Minor destruction, massive destructions - Sigismond

From Peaceful Beginnings

MINOR DESTRUCTION - MASSIVE DESTRUCTIONS

The findings on the field of American anthropologists bring Prescott (1, 2) to conclude that violence is strengthened by pain, lessened by pleasure. The study of forty-nine cultures 2 revealed an absolute correlation between adult violence (criminality) on one hand and, on the other hand, deprivation of physical affection and corporal punishment of children, often accompanied by the prohibition of sexuality to adolescents (and to children, should it be added). Socio-religious beliefs preach intolerance towards sexual pleasure, considered dangerous.

According to Moisés Tractenberg, circumcision is a cause of sado-masochism:

"Another consequence of early circumcision is that it imprints an aggressive and traumatic situation onto the mind of the newborn… The impossibility of processing such a tremendous infusion of inwardly focused aggression may lead, a posteriori, to the emergence of psychopathic and violent behaviour or, in many other cases, to the emergence of extreme masochistic behaviour." (3)

Saying that the circumcised are systematically violent would be inaccurate. Hundreds of examples of the contrary can be found. However, in extreme situations or after repeated or strong provocations, all things being elsewhere equal, those who experienced a grave trauma will be likely to lose their temper in a position of strength, and to endure stoically in a position of weakness. The unconscious memory of the trauma renders them unable of self-control and serene and objective analysis. This explains the passivity of the Jews in the extermination camp of Treblinka as well as the appalling immoderation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It can be thought, too, that infantile sexual mutilation favours group suicidal behaviour: Treblinka, Zionism, Gulf war, Islamic terrorism.

By traumatizing man, by depriving him of a natural protection, circumcision hardens his paranoid tendencies, bringing him to seek other types of protection. Far from the shelter of his native land he will be persecuted, settled on his ground-lines he will overrun his neighbours. The warlike temper of nations of circumcised men reflects their barbarity towards children. Overbearing and confident, their history is marked by violence. The Hebrews, chased from Palestine by historical events, suffered violence; Arabs and Israeli conquerors exerted it. For thousands of years, wars and unceasing tribal slaughters have been devastating Africa and the Middle East. Many peoples of polygamists, enslavers, invaders or perpetrators of genocide, practised circumcision: it was the immediate preliminary of the invasion of the land of Canaan, the Arabs brought it into widespread use to the Africans they subdued, and its adoption followed the extermination of North American Indians. Piracy against the protective envelope of the child’s sex generates the piracy of adults.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, at the age of the conquering bourgeoisie, two nations that gave themselves the vocation to guard planetary order (Victorian England and the United States) adopted circumcision in spite of their Christianity, dragging along with them the other Anglo-Saxon countries, prompted by the medical profession and other notables.

Except for one civil war, all wars between 1996 and 2002 involved at least one circumcising country. But they were 4 times more frequent in circumcising countries. The death penalty is twice more frequent in them. Out of the ten genocides of modern times: Congolese, Hereros, Armenians, Jews, Biafrans, Cambodians, Hutus, Tutsis, Bosnians, inhabitants of Darfur, nine implied circumcised on one side or the other.

In the eyes of the intact, circumcision is a scandal against nature. This scandal is generally unconscious; Spinoza and Freud attribute Judeo-phobia to circumcision:

"… the Jews having lived apart from all nations in such a way that they incurred universal hatred, and this not only by observing exterior rites opposed to those of other nations, but by the sign of circumcision… " (4).

"… among the customs by which the Jews made themselves separate, that of circumcision has made a disagreeable, uncanny (unheimlich) impression, which is to be explained, no doubt, by its recalling the dreaded castration..." from 5,

"The hypothesis that a root of those hatreds of the Jews (Judenhasses) which occur in such primary ways and lead to such irrational behaviour among the nations of the West, must be sought here too, seems inescapable to me. Circumcision is unconsciously equated with castration." (6)

"The castration complex is the deepest unconscious root of anti-Semitism; for even in the nursery, little boys hear that the Jews have something cut off in their penis - a piece of their penis, they think - and this gives them a right to despise the Jews." (7)

Similarly nowadays, the psychoanalyst Alice Miller writes:

"The ritual practices of circumcision and excision have effects that reach not only the individual and their descendants but also other men." (8)

Infantile sexual mutilation is the height of the “black pedagogy” denounced by this author.

