Advancing Psychological Education for All
The air in the draftless hallway seemed to darken and roil thickly, like cream in hot coffee, just for a second. Eberling, the butler’s features darkened too, making his eyes appear to glow, the way a lightbulb flares just before it burns out. He sucked a quick gulp of air, as though dizzied by an … Continue reading
With the record deficits, high inflation, cost of food and housing, Americans are looking for not only a way to save money, but also to make money. This drive for success and desire to make money has pushed many people to invest in the stock market. And the only real protection against all the vagaries … Continue reading
A chilling undercurrent of voices seemed to reverberate through Llanada Villa’s pipework, and the hidden, dead spaces between the walls. In the Grand Ballroom the chandelier began to move by itself, as the candelabra reached out like tentacles. Below their ghostly tinkling, I felt that my dormant fears my destroy me. A quartet of figures … Continue reading
Vague hopes, threatening fears, promises of reward, and dread of punishment have been so thoroughly endured. However, from my earliest days, I have always felt that one great unfilled want of this World, undeniable proof that, when we leave it, we shall live again, or rather, that we shall never cease to live. Show us … Continue reading
The goal in America is to build generational wealth and it is possible no matter what race you are. Many loans, including automobile, mortgage, and small business loans are conducted over the Internet, so you do not even have to meet with a banker in person. Therefore, race is not as likely to be a … Continue reading
Time is a real and constant motion, rolling us along. No one wants to look back on the years, and wonder where those years have gone. In the middle of the night, I started to wake. The cold took away my voice, and my power to walk. Looking toward my bedroom window, I saw a figure in black flowing shroud with two arms and hands extending from the edges, but they were not human appendages. Not normal, regular arms and hands, but cloven ones like those of a pig. The teeth and mouth seemed inhuman. Four fangs protruded where incisors should have been, and rough, thornlike projections were the closet semblance of human teeth. Its face had an almond shape and the skin was pitch-black. However, the eyes are what frightened me most, for they burned crimson. The creature had no hair, and the ears were pointed…there were no feet…the ghoul moved by floating. This being was definitely up to no good. It wanted to steal my soul and devour my human body. Not before long, the monster feld though the bedroom wall and disappeared into the night. The next morning, we were missing two dogs and two male servants. On and around the mansion were strown oddly and inexpertly dissected parts of one man and one dog. I shall spare the feelings of survivours by omitting mention of the man’s identity. We buried the human parts besides other seven men, and the canine parts with the other thirty-nine dogs. This formed the worst of Llanada Villa’s horror. Later that evening, at about nine or ten at night, all being in bed, except the maid, she, being in the kitchen and having raked up the fire, took a candle in one hand and Zip in the other am, turning about, saw one in a black gown walking through the room, and thence out of the door into the orchard. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7
Upon this the maid, hasting up the stairs, having covered but two steps, cried out; on which I ran down, found the candle in her hand, she grasping the dog around the neck with the other arm: she told me the reason of her crying out. I saw suddenly the truth of her fear. I felt reflected tension in my own muscles. With my eyes shut, I turned my head away. She would not that night tarry in the house, but removed to another, one of the Victorian cottages on the estate, where she cried out all the night, from the terror she was in; and she could not be persuaded to go any more to the mansion, on any terms. The World took on cockeyed, dangerous tilt. She suffered two broke ribs, multiple contusions, a badly wrenched shoulder, and a deep cut on the scalp which Dr. Wayland thought accounted for the blood loss the woman suffered. In spite of all the prevailing horrors we were left with enough sheer mystery to wonder about the unknow realm. I suppose the spirits were trying to keep others from meddling with or prying too deeply beneath the surface that Llanada Villa’s forbidden secrets and unhuman immensurable evils. Nevertheless, we were acutely conscious of the rarefied air and intensified cold that emanated from the halls of Llanada Villa from the night on. I was dressed, of course, in my heaviest furs. As I drew near the forbidding peaks of the mansion, I noticed more and more the curiously formed shadows on the walls. How to account for such things in this place was frankly beyond me, and I felt queerly humbled. My sensations of tense expectancy as I prepared to round the hall and peer unto untrodden sections of the mansion can hardly be described on paper; even though I had no cause to think the regions beyond the range essentially different from those usually traversed. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7
The touch of evil mystery in the east wing of the mansion and in the Tower of Bable was a highly subtle and attenuated matter not to be explained in literal words. Rather it was an affair of vague psychological symbolism and aesthetic association—a thing mixed up with exotic poetry and paintings, and with archaic myths lurking in shunned and forbidden rooms. Even the wind’s burden held a peculiar strain of conscious malignity; and it even seem that this wing of the mansion included a bizarre musical whistling or piping over a wide range as the blast swept in and out of the omnipresent and resonate hallways. There was a mystical note of reminiscent repulsion in this sound, as complex and unplaceable as any of the other dark impression. Up here were only dark rooms, creaking floor boards, unusual staircases, and echoing hallways to add a portent of the unnatural, the fantastic, and the dream-like. Unable to speak except in shouts amidst the howling, piping wind that raced through the passages, I pondered the unsampled secrets of Llanada Villa. I continued to search all the rooms to see if anybody was hid there to impose upon me. At last I came a lumber room. I called for the apparition. I was ready to drop down with fear, and left the room and went down into the kitchen, where I sat up there the remaining part of the night, and had no matter of disturbance. Then I saw something walk along in a black gown, and place itself against a window, and there stood for some time, and then walked off. However, something black seemed to drop from the ceiling and run down the wall. It was exceedingly cold. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7
