Are the Evil Gods Returning? Or is Evil is Inside us?

 

Benito Mussolini in 1922: is this the face of evil? Maybe, but Mussolini was not worshiping evil deities, he was not eating babies, he was not making human sacrifices. He wasn't even indulging in bouts of satanic laughter, as evil characters are supposed to do. There was nothing behind the mask. Mussolini was just a victim of his own propaganda.  

As a devoted reader of H.P. Lovecraft's stories, I have always found the idea of evil deities fascinating. The existence of supernatural entities that somehow control people's minds could explain a lot of things that otherwise would seem impossible to understand. But Lovecraft's horror stories are so over the top that they are not really scary. His evil Gods are comic book characters, clumsy creatures haunting dark and desolate places. Not even the mighty Cthulhu and his minions ever directly intervened in human political decisions. 

Yet, sometimes you have the sensation that something truly evil is moving in the world. Naomi Wolf expressed the idea most clearly in a recent post of hers.   

I could not explain the way the Western world simply switched from being based at least overtly on values of human rights and decency, to values of death, exclusion and hatred, overnight, en masse — without reference to some metaphysical evil that goes above and beyond fallible, blundering human agency. ...

What we have lived through since 2020 is so sophisticated, so massive, so evil, and executed in such inhumane unison, that it cannot be accounted for without venturing into metaphysics. Something else, something metaphysical, must have done that. And I speak as a devoted rationalist.

Lately, I've been thinking along similar lines. I even argued that worshiping the evil deity Baphomet could be a good idea for really nasty people who want to dominate the world. Overall, though, I think it is not the right explanation. No matter how inexplicable the rise of evil can look, it is still something that comes from inside us, not from the outside. Evil is us, eventually.

The recent release of the "Lockdown Files" in Britain supports this idea. These files contain the messages sent and received by Matt Hancock, the British Secretary of State for Health and Social Care during the lockdown period in Britain. In these messages, Hancock doesn't sound evil. He just writes as if he cared only about himself and his personal prestige. He wanted to "own the exit," and he didn't care about the British people, whom he evidently considered a band of morons. We were mistreated by dumb bureaucrats, not by the minions of evil deities.

Now, I have a stated policy that I call the "Grokking Strategy" that consists in listening to everyone and trusting no one. So, I am perfectly willing to consider the hypothesis that the Hancock files are a psyop designed to divert the public's attention away from the hidden forces that governed the reaction to the pandemic. On the whole, though, I think these files are genuine. They make sense, and they also match other examples of the same kind. For instance, we recently saw similar leaks of messages sent and received by the Italian equivalent of Hancock, Mr. Roberto Speranza, Minister of Health of the Italian government during the lockdown period. We can't swear on the authenticity of these leaked messages, but they fit with the personality of Mr. Speranza. Like Hancock, he was clearly trying to "own the exit." In late 2020, he published an autobiographical book designed to show how he had been valiantly fighting the virus and eventually had succeeded in squashing it. The book was quietly removed from the market when it turned out that the pandemic was not over. Now a printed copy is a rare collector's item.

Speranza and Hancock are just examples of the attitude of many people who reach the top. They are psychopaths, caring only about themselves, unable to feel anything for other people. They have zero or nearly zero empathy. Hannah Arendt describes this attitude for Adolf Eichmann, the German war criminal executed in 1962. 

“What he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”

We find another example of this attitude with Benito Mussolini, who ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943, and part of it up to 1945. For him, we have the equivalent of the leaked messages by Hancock and Speranza in the diary kept by his son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, who acted as foreign minister up to 1943. In a post of mine I described how the diary tells us of a man who had lost all contact with reality. Mussolini had no friends, just lackeys. He wasn't listening to anyone; he was giving orders. He was not asking questions; he had all the answers. He was not learning from his mistakes; they were always someone else's fault. Worst of all, he had no respect for the life of the people he was supposed to rule. Just as an example, during a cold wave in winter, he was rejoicing because "the weak die, and the race becomes stronger." In 1943, Mussolini ordered the execution of his son-in-law. He didn't care even about the members of his own family. 

Was Mussolini pursuing an evil plan of his own creation? No, he never had structured ideas or plans. You may have some hints of his thoughts from his 1911 novel: "The Lover of the Cardinal." About it. I wrote:

.... I was curious about the possibility of gathering some hints about Mussolini's personality. Maybe his dreams, his goals as a young man, his ideals, this kind of things. But there is nothing like that in the novel. The author comes out of it as shallow as his characters. Which I think is what Mussolini probably was. A shallow character, of modest culture, with no real ideals, and with just a few ideas, but confused. 

Yet, a whole nation followed this man into doing whatever he thought was to be done. Let's skip the many disastrous strategic mistakes he made, and let's just focus on one that was pure evil: the persecution of the Italian Jews. It started in the mid-1930s, and it was a crescendo of harassment and mistreatment. The "racial laws" were enacted in 1938, and the Jews saw themselves fired from their jobs, forbidden to work, and, in many cases, forced to exile. Jews could not be administrators or doorkeepers of houses inhabited by Aryans, dealers in valuables, photographers, sellers of books, children's items, playing cards, and stationery. Jews were also forbidden to be licensed as amateur fishermen, to publish mortuary announcements, to include their names in telephone directories, to own and sell radios, and to join sports or recreational societies. They were forbidden to play chess in chess clubs. Even the Italian "Science" was compact in condemning Jews as an inferior race based on what was presented as a certain and undisputable set of data. See in the image the front cover of a 1938 Italian magazine: it is self-explanatory ("La difesa della razza" means "the defense of the race").

