I continue this topic in Spanish

Since I almost never review the email where this blog is connected, in the last years I missed several comments which I discovered today, for example:

This is the most concise critique of Daniel Mackler I have ever read. He denies there are biological differences between the races and will not acknowledge the concept of psychoclasses, that non-Western peoples have parenting of a much lower standard. He simply says ‘I don’t agree’ when he is accurately rebutted. [Comment in ‘Daniel Mackler’s views on Solzhenitsyn’ September 15, 2016]

I am basically retired from Blogspot and now I blog in WordPress. But in Spanish I continue to write about child abuse, both on the site linked below and in my books, where my real work is...

https://hojaseliminadas.wordpress.com

Daniel Mackler lies again

This (((guy))) is quite dishonest. In his latest video—

—he lies by omission, i.e., by concealing the fact that Alice Miller became “enlightened", to use Mackler’s word, only after writing her second book, in her sixties. It goes without saying that before that she was so “unenlightened” that she abused her child, Martin Miller.

What I find repulsive about Martin is that he blames his mother’s traumas on the Second World War, while the real trauma that Alice suffered came from Martin’s grandmother.

Shame on (((Martin Miller))).

You may find more critical material about Mackler here.

BO's myopia

Today I received a spam email with this link. Beyond Ideologies, previously known as Becoming Other (BO) and author of the above-linked essay, still fails to see the world beyond the box.

I don't have time for an elaborate entry, except saying that he and other supposed militants against child abuse (Daniel Mackler, Dennis Rodie and Andreas Wirsén) have failed to respond to my book (pic left, sample chapter: here).

Make no mistake: BO is not radical enough to side the abused child.

Carthaginians sacrificed their own children

by Maev Kennedy (source: here) 

 

A tophet outside Carthage, a special part of a cemetery

dedicated to the burial of infants, according to Josephine Quinn. 

  Just as ancient Greek and Roman propagandists insisted, the Carthaginians did kill their own infant children, burying them with sacrificed animals and ritual inscriptions in special cemeteries to give thanks for favours from the gods, according to a new study.

"This is something dismissed as black propaganda because in modern times people just didn't want to believe it," said Josephine Quinn, a lecturer in ancient history at Oxford, who is behind the study, with international colleagues, of one of the most bitterly debated questions in classical archaeology.

"But when you pull together all the evidence – archaeological, epigraphic and literary – it is overwhelming and, we believe, conclusive: they did kill their children, and on the evidence of the inscriptions, not just as an offering for future favours but fulfilling a promise that had already been made.

"This was not a common event, and it must have been among an elite because cremation was very expensive, and so was the ritual of burial. It may even have been seen as a philanthropic act for the good of the whole community."

Argument has raged on the subject since cemeteries known as tophets – after the biblical account of a place of sacrifice – were excavated in the early 20th century on the outskirts of Carthage in modern Tunisia, and then at other Carthaginian sites in Sicily and Sardinia. The graves held tiny cremated bones carefully packed into urns, buried under tombstones giving thanks to the gods. One has a carving which has been interpreted as a priest carrying the body of a small child. Some archaeologists and historians saw the finds as proving ancient accounts of child sacrifice; others insisted they showed tender respect for cherished children who died before or soon after birth.

Quinn and her colleagues, a group of Punic archaeologists and historians from Italy and the Netherlands, who publish their findings in the journal Antiquity – where the argument has been rumbling on for several years – completely reject the latter theory.

"The inscriptions are unequivocal: time and again we find the explanation that the gods 'heard my voice and blessed me'. It cannot be that so many children conveniently happened to die at just the right time to become an offering – and in any case a poorly or dead child would make a pretty feeble offering if you're already worried about the gods rejecting it."

"Then there is the fact that the animals from the sites, which were beyond question sacrificial offerings, are buried in exactly the same way, sometimes in the same urns with the bones of the children."

Although hundreds of remains were found, there were far too few to represent all the stillbirth and infant deaths of Carthage. According to Quinn, there were perhaps 25 such burials a year, for a city of perhaps 500,000 people.

The Roman historian Diodorus and other ancient historians gave graphic accounts of Carthaginian child sacrifice: "There was in their city a bronze image of Cronus, extending its hands, palms up and sloping towards the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire."

Diodorus even said that some citizens who bought children from poor people and reared them specially for sacrifice believed misfortunes had resulted because they had not sacrificed their own offspring.

The argument has been passionate for years, with scientists often reaching opposed conclusions from the same bone fragments: four years ago a group of scientists published a paper saying the cremated remains did not indicate infant sacrifice.

Now in the same issue as Quinn's research, Antiquity is publishing a new paper on the same bones, insisting that the earlier study got the science of burnt infant bones wrong, and therefore greatly overestimated the number who died before birth rather than being murdered in infancy.

Quinn said many of her academic colleagues were appalled by her conclusions.

"The feeling that some ultimate taboo is being broken is very strong. It was striking how often colleagues, when they asked what I was working on, reacted in horror and said, 'Oh no, that's simply not possible, you must have got it wrong.'"

"We like to think that we're quite close to the ancient world, that they were really just like us – the truth is, I'm afraid, that they really weren't."

Further to Miller's nonsense about Hitler

Alice Miller wrote:

The liberation of Germany and the destruction of the Jewish people down to the last Jew, i.e., the complete removal of the bad father, would have provided Hitler with the conditions that could have made him a happy child growing up in a calm and peaceful situation with a beloved mother…

The example of Hitler's childhood allows us to study the genesis of a hatred whose consequences caused the suffering of millions…

It would be a highly instructive and rewarding task to make Hitler's entire political career comprehensible from the perspective of the history of his persecution in early childhood...

Little Adolf could be certain of receiving constant beatings; he knew that nothing he did would have any effect on the daily thrashings he was given. All he could do was deny the pain, in other words, deny himself and identify with the aggressor... This state of constant jeopardy is reflected very clearly in the fate of the Jews in the Third Reich…

A child who has been required to don the armor of "virtue" at too early an age will seize upon the only permissible discharge; he will seize upon anti-Semitism (i.e., his right to hate), retaining it for the rest of his life. It is possible that Hitler did not have easy access to this discharge, however, because it would have touched upon a family taboo. Later, in Vienna, he was happy to shed this silent prohibition, and when he came to power he needed only to proclaim this one legitimate hatred in the Western tradition as the highest Aryan virtue.

Had he made the entire world his victim, he still would not have been able to banish his introjected father from his bedroom, for one's own unconscious cannot be destroyed by destroying the world.

Statements such as the above in Alice Miller’s chapter on Hitler in For Your Own Good are so ridiculous when considering history, as shown in my previous post, that it’s unnecessary to rebut this nonsense again. But even if it’s unnecessary I’d like to add something to the historical context of my previous entry.

There’s a world of difference between reading Miller while one has absorbed so much historical disinformation and historical mendacity, and after one is unplugged from that Matrix of political correctness. In Mein Kampf Hitler describes his own lightning experience that revaluated his values concerning the Jewish Question. Starting on page 52 in Ralph Manheim’s translation, Hitler wrote:

For the Jew was still characterized for me by nothing but his religion, and therefore, on grounds of human tolerance, I maintained my rejection of religious attacks in this case as in others. Consequently, the tone, particularly that of the Viennese anti-Semitic press, seemed to me unworthy of the cultural tradition of a great nation. I was oppressed by the memory of certain occurrences in the Middle Ages [pogroms], which I should not have liked to see repeated.

On page 55, however, after realizing how Jewry was taking over Vienna, Hitler confessed:

My views with regard to anti-Semitism thus succumbed to the passage of time, and this was my greatest transformation of all. It cost me the greatest inner soul struggles, and only after months of battle between my reason and my sentiments did my reason begin to emerge victorious. Two years later, my sentiment had followed my reason, and from then on became its most loyal guardian and sentinel.

I’ve said that Miller, who in fact was born in a Jewish family, was ignorant about the Jewish Question. It’s natural, therefore, that she seemed to have ignored humane passages of Hitler's book such as the above. In fact, Miller wrote: “there probably had never before been a person with Hitler's power to destroy human life on such a scale with impunity…”

Was the renowned psychologist ignorant of the fact that, even if the six million figure of killed Jews is correct, Mao committed a genocide about ten times that figure? And that Lenin, Stalin and their Jewish commissars killed about twenty million of innocent people? Did Miller ever hear the name Genrikh Yagoda, the greatest murderer of white people in the 20th Century? Yagoda was a Jew: the GPU’s deputy commander and the founder and commander of the NKVD. He diligently implemented Stalin’s collectivization orders and was responsible for the deaths of at least ten million people. His Jewish deputies established and managed the Gulag system.

Miller, who seemed to ignore all of the above, wrote:

I asked myself what the childhood of this person [Hitler] had been like, a person who was possessed by hatred all his life and for whom it became so easy to involve other people in his hatred.

Forget the Jews for a moment. What about asking ourselves what the childhood of Hitler had been when considering someone possessed by such love for his people? Just compare Hitler and the National Socialist men with the current German and Scandinavian elites who have their people into a path of demographic dilution (and eventual extinction---cf. Mark Steyn’s saying “I will miss the Swedish blondes when they are extinct”).

Miller wrote:

All it took was a Führer's madness and several million well-raised Germans to extinguish the lives of countless innocent human beings in the space of a few short years.

