutes.
And children as young as six were openly offered for sale and sexual use by public advertisements in most cities of Europe.
Doctors well into the nineteenth century thought having sexual intercourse with three-year-old girls was a good idea because it was, quote, instructive to familiarize them with carnal matters.
As Anna Clark puts it, men seemed to regard rape as a trivial issue.
Even twentieth-century sexologists considered pederasty positively.
There is no shame in being a pederast or a rapist if one is satisfied.
Edwards and Masters It is difficult to understand why a child should be disturbed at having its genitalia touched.
Kinsey Incest can be a satisfying and enriching experience.
Pomeroy Physicians were long familiar with young children with venereal diseases.
Most resisted making any explicit connection between venereal diseases in children and sexual contact with adults, even when the disease existed in the immediate family.
Not until psychohistorian Karen Taylor analyzed hundreds of the medical journals of 19th century physicians and showed that even though the physicians assumed innocent causes for the children's venereal diseases, there had to be intimate direct sexual contact with the diseased genital area of the adult, usually the father, So that she strongly concluded that the children with venereal disease were in fact victims of sexual abuse.
The belief that one could cure venereal disease by means of sexual intercourse with children was of course one of the main underlying motivations for the frequency of paternal abuse, in addition to the need of fathers to prove their masculinity.
Advancing from Monarchical States to Democratic Nations The monarchies of the sixteenth century consciously repeated the husband's domination of the paternal family.
As King James put it in 1603,"'I am the husband, and the whole island is my lawful wife.' As the brutal, intrusive mode bond between father and child was established, the authoritarian family and the authoritarian nation-state were the solutions to an intolerable sense of anxiety and a deep yearning for order.
The state, and the king, like the father, could do no wrong, and state sovereigns could summon standing armies and levy permanent taxes, unlike earlier regents who had to go begging from town to town to obtain local grants.
Before states could supplant local lords and create nations, they had to develop governments that have monopolies over the legitimate use of physical force throughout the country, to keep order, to build roads, to deliver basic services.
Nations are termed imagined communities by Benedict Anderson, emphasizing that they are not ethnic groups or single-language communities.
All these advances were made possible by an increase in trust within the family, extended to the nation.
Even when kings shared power with the Parliamenters in England, the king's prerogative was indisputable in matters involving war and peace.
Kings were said to have two bodies, like the two sexes of a hermaphrodite, combining the domination alters in the brains of their subjects of both mother and father.
Soldiers are told by the kings to fight for la patrie and suffer even death for her.
Where there were early royal parliaments they addressed their humble petitions to the king, but he would then end the matter by saying yes or no.
Monarchs were free to inflict their grandiosity upon both subjects and enemies, experiencing a dopamine high and claiming they had to cleanse them of their evils As their parents had cleansed them of evil.
Homicide rates plunged when modern states began imposing their police power, but deaths by the state nevertheless increased dramatically as wars became far more deadly, with massive conscripted armies replacing hired mercenaries and gunpowder replacing swords.
Memories of maternal infanticide nevertheless remained and were re-experienced during periodic witchcraft epidemics, where women were regularly addressed as monstrous mothers, and young girls had convulsive fits in courts as the devil entered them, while they switched into their memories of their mother's beatings as ghosts from the nursery.
Witches were accused of doing the things mothers actually did, Witches suffocate very small children or kill them by thrusting a needle behind their ear, or they snatch children from the cradle and rend them in pieces.
Sometimes entire villages would go into altar trances together, as when the Benedanti fantasized as they slept, they fought night battles against witches.
It was the developmental new strengths of the intrusive child-rearing mode, not changes in culture, that produced the dramatic historical innovations of the Reformation, humanism, and industrialism.
For instance, what allowed James Watt to invent the modern steam engine was his parents teaching him to read and allowing him to endlessly experiment with the steam kettle for hours every day in his family kitchen, changing the world by his curiosity.
Initially, of course, modern social relationships carried out the paternal authoritarianism of the family.
If child-rearing had been better, early voters would have dominated kings and early workers would have been given corporate board seats along with investors.
But modern states were established under patriarchal domination principles, and industrialization gains in gross national product were constantly offset by increasingly destructive wars, as every strengthening of the fantasy of in-groups was matched by a strengthening of the fantasy of dangerous out-groups.
Between 1530 and 1710, there was a ten-fold increase in the total numbers of armed forces involved in major European battles.