Now, picture yourself in Italy in the 1930s. Why this avalanche of hate against a group of Italian citizens? Many of them had fought for Italy during the Great War, and many were intellectuals, professionals, industrialists, and active elements of the Italian economy. They were indistinguishable from the "normal" Italians, except for their religious beliefs, But even that was not the point, because even those Jews who had converted to Christianity were targeted by the racial laws. You were just subjected to a wave of hate against Jews that pervaded the media of the time: mainly radio and the press.

Who exactly was masterminding this campaign? Obviously, it was created and controlled by members of the Fascist party or by government officials (the two things had mostly merged into a single entity in the 1930s). And, of course, once the story started, there were people or groups of people who directly benefitted from the persecution. Non-Jews took over the positions left free by Jews. For instance, university professors seem to have been more than happy to see their Jewish colleagues fired. At least, no non-Jewish professors protested against the mistreatment of their Jewish colleagues. Others profited from the confiscation of Jews' goods and property. Then, the military industry had everything to gain from a wave of hate that was clearly leading to war. But the surprising point is how the hate percolated through all sectors of society when most Italians had nothing to gain from the persecution. Mussolini himself had no obvious interest in taking an anti-semitic stance. He had taken over the Italian Government in 1922 without the need to demonize Jews, and in 1938 he was safe and secure in his position after the success of the Ethiopian campaign (*). I would surmise that he was a victim of his own propaganda.

Wouldn't you think that some evil deities were at work in causing this disaster? But the Italian Fascists were not the minions of an evil cult. And we don't have evidence that Mussolini himself was a puppet of supernatural entities or of human lobbies. The British secret services may have pushed him to make some of his many strategic mistakes, but there is no evidence that they had a role in the anti-semitic campaign. Evil didn't originate from Mussolini, nor from evil deities behind him. It was generated by ordinary people, just like you and me, who fell into the trap of propaganda. It is easy: you know that the road to Hell is smooth and easy. 

I think there the persecution of Jews in Italy is one of the best examples in history of the phenomenon that Mattias Desmet calls "Mass Formation." It was a self-reinforcing phenomenon: the Italian press started telling people that Jews were evil, people were believing what they were told, and that led the press to step up their accusations, convincing people even more.  And that went on, unchecked: a spiral of evil growing on itself. Soon, nobody, not even the Catholic Church, dared to say a word to defend their fellow Italian citizens so unfairly discriminated against. All the self-reinforcing phenomena tend to grow rapidly, even exponentially. And that was what happened with the anti-semitic campaign in Italy. It grew to the point when concentration camps started being built for the Jews, then these camps became extermination camps. Fortunately, the whole thing crashed with the defeat of Italy in WWII before it could reach the level of the parallel German extermination program. It was a perfect example of a Seneca Cliff -- even evil is subjected to slow growth and fast collapse. 

During the past three years, the whole world has been walking along a dangerous and slippery road toward Hell. In Italy, the Covid policies didn't arrive at the creation of concentration camps, but we got very close to that. They were actually created in Australia. Then, miraculously, something happened that defused the whole thing. Now the story seems to be over, and most people just want to forget about that, just like Italians want to forget the mistreatment that their grandparents and great-grandparents inflicted on Jews. But the elements that created these waves of hate are all in place, and we are all subjected to being affected by a propaganda campaign designed to demonize someone. Who will be the next victims?

 

(*) I have an idea about what could have been going on in Mussolini's head. It goes like this. First, there is no evidence that Mussolini had anti-semitic ideas for most of his political career. He never wrote anything about Jews, and even in his 1911 novel, the Cardinal's lover, there is no trace of anti-semitism. Mussolini even had a Jewish mistress, Margherita Sarfatti (1880-1961), an intellectual, artist, and writer, from when they met in Milano in 1911. But, in 1933, Mussolini took a younger woman as mistress, unceremoniously dumping the older Sarfatti. From then on, Mussolini started to encourage anti-semitism, becoming a rabid anti-semite himself. Was the whole idea of persecuting the Jews a result of Mussolini's personal dislike of his former Jewish lover? Who can say? If a butterfly can start a hurricane by flapping its wings, some of the mass murders of WWII might have started from a bedroom quarrel. But we will never know. 

Small Communities: How to avoid being exterminated

 

In the "Simpsons" series, Shelbyville Manhattan is the mythical founder of the town of Shelbyville. He split from his companion, Jebediah Springfield, who had refused to found a town where cousin marriage was legal. So, they founded two separate cities: Shelbyville and Springfield. Both cities went their own ways, without interacting very much with each other except in terms of occasional raids performed by local hotheads. In a more realistic tale, however, we might have expected that the Shelbyvillians and the Springfielders would have considered each other as abominations to be stamped out and that they would have engaged in doing exactly that.

Sometimes, you really feel like leaving this madness to the people who watch the news on tv every day or keep harassing you on social media. You feel like joining a separate community, like the Amish. They don't watch TV, don't use the Internet: wonderful life. Yet, you have a nagging feeling that it might not be so easy.....