This is inverted reality. Lenin and Stalin started an holocaust larger than the one attributed to Hitler long before Hitler became Chancellor. The Germans reacted to Bolshevik communism and the Red Terror, perhaps too hastily with their Operation Barbarossa. As a nationalist blogget put it, Hitler won most seats and was given the Chancellorship by the German elite in 1933: the year after the Jewish Bolsheviks deliberately starved six million Ukrainians to death. Can there be any real doubt that the threat of the Bolshevik terror influenced both the German voters and the decision to give Hitler the Chancellorship? Why isn’t this taught in the schools? As to Miller's claim that "all it took was a Führer’s madness and several million well-raised Germans to...," it was an England ruled by a Jew-sympathizer, not Germany, the one that started the war (cf. again my previous post and search for the word “Churchill”).

Miller wrote:

A child whose father does not call to him by name but by whistling to him as though the child were a dog has the same disenfranchised and nameless status in the family as did "the Jew" in the Third Reich. Through the agency of his unconscious repetition compulsion, Hitler actually succeeded in transferring the trauma of his family life onto the entire German nation.

I’ve said that statements such as these have been so thoroughly debunked through my excerpts taken from a scholarly book that it’s unnecessary to rebut the nonsense again. However, the above comment reminds me my critique of one of Alice Miller’s foremost colleagues, Lloyd deMause and his psychohistorians. I refer to an incredibly silly article of the Journal of Psychohistory by Madeleine Gómez. Like the above analytic interpretation of the mind of Hitler by Miller, according to Gómez the whole Spanish conquest of the Americas was a reenacting of “the birth trauma.” Gómez also claimed that the Spanish and Portuguese endeavors to conquer the seas were “attempts to surmount the birth trauma.” This is the sort of lunacy that gives an ill name to child abuse studies. Anyway, Miller wrote:

At the same time, the racial laws represented the repetition of the drama of Hitler's own childhood. In the same way that the Jew now had no chance to escape…

No: racial laws in a mere decade of National Socialism were analogous to racial laws among the Jews through the millennia. Furthermore, the goal was the same: to protect one’s own ethnic group against the gene pool of the surrounding peoples. Keep in mind that Miller herself was the product of such Jewish racial laws among her ancestors. She wrote:

Perhaps no better commentary can be found to illustrate Hitler's legendary powers of seduction: whereas the Jews represented the humiliated, defeated side of his childhood self…

Once again, this reminds me what I said about self-styled “psychohistorian” Madelaine Gómez. This sort of nonsense, relatively common in some exponents of child abuse studies, moved me to sever ties with my former colleagues. I’ve refused any contact with them unless and until they publish---as I did---painful autobiographies. (By avoiding heavy psych info about themselves my former colleagues take refuge in fantastic theories that place the burden of guilt onto convenient scapegoats instead of their own abusive parents.)

Miller wrote:

The persecution of people of Jewish background, the necessity of proving "racial purity" as far back as one's grandparents, the tailoring of prohibitions to the degree of an individual's demonstrable "racial purity"--all this is grotesque only at first glance.

Since Miller rejected Judaism in her adult life, it is unsurprising that she didn’t see any similarity between the Laws of Nuremberg and the racial laws of her family. The rationale behind the Laws of Nuremberg was to ascertain that a genuine German citizen would not be a subversive crypto-Jew, a sort of fake converso like those who plagued Spain after 1492. Did Miller ignore that through the millennia Jews have had incredible tough religious laws and regulations which purpose is to keep their gene pool uncorrupted from gentile “contamination”? (see the chapter “Genetic segregation of Jews and Gentiles” in Kevin MacDonald’s A People That Shall Dwell Alone). Miller saw the straw in the eyes of Germans and not the beam in her former tribe. About Klara Hitler she wrote:

If Hitler had really been loved as a child…

Was Miller ignorant that even hostile biographers of Hitler marvel about how humanely young Adolf mourned his dead mother? Miller then quoted a Hitler slanderer in the context of Hilter's relationship with his mother:

Stierlin writes: N. Bromberg has written about Hitler's sexual habits: "the only way in which he could get full sexual satisfaction was to watch a young woman as she squatted over his head and urinated or defecated in his face."

These grotesque claims would have to be corroborated by a reliable source before addressing them. To my mind these claims only show that, since Miller suffered under the Nazi regime, she could only think of the German Chancellor in terms of Allied propaganda.

For a vaccination against such historical disinformation and mendacity, see the best article I know about Adolf Hitler: "Some Thoughts on Hitler" by Irmin Vinson.

My review of a treatise about infanticide

Below, my review published in The Journal of Psychohistory 36, 2 (Fall 2008) of Hardness of Heart, Hardness of Life: The Stain of Human Infanticide by Larry S. Milner

When I first discovered Lloyd deMause’s writings in the internet in February 2006, I was slack-jawed. My first reaction was a healthy skepticism about the most gruesome aspects of childrearing and, like a member of a juror, I decided to listen to both sides of the story. I promptly purchased a copy of Colin Heywood’s 2001 History of Childhood because Heywood, a senior lecturer in economic and social history in the University of Nottingham, is not a psychohistorian. It surprised me that, although Heywood does indeed accept the historicity of the data of abusive childrearing in history, he did not reach the same stance of deMause by condemning the abuse. After reading his book I could not conjecture another reason for this omission but that Heywood simply chose to close his eyes. Thus the first “witness” against psychohistory in our hypothetical trial had, in fact, the opposite effect in my mind: the data that deMause had amassed was right, but an academic did not want to reach the natural conclusion that childrearing methods have been a nightmare throughout history.

There are not many places in the internet to follow a discussion with knowledgeable academics hostile to psychohistory. But I found an active forum in the talk pages of the articles of Wikipedia related to Psychohistory. Again, after editing quite a few Wikipedia articles and engaging in the lively debates this experience strengthened, not weakened, my working hypothesis that the psychohistorical model was sound. Still unconvinced that the model could potentially shift the paradigm in the humanities and social sciences, I decided to read the most scholarly treatise on infanticide to date, Hardness of Heart, Hardness of Life, first published in 1998 and authored by Larry Milner, a physician who currently has a private medical practice in Illinois. Milner’s treatise is certainly a treasure of very valuable sources for the psychohistorian, and his book is certainly the first exhaustive survey of infanticide. Like most readers of this journal, Milner accepts the evidence of the propensity of parents to murder their children, and in his webpage he estimates that the frequency of infanticide indicates that “up to 10-15% of all children ever been born have been killed by their parents: an astounding seven billion victims!”

Far beyond my expectations, after studying closely Milner’s monograph it corroborated, again, the veracity of the information about what deMause has termed “early” and “late” infanticidal modes of childrearing. Nonetheless, Milner’s views on the subject, not the vast information he collected, left me so speechless that I cannot resist the temptation of quoting him extensively. In the first chapter of his treatise, Milner wrote:

If our forefathers had to practice infanticide, it was because of the hardness of their life, rather than the hardness of their heart. It was not anger that led them to strangle or expose their children, it was the only way they could assure that the other members of a family could survive (p. 19).

I could easily rebut this statement, but in Milner’s work there are so many similar, outrageous statements that paradoxically it would be more eloquent simply to let him speak out.

In the chapter on medieval infanticide Milner quotes from a book by Linda Pollock: that children “were often brutally exploited and subjected to indignities now hard to believe.” Pollock might be described as an author who wants to idealize the parents’ behavior. Just like Pollock Milner idealizes the parents adding that “this did not necessarily mean they did not love them” (p. 72). Before the school of thought named cultural relativism appeared in anthropology and history, nineteenth century scholars were more willing to express value judgments on infanticide. For instance, in his chapter on tribal infanticide Milner quotes Brough Smyth’s 1878 study of the Australian aboriginals, a practice that Smyth described as “savage” and the tribes as being in a “half-civilized state.” Milner, following the political correctness of our times, comments that Smyth’s statement “is unfairly colored by our own particular moral judgments and bias” (p. 139). In the next page Milner states that the adults’ needs have priority over the needs of the infant, and he grossly misrepresents deMause’s views on infanticide:

As a result, infanticide may become a necessity when certain stressful conditions, like extreme shortage of food, are met. According to Lloyd deMause, hunter-gatherer tribes are frequently forced into such circumstances, and are thereby “in the infanticidal mode” (p. 140).

It must be noted that Milner seems to be familiar with deMause’s History of Childhood and the first issues of deMause’s journal, which he mentions fairly often. In his study of the diary of Herold, the doctor of the infant Louis XIII, deMause has called our attention about how the infant was invested with massive, paranoid projections from the adults. Quoting Edward Westermarck, Milner projects similar delusions onto the child: “The adults had to resort to the killing of infants ‘as a means of saving their lives’“ (p. 141). In the next page Milner adds: “It was necessary at times to look at the greater good, and not let the birth of an unwanted infant jeopardize the survival of the entire family or tribe” (p. 142). How a tiny newborn could be so phenomenally powerful, Milner does not explain. In the same chapter on tribal infanticide and cannibalism Milner makes this remarkable comment: “The newborn was occasionally sacrificed in order to help save the life of an older sibling” (p. 151), and using language in a way I could only describe as Orwellian Newspeak, he adds: “[Australian] infanticide was never effected by violence, such as a blow or cut, but rather either by exposure, strangling, or burying alive” (p. 152; my emphasis). Milner continues with this misuse of language when writing about Eskimo infanticide. While he concedes that “the baby is killed”, he comments that “this attitude is not cold-hearted”, and here goes the Newspeak: “This empathy [my emphasis]...has resulted in a general understanding that children must be sacrificed before the adult” (p. 167). In the next pages I marked non-empathetic phrases toward the child such as “One advantage of this destruction of females at birth...,” “forced circumstances to destroy them,” and “they have even been forced to eat the children.”