As I was turning to look behind me, a little dark form appeared to rise out of the shadow behind the door and from it two arms enclosing a mass of blackness came before my face and covered my head and neck. My legs and arms were wildly flourished, but no sound came. Then, there was no more movement. I was alone. I had fallen back through the wall into another room. The room was a mixture of muddled colours, instead of the carefully blended pastel shades I had selected. The line of wall, floor and ceiling were strangely off proportion, zigzag, and unrelated. Then everything went back to normal. I was able to move again. For a moment the orderly universe was disarranged and the fabric of belief was ripped. However, the moment passed. I remembered once before awakening in this room in the middle of the night. How strange everything had looked! Chairs, table, all out of proportion, swollen in the dark. The be ceiling pressing down, as in a dream. I went three or four steps; and, it being a moonshine night, I saw an apparition move from the bedside, and clap up against the wall that divided the room. I went and stood directly against it, within my arm’s length of it, and asked it in the name of God what it was it that made it come disturb my home. I stood some time, expecting an answer, and, receiving none, thinking it might be some fellow hid in the room to fright me, I put out my arm to feel it, and my hand seemingly went through the body of it, and felt no manner of substance will it came to the wall; then I drew back my hand, and still it was in the same place. Through clearing eyes, I looked at the formality I had called my World. My flesh quivered. Stomach and intestine contracted in sympathetic fear. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7
I adjured the apparition to tell me what it was: when I had said those words it, keeping its back against the wall, moved gently along towards the door; I followed it, and it, going out at the door, turned its back towards me; it went a little along the gallery, and it disappeared where there was no corner for it to turn, and before it came to the end of the gallery where were the stairs. Then I found myself very cold from my feet as high as my middle, though I was not in great fear: I went into the bed betwixt. The apparition reappeared. I stretched out my hand toward it. The apparition seemed to have a morning gown of a darkish colour, no hat nor cap, eyes half shut, the arms hanging down, the hands visible beneath the sleeve. I cried out in mixed awe, wonder, terror, and disbelief in my own senses. I could not believe what fell back upon my eyes in this limitless, almost endless labyrinth I had built. The effect of the beautiful but bizarre sight was indescribable, for some fiendish violation of known natural law seemed certain at the outset. I had previously dismissed, so far as serious thought was concerned, any theory that I had opened a gateway into another World. Yet, not the sway of reason seemed irrefutably shake for this mansion of squared, curved, angled blocks had features which cut off all-natural origin. Of course the phantom had been twisted. Llanada Villa was an incredible, unhuman massiveness of these vast wooden towers and rambling floors. All sorts of fanatic phrases sprang to the lips of servants and guests as they looked dizzily at my unbelievable spectacle. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7
Myths had so persistently haunted me in this demonic plateau. For boundless miles in every direction this labyrinth stretched off with very little thinning; indeed, as eyes followed it to the right and left along the base of the low, to the peaks of its towers, one could see they had come upon something of incalculable extent. The walls seem to range from 10 to 150 feet in height, and of a thickness varying from one to five feet. There were innumerable honeycomb arrangements of enormous extent as well as smaller separate structures. The general shape of the mansion tended to be conical, pyramidal, or terraced; though there were many perfect cylinders, perfect cubes, clusters of cubes, and other rectangular forms, and a peculiar sprinkle of edifices. The builders had made constant and expert use of the principle of the arch, and domes. However, the darkness cannot understand the light, and it will never leave humans in peace, for as long as there shall be struggle, dispute, confusion, and fear. Evil wants to win at any cost. It will scare, deceive, and play unfairly. A shadowy figure often emerged from the Tower of Babel, looking like a monster from another World. Every time I saw a ghoul, it shook me to my core. My skin burned where the claw had touched it. The shape of the monster was covered by swaths of fog. The bizarre clouds of mist formed an eerie dance around it. These ghouls had probably spent centuries in Santa Clara Valley. Hese ghosts and ghouls that materialize before humans in dark and lonely places or in creepy castles and moldering mansions are a reality. They have deep baritone and gentle, melodic voices. These spirit entities have the ability to influence the human mind telepathically in order to project what may appear to be three-dimensional images. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7
