"Never wrestle with a pig. You just get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it."
- George Bernard Shaw
I believe this is the right place for me to make my own statement, since I also have been challenged by César Tort to take a stand on the Muslim issue. I have ignored it for a long time, mostly since I have my own intellectual interests to pursue, and don't want to spend hours reading articles of whatever new subject César Tort considers the most important in the world - that means I have been cast as yet another villain in the on-going Internet soap opera of people-who-once-shared-some-intellectual-interests-and/or-opinions-of-César-Torts-but-now-no-longer-(for-whathever-reason)-don't-agree-anymore-with-him-100%-which-supposedly-is-a-self-evident-Bad-Thing. So while I'm studying hard to learn Russian, I have neglected my duties to read up on Césars current interests. This, of course, will not go unpunished. We are becoming quite a tribe, us heretics - Mackler, Rhodie, me - even a lady who for years paid the maintenance of Césars internet site and had him live at her house. Of which the voyeuristically inclined reader can find more information on Césars blog.
I'll make my statement in this forum, in order to make it semi-official and so, perhaps, a bit less similar to the pig-wrestling mentioned by Shaw above. Though I won't refrain from at least one low blow, since César Tort has initiated following the mudslinging street rules of conversation.
For the record, I believe Lloyd deMause´s psychohistorical model to hold water. From that follows that I believe certain regions have more intense child abuse than others. There is a crucial difference a certain estrangement common between children and adults, and getting your clitoris chopped off. Some of the geographical areas in which adults hurt children more severely are muslim, but there are huge differences between different nations in the Middle East. For instance, I was once in Iran, and I know from personal experience that in the big cities there, there is a middle class at least as psychogenically advanced (to speak with deMause) as is the average among the educated urban population of Europe. These people, in exile, often become writers or politicians who participate and contribute in a positive way to society. I have reason to believe we will se quite a few Swedes with Iranian origin in Swedish public life as my generation gradually enters professional life. All this I have said to imply that César Tort plays the race card wrong - he has an aesthethic love for white skin that makes him lose eyes on the ball, so to speak, of Child Protection, the issue which we once had in common. For those who want proof of Torts irrational, aesthetically based fetish for White Skin I refer them to this Youtube video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmLW-z6ggNQ
If Child Protection really is your goal, you should be able accept a world where every child is raised in deMause's Helping Mode, but where everyone's skin is black. I would. Or for that matter, where everyone is white, or yellow. Wouldn't care. Ending child abuse is the all-important, over-arching goal. But you, for you it would matter, since you have developed this weird fetish for white skin. But this isn't, however, gentlemen of the jury, as we shall see, the only time that César Torts sense of aesthetics betray him. Another case in point - César loves the work of Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, so much so that he has written a book in manuscript form where he invokes it as a desirable scenario for the future of the human race. In his book Childhood's End, Clarke depicts a future where a superior race from outher space, The Overlords, colonize earth, and thus put an end to wars. After a few generations, humans give birth to children that collectively turn the planet into enrgy and joins the Overmind, thus capping evolution and giving a meaning to our life on earth. Anyone who has seen Kubrick's 2001: A Space Oddyssey, based on another of Clarke's books, has seen the writer returning to that same theme of mankind's evolution to a higher, more conscious state. Now comes the problem - Arthur C. Clarke fucked little boys. At least pre-pubertal. This he did as another slimy, pink-fleshed colonial sex tourist while living in Sri Lanka. César Tort, for a moment, in his fanboyish enthusiasm for Clarke's science fiction, loses his focus on child protection and accepts his hero's sexual abuse of children as beside the point.
César writes, on his Wikipedia talk page:
Nobody on the planet has loved the film 2001 more than me, not even Piers Bizoni. What Clarke did[i.e. wrote what is generally regarded as an inferior sequel to 2001: A Space Oddyssey - Andreas] was something like reviving Hamlet for money: an outrageous shame and a treason for people like us. I don't care at all if he fucked with teen boys. Believe me!
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk: ... t/archive1
It's a hard issue of course. I myself used to love the work of William S. Burroughs, until I realized the full significance of his use of boy prostitutes while living in Tangiers, Morocco in the 1950's. As I believe most people who will read this understand, someone whose work of art you enjoy can become a real companion in your mind, and the break can be hard. This is my temporal solution to the dilemma: I believe what Burroughs did was a crime, and should have been prosecuted as such. I believe the same about another person who has hurt a child sexually, and who has created art, should be incarcerated. I am talking of Roman Polanski. (For more on that subject, watch this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISPkY59vdWI). I believe he should be incarcerated, and I will never forget the impression his film Chinatown has made on me. End of story.
But César Tort has been willing to lend an ear to sexual abusers of children who like to construe themselves as "ephebophiles". Once again, like with the white skin, a weird personal aesthetics has driven César Tort away from what should be the important issue, child protection.
In his fifth unpublished manuscript, with the english title The Extermination of the Neanderthals, César Tort wishes a Clarke-like scenario would take place, where a cosmic race took over earth and extinguished all child abusers. Too bad Clarke was one of the abusers himself. Oh, yes, César, and what was the subject of that sixth book of yours?