I could easily fill a chapter with these sorts of quotations that appear throughout Milner’s long monograph. But for the sake of brevity I will only add a few more. In the chapter about child sacrifice, Milner states:

If so many diverse cultures thereby found the offering of their offspring beneficial, can we merely pass them off as chaotic, or pathologic, customs? I think not... Somehow we must find a more rational explanation for their behavior (p. 319).

Milner repeats the above sentence almost verbatim in his final chapter, “Conclusion.” What I found most offensive in this concluding chapter were these words by the author while speculating about a possible genetic explanation of infanticide:

Such research must be supported, however, and our beliefs must include the realization that killing may not always be wrong. Quintilian [ca. 35 -100 CE] noted that “to slay a man is often a virtue and to put one’s own children to death is at times the noblest of deeds” (p. 549).

Milner wrote the above sentence on the very last page of his voluminous treatise. The remainder of the book contains a vast bibliography and an index of names and subjects.

What strikes me the most is that Milner agrees with deMause and some historians about the magnitude of infanticide throughout pre-history and history. Milner even quotes anthropologist Laila Williamson as the chosen epigraph at the beginning of his book: “Infanticide has been practiced on every continent and by people on every level of cultural complexity, from hunter gatherers to high civilizations, including our own ancestors. Rather than being an exception, then, it has been the rule” (p. 1). However, like most anthropologists and orthodox historians who have ventured on writing childhood history, Milner seems emotionally incapable of a proper evaluation of the data he amassed through ten years of research. If Milner is representative of the academic idealization of the parental Holocaust perpetrated since our simian ancestors, it is no surprise that psychohistory has yet to be recognized in the academia.

New Leaves

I am about to embark on a project that extensively quotes for this blog excerpts from two books about the history of the white race. Why?

Those familiar with Fallen Leaves may know that a couple of years ago I parted ways with my former friends: the fans of Alice Miller who claim to side the child during conflicts with their parents. It always bothered me that these people were incapable of honestly discussing my interpretation of psychohistory, which main finding is that non-western cultures treat their children worse than we westerners do. If my former friends truly sided the child, they would make an effort to approach psychohistory either to refute my interpretation of it, or, conversely, to use the findings of psychohistory to expand their worldview.

The do neither. And the question is why.

It is my belief that present-day westerners are plugged in a thought-controlling matrix. It all started right after the Second World War with a barrage of ubiquitous, malicious propaganda directed against Germany. The truth is that, whatever sins the Germans committed during the war, the Allied forces surpassed them in times of peace, from 1945 to 1947 (see e.g., my quotations of Hellstorm).

The same goes with the Jews and their holocaust. When Hitler became chancellor a Jew named Yagoda, the chief of the Soviet Union's intelligence agency, killed more civilians than the later killings attributed to Himmler, and precisely for ethnic reasons. Never before had an entire white nation been ruled mostly by Jewry, and just see what happened in Russia. Hitler and the Nazis merely reacted against such killing.

These historical facts move me to think that Germany continues to be dishonestly demonized by an ongoing, twenty-four hours a day campaign of enumeration of her crimes. Demonized I say because the comparatively larger crimes of the Allies have been hidden from the public view in the soft totalitarian System we are living in.

I call this socio-political scheme a mind-controlling matrix, a prison for the mind. Not only the crimes committed by the Allies are taboo. As an unwritten law, after the Second World War race studies also became forbidden in the mainstream media and the academia—with the exception of the continuing demonization of the Reich and, through intellectual fads of “historical grievances,” even the entire West. And not only the previous, perfectly respectable field of racial studies is now considered beyond the pale. An entire school of charlatanic thought, Boasian anthropology, has become axiomatic in the academia. Presently it is considered heretical to state the obvious: that there are cultures more primitive than others. Just one example: academicians are not even allowed to condemn the Amazonian tribes that still bury their children alive.

For the sake of using a handy word, let us call “liberalism” the religion that the leftist elites have been imposing on us after the Second World War. It is the perspective that comes after this knowledge—the exposé of a new civil religion that has been imposed upon the white psyche—what explains why I have distanced myself from my former friends. Consciously or unconsciously, these people are liberals first and child advocates second. Their true religion is liberalism, not child advocacy. (For a formal definition of the meta-ethical axiom in this secular religion, the “non-discriminatory principle,” see here.) If they prioritized child interests, they would side the children in cases of parental abuse among non-Caucasian immigrants, who, according to the data collected by psychohistory, are more serious abusers than white families.

They do nothing of the sort. The sole mention of “race,” “inferior cultures” or “psycho-classes” freaks them out and shun any frank discussion on the subject.

In other words, the followers of the late Alice Miller are deceiving themselves. Despite claims to the contrary they do not always side the children against their surrounding culture. If you are a Miller fan and believe I am wrong, you are invited to challenge my approach to psychohistory in any of these discussion threads.

I predict, notwithstanding, that this challenge will fall on deaf ears. By experience I know that Miller’s fans are no men of honor. They are too coward, and dishonest, to discuss psychohistory’s most relevant finding: the grim consequences for child interests after the ongoing, massive non-white immigration in their respective countries—at the same time that the peoples of European origin are dwarfing their birthrates!

Following the metaphor I used in “Those who stayed behind,” in the coming entries I will be reproducing excerpts from two historical books for the benefit of the inhabitants of the country N, not of those left behind in country M, still trapped in the matrix of political correctness.

Pinocchio (2)

I have moved this entry here: http://chechar.wordpress.com/2013/08/16/pinocchio-2/

Pinocchio (1)

I have moved this post here: http://chechar.wordpress.com/2013/08/05/pinocchio-1/

Eumolpus’ tale from Petronius’ Satyricon

“When I went to Asia,” Eumolpus began, “as a paid officer in the Quaestor’s suite, I lodged with a family at Pergamus. I found my quarters very pleasant, first on account of the convenience and elegance of the apartments, and still more so because of the beauty of my host’s son. I devised the following method to prevent the master of the house entertaining any suspicions of me as a seducer. Whenever the conversation at table turned on the seduction of handsome boys, I showed such extreme indignation and protested with such an air of austerity and offended dignity against the violence done to my ears by filthy talk of the sort, that I came to be regarded, especially by the mother, as one of the greatest of moralists and philosophers. Before long I was allowed to take the lad to the gymnasium; it was I that directed his studies, I that guided his conduct, and guarded against any possible debaucher of his person being admitted to the house.

“It happened on one occasion that we were sleeping in the dining-hall, the school having closed early as it was a holiday, and our amusements having rendered us too lazy to retire to our sleeping-chambers. Somewhere about midnight I noticed that the lad was awake; so whispering soft and low, I murmured a timid prayer in these words, ‘Lady Venus, if I may kiss this boy, so that he know it not, tomorrow I will present him with a pair of doves.’ Hearing the price offered for the gratification, the boy set up a snore. So approaching him, where he lay still making pretense to be asleep, I stole two or three flying kisses. Satisfied with this beginning, I rose betimes next morning, and discharged my vow by bringing the eager lad a choice and costly pair of doves.

“The following night, the same opportunity occurring, I changed my petition, ‘If I may pass a naughty hand over this boy, and he not feel it, I will present him for his complaisance with a brace of the best fighting cocks ever seen.’ At this promise the child came nestling up to me of his own accord and was actually afraid, I think, lest I might drop asleep again. I soon quieted his uneasiness on this point, and amply satisfied my longings, short of the supreme bliss, on every part of his beautiful body. Then when daylight came, I made him happy with the gift I had promised him.

“As soon as the third night left me free to try again, I rose as before, and creeping up to the rascal, who was lying awake expecting me, whispered at his ear, ‘If only, ye Immortal Gods, I may win of this sleeping darling full and happy satisfaction of my love, for such bliss I will tomorrow present the lad with an Asturian of the Macedonian strain [a horse], the best to be had for money, but always on the condition he shall not feel my violence.’ Never did the stripling sleep more sound. So first I handled his plump and snowy bosoms, then kissed him on the mouth, and finally concentrated all my ardors in one supreme delight. Next morning he sat still in his room, expecting my present as usual. Well! you know as well as I do, it is a much easier matter to buy doves and fighting cocks than an Asturian; besides which, I was afraid so valuable a present might rouse suspicion as to the real motives of my liberality. After walking about for an hour or so, I returned to the house, and gave the boy a kiss—and nothing else. He looked about inquiringly, then threw his arms round my neck, and ‘Please, sir!’ he said, ‘where is my Asturian?’

“‘It is hard,’ I replied, ‘to get one fine enough. You will have to wait a few days for me to fulfill my vow.’

“The boy had wits enough to see through my answer, and his resentment was betrayed by the angry look that crossed his face.