 

As things stand, many of us are starting to think about the possibility of quitting. Yes, quitting the debate on social media, quitting the insults on TV, quitting the attempt to extract a drop of rationality from people whose brain was washed away by a tsunami of folly. They think they are the majority and maybe they are. Or maybe not but, in any case, why can't you just do your thing in peace, without bothering anyone? 

Not so easy. Theoretically, democracy is about protecting the rights of minorities. But, in practice, the Western propaganda system has evolved into something that thrives on demonizing minorities, in some cases pushing for, and obtaining, their extermination. The case of the Jews in Europe remains paradigmatic: it came after decades of demonization carried out in a society that was basically democratic in terms of its political structure. 

So, if you want to be a minority, you are at risk. At a very serious risk. 

In earlier times, it was possible for non-standard groups to leave their countries of origin and simply move to other places. That's becoming more and more difficult: not only the world is full of people, but the global propaganda machine seems to be linking governments all over the world. Countries that at some moment seemed to be friendly, suddenly become heavily engaged in stamping out the abomination represented by the minority of people who think like you. 

There follows that if you really want to be different, you have to accept that you are a separate group in a potentially hostile larger community. It is a dangerous condition, but history tells us that there have been examples of minority groups surviving for centuries or even millennia. Think of the Jews, the Dhimmi (non-Islamic communities in Islamic countries), the Roma (the "Gypsies"), and the Amish as possibly the oldest example of the many minority religious communities in the United States.

The Jews are the most ancient example. Their dispersion is known as the "Diaspora." It started with the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem in 70 AD. From then on, most Jews have been living in scattered communities in Asia, Europe, and Africa. In recent times, they switched their strategy by returning to a full-fledged state. Their population is estimated at about 15 million (ca. 0.2% of the total world population).

The Dhimmi, أهل الذمة Ahl aḏ-dhimmah "the people of the covenant" are the non-Muslims living in an Islamic state. They are mostly Middle Eastern and African communities that maintained their Christian identity during the expansion of Islam, starting with the 7th century AD.  But they are also non-Christian groups such as the Jews and the Zoroastrians in Iran. Their number is hard to estimate, but it may be large: for instance from 10% to 15% of the Egyptian population is estimated to be Christian Copts nowadays. 

The Roma, also known as the Gypsies, are not so ancient as the Jews and the Dhimmi, but their existence may go back to the early middle ages as migrants from India, so quite possibly more than one thousand years. Very little is known about them until relatively recent times and even their total population is hard to estimate: it may be as small as 2 million, or perhaps as large as 20 million. 

The Amish are the most recent of the list, but still count at least three centuries of existence, having originated in Switzerland in the late 17th century, as a sect of Christian "anabaptists." In time, most of them moved to North America. They are now estimated to be about 350,000. 

All these groups didn't have an easy life and they were often subjected to various kinds of vexations and persecutions. Of the three, the Jews went through a full-fledged extermination attempt during the 20th century, after a history of local exterminations called "pogroms". The Dhimmi fared somewhat better: they are protected by the Sharia law and there are no reports of extermination campaigns specifically directed against them. But they have to pay a special tax and there are many reports of vexations and harassment against them. The Roma were repeatedly mistreated all over history and explicitly targeted for extermination during the 20th century by the German Nazis. The Amish were never under an actual threat of extermination in modern times, especially in the US where the legislation traditionally favors religious groups. But they had their troubles in the past and nobody can know what the future has in store for them. 

You may think that the hard life of Jews, Dhimmi, Roma, and Amish has been difficult enough that it is not to be taken as an example. But they are, actually, exceptions to the rule that in most human societies, anyone different is exterminated. The list is long: just take a look at the Wikipedia entry for "genocides," you'll see what I mean. 

So, how could the Jews, Dhimmi, Roma, and Amish manage to survive? There are several points in common in their strategies, the main one being to offer a low profile target to would-be exterminators. It means being not just a minority, but a very small minority that keeps to itself. That is, little or no proselytizing is allowed. It is possible to convert to Judaism for someone not born as a Jew, but it is not easy. The Dhimmi, wisely, refrain from trying to recruit Muslims. The Roma are close-knit family groups: you have to be born a Romani to be one. As for the Amish, they are more open to new recruits, but they do not make much of an effort at proselytizing, either.

The non-threatening image is helped by the rules that discourage mixed marriages. A rule sometimes expressed as "I don't marry your sister, you don't marry my sister." Then, the idea is to be poor -- even abjectly poor and also to avoid all forms of violence. 

The Roma have honed this strategy to perfection, they are often extremely poor and do not use and do not carry weapons. The Amish do the same, although they are known as gun lovers -- but they use guns only for hunting. The Jews are somewhat an exception, but their modern fame of a rich elite and of being effective warriors is recent. The condition of the Christian Dhimmi in the Middle East is similar: only recently have they developed effective militias, but they never tried an all-out clash against the Muslim majority. 

The main strategic position of these surviving minorities involves laying all their cards on the table. The way they dress, their language, their physical aspect, clearly identify them for what they are. (again the Jews are an exception, but that's modern. In earlier times, they were clearly identifiable). Deception by the minority would be seen as a threat by the majority -- it is to be avoided at all costs. 