César Tort scolds, as he calls it, Daniel Mackler for telling people of comparable higher emotional availability not to breed. He thinks they should breed, to hold away the hordes of abusers. But it seems that the natural inclince of people when they get more material comfort, is to have fewer children. And if follows naturally, from being a Helping Mode parent, that you must have fewer children - it is extremely time-consuming, and a huge emotional commitment, to be a non-abusive parent according to the best standards that we know of today. All families should, ideally, raise fewer children and do it better. deMauses idea of Community Parenting Centers, teaching skills and creating a meeting place for new parents in a community, is a much more progressive, empathetic policy than César Torts science-fiction fueled genocidal fantasies. (An interesting, but not particularly psychohistorically informed, take on the problem of demographics can be found here:
http://exile.ru/blog/detail.php?BLOG_ID=19201)
César Tort also scolds Daniel Mackler for his sexuality. In Mackler's now defunct forum, Tort published pictures of Michelangelo's David and the paintings of Maxwell Parrish. Michelangleo's model in that picture was below the age of consent for sexual relations in the civilized parts of the world today. Luckily, what deMause terms our species' psychogenical evolution have moved us beyond the stage were it is a cultural norm that young boys be used sexually. (For readers unfamiliar with deMause's perspective - once pederasty was considered the societal norm. Think of Ancient Greece. Forget whatever rationalizations you have heard - that was a society founded upon Child Sexual Abuse.) If Tort for whatever reason likes to look at works of art representing adolescent bodies as erotic objects, he is free to do so. If someone wants to act on similar sexual fantasies and commit a sexual offense against a person below the age of consent, he has stepped over the line and become a criminal.
As a boy, César Tort harbored dreams of fleeing from his emotionally abusive home environment, by finding a pederastic protector. He even went to La Zona, a part of Mexico City where men who have sex with men or boys meet, all in order to find himself a mecenate. He did not find one, and Tort believes this is an important reason why he is not today a famous movie director, on par with Kubrick.
The episode is described in Torts unpublished second book manuscript.
Let us keep in mind the distinction between homosexuality as such, and pederasty. It is an important one. If a human rapes a female child, would we call it a Heterosexual Child Sexual Abuse? I feel confident we would not. However, when a human rapes a male child, it is often referred to as a "homosexual act". Sex acts between consenting adult, hetero- or homosexual, should be, and are, legal in all civilized parts of the world. This is provided as background. In this issue, too, Torts twisted sense of aesthetics places him opposite those protecting children - he finds two adult males in leather clothes kissing each other aesthetically revolting, and therefore opposes it - but he has his a whole internal of his own of pederastic fantasies - from watching the movie version of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, from reading Germaine Greer's white-washing The Beautiful Boy, to ogling photos of himself as a budding young "ephebe". In the choice between protecting young boys from the sexual attention of older males, or indulging in his own disgust for certain consensual sexual acts between adults, César Tort comes comes down squarely on the side of the perpetrator - Clarke, or the imagined Demon Lover who would take him away from all this. He were to write about this in a book which he has, as far as I know, yet to put to paper. Perhaps there,he can show his baffled audience how all of this makes any sense - but most likely he won't, since in the latest version of his thinking, homosexuality is a postmodern sin against expanding the white race.
In the above few paragraphs, I have given references to writings by César Tort which are not generally available for readers to independently verify my observations. Daniel Macklers forum is now closed, and Torts manuscripts remain unpublished. This is a problem. However, I dare César to refute my statements, which he knows to be true. If he believes I have misrepresented what he has written in his unpublished manuscripts, he could copy the relevant passages on to this page, for others to judge.
After all this has been said, I still believe César has made great contributions to psychohistorical theory. He has made an assessment of deMause, pruning away his psychoanalytical excesses, to leave the hard core of the theory standing. This was a great eye-opener for me at the time, when I had struggled and lived with deMause's theory for years. Torts review essay on infanticide, and the articles he edited on that subject on Citizendum and Wikipedia, are required reading for those interested in the subject. His book, The Return of Quetzalcoatl, is a very interesting application of psychohistorical theory to the ancient civilizations of his native Mexico.
But he has become way too rude in person, something which stems, of course, from badly developed interpersonal skills - a loner in childhood, because of the special form his abuse took (other abused children get socially assertive, hyperactive), he never learnt how to deal with people. This demand that he has, of 100% reciprocity of opinions between him and everyone he has interchanges with - or else them being bashed in his blogs, should make anyone, who is about to strike up a correspondence with Tort, wary. Today, me, Mackler, Rhodie, Theresa, tomorrow - maybe you.
In conclusion, some of César Torts writing are brilliant, some absolute nuts. You've got to separate the good from the bad. When we were still having exchanges, we both agreed that, for instance, psychohistorians Henry Ebel and Robert Godwin were right, and made great contributions, up to a point - beyond which they moved way out in Cuckoo La-La-Land. In my opinion, as of recently, César Tort has joined them there.
And all this from someone who is so knowledgeable, who has written two good books about the humans, his so-called parents, who destroyed deconstructed his mind and destroyed his life. I haven't been able to understand the discrecpance, and I have been thinking about it for a long time. After my first round with Alice Miller, I came away with the impression that everyone who understood their childhood victimization would be this somehow totally harmonious human being respecting other people's feelings. Turns out it wasn't so. Same with me, I guess. I freely admit that in the above I have acted like a schoolyard bully. And I too have a childhood history of being emotionally abused. But he had it coming...
Andreas Wirsén