Her colleague Julia Kristeva highlights the irreparable of handicaps at the eyes of those non handicapped:

"… (they) confront each one of those who are not affected by those disablements to the anguish of castration, to the horror of the narcissistic wound, and, beyond, to the irreparable of physical or psychical death: thus establishing the most uncompromising of exclusions." (9)

The wanton character of criminal mutilation practised upon children by their own parents, still more strongly than accidental or genetic handicap, stirs up repulsion, sadness and revolt of strangers to these customs. Sexual mutilation of children puts each woman, each man, in front of human vulnerability confronted to the arbitrariness of nonsensical and savage tyranny, and to fierce brutality, sadistically setting about the innocent, the weak, the impotent, cruelly victimized. Barbarous mutilation of children thus inevitably generates dislike against its authors. Like all crimes, notably those against the child, it provokes hatred. The victims must not make their children victims. For the neuropsychologist James Prescott, editor of the Montagu petition against the genital mutilation of children (10),

"The greatest crime against humanity is the torture and mutilation of children.",

all the more if it is a crime against sexuality.

Instead of this, their compulsion to circumcise drives the circumcised to mutilate their defeated enemies. A testimony of it is brought by the foreskins required from David by Saul to obtain his daughter’s hand (1 Sam, 18: 25-27), by the martyrdom of English prisoners of the Moguls and that of the Germans caught by the Herero. Von Trotha, a general of William II, colonizer of Namibia, wrote in 1904:

"They (the Hereros) have killed, robbed, cut noses, ears and other parts of the wounded soldiers… " In December 2000, international press reported mass circumcisions and excisions of Christians in Moluccas (Indonesia), during forced conversions by fanatical Islamists. At the assembly of the United Nations of 31 July 2001 , the Indonesian government recognized the fact of forced conversions without infirming or confirming the genital mutilations. In Europe itself, Muslim warriors have circumcised Serbs (12).

Circumcision is responsible for the slaughters of circumcised

The Germans created the first extermination camps for the circumcised Hereros of Namibia. Hitler repeated the same method for the Jews. Similarly the Tutsis slaughtered the circumcised Hutus (Simone Veil, a survivor of Auschwitz, declared (13) that a characteristic of Hutus’ extermination: the Tutsis took pleasure to penetrate the intimacy of their victims, makes it comparable to that of the Jews). At last the Serbs slew the Bosniacs. That exterminating madness is not a mere effect of hazard; the unconscious has its reasons and hatred always has unconscious motives. The latter have been highlighted by an inquiry, quoted by doctor Foley (14), to 200 members of the German extreme-right. One of the unconscious fantasies of the persecutors of the Jews manifestly comes from an overt fear of one day having to bear the lot that the Eternal, according to Abraham’s testimony, would have assigned to him as well as to his sons and servants. We have just seen that those fears are not fanciful.