Finally, these minorities tend to live in enclaves or traveling colonies of limited size, but not just as single families. It is probably a compromise between being too vulnerable (single families) and threatening (large groups). 

These rules have kept these separate communities alive for several centuries. But tolerance is always just one step away from genocide. It typically starts with the accusation of mistreating babies, then it moves one step up toward the accusation of eating them. It was commonly used against the Jews (and one may wonder how difficult it must have been for them to find kosher babies for their evil dinners). The Roma are commonly accused of stealing non-Roma's children (just as unlikely, considering that they have many of their own). And, finally, the Amish have been recently accused of pedophilia. (it is enough to say that it came from the "Daily Mail" to be sure that it is false, but just in case, take a look at this) 

After the "baby eating" phase, accusations may climb up to higher levels of depravity in a positive feedback mechanism well known in these matters. It does not necessarily lead to a full-fledged genocide, but it may happen if there are economic gains to be made in the extermination. A typical case is that of the Cathars, a European religious group that was common in Southern France during the Middle Ages. Their problem may have been that they owned lands in a specific region of Europe, where they also kept cattle and, probably, money and valuable items. When a papal decree allowed the confiscation of their possessions (and those of their supporters, or presumed to be), that opened up a specific interest in exterminating them. And it happened. 

Another example of a group that chose the wrong strategy were the followers of Jim Jones, who retreated to a remote jungle commune that they called "Jonestown," in Guyana. We will never know exactly what happened, but the whole community was wiped out in 1978. It is normally reported that it was the result of mass suicide, but some say they were exterminated by someone who wanted to get at the community's treasure. Like the Cathars, they had isolated themselves in a specific region, they had accumulated a certain wealth, and when they were attacked (if that's what happened), nobody could intervene to help them. 

As you see, forming your own community within a larger society is not easy -- especially in a democracy. You would have to develop a special language, live separately from the others and, most of all, be abjectly poor. And even that won't save you from the occasional pogrom. Then, if you make a mistake, you may expect the worst: not just a pogrom, but a full-fledged attempt of genocide. Not great as a prospect. 

Can you think of a different strategy? How about NOT laying your cards on the table and, instead, forming some kind of secret society? As you may imagine, this idea brings a different set of problems. We'll discuss that in a future post. 

 

The Age of Exterminations (V): Suicide as a Weapon of Mass Destruction

Regina Lisso, 21-year-old German girl, photographed in 1945 after having killed herself by ingesting a cyanide capsule. She was unlucky enough to find herself in the crosshairs of a major propaganda effort where the Allied and the German governments collaborated to convince Germans to commit suicide. It is hard to convince people to kill themselves, but we cannot exclude that it could be tried again in some indirect forms. 

This is the 5th part (one, two, three, and four) of a series dedicated to exploring a dark area of human behavior: mass exterminations. Here, I examine perhaps the darkest part of it: when the victims can be convinced to submit to be killed or even to kill themselves by lies and propaganda.  

During the last two years of WW2, the German and the Allied governments found themselves in an unholy alliance. Both wanted the Germans to fight like cornered rats up to the very last moment but for different reasons. The Germans were trying to postpone their defeat; the Allies wanted the destruction of Germany's military and industrial base. You can find this story told in some detail in my book "Before Collapse" (1). 

A side effect of this weird bipartisan effort was the rise of perhaps the first psyop in history that tried to convince an enemy population to commit mass suicide. In 1945, the British printed and distributed in Germany a propaganda postcard written in German and supposedly issued by the Nazi government. It provided detailed instructions on how to hang oneself (postcard "H. 1321") (2). Even more weirdly, the Germans collaborated with the Allies in pushing German civilians to commit suicide. Possibly, they were possessed by a mystic intoxication about glorious death but, more likely, the German government reasoned that mass suicide was an easy way to get rid of unproductive people, mostly women and the elderly. The result was the wide distribution of cyanide capsules to the population. One of those cyanide capsules was used by Regina Lisso, a 21-year-old girl who had no reason to die but who was caught in the madness of the propaganda storm (5). Other Germans used different methods: hanging, drowning, guns, and more. 

Nevertheless, induced suicide as a weapon of mass extermination turned out to be scarcely effective. There are no reliable estimates of the total number of victims in Germany. It is mainly because of the chaos of the last months of the war, but also because everyone wanted to keep a veil of silence on the story after the war was over. From what we know, it seems that a few tens of thousands of people chose to kill themselves. Not a negligible number, but only a minor fraction of the German population, at that time over 60 million. It was small also in comparison to the number of victims of the Allied bombing, which turned out to be a much more effective way to kill large numbers of German civilians. 

The poor results of the joint Allied/German suicide psyop in 1945 do not demonstrate that much more significant effects cannot be obtained. In history, there have been cases where the casualty rate by suicide was 100%. An example is the fall of the fortress of Masada in 73 AD, where the Jewish defenders chose to kill themselves and their families rather than surrender to the Romans. A modern example is when, in 1978, more than 900 followers of the religious leader Jim Jones killed themselves in an apparent case of mass poisoning. 