Emperor Lucifer, Master and Prince of Rebellious Spirits, I invoke and command thee by the particular nature of this Universe, by the Seal of creation, and by all the Infernal Spirits of Hell, of all contained therein, by their powers of virtues, to come before this circle, in a fair and comely shape. Open the seal of Dush-huvarsht, the place of evil deeds through the five hell realms. Consume sentient consciousness and short circuit the subtle energy bodies causing insanity and disease. Cause the infernal vortex to rise and bring the powers of hell to the corporeal plane, the power to take our finite and limited consciousness to the realms of Hell for the dark alchemical expansion of that consciousness, as well as the ability to employ the unseen powers of darkness within this corporeal plane to destroy its limitations through sorcery for the sake of merging the corporeal and spiritual planes experientially. Expand our perceptual awareness beyond the five senses to destroy the limits of the human being. Allow us to shine the light of wisdom of the throne of Angra Mainyu to lead us to the source of unlimited possibility found within. Looses the spirits upon the limits of the corporeal plane for the sake of destroying them and transmuting them according to will, making the limitations limitless. Allow the limits of reality to act as mere focal points which show us what changes need to be made within the World. As limits cease to exist, all that will remain is an artistic medium to be sculpted and the life of experience will then become art. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7
Noises are often the first inklings of a haunting. Knockings and tappings are frequent. The sound of footsteps is common. There are many reports of unseen visitors scraping the floor, as if they were covered with branches, or apparently dragging someone or something. The jingling of money is common. A person seems to be dragging furniture about the rooms, although the house is empty. Calls and cries have been heard. There has even been the sound of laughter, of a newspaper rustling, of dogs growling. On the wall of the Winchester Mystery House, there was once a sign inscribed upon a wall—“This is where a caretaker was buried alive in this wall. His cries can be heard sometime at midnight. 1924.” There is also a chamber from which issued the sound of an old spinning wheel. It is only one of a number of cases in which the sounds of ancient occupations can clearly be heard still echoing. Caretakers have been sure that they heard the noises of small hammers in parts of the mansion where there was no activity. The phantoms are known as “knockers” or “buccas.” When the sounds are heard, there is to be no more whistling or swearing; nothing is to be marked with a cross. There are also voices. A young lady was in the bath when she heard a voice saying “Open the door” four times. She did so, and thereupon fainted. There was no one there. But many spectres cannot speak. It is commonly reported that ghosts are on the point of saying something, but uncomfortably cannot. Some among them seem to be physically prevented from talking. Characteristically they gasp or emit a loud and garbled sound.
For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
It is great to be here surrounded by so many friends and close partners. This is my thirteenth straight year participating in this program and it strikes me that, in many ways, our partnerships are stronger today than ever. The reason our relationships are so strong among the agencies we represent is because we share … Continue reading
For a while, Llanada Vila was the scene of lavish parties and cheerful laughter. Well-dressed visitors came and went, and rumours ran wild about the loud and raucous legion of ghosts said to be held behind its stately walls. One woman claimed she saw a “black ghost” and another said she was attacked by a “big black dog” in the hallway. The stories grew—and so did people’s fears of my home. Perhaps a great horror—or a greater marvel is reaching out. The reality of what I have been through is highly uncertain in my mind, but I feel that something hideous lay in the background. I must get away from evil. Despite weakness, hunger, horror, and bewilderment, you can see by looking at me that there are no obvious clues to my unique nature. However, believe me, an examination of any depth by even a half-sleeping medical practitioner would reveal some alarming deviations from the norm. I take pains to stay health, and I seem to be gifted with an exceptionally hardy constitution, even though I was gradually being consumed by an unnamable abyss of darkness and alienage. And, at times, I found myself almost unable to shut my eyes. I hear strange things in my sleep, and awake with a kind of terror. Despite the enveloping terror, I found myself ensnared by a bizarre allure, an unexplainable attraction to my home that was a petrifying as it was captivating. The mansion’s very walls seemed to whisper tales of the ghosts that inhabited them. One evening, I was alone dressing for a very late dinner, and as I rose from my looking-glass to get some articles of dress, I saw standing near my bed—a little iron one, placed out in the room away from the wall—the figure of a child dressed in a very quaint frock, with an odd little ruff around its neck. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
From some moments, I stood and stared, wondering how this strange little creature could have entered my chamber. The full glare of the candle was upon its face and figure. As I stood looking at it, the child began to run round the bed in a wild distressed way, with a look of suffering on its little face. In a rough whisper, “I offer beauty as well as terror,” the child said. “Mrs. Winchester, let me in.” I still more and more surprised, walked up to the bed and stretched out my hand, when the child suddenly vanished, how or where I could not see, but apparently into the floor. I went at once to the maid’s room, and enquired of her to whom the little girl could belong I had just seen in my chamber, expressing my belief that it was supernatural and that the child was in odd dress and troubled face. We went down to dinner, for many guests were staying in the house. The feeling of entrapment was all-consuming, it was as though I was locked in a ceaseless nightmare. Several savage windstorms had burst upon us from the west, but we had escaped damage, as they roared by. This was in addition to a raging storm of terror and uncertainty which whipped me mercilessly. The dining room was brimming with a disquieting energy that was impossible to ignore. It echoed with a spectral silence, haunting ambience and delectable cuisine. A huge raven swooped at the window, thudding into the glass. Stunned, it fell to the ground and lay still. William Kemmler and Renee Meckelburg hurried to the door, opened it and went out on the veranda, both kneeling to examine the bird. Screeching, it righted itself and flapped its enormous winds, and dived at them so quick they were barely able to duck. William and Renee came back inside. William pulled the cord to close the drapes. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