However, its systematic character compels to put aside the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. This barbarous madness certainly answers that of the collective crime against children and sexuality and, with Freud, one must see the violation of the physical integrity of the newly-born as the deep source of the peculiar violence of Judeo-phobic racism. The belief in a link between a physical marking and land property is particularly scandalous and irrational for other peoples. A detail of life in camps, that of the systematic torture exerted at the very arrival of the prisoners, intended to break the individual, recalls the torture of circumcision on the eighth day that breaks, from entrance into life, one of the most intimate and sacred human bonds: attachment to the mother. This detail adds up with that here-above reported with the Tutsis and the Germans, of penetration into the victims’ intimacy. A third detail confirms this thesis: death through poisoning by gas tends to accuse the Jews of poisoning humanity. Indeed, this whole work demonstrates that circumcision poisons humanity. This is not a reason to poison the Jews. However, fourth detail, a great common point between the attitude of the Nazis and that of the Jews is the revolting penalty that is at the basis of Abrahamic cultural identity: the exclusion from the people of those who would refuse circumcision a discrimination of the same order as racism since founded upon a physical difference. This exclusion correlatively bears upon strangers, practically barred from marrying Jewish girls, except through adopting their religion. The Nazi racism models upon this racism. The Jews excluded the intact from the people, the Nazis wanted to exclude the Jews from the human gender. Even if the second is worse than the first, both attitudes are inhuman. The conjunction of those "details" aims towards establishing the existence, with the Nazis, of an unconscious will less to exterminate the Jews than to abolish circumcision. Those who treat the child either like a subhuman of whom a declared congenital anomaly should be corrected, either like a beast of which the belonging to the herd should be marked, may expect disproportionate reactions: being themselves treated like sub-humans or animals. But this explanation is insufficient. Why setting about the Jews rather than to the other circumcisers? The answer to this question lies in the particular ideological powerfulness of Abraham’s lie There is, in Jewish circumcision, an element that does not exist in other circumcising cultures (the term "circumcision" does not exists in the Koran), a politico-religious ideology which founds upon circumcision a colonialism perpetrator of genocide (today repeated against the Palestinian people). The affirmation of a circumcision by divine order deeply affects Christian conscience which rejects such a superstition with horror; how could God order a crime against the child? This lie is all the more deeply rooted with the Jews as it pretends founding in the same time the identity of the people and a title deed – like both an act in a registry and a notarized act. Jewish circumcision so creates, in a much stronger way than other circumcisions, both neurosis and the benefits of neurosis. Concerning land property, whereas the Jews were scattered in a multitude of countries of Africa, Middle-East and Europe, German imperialism appears as an extreme, caricatured radicalization of the myth of the colonization of the land of Canaan. But was there caricature of the: "... I make you the father of a multitude of nations... " (Genesis: 27, 5)? The only way imagined by the Nazis to end the adult imperialism of the crime against nature of circumcision and with the discriminatory ideology that accompanies it was the settlement of a still more systematic ideology. Nevertheless, since this radicalisation is accompanied by a will of extermination of the Jewish people, it must be thought that the pupils are not only looking for overtaking the masters but that they have a particular problem to settle with them. Obviously, this problem was circumcision. Nazi madness pretended punishing a minor crime against humanity by a major crime against humanity. That madness was exerted within the logic of the unconscious which, assimilating the part to the whole, holds circumcision for murder. One should let sleeping dogs lie.

1 Genital pain versus genital pleasure: why the one and not the other? The truth seeker, July-Aug 1989; (1-3): 14-21. cirp.org/library/ psych 2 Body pleasure and the origins of violence. The bulletin of the atomic scientists, Nov 1975: 10-20. cirp.org/library/psych 3 Moisés Tractenberg. Psychoanalysis of circumcision. Male and female circumcision. New York: Denniston et al. Plenum publishers; 1999. 4 Politico-theological treatise. 1670. 3: 99. 5 Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood. 1910. London: The Hogarth press ltd.; 1957. S.E., XI. p. 95, n. 2. 6 Moses and monotheism. 1936. London: The Hogarth press ltd.; 1964. S.E., XXIII, p. 91. 7 Analysis of a phobia on a five-years-old boy (Little Hans). 1909. London: The Hogarth press ltd.; 1955. S.E., X, p. 36, n. 8 Banished knowledge - Facing childhood injuries. Chap VII. 1988. New York: Anchor press; 1997. 9 Aux frontières du vivant. Le magazine littéraire, février 2004 (428). 33-36. 10 MontaguNOCIRCpetition.org 11 UN document A/56/253, Questions relative to the rights of man, n° 44: 12-13. 12 UN document S/1994/674 section IV-F. 13 Radio broadcasted speech. 8 March 2004 (day of woman). 14 Foley J. The unkindest cut of all. Fact magazine 1966; 3 (4): 2-9. cirp.org/news/1966.07_Foley