“Although by this breach of faith I had closed against myself the door of access so carefully contrived, I returned once more to the attack. For, after allowing a few days to elapse, one night when similar circumstances had created just another opportunity for us as before, I began, the moment I heard the father snoring, to beg and pray the boy to be friends with me again —that is, to let me give him pleasure for pleasure, adding all the arguments my burning concupiscence could suggest. But he was positively angry and refused to say one word beyond, ‘Go to sleep, or I will tell my father.’ But there is never an obstacle so difficult audacity will not vanquish it. He was still repeating, ‘I will wake my father,’ when I slipped into his bed and took my pleasure of him in spite of his half-hearted resistance. However, he found a certain pleasure in my naughty ways, for after a long string of complaints about my having cheated and cajoled him and made him the laughing-stock of his school-fellows, to whom he had boasted of his rich friend, he whispered, ‘Still I won’t be so unkind as you; if you like, do it again.’

“So forgetting all our differences, I was reconciled to the dear lad once more, and after utilizing his kind permission, I slipped off to sleep in his arms. But the stripling was not satisfied with only one repetition, all ripe for love as he was and just at the time of life for passive enjoyment. So he woke me up from my slumbers, and, ‘Anything you’d like, eh?’ said he. Nor was I, so far, indisposed to accept his offer. So working him the best ever I could, to the accompaniment of much panting and perspiration, I gave him what he wanted, and then dropped asleep again, worn out with pleasure. Less than an hour had passed before he started pinching me and asking, ‘Eh! why are we not at work?’ Hereupon, sick to death of being so often disturbed, I flew into a regular rage, and retorted his own words upon him; ‘Go to sleep,’ I cried, ‘or I’ll tell your father!’”

Solzhenitsyn

Quoted in my last post of the West's Darkest Hour:

Prison causes the profound rebirth of a human being… profound pondering over his own “I”… Here all the trivia and fuss have decreased. I have experienced a turning point. Here you harken to that voice deep inside you, which amid the surfeit and vanity used to be stifled by the roar from outside… Your soul, which formerly was dry, now ripens from suffering…

A class with Colin Ross

Psychiatrist Colin Ross



A section from my book:

What causes mental disorders? The best text I have read on this subject appears in the book The Trauma Model by Colin Ross, whom I introduced already in my second book of Hojas Susurrantes when discussing the unfortunate life of David Helfgott (see e.g., the Academy Award-winning film Shine).



The problem of attachment to the perpetrator

Attachment theory, originally developed by John Bowlby, is one of the most fruitful platforms to explain human psychological development. Evolution always chooses its available mechanisms for its use, and since every living creature has the imperative to survive, hominids developed an unconscious structure to maintain the illusion of parental love even when there really is none.

Perhaps the most accessible way to visualize attachment is through a modern fairy tale: Steven Spielberg’s film Artificial Intelligence. I’m referring to the scenes in which Henry warns Monica not to imprint their adoptive son David with the program of affective attachment if Monica is not completely sure that she will want to reciprocate the love that David would profess, since the program is irreversible (“The robot child’s love would be sealed—in a sense hardwired—and we’d be part of him forever”). After some days Monica nonetheless reads to David the seven magic words that imprint him (“What were those words for, Mommy?”).

The platform which Ross is standing on in order to understand mental disorders is what he calls “the problem of attachment to the perpetrator”:

I defined the problem, in the mid-1990s, in the context of the false memory war.

In order to defend myself against the attacks by hostile colleagues, I sought solid ground on which to build fortifications. It seemed like the theory of evolution offered a good starting point. What is the basic goal of all organisms according to the theory of evolution? To survive and reproduce. This is true from amoeba on up to mammals. Who will dispute that all organisms want to survive and replicate? This seemed like safe ground.

Dragonflies, grasshoppers, salamanders and alligators do not have families. They do not send cards on Mother’s Day. Things are different if you are a bird or mammal. Birds and mammals are absolutely dependent on adult caretakers for their survival for a period after birth, which ranges from weeks to decades depending on the species. For human parents, it seems like the period of dependency lasts over thirty years. In some species, if the nursing mother dies, the child dies. But in others, including elephants, if the nursing mother dies, a female relative takes over the care of the young one, and the child survives. In elephants there is a built-in Child Protective Services, and there is a sociology of attachment.

Attachment is like the migration of birds. It is built in, deep in our brain stems and DNA. The infant bird or mammal does not engage in a cognitive, analytical process to assess the cost-benefit of attachment. It just happens. It’s biology. The fundamental developmental task of the human infant is attachment. You will and you must attach. This is true at all levels of the organism. You must attach in order to survive biologically, but also in order to thrive and grow at emotional, intellectual, interpersonal and at all possible levels.

We know the consequences of failure to attach from several sources. The first is the third world orphanage. Orphan babies may have an adequate intake of protein, carbohydrate and fat, and may have their diapers changed regularly, but if they are starved for love, stimulation, attention, and affection, they are damaged developmentally. Their growth is stunted at all levels, including basic pediatric developmental norms.

Ross goes on to explain the body of scientific evidence about the effects of abuse in the offspring of primates: “The Harlow monkey experiments, for instance, are systematic studies of abuse and neglect. Little monkeys cling desperately to their unresponsive wire-and-cloth mothers because they are trying to solve the problem of attachment to the perpetrator, in this case the perpetrator of neglect.” He also mentions experimental evidence that profound neglect and sensory isolation during early infancy physically damage the brain in a measurable way: “The mammal raised in such an environment has fewer dendritic connections between the nerve cells in its brain than the mammal which grew up in a ‘culturally rich’ environment.” It is in this context that Ross states that it is developmental suicide to fail to attach, and “at all costs and under the highest imperative, the young mammal must attach.” He then writes:

In a sense, we all have the problem of attachment to the perpetrator. None of us have absolutely secure attachment. We all hate our parents for some reason, but love them at the same time. This is the normal human condition. But there is a large group of children who have the problem of attachment to the perpetrator to a huge degree. They have it to such a large degree, it is really a qualitatively different problem, I think. These are the children in chronic trauma families. The trauma is a variable mix of emotional, verbal, physical and sexual abuse.

The locus of control shift

For psychiatrists Theodore Lidz, Silvano Arieti and, in a less systematic way, Loren Mosher, in schizophrenogenic families not only one but both parents failed terribly. If the problem of attachment to the perpetrator is a cornerstone for the trauma model of mental disorders, there is yet another stone. Though the number one imperative for birds (and in previous times, the dinosaurs) and mammals is to attach, in abusive families the child makes use of another built-in reflex: to recoil from pain. Ross explains what he calls “The locus of control shift” (in psychology, “locus of control” is known jargon).

The scientific foundation of the locus of control shift is Piaget and developmental psychology. We know several things about the cognition of children age two to seven. I summarize this as “kids think like kids.” Young children are self-centered. They are at the center of the world, and everything revolves around them. They cause everything in the world [“locus shift”] and they do so through magical causality. They do not use rational, analytical, adult cognitive strategies and vocabulary.

Imagine a relatively normal family with a four year-old daughter. One day, the parents decide to split up and dad moves out. What is true for this little girl? She is sad. Using normal childhood cognition, the little girl constructs a theory to explain her field observation: “Daddy doesn’t live here anymore because I didn’t keep my bedroom tidy”.

This is really a dumb theory. It is wrong, incorrect, inaccurate, mistaken and preposterous. This is how normal kids think. But there is more to it than that. The little girl thinks to herself, “I’m OK. I’m not powerless. I’m in charge. I’m in control. And I have hope for the future. Why? Because I have a plan. All I have to do is to tidy up my bedroom and daddy will move back in. I feel OK now”.

The little girl has shifted the locus of control from inside her parents, where it really is, to inside herself. She has thereby created an illusion of power, control and mastery which is developmentally protective [of the attachment].

Ross explains that this is normal and happens in many non-abusive, though dysfunctional, families. He then explains what happens in extremely abusive families:

Now consider another four year-old girl living in a major trauma family. She has the problem of attachment to the perpetrator big time. What is true of this little girl?

This other girl is powerless, helpless, trapped, and overwhelmed. She can’t stop the abuse, she can’t escape it, and she can’t predict it. She is trapped in her family societal denial, her age, threats, physical violence, family rules and double binds. How does the little girl cope? She shifts the locus of control.

The child says to herself, “I’m not powerless, helpless and overwhelmed. I’m in charge here. I’m making the abuse happen. The reason I’m abused is because I’m bad. How do I know this is true? Because only a bad little girl would be abused by her parents.”

A delicious exemplification of the locus of control shift in the film A.I. is the dialogue that David has with his Teddy bear. After Monica abandoned him in the forest David tells his little friend that the situation is under control. He only has to find the Blue Fairy so that she may turn him into a real boy and his mom will love him again…

In contrast to fairy tales, in the real world instances of the locus of control shift are sordid. In incest victims, the ideation that everything is the fault of the girl herself is all too frequent. I cannot forget the account of a woman who told her therapist that, when she was a girl, she took baths immediately after her father used her sexually. The girl felt that since she, not her father was the dirty one and that her body was the dirty factor that aroused the father’s appetite, she had to “fix” her body.

But there are far more serious cases, even, than sexual abuse. According to Ross, in near-psychotic families:

The locus of control shift is like an evil transfusion. All the evil inside the perpetrator has been transfused into the self, making the perpetrator good and safe to attach to. The locus of control shift helps to solve the problem of attachment to the perpetrator. The two are intertwined with each other.