I felt a twinge between pain and irritation. I patted their heads good night. Each night, sleep came like a malevolent specter, pulling me into a realm of nightmares. I found myself lost in an intricate catacomb of shadows, chased by formless figures that bore a macabre intent. Each breath I drew was laced with the cold sting of dread, and the ominous throb of my heart was reminiscent of a death echo. This particular light, I was woken from sleep by a tremendous crash in the room below; it sounded as though all the chairs and tables had been collected together, and then thrown violently down upon the wooden floor. Suddenly, icy hand clamped around my throat. The spectral fingers were skeletal, remorseless, biting into my flesh like the talons of vulture. I stumbled through the darkness, as grotesque formed twisted and pulsed with an unholy luminescence. Fear wrapped its icy tentacles around my heart, my eyes bulged with horror as the twisting wind’s wail chilled my soul to the quick. Going down stairs to investigate, carrying a book in my hand, is when I discovered the shape of a woman sitting in a chair dressed a modern costume. She was adored in a black gown, a kerchief, and a white stomacher’ that covered the chest and bosom of this dead woman. I was so astonished at this apparition that I could not speak to it nor stir; it lingered for quarter of an hour, and then vanished. I remained trembling in a state of understandable fright and horror. Then I heard the sound of feet moving about the room as if several men were moving about without stockings. I was in such an agony of terror that I was reassured by the sudden cry of a housemaid who slept in a room on this floor—“Lord have mercy on us!” #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
I was in a nervous state. The troubling spirit had crept over me, and held me. While sitting by the kitchen fire, I was hit by a number of stones on my back and shoulders, presumably coming through the open window behind me. Unhurt but frightened, I retreated to the morning room on the first floor, where I was barraged with more stones, hurled with so much force they caused the curtain to move. As the curtains flew open, I felt a presence crawl slowly over my body, starting at my feet. I then fruitlessly searched the pitch-black room as the windows and the shutters opened and closed repeatedly, apparently of their own accord. Finally, I rested at midnight after my evening of terror and bafflement. Only for my pillow to be pulled from my head and my bed-covers and blankets mysteriously removed. Seeking a natural explanation, I lit a candle and searched the room. Once the candle was lit, quiet descended on the room, but when extinguished the disturbances started once more. As night was widely believed to belong to supernatural entities such as ghosts, I knew I was dealing with something not of the temporal World. The next morning while sitting at the kitchen fire, a boy appeared before me and my servant Renee Meckelburg. The boy was ten or twelve years of age, wearing a torn black vest, a black bonnet and a tattered blanket over his shoulders. Given his ragged appearance, I assumed the boy was a strolling beggar looking for something to eat. More unusual was the fact that the boy covered his face with his hand, despite my repeated requests for him to remove it and name himself. He then became agitated, danced frantically and menacingly around the kitchen, before leaping out of an open window and running to the end of the garden into the cow house. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
My servants gave chase, but soon lost sight of him, only to discover later, when they returned to the mansion, that he was waiting for them. This charade was repeated around a dozen times before Renen confronted the boy who then turned into a black mist, vanishing into thin air leaving behind blood everywhere. The servant’s eyes were wild, faces chalky with salt. They had never seen anything like this. We were trying to find out was causing the disturbance when all the men on the farm went missing in the blink of an eye. The butler, William Kemmler, let out a demonic yell his eyes agitated with a fiery rage. A shower of blood rained down his face, as he stared at the thick red blood coating his hands and the bodies that appeared around us. He had somehow torn the man asunder. He seethed for several minutes, taking quick breaths that did not calm him down. He took care of the bodies and the mess he just made. I ran to my room and shook and sobbed from under my bed, curled up into a ball. “Why?” I said over and over, trying to understand. There were demonic wounds on my spirit…on my soul caused by a curse to flog every aspect of my life. Unfortunately, it was clear that a demon had entered my home. Demons were considered to be the spirits of natural forces such as fire, plagues, and other misfortunes. I employed amulets and other magical deterrents to stave off demonic attacks. Around my home were potent charms, and post placed upside down to catch demons and prevent them from entering. However, I have no idea how many demons were able to penetrate the forcefield. It could be as few as five or six. It could be a legion. When these demons are near, flames turn blue; dogs howl; a sound of rustling silk can be heard; the temperature is lowered. These are just some of the signs of a haunting. Often times when these supernatural forces appear, people cannot speak at the moment of seeing. “I dare not speak,” one of my guests told me. “I was afraid of the sound of my own voice.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