As the interstate system expands in the modern period, strong states tend to fight the strong, and the weak tend to fight the weak.
The stronger two states are, the greater the likelihood of a fight between them.
The common theory of historians that territory is the most important single cause of war between states is meaningless.
It is like saying, school yard bullies usually hit those nearest to them, but never asking why they need to hit.
What is more accurate is their finding that fighting is more prevalent during periods of prosperity rather than periods of stagnation and depression.
Which backs up my theory that wars are motivated by growth panic, progress that triggers the re-enacting of childhood violence.
In fact, no great power wars have started during a depression in the past two centuries.
Mordelsky traces these cycles of war to clusters of innovations introduced into the world, and shows how Portugal was the first pioneer of discoveries, how Britain unleashed the Industrial Revolution, and how both were very war-prone during their most progressive periods.
When outside enemies cannot be found to start wars with, inside groups are imagined as dangerous.
In democratizing Rwanda, Hutus and Tutsis were neighbors, schoolmates, friends, even in-laws, indistinguishable from each other.
But when splitting time came because of growth panic, they slaughtered over a million of their neighbors.
They could only say as a reason that they did it, because their noses were longer, or they were cockroaches, or God said he no longer wanted them.
Their war trance made them completely dissociated.
After they chopped off the arms and heads of their friends, they said, I had been living with these people all these years.
I wasn't afraid of them.
They weren't a threat to me.
But we were told they were enemies, and I believed it.
Just as interesting is the finding that the usual methods of dealing with interstate threats, the making of alliances and the build-up of your military, are actually just provocative results of national grandiosity and lead to wars.
The need for nations to demonstrate our resolve by military build-ups is simply a restaging of parental demonstrations of resolve to use violence against their children, as nations fuse with the punishing parental altars embedded in their amygdala and fear centers.
Only the emotional state of grandiosity experienced by states going into their war trances, caused by the release of dopamine and brain opiates, makes them feel invulnerable.
Usually the periods before wars include wild, apocalyptic group fantasy trance episodes like the Great Awakenings in America in 1858, when daily gatherings of thousands of people in spontaneous prayer meetings took place, where people fell down, saw visions, and went out and destroyed their goods in preparation for the end of the world, as they felt godlike and were cleansed in the fires of war.
In fact, the states that have the least need to go to war are the most likely to start them.
The strongest states are the most war-prone and the most likely to initiate wars.
The average modern nation is at war 20% of the time during the 19th century, compared to pre-state societies which were almost continuously at war.
In my previous book, The Emotional Life of Nations, I presented extensive evidence showing how modern nations regularly go to war four times a century, repeating four national group fantasy phases.
One, innovative phase.
Two, depressed phase.
Three, manic phase.
And four, war phase.
The second phase, that of depressions, takes place periodically between wars as nations become grandiose and engage in more and more self-destructive risky ventures, convinced each time that this time is different Modern nationalism became a religion to replace Christianity,
with the French assembly setting up actual altars to the nation like church altars, with the inscription, The citizen is born, lives, and dies for la patrie.
The national flag and the national anthem become sacred replacements for the cross and for church hymns.
Schools begin to teach patriotism to the nation rather than devotion to the Lord, and new national leaders found that they could more easily increase their popularity by provoking a war than by achieving spiritual or economic gains.
Nations split into parties by child-rearing psychoclasts.
Because nations contain some adults that are advanced, child-rearing modes and others that fall behind and have more abusive childhoods, they split into progressive and reactionary political parties.
While progressives invent more empathic, secure economic and political relationships, reactionaries have been shown to have greater death anxieties, entertain more authoritarian, more apocalyptic group fantasies, see others as sinful and needing punishment, need more military solutions to problems, and are more misogynistic towards females.
The party that speaks with the voice of the punishing parent is termed reactionary because their central focus is to react against progressives, accusing them of being too liberal and not tough enough.
Reactionary psychoclasses have their mirror-neuron networks damaged during childhoods and lack empathy towards others.
Careful studies reveal that they have three times as many nightmares, fear death more, and support wars far more.
The group fantasy cycles described above are periodic phases of domination, of national mood, first by progressive and then by reactionary psychoclasses, with growth of industrialization, civil rights movements, women's suffrage movements, peace movements and other progressive movements being opposed by the majority of the reactionary populace.
Historians usually overlook the child-rearing of progressive and reactionary leaders, but it isn't difficult to trace the origin of their political policies back to their parenting experiences.