Although Silvano Arieti made similar pronouncements half a century before, these two principles as elaborated by Ross are the true cornerstones to understand the edifice of this work [Hojas Susurrantes]. As I mentioned in my second book, when I visited the clinic of Ross in Dallas as an observer, I had the opportunity to observe the therapies of some adult women. I remember a lady in particular who said that if her husband hit her it may be because she, not her husband, behaved naughtily.

In his book Ross mentions cases of already grown daughters, now patients of his psychiatric clinic, who harm themselves. These self-harmers in real life exemplify the paradigm of the girl mentioned by Ross: Evil has been transfused to the mind of the victim, who hurts herself because she believes she is wicked. In my previous book I said that in the film The Piano Teacher a mother totally absorbs the life of her daughter, who in turn redirects the hate she feels toward her mother by cutting herself in the genital area until bleeding profusely: a practice that, as we will see in the next section, is identical to the pre-Hispanic sacrificial practice of spilling the blood of one’s own genitals.

In his brief class Ross showed us why, however abusive our parents, a Stockholm syndrome elevated to the nth degree makes us see our parents as good attachment objects. The little child is like a plant that cannot but unfold towards the sun to survive. Since even after marriage and independence the adult child very rarely reverts in her psyche the locus of control shift to the original source, she remains psychically disturbed.

For Lloyd deMause, this kind of super-Stockholm syndrome is the major flaw of the human mind, the curse of Homo sapiens that produces an alter ego in which all of the malignancy of the perpetrator has been transfused to the ego of the victim. In a divided self this entity strives for either (1) substituting, through the locus of control shift, the unconscious anger felt towards the parents onto herself with self-harming, addictions, anorexia or other sorts of self-destructive behavior, and/or (2) harming the next generation of children. In any case the cause of this process is the total incapability of judging and processing inside ourselves the behavior of the parent: the problem of attachment to the perpetrator.

As I said above, I believe that Ross' class is the corner stone to understand the trauma model of mental disorders.

Fourth book of "Whispering Leaves"

Book 1. Letter to mom Medusa

Book 2. How to murder your child’s soul

Book 3. The chingada Indian girl

Book 4. The Return of Quetzalcoatl

Book 5. Whispering leaves


Only most of the fourth book will be published in The West's Darkest Hour. Of The Return of Quetzalcoatl, an introduction to the shocking field of research known as Psychohistory (leaf through "The Feathered Serpent" linked below), its three chapters are reproduced as entries in The West's Darkest Hour:

1. Psychohistory

2. The Feathered Serpent

3. Psychohistory in Meta-Perspective

Alternatively, a PDF is available: here.

Daniel Mackler’s views on Solzhenitsyn

Daniel Mackler (photo) is a pseudo-follower of Alice Miller. The very second post in my blogging career was precisely a piece debunking Mackler. While I have told me many times that it looks a bit silly to continue to debunk this guy, a book-review—what he said about Solzhenitsyn’s magnum opus—within a cornucopia of extremely frivolous book-reviews in Amazon by Mackler has moved me, again, to write about this man.

Even a superficial perusal of Mackler’s Amazon book reviews reveals how incredibly silly is the universe he inhabits. There are lots of reviews of Alcoholics Anonymous and in the comments Mackler confesses he spent years in AA therapy. Does this mean that he, who among his acolytes fancies himself as the Enlightened One, had substance abuse problems earlier in his life?

Mackler's reviews of about two-hundred silly pamphlets and silly films reminds me the Stalinist apologist, Gorky, who in his younger years was an avid reader of the trash literature of his time. But Mackler’s review of Childhood’s End is absolutely ridiculous: he reviewed Arthur Clarke’s sci-fi masterpiece as if Clarke was writing non-fiction! Similarly, in one of his repetitive reviews of Miller’s books, Mackler said:

And then there is her intense anti-religiosity, and refusal to believe in God or support any form of therapy...

Apparently, according to Mackler we who don’t believe in the existence of real therapy or in a personal God, including Miller, are not yet as “enlightened” as he is. It’s worth saying that in the commenters section of Mackler’s review a commenter said that in that veiled review Mackler was really writing about him.

In his review of The Lord of the Rings, Mackler wrote:

I sometimes, felt, though, that he was metaphorically speaking about modern human races—black, white, Asian, etc.—when he spoke of the different "races" of Middle Earth, and that made me uncomfortable, because I didn't feel the message was that enlightened.

Like millions upon millions of brainwashed liberals who subscribe a flawed post-Second World War narrative of history, Mackler cannot grasp the fact that defending the white race from extinction, one of the subliminal messages of J.R.R. Tolkien’s monumental novel (which incidentally I finished last week), is the most important task of our time. I have an entire blog on the subject and cannot explain here the details of this enormous task, akin to take the One Ring to Mount Doom for destruction.

But what irritated me to the point of deciding to write this entry was Mackler’s extremely disdainful views on poor Vincent Van Gogh, about whom I had already read three books, including the one that Mackler horribly reviewed:

This review is from “Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh” (Paperback)

Here's your unadulterated chance to see just how screwed up van gogh was. Letter after letter after letter sitting on the pity pot writing to his younger brother whining for money, crying for assistance, guilting his brother into supporting his art... his art habit... his art addiction. Ya know, after reading this book my perspective on van gogh changed. He struck me as an ultra-martyr (in the icky sense of the word), so big into self-pity. Now, having since read a little more of his history—screwy parents, etc, I have some more compassion for the guy and for why he was so screwed up, but these letters are honestly nothing short of tedious. One after the other, whining for money, then waxing eloquent about his art, which actually struck me often as quite manipulative—like he was justifying his existence and his productivity to theo.

Mackler’s charges against Van Gogh are baseless of course, as another Amazon commenter of his review readily pointed out. But the biggest shock was Mackler’s views about the Russian Revolution (actually, the Russian Holocaust), Lenin, and "the ideals of true [sic] socialism." Like the Van Gogh case, at least Mackler acknowledges in his review of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich that he is a “freeman” and Solzhenitsyn was a “slave” of the Soviet Regime. However, in his review of The Gulag Archipelago Mackler said:

Solzhenitsyn throws out the baby (The Russian Revolution, Lenin, and the ideals of true socialism) with the bathwater (Stalinism and reaction to the Revolution). He builds a long, tangential, and overall stilted case for lumping them all in together and pasting on top the label of evil—Evil Communism. If he'd only stuck with writing about his own experiences and those of his fellows, and not been so heavy-handed with the historical background information, this book would have been a knockout. Funnily enough, I think a modern editor could easily tease out this wheat (60% of the book) from the chaff (40%).

This reminds me another therapist (my chapter in Spanish here): one who agreed with my iniciative to write the story of how my parents abused me as a minor but vehemently asked me to stop my writing when I added a second chapter to my testimonial: a chapter exposing the obscene alliance of his colleagues with abusive parents!

Besides being a leftist who supports "the ideals of true socialism," whatever that means, Daniel Mackler is ethnically Jewish. As Kevin MacDonald has demonstrated in his study of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy, the horrific consequences of Bolshevism for millions of non-Jewish Soviet citizens (like Solzhenitsyn) do not seem to have been an issue for Jewish leftists. This pattern continues into the present with people like Mackler, who believes that exposing the crimes of communism is throwing out the baby ("true socialism") with the bathwater. One of MacDonald’s chapters in The Culture of Critique is a must read to understand how common this moral blindspot among extreme liberal Jews, like Daniel Mackler, is undermining our civilization.

Perhaps the best way to respond to Mackler’s dismissive paragraph of the Archipelago is simply to quote some excerpts of the very first chapters to give the reader a bit of the flavor of what Solzhenitsyn’s work is all about. But first let me quote two non-frivolous readers of what many consider the most important non-fiction book of the 20th century:

“To live now and not to know this work is to be a kind of historical fool” —W.L. Webb

“When do you plan to campaign for a museum honoring the memory of the tens of millions of victims of Soviet terror? Why aren’t you outraged by the fact that not one has been built?” —Alex Kurtagic

Ok, here we go!

The astute way to present the Jewish Problem (JP) to a misinformed public—and yes: I include Mackler’s advice to the Aryan people not to reproduce as part of the JP—, is not to deny the Holocaust of Jews in 1942-1945, but to show the masses that they have been ill served by the mainstream media and Hollywood. So many movies depicting the Holocaust and zero about the Gulag can only mean that Hollywood’s masters have kept their gentile sheep in the dark. (As shown in my critique of Alice Miller, Nazism was largely a reaction to the Red Terror, which nationalist Germans perceived as Jewish Terror when the world was a little saner than today.)

The Gulag, as a subject, is so huge that it shocks me that despite the Cold War even the well educated Anglo-Saxons I have spoken to don’t know the meaning of Solzhenitsyn’s main metaphor in the term Gulag Archipelago (see map below). Here I’ll drop only one fact. In what some people call the “Russian Holocaust,” the Bolsheviks, overrepresented by Jews, killed more civilians than what the Nazis did in their death camps.

Since the overwhelming majority of Westerners ignore these facts it could be said without hyperbole that they are profoundly sleeping in the Matrix of political correctness (PC) and disinformation.