The fortune of my father-in-law, Oliver Winchester and his rapidly growing firearms company surged during the years of 1873 and 1876. The new rifles caught the public’s fancy immediately upon reaching the market. These new models, in carbine, rifle, and musket various, were part of the evolution of the firm as the dominant American maker of lever-action repeating arms. However, it was believed that these weapons were immensely successful because demons were hidden in the weapons. Demons made their abode in them, because men, in these times, worshipped weapons, and the weapons were regarded as supernatural protectors. My father-in-law’s ivory-gripped Volcanic Navy pistols were magical. One evening he and my husband William were gathered in the banqueting hall, and had left their guns on the table, when rushed in a pack of renegades. Before they had time to get to their feet, Oliver called out to his pistol to come to him. The gun knew its master’s voice, and leaped straightway from the table to meet him, killing thirteen men on its way; and in placed itself in the Oliver’s hands, who took in its magic. From the day on, every rifle made by the Winchester Repeating Arms Company had the distinguished mark of this demonic power. Because these weapons were forged with such marvelous power, there was a price to pay. They possessed a hunger that was only quenched by human blood, making them the most powerful and vicious weapons to ever exist. The Winchester fortune is cursed and whomsoever benefits from its estate inherits the curse. It will be passed from generation to generation until the Winchester Bloodline is no more. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
A report states that in 2007, a tour was besieged by unusual phenomena. The records state that on one occasion a “ball of fluorescent mist” drifted past a group of spectators in the Grand Ballroom before vanishing through a doorway. In another recorded case, a couple of tour guides had been separately disturbed by an apparition and by the sound of scratching, the male tour guide reported seeing a ball of light changing size constantly and floating around the morning room. Tour guides have often meet with innumerable cases in which this phosphorescent light is one of the accompaniments of unusual activity. There was an instance in which this ball of flickering light caused excessive trembling in a guest who witnessed it; this was followed by the complete doubling up of his body into a round ball. It has been suggested that these hovering or floating lights, well attested in many accounts, are some wayward forms of energy. During the night tours, a corpse candle has intrigued many. On occasions, a translucent candle has appeared hovering in a few of the rooms. It has often been suggested that it represents nothing more than the gaseous emanation from some rotting matter. Bog vapours have also been witnessed. Two of them seeming to play one with other. The sight often robs people of their philosophical reasoning, and they leave the estate believing in spirits.
For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
There is one requirement that is absolute in money managing, as well as in life, and you have already learned it with the first Irregular Rule: If you do not know who you are, this is an expensive place to find out. The requirement is emotional maturity. You have to use your emotions in a … Continue reading
Like so many things, competition can be either good or bad, depending on how you approach it. It is bad if you define it as “seeking to humiliate and destroy others” or “obsessively comparing myself to others” or “placing winning above everything, including my character, integrity, love of others, and covenants with God.” However, it can be good if it is about coming together with others to bring out everyone’s best or have harmless fun. When it is done in the right spirit, it can make winning and losing less a matter of ego and can help you take joy in the accomplishment of others (as well as yourself). Whether it is sports, board games, a dance contest, or any other endeavour, healthy competition can sometimes enhance the experience for everyone. Unhealthy competition, on the other hand, can make everyone miserable. You can usually tell which is which by the spirit that accompanies it. “There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it,” reports 1 Corinthians 10.13. It is interesting to observe that in connection with this crude Darwinism the “socialist” Mr. Hitler champions the liberal principles of unrestricted competition. In a polemic against co-operation between different nationalistic groups he says: “By such a combination the free play of energies is tired up, the struggle for choosing the best is stopped, and accordingly the necessary and final victory of the healthier and stronger man is prevented forever.” Elsewhere he speaks of the free play of energies as the wisdom of life. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
To be sure, Dr. Darwin’s theory as such was not an expression of the feelings of a sado-masochistic character. On the contrary, for many of its adherents it appealed to the hope of a further evolution of humankind to higher stages of culture. For Mr. Hitler, however, it was an expression of and simultaneously a justification for his own sadism. He reveals quite naively the psychological significance which the Darwinian theory had for him. When he lived in Munich, still an unknown man, he used to awake at 5 o’clock in the morning. He had “gotten into the habit of throwing pieces of bread or hard crusts to the little mice which spent their time in the small room, and then of watching these droll little animals romp and scuffle for these few delicacies.” This “game” was the Darwinian “struggle for life” on a small scale. For Mr. Hitler it was the petty bourgeois substitutes for the circuses of the Roman Caesars, and a preliminary for the historical circuses he was to produce. The last rationalization for his sadism, his justification of it as a defense against attacks of others, finds manifold expressions in Mr. Hitler’s writings. He and the German people are always the ones who are innocent and the enemies are sadistic brutes. A great deal of this propaganda consists of deliberate, conscious lies. Partly, however, it has the same emotional “sincerity” which paranoid accusations have. These accusations always have the function of a defense against being found out with regard to one’s own sadism or destructiveness. They run according to the formula: It I you who have sadistic intention. Therefore I am innocent. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