In America's last election, for instance, progressive Barack Obama often reported details of the love and affection of his mother and grandmother during his early years, saying, The best thing my mom taught me was empathy, making sure that you can see the world through somebody else's eyes.
In stark contrast, reactionary John McCain described his parents as beating him so hard that he often passed out as he held his breath during the beatings.
He reports that they punished him for holding his breath and passing out by filling the bathtub with ice-cold water and throwing him in while unconscious, fully clothed.
He says, This went on for some time, until I was finally cured.
Whenever I worked myself into a tiny rage, my mother shouted to my father, Get the water!
Moments later I would find myself thrashing, wide-eyed, and gasping for breath in a tub of icy-cold water.
He considers this made a man of him, and it was obviously the model for him choosing to remain in North Vietnam as a prisoner and be tortured.
The two bodies, male and female, of the state's monarch become split into the two bodies of the nation.
The male is the president, and he is the punishing father who enforces the rules, and his home in Washington has his phallic columns.
The female is the legislature.
It has the only power to go to war, and its home is the capital rotunda, an obviously full maternal breast, complete with erect nipple on top, and with a statue of the war goddess Freedom on the very top, holding her war sword and her victory wreath.
If presidents don't take nations to war when the people and Congress ask him to, he is shot, as John F. Kennedy was shot after so many people were furious with him for not giving the U.S. the war it was expecting in Cuba, and after he was so aware of Dallas citizens wanting his death that he made a home movie just before going there, just for fun, of him being assassinated.
Reactionaries don't just oppose progressives, they demonize them as weak, appeasers, and grovelers in chief, as Obama was recently called.
The grandiosity that precedes wars is experienced as a moral crusade against the vile sinfulness of two liberal insider groups.
As Kuhnz put it in her book The Nazi Conscience, the road to Auschwitz was paved with righteousness.
The righteousness of the punishing parents embedded in their amygdalas.
DEMOCRACIES AND WAR Midlarsky's lifelong studies of war show that a joint democracy is sufficient to ensure peace between pairs of states.
There are no exceptions to that rule.
But democratizing nations go to war more often even than authoritarian dictatorships, from 4 to 15 times as often as non-democratizing states, since they experience far more growth panic as they work off the fears of their growth panic on enemies.
The most war-prone states are those at the beginning stages of democratization.
Democratizing states have been more likely to be the attacker than the target of aggression in these wars.
Countries do not become mature democracies overnight.
More typically, they go through a rocky transitional period.
In this transitional phase of democratization, countries become more aggressive and war-prone, not less.
And they do fight wars with democratic states.
Although virtually every great power has gone on the warpath during the initial phase of its entry into democracy, fully liberal democratic nations have never started wars with other democratic nations.
Since to become a fully liberal democratic nation, the bulk of the families must have made the transition into the socializing mode of child-rearing, with most families having evolved beyond infanticide, swaddling, wet-nursing, and beating.
The majority of even democratic nations' families still dominate and hit their children, of course, so democratic nations continue to go to war as often as other countries, but choose non-democracies as their enemies, particularly ones that can be made into colonies, winning most of the wars they start.
Statistical analyses of wars reveal, despite the fact that mature democracies do not fight each other, democracies are about as likely to fight wars as non-democracies.
Most wars after democratization are wars of ethnic cleansing, like the long war that killed over 10 million American Indians that Jefferson called justified extermination.
As man puts it, murderous cleansing is modern because it is the dark side of democracy.
As both fathers and mothers raise their children, before they are toilet trained, they regularly call them dirty, and the cleansing of ethnic groups becomes one of the main tasks of civil wars as they fuse with their cleansing parents and punish their bad selves.
Democratization requires cleansing terror and war.
As French families improved in the 17th and 18th centuries, as infanticide declined, as women were allowed to choose who they married, as children began to go to school, as husbands began to beat their wives less, child-rearing moved into the socializing mode with its quest for the real self through individuation, and nations began to ask for democratic freedoms.
Real love entered the family.
As Bedinter summarizes her findings, by the nineteenth century the marriage of convenience had given way to the marriage based on love, for many French families.
Rather than spending their adult lives chasing their ghosts from the nursery, men began to trust others and create the Industrial Revolution.
There is a chart above that shows how income per person had been unchanged for centuries, but in the 19th century, prosperity literally turned straight up, creating progress in every walk of life.
Since historians generally ignore changes in child-rearing, they are totally bewildered as to why this took place at this particular time, before democratic freedoms, saying things like, no one planned progress as a whole, it simply erupted.