But was the Red Terror really Jewish Terror as the Nazis believed (and acted accordingly)? Thanks to MacDonald’s lead, Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together, a two-volume work on the history of Russian-Jewish relations, is being translated, step by step, in The Occidental Observer blogsite. The publishing houses in the US and the UK, including the universities presses, are such PC cowards that Solzhenitsyn’s last major work, published since 2001-2002 in Russian, had not been translated to English! However, before reading it I would strongly recommend the abridged version of Solzhenitsyn’s most important book (the longer version of The Gulag Archipelago, published in 1973 is either for scholars or Russians). If read in the context of MacDonald’s work, the abridged Archipelago could have the effect of taking the redpill.

When I was much younger the Soviet dissidents had to smuggle copies of Solzhenitsyn’s work into the Soviet Union. Today, totalitarianism has been inverted and it is us who are smuggling unauthorized translations of Solzhenitsyn’s last major work from Russia into the United States due to our PC deference to the philo-Semitic Zeitgeist.



The Gulag Archipelago (The Harvill Press, 1999). Abridged by Edward Ericson

Foreword to the Abridgement (excerpt)

If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people’s bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: “It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.”

Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.

Yet I have not given up all hope that human beings and nations may be able, in spite of all, to learn from the experience of other people without having to live through it personally. Therefore, I gratefully accepted Professor Ericson’s suggestion to create a one-volume abridgement of my three-volume work, The Gulag Archipelago.

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

Introduction (no ellipsis added between excerpts)

For a few decades the word Holocaust has served us well as a shorthand term for modern man’s inhumanity to man. In recent years a second such shorthand term has entered our working vocabulary: Gulag. This term comes to us not from a host of witness but from one lone man: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose very name has become a household word around the world.

Were The Gulag Archipelago to be even more widely read than it has been, it would, I believe, make an indelible impression on the modern mind and have a salutary effect on the whole world. Here we have the greatest horror story of human history—in quantitative terms, at least (the comparable toll in China having not yet been calculated)—and, although it happened during our lifetime, most of us do not even know about it.

This work was written especially for future generations of Russians. It is these readers in particular who need to know, in as much detail as possible, the truth of their history. This abridged text is designed for the general reader, not for the scholar.

At Solzhenitsyn’s own suggestion, I have eliminated much of his personal story, though parts of it I treasure too much to drop.

Needless to say, I take responsibility for any errors of omission or commission. I hope only that any mistakes which I have made do not interfere with the transmission of Solzhenitsyn’s words to an audience which I believe desperately needs to hear them.

Edward Ericson

Author’s Note (no ellipsis added between excerpts)

And the Kolyma was the greatest and most famous island, the pole of ferocity of that amazing country of Gulag which, though scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in the psychological sense, fused into a continent—an almost invisible, almost imperceptible country inhabited by the zek people.

And this Archipelago crisscrossed and patterned that other country within which it was located, like a gigantic patchwork, cutting into its cities, hovering over its streets. Yet there were many who did not even guess at its presence and many, many others who had heard something vague. And only those who had been there knew the whole truth.

In this book there are no fictitious persons, nor fictitious events. People and places are named with their own names. If they are identified by initials instead of names, it is for personal considerations. If they are not named at all, it is only because human memory has failed to preserve their names. But it all took place just as it is here described.

This book could never have been created by one person alone. In addition to what I myself was able to take away from the Archipelago—on the skin of my back, and with my eyes and ears—material for this book was given me in reports, memoirs, and letters by 227 witness, whose names were to have been listed here.

What I here express to them is not personal gratitude, because this is our common, collective monument to all those who were tortured and murdered.

Chapter 1: "Arrest" (no ellipsis added between excerpts)

How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago? At ticket windows or at travel bureaus for Soviet or foreign tourists the employees would be astounded if you were to ask for a ticket to go there. They know nothing and they’ve never heard of the Archipelago as a whole or of any one of its innumerable islands.

Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?

The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: “You are under arrest.” The gate behind us, the gate to our past life, is slammed shut once and for all.

It is an alien, brutal, and crushing force totally dominating the apartment for hours. And nothing is sacred in a search! During the arrest of the locomotive engineer Inoshin, a tiny coffin stood in his room containing the body of his newly dead child. The “jurists” dumped the child’s body out of the coffin and searched it. They shake sick people out of their sickbeds, and they unwind bandages to search beneath them.

For those left behind after the arrest there is the long tail end of a wrecked and devastated life. And the attempts to go and deliver food parcels. And this means once and for all: “No right to correspondence”—and that almost certain means: “Has been shot.”

They take you from a military hospital with a temperature of 102, as they did with Ans Bernshtein, and the doctor will not raise a peep about your arrest—just let him try! They’ll take you right off the operating table—as they took N.M. Vorobyev, a school inspector, in 1936, in the middle of an operation for stomach ulcer—and drag you off to a cell, as they did him, half-alive and all bloody.

And even in the fever of epidemic arrests, when people leaving for work said farewell to their families every day, because they could not be certain they would return at night, even then almost no one tried to run away and only in rare cases did people commit suicide. And that was exactly what was required. A submissive sheep is a find for a wolf.

Universal innocence also gave rise to the universal failure to act. Vanya Levitsky: “Every honest man is sure to go to prison. Right now my papa is serving time, and when I grow up they’ll put me in too.” (They put him in when he was twenty-three years old.) The majority sit quietly and dare to hope. Since you aren’t guilty, then how can they arrest you? It’s a mistake! They are already dragging you along by the collar, and you still keep on exclaiming to yourself: “It’s a mistake. They’ll set things straight and let me out!” Others are being arrested en masse, and that’s a bothersome fact, but in those other cases there is always some dark area: “Maybe he was guilty...?” But as for you, you are obviously innocent! You still believe that the Organs are humanly logical institutions: they will set things straight and let you out.

Once a person was arrested he was never released. Some still have hopes of a favorable outcome to their case and are afraid to ruin their chances by an outcry. (For, after all, we get no news from that other world, and we do not realize that from the very moment of arrest our fate has almost certainly been decided in the worst possible sense and that we cannot make it any worse.)

I myself lugged a fifth suitcase with no great joy since it contained my diaries and literary works, which were being used as evidence against me. My cellmates—tankmen in soft black helmets—hid nothing. They were three honest, openhearted soldiers—people of a kind I had become attached to during the war years because I myself was more complex and worse. All three had been officers.

“Out for toilet call! Hands behind your backs!”

I was bursting with indignation that some ignoramus of a master sergeant dared to give orders to us officers: “Hands behind your backs!” But the tank officers put their hands behind them and I followed suit.

Back of the barn was a small square area in which the snow had been all trampled down but had not yet melted. It was soiled all over with human feces, so densely scattered over the whole square that it was difficult to find a spot to place one’s two feet and squat. However, we spread ourselves about and the five of us did squat down. Two machine gunners grimly pointed their machine pistols at us as we squatted, and before a minute had passed the master sergeant brusquely urged us on:

“Come on, hurry it up! With us they do it quickly!”

Chapter 2: "The History of Our Sewage Disposal System" (no ellipsis added between excerpts)

Although I have no statistics at hand, I am not afraid of erring when I say that the wave of 1937 and 1938 was neither the only one not even the main one, but only one, perhaps, of the three biggest waves which strained the murky, stinking pipes of our prison sewers to bursting.

Before it came the wave of 1929 and 1930, the size of a good River Ob, which drove a mere fifteen million peasants, maybe even more, out into the taiga and the tundra. But peasants are a silent people, without a literary voice, nor do they write complaints or memoirs. This wave poured forth, sank down into the permafrost, and even our most active minds recall hardly a thing about it. It is as if it had not even scarred the Russian conscience. And yet Stalin (and you and me as well) committed no crime more heinous than this. And after it there was the wave of 1944 to 1946. But in this wave, too, the people were of the simpler kind, and they wrote no memoirs.

But the wave of 1937 swept up and carried off to the Archipelago people of position, people with a Party past, yes, educated people, around whom were many who had been wounded and remained in the cities... and what a lot of them had pen in hand!

It is well known that any organ withers away if it is not used. Therefore, if we know that the Soviet security organs, or Organs (and they christened themselves with this vile word), praised and exalted above all living things, have not died off even to the extent of one single tentacle, but, instead have grown new ones and strengthened their muscles—it is easy to deduce that they have had constant exercise. This action was, in fact, explained openly (Latsis, in the newspaper Red Terror, November 1, 1918):

“We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeois class. It is not necessary during the interrogation to look for evidence proving that the accused opposed the Soviets by word or action. The first question which you should ask him is what class does he belong to, what is his origin, his education and profession. These are the questions which will determine the fate of the accused. Such is the sense and the essence of Red Terror.”

A decree of the defense Council on February 15, 1919 (the meeting was evidently presided over by Lenin), suggest that the Cheka and the NKVD take hostages among the peasants of those regions where “the cleaning of snow from the railroads does not proceed quite satisfactorily” and noted that “these hostages be executed if the cleaning is not completed.” In other words, free people were simply arrested and executed immediately...

The practice of arresting students began in 1921. In the spring of 1922 the Patriarch Tikhon was arrested and two resounding trials were held, following by the execution of those who had publicized the Patriarch’s appeal. Metropolitans and bishops were arrested, and, as always, in the wake of the big fish, followed shoals of smaller fry: archpriests, monks, and deacons. They arrested and sentenced active laymen. The circles kept getting bigger, as they raked in ordinary believers as well, old people, and particularly women, who were the most stubborn believers of all. As Tanya Khodkevich wrote:

You can pray freely
But just so God alone can hear.