In both cases, there were no survivors left to tell how exactly things went, but it is clear that, in Masada, the defenders killed each other rather than committing suicide. In the case of Jones' followers, it may well be that many of the victims, if not all of them, were gunned down rather than poisoned (3). It seems to be easier to convince people to engage in a consensual suicide pact rather than killing themselves directly. It is perhaps because they hope to have a chance to escape death at the last moment. It happened at the siege of Jotapata (Yodfat) in 67 AD when the commander of the Jewish forces (Ben-Matityahu, later known as "Flavius Josephus") escaped the suicide pact of the defenders and defected to the Romans.

So, it seems that psyops cannot easily turn suicide into a weapon of mass extermination. Even in the worst situations, rather than killing themselves, people will engage in desperate attempts at fighting back. That was the case of the Japanese kamikaze pilots, or the Native Americans in the 19th century with their cult of the ghost shirt. 

Nevertheless, there may exist creative possibilities for a "soft" elimination of large numbers of consenting people. One way could be not letting them know that they are being killed. Alternatively, they could be convinced to kill themselves in ways that they don't recognize as "suicide." Both methods require deception, but that's not a problem: deception is part and parcel of the very concept of "Propaganda."

We all know the story of people quietly walking into gassing chambers after being told that they would have a shower. It is an example of the strategy of deception used in Nazi Germany to eliminate that fraction of the population defined as "Lebensunwertes Leben," ''life unworthy of life.'' It included not only Jews and other ethnic minorities, but also "Aryan" German citizens affected by malformations or just considered a burden for the state. In Germany, regular medical doctors used barbiturates to kill children and gas chambers to get rid of adults. Neither the victims nor their families were told of what was being done. Officially, the victims were hospitalized to receive medical treatment; later on, families received notice that, unfortunately, their relatives had not survived the attempt to cure them. The number of ethnic Germans killed in this way is estimated as around 300,000. Much smaller than that of the Jews and other ethnic groups exterminated, but still not negligible and probably ten times larger than the number of Germans who could be convinced to commit suicide. 

In our times, we have methods to get rid of people with their consent that were not available in Nazi Germany. In terms of "substance abuse," we have a wide choice of substances that shorten one's life expectancy and that are willingly ingested by people. In some cases, they are forbidden, although obtainable illegally (heroin, cocaine, and others). Some are marketed but advertised with severe limitations (alcohol and tobacco). In other cases, they are heavily advertised and widely available (junk food). We also need to mention that some medical treatments are widely recommended as good for your health, but nobody really knows if they really are (4), and in some cases, it is discovered only later that they are very bad. Maybe you remember the case of Thalidomide, but there are many more in the history of medicine. Surely, there will be more cases in the future.

Although effective, these substances are slow and messy ways to get rid of people, and they may generate unwanted side effects. For instance, cocaine taken every day will shorten a person's life by about 10 years on average, too slow to be interesting for exterminators. It is at least unlikely that the diffusion of heavy drugs in our society is the result of an evil plan of extermination, although some agencies of the deep state may well have a role in their supply and distribution. 

At this point, the question is whether the stress on our society could accumulate to a level in which we would start doing the things that were done in Germany during the Nazi period, that is, to exterminate people singled out for some physical factor, religious belief, or ideology. And there is no doubt that our society is heavily stressed although probably not so heavily as Germany was in 1945 (not yet, at least). 

Of course, the reaction to this hypothesis normally comes with the sentence, "It can't happen here," and clearly, we are not seeing our governments distributing cyanide capsules to the population. Nor do we have evidence that doctors are willingly killing their patients. But a basic rule in history is that if something happened once, it may happen again. 

So, never underestimate what psyops can accomplish, nor how evil the people in power can be! And if they were to start reasoning like the German government did in 1945, they have a number of options that we can only hope will never be put into practice.  

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Notes

(1) All traces of the infamous "H.1321" postcard exhorting the Germans to commit suicide seem to have disappeared from the Web. Why that happened is left to the reader to wonder about. Yet, the postcard can still be found at the "wayback machine"

H.1321 (and H.1380). This card, produced in March 1945, is entitled "Instructions for suicide by hanging." Seven suggestions are listed. The text is written in a ponderous and unusual style of German that required frequent use of a dictionary. The text starts on the back of the card (all text, no image) and is printed in red, giving the impression of being typewritten.



"If you want to avoid useless suffering, pay attention to the following instructions:


1.) Choose a strong cord, about the strength of a clothes-line. A thin one cuts and hurts.

2.) Tie the knot of the bow in a way that the bow will not tighten the cord. The cord must go unhindered through the bow.

3.) Grease the bow and cord well to achieve a sleek fastening of the noose.

4.) Avoid getting strangled before jumping, or you will have to struggle longer.

5.) Secure a full jump. This guarantees a break of the neck instead of getting strangled. Climb a chair or a table and fix the noose high enough (use a hook in the ceiling or wall), so that your feet will hang free after the jump.

6.) Put the neck through the noose. Make sure that the knot and bow are behind the neck, not in front of the throat.

7.) Jump courageously. If you want to be sure, then jump as high and bold as you can to fall down near your jumping location,”

The rest of the message appears on the front of the postcard, typed vertically at the left side.


“as if you wanted to make a joyful jump from the diving board into the water. The stronger the leap, the safer the break of the neck.


Don't hesitate!

The Horst Wessel standard is calling!