As everyone began to experience more freedoms, the nation began to be represented as a goddess, Maria, La Nation, and Republicans were said to, live only for the mother country, as soon as he has no more mother country, he is no longer.
This fusion with the motherland, patriotism, made all progress and all individual freedoms terribly frightening, and was experienced as growth panic.
Mommy hated my freedom.
Mommy had told me she was the boss, that I was only interested in my needs, not hers.
From the very beginning the French Revolution imagined angry, dangerous women populating the nation, as when Marie Antoinette, a rather sweet-natured young woman, was deemed a vampire who sucks the blood of the French, so they had to chop off her head.
The terror of the revolution not only had no rational purpose, it was accomplished by putting the guillotines in front of statues of Maria on her maternal throne, holding the club with which mothers usually hit their children.
As revolutionaries chopped off heads, they paraded them on pikes.
That again represented the mothers' beating sticks.
Men began to deny all the rights of women that had begun materializing.
The convention outlawed all women's associations, and began to guillotine all women who asked for voting rights.
The nation, as mother, la nation, had no feminine qualities.
It was not a threatening, feminizing force.
It was a masculine mother, a father, capable of giving birth.
Democratization for every nation involves revolutionary violence and war.
As the new freedoms of the revolution began to be acted upon in the assembly, in-group and out-group splitting began, with gratuitous accusations by Girardins and Jacobins that the other side was full of traitors who were about to restore the monarchy.
Both revolutionary violence and foreign wars were precipitated by this splitting into in-groups and out-groups.
The goal was solely slaughter.
The guillotine is hungry, said a member of the assembly.
It's ages since she had something to eat.
Madame Rollin described the revolutionary killing expeditions.
Women were brutally raped before being torn to pieces, guts cut out and worn as ribbons, human flesh eaten, dripping with blood, The same splitting created France's external enemies as their serotonin levels plunged and their mirror neurons turned off, so that empathy disappeared.
Frenchmen became clinically paranoid toward neighboring nations, turning down any attempts to appease them, and instead imagined that foreigners might want to invade in order to destroy the revolution.
By the time Napoleon came to power and made war routine, France was already weary from a decade of wars, which used nationalistic appeals to foster loyalty, but whose causes were in fact solely internal and self-destructive.
Historians agree that there was no question of any threat from the outside, When Brissot declared that he cannot be at ease until Europe and all of Europe is in flames, he spoke for citizens needing to become martyrs in order to punish their inner bad selves.
The ideal of sacrifice for the nation became the central focus of French wars.
As Michelet said, Sacrifice for the nation is our political ideal.
Not one Paris newspaper voiced opposition to the escalation of war fever in January 1792.
Not one Paris newspaper objected when Napoleon declared war on Austria in April 1892.
Napoleon himself was all his life depressed and suicidal, writing in his diary entries like this, Life is a burden to me because I taste no pleasure and all is pain.
Since die I must, is it not just as well to kill myself?
The actual words that the French used as they went to war were those their angry mothers had used as she had to clean them of their urine and feces.
War was necessary to cleanse the soil of liberty of this refuse.
They should be given strong Republican medicine, a purge, a vomit, and an enema.
French soldiers routinely raped and mutilated women and children, forcing them to kneel in front of a large pit they had dug.
They were then shot so as to tumble down into their own grave.
As a preliminary to the Nazi Holocaust, Napoleon, like Hitler, aimed only at mass extermination, humiliating and provoking one nation after another into battle, and telling Metternich that, a man like me does not give a shit about the lives of a million men.
Napoleon's twelve years of wars, with a series of coalitions of European states, so overextended French armies that when they invaded Russia, they were finally defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
Suicidal French wars were over for a while.
Napoleon himself tried to commit suicide again after Waterloo by poisoning himself.
Counting both military and civilian deaths, over two million Europeans, in fact, were victims of the suicidal growth panic of democratization.
After the French Revolution, nation after nation democratized around the world, each time producing the sacrificial growth panic of internal terror and external war.
The past two centuries have been filled with hundreds of totally unnecessary suicidal civil and external wars by democratizing nations around the world, by hundreds of leaders who repeated Napoleon's dicta that troops are made to get killed.
In the next chapter, we will examine the global wars of the 20th century and reveal how each of them was triggered by the growth panic of democratization, by national grandiosity, and by the self-destructive internal alter egos that forced citizens to reenact their abusive childhoods.
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