(She received a ten-year sentence for these verses.) A person convinced that he possessed spiritual truth was required to conceal it from his own children. In the twenties the religious education of children was classified as a political crime under Article 58-10 of the Code.

In 1929, also, those historians who had not been sent abroad in time were arrested... It even reached a point of such confusion that men and women were imprisoned in the same cells and used the latrine bucket in each other’s presence—who cared about those niceties? Give up your gold, vipers! The interrogators had one universal method: feed the prisoners nothing but salty food and give them no water. Whoever coughed up gold got water. One gold piece for a cup of water!

In sheer size this nonrecurring tidal wave (it was an ocean) swelled beyond the bounds of anything the penal system or even an immense state can permit itself. There was nothing to be compared with in all Russian history. It was the forced resettlement of a whole people, an ethnic catastrophe.

This wave was also distinct from all those which preceded it because no one fused about with taking the head of the family first and then working out what to do with the rest of the family. On the contrary, in this wave they burned out whole nests, whole families, from the start; and they watched jealously to be sure that none of the children—fourteen, ten, even six year old— got away: to the last scrapings, all had to go the same road, to the same common destruction. (This was the first such experiment—at least in modern history. It was subsequently repeated by Hitler with the Jews.)

In 1941 the Germans went round Tagnrog, cutting it off so swiftly that prisoners were left in freight wagons at the railway station where they had been brought to be evacuated. What should one do with them? Certainly not set them free nor leave them to the Germans. Oil tank trucks were rushed to the station, and the wagons were drenched with oil and set on fire. All the prisoners were burned alive.

Chapter 3: "The Interrogation" (no ellipsis added between excerpts)

What had already been regarded as barbarism under Peter the Great, what might have been used against ten or twenty people in all during the time of Biron in the mid-eighteenth century, what had already become totally impossible under Catharine the Great, was all being practiced during the flowering of the glorious twentieth century—in a society based on socialist principles—not by one scoundrel alone, but by tens of thousands of specially trained human beasts standing over millions of defenseless victims.

In 1952 Anna Skripnikova was undergoing her fifth imprisonment, and Sivakov, Chief of the Investigative Department of the Ordzhonikidze State Security Administration, said to her:

“The prison doctor reports you have a blood pressure of 240/120. That’s too low you bitch! We’re going to drive it up to 340 so you’ll kick the bucket, you viper, and with no black and blue marks; no beatings; no broken bones. We’ll just not let you sleep.”

She was in her fifties at the time. And if, back in her cell, after a night spent in interrogation, she closed her eyes during the day, the jailer broke in and shouted: “Open your eyes or I’ll haul you off that cot by the legs and tie you to the wall standing up.”

As early as 1921 interrogations usually took place at night. And there was an airtight cork-lined cell in which there was no ventilation and they cooked the prisoners. A participant in the Yaroslavl uprising of 1918, Vasily Aleksandrovich Kasyanov, described how the heat in such a cell was turned up until your blood begin to ooze through your pores.

Then in the years 1937-1938, in view of the extraordinary situation prevailing (the specified millions of admissions to the Archipelago had to be ground through the apparatus of individual interrogation in specified, limited periods, something which had simply not happened in the mass waves of kulaks and nationalities), interrogators were allowed to use violence and torture on an unlimited basis, at their own discretion. For the first time in human history the calculated torture of millions was being undertaken.

In the Novocherkassk NKVD, Yelena Strutimskaya was forced to remain seated on a stool in the corridor for six days in such a way that she did not lean against anything, did not sleep, did not fall off, and did not get up from. Six days! Just try to sit that way for six hours! People could be compelled to kneel in the interrogator’s office or the corridor for twelve, or even twenty-four hours. (The interrogator himself could go home, sleep, amuse himself in one way or another—this was an organized system; watch was kept over the kneeling prisoner, and the guards worked in shifts.) What kind of prisoner was most vulnerable to such treatment? It was a good method to use with women. Ivanov-Razumnik reports a variation of it: Having set young Lordkipanidze on his knees, the interrogator urinated in his face! And what happened? Unbroken by anything else, Lordkipanidze was broken by this. Watch shows that the method also worked well on proud people.

Then there is the method of simply compelling the prisoner to stand there, and if he goes to sleep and falls over he is given a kick and straightened up.

Sleeplessness, which they quite failed to appreciate in medieval times: They did not understand how narrow are the limits within which a human being can preserve his personality intact. Sleeplessness (yes, combined with standing, thirst, bright, light terror, and the unknown—what other tortures are needed?) befogs the reason, undermines the will, and the human being ceases to be himself, to be his own “I.” (As in Chekov’s “I Want to Sleep,” but there it was much easier, for there the girl could lie down and slip into lapses of consciousness, which even in just a minute could revive and refresh the brain.) A person deprived of sleep acts half-consciously or altogether unconsciously, so that his testimony cannot be held against him.

Sometimes, as a refinement, instead of making the prisoner stand up, they made him sit down on a soft sofa, which made him want to sleep all the more. (The jailer on duty sat next to him on the same sofa and kicked him every time his eyes began to shut.) Sleeplessness became the universal method of the Organs. The prisoners were forbidden to sleep even one minute. Whoever was undergoing interrogation got no sleep for at least five days and nights. The above method was further implemented by an assembly line of interrogators. Not only were you not allowed to sleep, but for three or four days shifts of interrogators kept up a continuous interrogation.

As long ago as 1933 this was one of the ways they tortured S.A. Chebotaryev in the Khabarovsk GPU. They locked him in a concrete alcove in such a way that he could neither bend his knees, nor straighten up and change the position of his arms, not turn his head. And that was not all! They began to drip cold water into his scalp—a classic torture—which then ran down his body in rivulets. They did not inform him, of course, that this would go on for only twenty-four hours. It was awful enough at any rate for him to lose consciousness, and he was discovered the next day apparently dead. He came to on a hospital cot. They had brought him out of his faint with spirits of ammonia, caffeine, and body massage. At first he had no recollection of where he had been, or what happened. For a whole month he was useless for interrogation.

[The] bridling, also known as “the swan dive”: This was a Sukhanovka method—also used in Archangel, where the interrogator Ivkov applied it in 1940. A lone piece of rough toweling was inserted between the prisoner’s jaws like a bridle; the ends were then pulled back over his shoulders and tied to his heels. Just try lying on your stomach like a wheel, with your spine breaking—and without water and food for two days!

Is it necessary to go on with the list?

Chapter 4. "The bluecaps" (no ellipsis added between excerpts)

“Just give us a person and we will create a case!” That was what many of them say jokingly, and it was their slogan. What we think of torture they think of as a good work. The wife of the interrogator Nikolai Grabishchenko (the Volga Canal Project) said touchingly to her neighbors: “Kolya is a very good worker. One of them didn’t confess for a long time—and they gave him to Kolya. Kolya talked with him for one night and he confessed.”

You have a power over all the people in that military unit, or factory, or district, incomparably greater than that of the military commander, or factory director, or secretary of the district Communist Party. These men control people’s military or official duties, wages, reputations, but you control people’s freedom. From the moment you don that heavenly blue service cap, you stand higher than the publicly acknowledged power.

The girl is blushing all over and in tears. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the case,” she protests. “Yes, it does, speak up!” If you want, she’ll demonstrate with her body. She has no way out. In your hands you hold the punishment cell and her prison term.

To know what it meant to be a bluecap one had to experience it! Anything you saw was yours! [But] let everyone ask himself: “If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner?” Twenty-year-olds, we marched in the ranks of those born the year the Revolution took place, and because we were the same age as the Revolution, the brightest of futures lay ahead.

It would be hard to identify the exact source of that inner intuition, not founded on rational argument, which prompted our refusal to enter the NKVD schools. It certainly didn’t derive from the lectures on historical materialism we listened to: it was clear from them that the struggle against the internal enemy was a crucial battlefront, and to share in it was an honorable task.

Still, some of us were recruited at that time, and I think that if they had really put the pressure on, they could have broken everybody’s resistance. So I would like to imagine: if, by the time war broke out, I had already been wearing an NKVD’s officer’s insignia on my blue tabs, what would I have become? So let the reader who expects this book to be a political exposé slam its covers shut right now.

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

Socrates taught us: Know thyself! Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren’t. Just how are we to understand that? As the act of an evildoer? What sort of behavior is this?

We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there aren’t any. It is permissible to portray evildoers in a story for children, so as to keep the picture simple. But when the great world literature of the past—Shakespeare, Schiller, Dickens—inflates and inflates images of evildoers of the blackest shades, it seems somewhat farcical and clumsy to our contemporary perception. The trouble lies in the way these classic evildoers are pictured. They recognize themselves as evildoers, and they know their souls are black. And they reason: “I cannot live unless I do evil. So I’ll set my father against my brother! I will drink the victim’s sufferings until I’m drunk with them!” Iago very precisely identifies his purposes and his motives as being black and born of hate.

But no; that’s not the way it is! To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions. Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How then, do we dare to insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago. That is the precise line the Shakespearean evildoer could not cross. But the evildoer with ideology does cross it, and his eyes remain dry and clear...