With Mr. Hitler’s defensive mechanism is irrational to the extreme, since he accuses his enemies of the very thing he quite frankly admits to be his own aims. Thus he accuses the Jewish people, the Communists, and the French of the very things that he says are the most legitimate aims of his own actions. He scarcely bothers to cover this contradiction by rationalizations. He accuses the Jewish people of brining the French African troops to the Rhine with the intention to destroy, by the bastardization which would necessarily set in, the white race and thus “in turn to rise personally to the position of master.” Mr. Hitler must have detected the contradiction of condemning others for that which he claims to be the most noble aim of his race, and he tries to rationalize the contradiction by saying of the Jews people that their instinct for self-preservation lacks the idealistic character which is to be found in the Aryan drive for mastery. The same accusations are used against the French. He accuses them of wanting to strangle Germany and to rob it of its strength. While this accusation is used as an argument for the necessity of destroying “the French drive for European hegemony,” he confesses that he would have acted like Clemenceau had he been in his place. The Communists are accused of brutality and the success of Marxism is attributed to it political will and activistic brutality. At the same time, however, Mr. Hitler declares: “What Germany was lacking was a close co-operation of brutal power and ingenious political intention.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
The Czech crisis in 1938 and this present war brought many examples of the same kind. There was no act of Nazi oppression which was not explained as a defense against oppression by others. One can assume that these accusations were mere falsifications and have not the paranoid “sincerity” which those against the Jewish people and the French might have been coloured by. They still have a definite propaganda value, and part of the population, in particular the lower middle class which is receptive to these paranoid accusations on account of its own character structure, believed them. Mr. Hitler’s contempt for the powerless ones becomes particularly apparent when he speaks of people whose political aims—the fight for national freedom—were similar to those which he himself professed to have. Perhaps nowhere is the insincerity of Mr. Hitler’s interest in national freedom more blatant than in his scorn for powerless revolutionaries. Thus he speaks in an ironical and contemptuous manner of the little group of National Socialists he had originally joined in Munich. This was his impression of the first meeting he went to: “Terrible, terrible; this was clubmaking of the worst kind and manner. And this club I now was to join? Then the new memberships were discussed, that means, my being caught.” He calls them “a ridiculous small foundation,” the only advantage of which was to offer “the chance for real personal activity.” Mr. Hitler says that he would never have joined one of the existing big parties and this attitude is very characteristic of him. He had to start in a group which he felt to be inferior and weak. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Mr. Hitler’s initiative and courage would not have been stimulated in a constellation where he had to fight existing power or to compete with his equals. He shows the same contempt for the powerless ones in what he writes about Indian revolutionaries. The same man who has used the slogan of national freedom for his own purposes more than anybody else, has nothing but contempt for such revolutionists who had no power and who dared to attack the powerful British Empire. He remembers, Mr. Hitler says, “some Asiatic fakir or other, perhaps, for all I care, some real Indian ‘fighters for freedom,’ who were then running around Europe, contrived to stuff even otherwise quite intelligent people with the fixed idea that the British Empire, whose keystone is in India, was on the verge of collapse right there…Indian rebels will, however, never achieve this…It is simply an impossibility for a coalition of cripples to storm a powerful State…I may not, simply because of my knowledge of their racial inferiority, link my own nation’s fate with that of these so-called ‘oppressed nations.’” The love for the powerful and the hatred for the powerless which is so typical for the sadomasochistic character explains a great deal of Mr. Hitler’s and His followers’ political actions. While the Republican government thought they could “appease” the Nazis by treating them leniently, they not only failed to appease them but aroused their hatred by the very lack of power and firmness they showed. Mr. Hitler hated the Weimar Republic because it was wea ad he admired the industrial and military leaders because they had power. He never fought against established strong power but always against groups which he thought to be essentially powerless. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Mr. Hitler’s—and for that matter, Mr. Mussolini’s—“revolution” happened under protection of existing power and their favourite objects were those who could not defend themselves. One might even venture to assume that Mr. Hitler’s attitude toward Great Britain was determined, among other factors, by this psychological complex. As long as he felt Britain to be powerful, he loved and admired her. His book gives expression to this love for Britian. When he recognized the weakness of the British position before and after Munich his love changed into hatred and the wish to destroy it. From this viewpoint “appeasement” was a policy which for a personality like Mr. Hitler was bound to arouse hatred, not friendship. So far we have spoken of the sadistic one. There is the wish to submit to an overwhelmingly strong power, to annihilate the self, besides the wish to have power over helpless beings. This masochistic side of the Nazi ideology and practice is most obvious with respect to the masses. They are told again and again: the individual is nothing and does not count. The individual should accept this personal insignificance, dissolve oneself in a higher power, and then feel proud in participating in the strength and glory of this higher power. Mr. Hitler expresses this idea clearly