Hail Hitler!"

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(2) From Ugo Bardi's book "Before Collapse"

By September 1943, after the surrender of Italy, it must have been clear to everybody on both sides that the Allies had won the war, it was only a question of time for them to finish the job. So, what could have prevented the German government from following the example of Italy and surrender, maybe ousting Hitler as the Italian government had done with Mussolini? We do not know whether some members of the German leadership considered this strategy but it seems clear that the Allies did not encourage them. One month after Italy surrendered, in October 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, signed a document known as the “Moscow Declaration.” Among other things, it stated that:

"At the time of granting of any armistice to any government which may be set up in Germany, those German officers and men and members of the Nazi party who have been responsible for or have taken a consenting part in the above atrocities, massacres and executions will be sent back to the countries in which their abominable deeds were done … and judged on the spot by the peoples whom they have outraged. … most assuredly the three Allied powers will pursue them to the uttermost ends of the earth and will deliver them to their accusors in order that justice may be done. … <else> they will be punished by joint decision of the government of the Allies."

What was the purpose of broadcasting this document that threatened the extermination of the German leadership, knowing that it would have been read by the Germans, too? The Allies seemed to want to make sure that the German leaders understood that there was no space to negotiate an armistice. The only way out left to the German military was to take the situation in their own hands to get rid of the leaders that the Allied had vowed to punish. That was probably the reason for the assassination attempt carried out against Adolf Hitler on June 20th, 1944. It failed, and we will never know if it would have shortened the war.

Perhaps as a reaction to the events in Germany, on September 21, 1944 the Allies publicly diffused a plan for post-war Germany that had been approved at the Quebec Conference by the British and American governments. The plan, known as the “Morgenthau Plan,” was proposed by Henry Morgenthau Jr. secretary of the Treasury of the United States. Among other things, it called for the complete destruction of Germany’s industrial infrastructure and the transformation of Germany into a purely agricultural society at a nearly Medieval technology level. If carried out as stated, the plan would have killed millions of Germans since the German agriculture, alone, would have been unable to sustain the German population of the time.

Unlike the Moscow declaration that aimed at punishing German leaders, the Morgenthau plan called for the punishment of the whole German population. Again, the proponents could not have been unaware that their plan was visible to the Germans and that the German government would have used it as a propaganda tool. President Roosevelt's son-in-law Lt. Colonel John Boettiger stated that the Morgenthau Plan was "worth thirty divisions to the Germans."⁠ The general upheaval against the plan among the US leadership led President Roosevelt to disavow it. But it may have been one of the reasons that led the Germans to fight to the bitter end.

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(3) The story of the "mass suicide" in Jonestown is far from being clear. There were no survivors so the interpretation of what actually happened is mainly based on a tape with the last speech of Jim Jones, where we hear him exhorting his adepts to kill themselves. This is one of the many cases in which a mass killing event is explained on the basis of the near-miraculous survival of a tape where the evil guy of the story accuses himself of being the perpetrator. Another suspicious detail is that we know that the victims of cyanide poisoning normally die gasping for air, face-up, with their mouths open in a characteristic "grin" that you can see in the pictures of Regina Lisso. Instead, in Jonestown, nearly everyone died face down, and in none of the very few photos we have where we can see the face of the dead, we can detect the typical features of people dying of cyanide poisoning. Very few autopsies were performed, and it is likely that we'll never know exactly how these people actually died, but the hypothesis that they were gunned down, rather than convinced to commit suicide, cannot be excluded.

(4) The complexity of modern medicine is so high that even medical doctors may be at loss to understand what they are recommending. For instance, a large number of Americans are taking statins or other cholesterol-lowering drugs, and their use of statins is aggressively promoted. But is there evidence that statins significantly increase people's life expectancy? None at all, and statins have non-negligible side effects. So, why are people taking statins? Because their doctors told them so. And who told that to the doctors? At best, they read some scientific papers in a hurry and got the impression that statins are good. Or maybe they were convinced by the advertising of statin producers. Possibly, they know that statins are ineffective, but they won't take the risk of not prescribing them. In short, people take statins because everyone takes them.

(5) A commenter raised the question of whether Regina Lisso was really dead, since she looks relaxed, even beautiful in death. It is correct to doubt anything that comes from a government, and that picture was taken by a photographer working for the US army. But the setting, the posture, and all the details in the photo look just right. There are not so many photos of the bodies of people who killed themselves using cyanide in Germany, but in most cases, we see them lying face up, their mouths open, sometimes just a little, very much in the same posture as Regina Lisso. It also makes sense that it is a real photograph because the idea that a young and beautiful girl had killed herself to escape her "liberators," the US army, had no propaganda value for the Allies. 

 

Regina Lisso committed suicide together with her mother and her father, and the three of them are shown in several photographs easily found on the Web.  

The Age of Exterminations (III). Why you Should be Worried. Very Worried

 Disclaimer. I am no prophet and I have no crystal ball. I am just trying to find patterns in history. And I think many historical events can be explained simply on the basis of the tendency of people to try to make money whenever possible, even at the cost of doing the most evil things imaginable. That sometimes leads me to making rather somber predictions, as in this post, the 3rd of a series on mass exterminations (part one and part two). Sorry about this, but think that I may well be wrong -- and I hope so! (above: a hospital in Chernobyl in 2018: is that the destiny of our health care centers?) 