In that same period, by 1966, eighty-six thousand Nazi criminals had been convicted in West Germany. And still we choke with anger here. The fact that the murderers of our husbands and fathers ride through our streets and we make way for them as they pass, doesn’t get us worked up at all, doesn’t touch us. That would be “digging the past.”

Meanwhile, if we translate 86,000 West Germans into our own terms, on the basis of comparative population figures, it would become one-quarter of a million. Why is Germany allowed to punish its evildoers and Russia is not? What kind of disastrous path lies ahead of us if we do not have the chance to purge ourselves of that putrefaction rotting inside our body? What, then, can Russia teach the world?

Someday our descendants will describe our several generations as generations of driveling do-nothings. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future.

Chapter 5: "First Cell, First Love" (no ellipsis added between excerpts)

How is one to take the title of this chapter? Out of all the cells you have been in, your first cell is a very special one. All your life you will remember it... those days when you rethought your entire life. But it was not the dirty floor, nor the murky walls, nor the odor of the latrine bucket that you loved. For a week or a month you had been an abandoned waif, alone among enemies, and you had already said good-bye to reason and to life; and you had already tried to kill yourself by “falling” from the radiator in such a way as to smash your brains against the iron cone of the valve. Then all of a sudden you are alive again. And reason returned to you.

And that was the purpose of silent Sukhanovka: to leave the prisoner not a single moment for sleep, not a single stolen moment for privacy. You were always being watched and always in their power. But if you endured the whole duel with insanity and all the trials and loneliness, and had stood firm, you deserved your first cell! And now when you got into it, your soul would heal.

I had been dueling for four days with the interrogator, when the jailer, having waited until I lay down to sleep in my blindingly lit box, began to unlock my door. I heard him all right, but before he could say: “Get up! Interrogation!” I wanted to lie for another three-hundredths of a second. One night of undisturbed sleep was more important than all the fates on earth! And I lay there. Interrogation still pending over me, but how far it had retreated!

And there was no reason to be bored with my companions. They were people to listen and people with whom to compare notes. The old fellow with lively eyebrows—and at sixty-three he in no way bore himself like an old man—was Anatoly Ilych Fastenko. There was much in Fastenko I could not understand. In my eyes, perhaps the main thing about him, and the most surprising, was that he had known Lenin personally. Yet he was quite cool in recalling this. (Such was my attitude at the time that when someone in the cell called Fastenko by his patronymic alone, without using his given name—in other words simply “Ilych,” asking: “Ilych, is it your turn to take out the latrine bucket?” —I was utterly outraged and offended because it seemed sacrilege to me not only to use Lenin’s patronymic in the same sentence as “latrine bucket,” but even to call anyone on earth “Ilych” except that one man, Lenin.) Observing my enthusiasm, more than once Fastenko said to me insistently: “You are a mathematician; it’s a mistake for you to forget that maxim of Descartes: ‘Question everything!’ Question everything!” What did this mean—“everything”? Certainly not everything!

When, in the spring of 1943, recruiters from the first Byelorussian “legions” put in an appearance, some POWs signed up with them to escape starvation. Yuri went with them out of conviction, with a clear mind. Yuri became lieutenant in the German Army. In all, Yuri spent three weeks in our cell. I argued with him all these weeks. I said that our Revolution was magnificent and just; that only its 1929 distortion was terrible. He looked at me regretfully, compressing his nervous lips.

On May 2 a thirty-gun salute roared out. That meant a European capital. Only two had not yet been captured—Prague and Berlin. We tried to guess which it was.

That victory was not for us. And that spring was not for us either.

Chapter 6: "That Spring" [The concealed history of forced repatriation to the Soviet Union]

Along with them [a big wave of civilians that flowed into the Archipelago] were seized no less than one million fugitives from the Soviet government —civilians of all ages and both sexes who in 1946-1947 were perfidiously returned by Allied authorities into Soviet hands [...]. Not until 1973—in the Sunday Oklahoman of January 21—was an article by Julius Epstein published. And I am here going to be so bold as to express gratitude on behalf of the mass of those who perished and those few left alive. One random little document was published from the many volumes of the hitherto concealed case history of forced repatriation to the Soviet Union.

That spring of 1945 was, in our prisons, predominantly the spring of the Russian prisoners of war. Not only war prisoners passed through those cells. A wave of those who had spent any time in Europe was rolling too: émigrés from the Civil War; the “ostovtsy”—workers recruited as laborers by the Germans during World War II. It was the war prisoners who constituted the bulk of the wave.

“The Motherland has forgiven you! The Motherland has forgiven you!” and snared them the moment they reached the frontiers. It would appear that during the one thousand one hundred years of Russia’s existence as a state there have been, ah, how many foul and terrible deeds! But among them was there ever so multimillioned foul a deed as this: to betray one’s own soldiers and proclaim them traitors? Then, under the most just social system in the world, came the most just war of all—and all of nowhere millions of traitors appeared, from among the simplest, lowliest elements of the population. How is this to be understood and explained? Capitalist England fought at our side against Hitler; Marx had eloquently described the poverty and suffering of the working class in the same England. Why was it that in this war only one traitor could be found among them—but in our country millions?

The Vlasov men.

In addition, there were a few volunteer anti-Soviet units, made up of former Soviet citizens but under the command of German officers. The Lithuanians were the first to start supporting the Germans (understandably so: we had really hurt them beyond endurance in just one year!). Then the Ukrainians formed a voluntary SS division, and the Estonians joined a few SS units. In Byelorussia there was a people’s militia fighting against the partisans: 100,000 men. When the Germans conquered our southern regions, the number of volunteer battalions increased: there was a Georgian one, an Armenian one, a battalion of the Northern Caucasus peoples, and sixteen Kalmyk battalions. During the German retreat from the Don region, about fifteen thousand Cossacks followed the German army. The Briansk region had twenty thousand armed men. They called themselves “The Russian National Liberation Army.”

Vlasov made public appearances in the theaters of Smolensk and Pskov, both filled to capacity; he spoke about the goals of the liberation movement and then proceeded to declare openly that national socialism was unacceptable for Russia but that, on the other hand, it was impossible to overthrow the Bolsheviks without the Germans. Those were the last months during which millions of Soviet people were still out of Stalin’s reach and could fight against the Bolshevik slavery and organize their own independent existence.

But there was a gap between the Russian and the Western conscience which exist to this day. The West was fighting only against Hitler, and for this purpose all means and all allies were good, the Soviets above all. Not only could the West not concede that the Soviet people might have their own purposes which did not coincide with the goals of the Communist government; it did not want to admit any such thought, because it would have been embarrassing and difficult to live with. It is a tragicomic fact that on the leaflets which the Western allies were distributing among the anti-Bolshevik volunteer battalions on the Western front, they wrote: “We promise all defectors that they will be immediately sent back to the Soviet Union.” We soon discovered that they really were Russians fighting against us and that they fought harder than any SS men.

The West simply has to understand that Bolshevism is an enemy for all mankind. But the West did not understand at all. In World War II the West kept defending its own freedom and defended it for itself. As for us and as for Eastern Europe, it buried us in an even more absolute and hopeless slavery. But nobody heard that squeaking. Most of the America military commanders were amazed to learn about the existence of Russians who were not Soviets; they thought it quite natural to hand them all over to the Soviet state. The ROA [Russian Liberation Army] not only surrendered to the Americans; it implored them to accept its capitulation and begged for one thing only: the promise that Americans would not extradite them to the Soviets.

In Yalta Churchill and Roosevelt had signed the agreement to repatriate all Soviet citizens, and especially the military, without specifying whether the repatriation was to be voluntary or enforced: How could any people on earth not be willing to return to their homes? The nearsightedness of the West was condensed in what was written at Yalta.

The English turned over the Soviet army command a Cossack corps of forty to forty-five thousand men which had fought its way to Austria from Yugoslavia. The extradition was carried out with perfidy which is characteristic of British diplomatic tradition. The Cossacks did not grow suspicious when they were asked to turn in their weapons, on the grounds that this was necessary in order to standardize their equipment. On May 28... [Chechar's note: Solzhenitsyn describes in this paragraph how the Allied forces extradited these Russian people, against their will, to Stalin.]

They could not even shoot or stab themselves to death, since all their weapons had been taken away. Some jumped off the high viaduct into the river or onto the stones. The hearts of the British were not troubled, nor were their democratic minds. British tanks and soldiers arrived. The British soldiers started beating them with rifle butts and clubs, grabbing them and throwing them into the trucks, including the wounded, as if they were packages. Entire families sought death by throwing themselves into the river. Meanwhile, the British units in the neighborhood pursued and shot at the fugitives. (The cemetery where the people who were shot or trampled to death and buried still exists in Lienz.)

But even that was only the beginning. During all of 1946 and 1947 the Western allies, faithful to Stalin, continued to turn over to him Soviet citizens, former soldiers as well as civilians. It did not really matter who they were as long as the West could get rid of this human confusion as quickly as possible. People were extradited from Austria, Germany, France, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, from the American occupation zones, and from the territory of the United States as well.

Now, a quarter of a century later, when most of the Vlasov men have perished in camps and those who have survived are living out their lives in the Far North, I would like to issue a reminder, through these pages, that this was a phenomenon totally unheard of in all world history: that several hundred thousand young men, aged twenty to thirty, took up arms against their Fatherland as allies of its most evil enemy.