The extermination of social subgroups is a relatively recent phenomenon in history but, unfortunately, it seems to have become more and more frequent in recent times. Often, as in the case of the witch-hunting age, extermination is the result of a perfectly rational attitude that develops in societies under heavy stress. When a social subgroup is relatively wealthy, can be identified, and can't offer significant military resistance, there are good chances that its members will be exterminated and their assets confiscated. That was what happened to the people branded as "witches" in Europe during the 16th and 17th century in Europe. Another classic case was that of the Jews, a few centuries later.  

At this point, considering that our society is surely under heavy stress, the question is: which subgroup could be the next target for extermination? I asked this question to the readers in a previous post of this series, but almost nobody could identify the right target. Now I think I can propose the answer:

The most likely target for the next extermination round are middle-class retirees. 

Retirees satisfy all the requirements: They are identifiable, of course, they are old! They are often relatively wealthy and, more than that, they cost a lot of money in terms of health care. Finally, they can hardly put up serious military resistance. Exterminating the middle-class elders would be both easy and profitable. 

Let's make a few calculations. In the US, there are nowadays about 46 million retirees living on social security. The US spends about 7% of its GDP on pensions, that is, about 1.5 trillion dollars per year (about $30.000/person/year). That's more than the about 1 trillion dollars that the US government spends for the military budget, bloated as it is. 

Assuming that you could remove just 10% of the retirees, it would mean saving some 150 billion dollars per year. But, in practice, much more than that if you take into account the health care costs. For instance, summing nursing care facilities and home care for the elderly, we are talking of something close to 300 billion dollars per year, and that does not include hospitalization costs.  The potential savings are truly huge: hundreds of billions of dollars. 

Of course, exterminating the elderly cannot be done using the same demonization techniques used in the past against the witches and the Jews. Old people are parents and grandparents and their offspring won't normally like to see them burned at the stake or gassed in extermination chambers. But extermination takes many forms, and it is rarely explicitly proclaimed. After all, it never happened in history that you could find a sign with the words "extermination camp" at the gate of an extermination camp. During WWII. for instance, the Germans were told that the Jews were just being relocated, not that they were being exterminated. In other cases, the people being exterminated were glorified as heroes. 

So, what form could the extermination of old people take? It would be done using well-known propaganda techniques, the main one being to state the exact opposite of what is being done. In other words, when the idea is to kill some people, propaganda will convince everybody that the plan is to do them a favor (do you remember the "humanitarian bombs" dropped on Serbia?)

In practice, the weak spot of the middle-class retirees is that they need medical assistance and that they cannot normally pay the skyrocketing costs on their personal saving. So, they could be gently removed from the state budget by degrading the public health care system while saying that it is being modified in order to protect them. A clever way of doing it would be to focus so much on curing a specific single disease that the result would be a decline of the care for the illnesses that mostly affect aged people: cardiovascular diseases and tumors. A parallel measure to intensify the effect would be to degrade the quality of the food available, making it become less nutritious and contaminated with all sorts of pollutants.This method would not affect the elites, who can pay for good health care and and good food, but it will hit directly those who live on pensions.

Now, let's take a look at the current situation. In 2020 the average life expectancy in the US has declined by nearly 2% for a total of 600,000 extra deaths, most of them old people. So, we are talking of some 20 billion dollars saved just in terms of pensions. But it is much more than that considering the saving in health care costs. These numbers are not large in comparison to the US GDP, but not peanuts, either. And what we are seeing is just the start of a trend. 

At this point, it is customary to start screaming: "conspiracy theory!" It is true that, in most cases, pretended conspiracies are based on nothing. The world is so huge and complicated that it is unthinkable to see what happens as the result of a group of evil people collecting, say, in the basement of Bill Gates' mansion in Seattle. The mechanism that leads to collective events is collective: society as a whole is a complex network with a certain ability to process information. It does that without being "conscious" of what is being done: there is no plan, no specific objectives to reach. But often society moves as a whole in a specific direction. 

In this case, Western Society seems to perceive the problem created by an excess of elderly people, and it is moving to solve it. It is brutal, yes, but only individuals have moral restraints, society as a whole has none. Every decision taken individually affects all the other decisions, and we are seeing the results. It is nothing new in history where, typically, everything that happens, happens because it had to happen.

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This said we have arrived at a worrisome (to say the least) conclusion. Most readers of the "Seneca Effect" blog are middle-class Westerners (maybe Mr. Gates reads my blog? Unlikely, but who knows?). And sooner or later we are all going to become middle-class retirees. Of course, we are not going to be "exterminated" in the literal sense of the word. That is, no firing squads, gas chambers, or the like. But we will have to live on a progressively poorer diet and we won't have the same kind of free health care that our parents and grandparents had. 

What can we do about that? The answer is, unfortunately, "very little." Of course, you'll do well in following a healthy lifestyle, exercise, try to avoid the worst kinds of junk food, all that. A sane mistrust in doctors and their unhealthy concoctions may also help a lot. But you have to face it: the life expectancy of the people who are alive today is going to drop like a stone. It will be a classic example of a Seneca Cliff. 

But is it so bad? I don't think we should take this as a reason for despair. At least, we'll avoid the sad trap of overmedicalization in which so many of our elders fell. When my father was 87, he had a heart attack. I remember that while we were waiting for the ambulance, he said, "I think it is time for me to go." He was not happy, but I think he understood what was happening to him and perhaps he savored the idea of being reunited with his wife, who had died the year before. But that was not to be. He was kept alive for five more years, every year worse than the previous year, until he was reduced to a vegetal, his mind completely gone, kept alive by tubes and machinery. Being humiliated in that way is not something anyone would desire. When it is time to go it is better to leave this world in peace. If possible, at home. 

Since this blog takes inspiration from the words of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, at this point I might suggest to you to read Seneca's "De Brevitate Vitae" ("on the shortness of life"). Seneca was not so great as a teacher of wisdom and he made some egregiously unwise mistakes (with Queen Boudica, for instance). But when his time came, he died an honorable death. The death of a true stoic. 

The Age of Exterminations (I): Who are the Typical Victims?

 

The extermination of the witches is a dark spot in the history of Europe, one that we tend to dismiss as the result of an outburst of superstition. But, as always, things are more complex than they seem to be at first sight. Witch hunting had a dark secret: the fact that killing witches was good business for many people because the assets of the victims could be confiscated. You can see this facet of the story in this illustration from the book, "England's grievance discovered..." by Ralph Gardiner, 1655. Note, on the right, the scene described in the text as, "Witchfinder takes his money for his work."

If you think of the story of the witch hunts of the 16th-17th century in Europe, you may be under the impression that the typical witch was an old hag living in a hut at the margins of the village, alone with a black cat.

But no, that wasn't the case. Maybe this kind of marginal people were occasionally killed for being witches, but they were not the usual victims. In reality, witch hunting had a strong monetary component and it was often carried out with a view on making a profit on the confiscation of the assets of the victims. They were not poor and destitute women but, rather, members of the growing mercantile class in Europe. 

The profit-making facet of witch hunting has been often ignored by historians, but it is being reappraised and highlighted in recent times, for instance by Johannes Dillinger (2021) and by Shmakov and Petrov (2018). Both articles are highly suggested and provide a remarkable wealth of data about the financial mechanism that led to witch hunts: in short, there was no (or very little) witch hunting where the government didn't allow the assets of the victims to be confiscated. Killing witches, then, was just one of the many forms of legalized robbery in history,  

It is a fascinating story that has to do with the birth of capitalism in Europe. During the 16th and 15th centuries, Europe was moving from a nearly pure agricultural economy to a commercial and industrial one that involved the formation of a mercantile class that would engage in activities such as money lending, manufacturing, and other services. It was among the members of this newly formed class that the "witches" were found. The landed aristocracy of Europe found it convenient to use the propaganda techniques of the time to rouse the rabble against this new middle class and incorporate their assets. It was a class struggle that died out when the middle class grew to such a level of wealth and power that it could refuse to be victimized. A couple of centuries later, with the French revolution,it was the turn of the landed aristocracy to be exterminated and their assets incorporated by the state.

Witch hunting, then, was just one of the many cases in which wealth transfer was not obtained by trade but by extermination. You can find many examples in history where a population in expansion invaded the land of another population, exterminated them (at least the males), and took the land (and often the females) for themselves. 

A special case is when the extermination is carried out against people who belong to the same society as the exterminators, at least theoretically. Witch hunting was one example, but the mother of all the domestic exterminations was that of the Jews in Germany during the Nazi regime. The ideological reasons for the persecution of the Jews were prominent in the media and in later historiography, but the factor that pushed the extermination onward was that the Jews were relatively wealthy and that their properties could be confiscated for the benefit of the exterminators. Otherwise, you would not find a logic in the German government encouraging the extermination of a category of people that would have been useful for the war effort (the German Jews had fought for Germany during WWI). But, clearly, the extermination benefited the exterminators and that was the element that pushed it onward.

There are more examples of this kind, including the extermination of the European Cathars (a Christian sect) in Europe (1209-1229 CE), that of the Armenians at the beginning of the 20th century, the Rwandans, the Cambodians, and several more. The latest case is the accusation against the Chinese government to be exterminating the Uyghurs, a population living in Xinjiang, a North-Western province of China. Without going into the details, we can say that all these exterminations have several points in common.

1. A relatively wealthy subgroup of society that can be identified by physical, linguistic, or cultural traits, sufficiently large to give a good revenue if defeated and spoiled of its assets.

2. A strained economic, social, or military situation that leads the dominant groups to look for new resources.

3. The lack of effective military defense capabilities on the part of the subgroup.

If these conditions hold, the temptation is strong for a government or for a powerful political group to exploit the situation by convincing people that the subgroup is composed of evil people: they eat children, cast evil spells on you, eat disgusting things, whatever. Then, physical elimination can take place and the assets of the victims can be confiscated.

It has happened so many times that it is unthinkable that it won't happen again. There is no doubt that we are in a difficult moment, both economically and militarily. So, the temptation is strong for the elites to identify one or more subgroups to exterminate and rob of their assets. Who could be the next victims?

I think I can identify some potential extermination candidates for the near future. But I would leave this question to be answered by commenters. Who would you think would be the most likely target for the next round of ethnic/political cleansing?