in his definition of idealism: “Idealism alone leads men to voluntary acknowledgement of the privilege of force and strength and thus makes them become a dust particle of that order which forms and shapes the entire Universe.” Mr. Goebbles gives a similar definition of what he calls Socialism: “To be a socialist,” he writes, “is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Sacrificing the individual and reducing it to a bit of dust, to an atom, implies, according to Mr. Hitler, the renunciation of the right to asset one’ individual opinion, interests and happiness. This renunciation is the essence of a political organization in which “the individual renounces representing his personal opinion and his interests…” He praises “unselfishness” and teaches that “in the hunt for their own happiness, people fall all the more out of Heaven into Hell.” It is the aim of education to teach the individua not to assert his self. Already the boy in school must learn “to be silent, not only when he is blamed justly but he has also to learn, if necessary, to bear injustice in silence.” Concerning his ultimate goal he writes: “In the folkish State the folkish view of life has finally to succeed in brining about that nobler era when men see their care no longer in the better breeding of dogs, horses, and cats, but rather in the uplifting of mankind itself, an era in which the one knowingly and silently renounces, and the other gladly gives and sacrifices.” This sentence is somewhat surprising. One would expect that after the description of the one type of individual, who “knowingly and silently renounces,” an opposite type would be described, perhaps the one who leads, takes responsibility, or something similar. However, instead of that, Mr. Hitler defines that “other” type also by his ability to sacrifice. It is difficult to understand the difference between “silently renounces,” and “gladly sacrifices.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Mr. Hitler recognizes clearly that his philosophy of self-denial and sacrifice is meant for those whose economic situation doe not allow them any happiness. He does not want to bring about a social order which would make personal happiness possible for every individual; he wants to exploit the very poverty of the masses in order to make them believe in hi evangelism of self-annihilation. Quite frankly he declares: “We turn to the great army of those who are so poor that their personal lives could not mean the highest fortune of this World…” This whole preaching of self-sacrifice has an obvious purpose: If the wish for power on the side of the leader and the “elite” is to be realized, the masses have to resign themselves and submit. However, this masochistic longing is also to be found in Mr. Hitler himself. For him the superior power to which he submits is God, Fate, Necessity, History, Nature. Actually all these terms have about the same meaning to him, that of symbols of an overwhelmingly strong power. He starts his autobiography with the remark that to him it was a “good fortune that Fate designated Braunau on the Inn as the place of my birth.” He then goes on to say that the whole German people must be united in one state because only then, when this state would be too small for them all, necessity would give them “the moral right to acquire soil and territory.” The defeat in the war of 1914-1918 to him is “a deserved punishment by eternal retribution.” Nations that mix themselves with other races “sin against the will of eternal Providence” or, as he puts it another time, “against the will of the Eternal Creator.” Germany’s mission is ordered by “the Creator of the Universe.” Heaven is superior to people, for luckily one can fool people but “Heaven could not be bribed.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
In Russia, what happened by 1922 is clearer for the historian today than it was for the participants in those events. The hope for the revolution had failed. Just as Mr. Marx and Mr. Engles in the middle of the nineteenth century had underestimated the vitality of capitalism, so Mr. Lenin and Mr. Trotsky between 1917 and 1922 had failed to recognize that the majority of the workers in the West were not willing to give up the economic and social advantages the capitalist system had provided for them for the dangerous and insecure course of a socialist revolution. At first, in 1921 and 1922 the revolutionary retreat was made in good faith by Mr. Lenin and other leaders. They made a strategic retreat and hoped that some time in the future a new revolutionary situation would arise. However, with Mr. Lenin’s illness and death, Mr. Trosky’s slow elimination, and Mr. Stalin’s ascendancy, the retreat turned into a plain fraud. Although there is probably no single point at which this change could be said to have occurred, its development can be followed quite clearly in the sequence of events from the Rapallo pact in 1922 to the pact with Mr. Hitler in 1939. After the Putsch in Germany in 1923, through which “Communist prestige suffered a new and this tine an irreparable blow” Mr. Stalin’s view of the supremacy of Russia’s national interests over the revolutionary interests of the communist parities gained steady ascendency. He always had contempt for foreign Communist Parties and expressed this contempt many times. “The Comintern represents nothing. It exists only because of our support,” he said to Lominadze in the twenties. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The same attitude was expressed many years later when Mr. Stalin said to the Polish leader Mikolajczyk “communism fits Germany as a saddle fits a cow.” His personal contempt for the Chinese Communist was notorious. Under him, the relationship between Russian and the Communist movement changed drastically the might of Russian was the goal, and the Communist Parties had to serve this goal. For the first time Mr. Stalin acknowledged officially in 1925 that the acute revolutionary period after the First World War had passed and was being followed by a period of “relative stabilization.” Only in 1947 did he publish a speech to Communist students that he made in 1925, which throws a retrospective light on his attitude: “I suppose that the revolutionary forces of the West are great; that they grow; that they will grow, and that they may overthrow the bourgeoisie here of there. That is true. But it will be very difficult for them to hold their ground…The problem of our army, of its strength and readiness, will inevitably rise in connection with complications in the countries that surround us…This does not mean that in any such situation we are bound in duty to intervene actively against anybody.” This statement is a good example of the difference between ritualistic language and real policy which would from then on pervade all Russian statements. The expressions of hope in the growth of the revolutionary forces are the ritual, without which no Communist statement could be made, but the operative part of the statement lies in the point that Mr. Stalin evaded any commitment tht the Red Army would come out to help foreign revolutions hold their ground. He left this open, but insisted that the was not “bound in duty” to intervene. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Russia’s foreign policy seemed to be successful for a while in the attempt to open friendly relations with the West, especially with Great Britain. However, the British conservative government moved clearly toward a break with Russian between 1924 and 1927. The Soviet Trade Delegation in London was raided on May 12, 1927, and, although the raid apparently did not yield any very incriminating evidences, the British government nevertheless served all official relations with Russian on May 26, 1927. After this setback in it foreign policy, “the Soviet government turned its back even more resolutely than before on actual revolutionary activities abroad, retired into a semi-isolation, and devoted its efforts to the accomplishment of two great internal programs.” These two programs were the rapid industrialization of Russia, expressed in the first Five Year Plan, 1928-33, and the establishment of a tight control over Russian agriculture. Mr. Trotsky was expelled from the party, and Mr. Stalin began the construction of a Russian managerial industrialism. As George Kennan has pointed out, this new program demanded tremendous sacrifices from the Russian population, and Mr. Stalin, as a justification for these hardships, had to emphasize the appearance of an external danger. He also used radical phraseology to hide the final abandonment of the revolutionary ideas and, in addition, to show the Western powers the nuisance value of the Communist Parties as a response to their hostile reaction after 1924. These three motives explain the new militant course of the Comintern after 1927. Mr. Stalin declared in his report on 3 December 1927, that “the stabilization of capitalism is becoming more and more rotten and unstable.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The official Comintern line was changed to say that the capitalist World had now entered upon another “cycle of wars and revolutions.” This new “revolutionary” line has been often interpreted by America Sovietologists as a proof that Stalinism never relinquished its revolutionary plans. These observers do not see that this radical line was purely in the service of Russian foreign and internal policy, and not the expression of any genuine revolutionary plants. The best over-all judgment on the new revolutionary line is presented by Gustav Hilger, the Counselor of the Germany Embassy in Moscow at the time. “Thus a competent Moscow observer of that day,” writes Mr. Kennan, “was able later, in describing Soviet policy during the first Five Year Plan period, to say that the Soviet Union ‘concealed an ironclad isolationism behind a façade of intensified Comintern activity which was designed in part to detract attention from her internal troubles.’” It must be noted furthermore that in spite of all radical talk, the Comintern did not send out any directives that demanded the seizure of power, but demanded only the continued struggle against “the capitalist offensive.” With the consolidation of Mr. Stalin’s power over all opponents, Mr. Hitler’s accession to power, and the beginning of the Roosevelt era, Mr. Stalin ordered another switch. He did not try to mobilize the German workers against Mr. Hitler with the goals of establishing a leftist government in Germany. On the contrary, led by a Moscow stooge who was treated with the complete contempt by the Moscow bosses, the K.P.D. was told to follow a policy which was plainly suicidal. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Treating the socialists as their main enemies and making a tactical pact with the Nazis, the Communist Party did everything possible not to prevent a Nazi victory. It is unthinkable that Mr. Stalin would have demoralized and stultified the Germany Communist Part so completely had his aim been a revolution in Germany, or even the defeat of Mr. Hitler. This is not to imply that Mr. Stalin wished for Mr. Hitler’s victory. He certainly saw himself threatened by Mr. Hitler and tried his best to avert this threat. However, there are many good reasons—although no conclusive proof—to think that Mr. Stalin preferred the victory of Mr. Hitler to an authentic worker’s revolution in Germany. The German dictator was a military threat with which Mr. Stalin could hope to cope with diplomatic maneuvers and military preparation. A German workers’ revolution would have undermined the basis of his whole regime. As a society, we declare that the World’s splendour has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed. A racing motor-car, its frame adorned with great pipes, like snakes with explosive breath…a roaring motor-car, which looks as though running on a shrapnel is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. We shall sing of the man at the steering wheel, whose ideal stem transfixed the Earth, rushing over the circuit of her orbit. Why should we look behind us, when we have to break in the mysterious portals of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. Already we live in the absolute, since we have already created speed, eternal and ever-present. We wish to glorify War—the only health-giver of the World—militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the beautiful Ideas that kill, the contempt for women. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
We wish to destroy the museums, the libraries, to fight against moralism, feminism, and all opportunistic and utilitarian meanness. There is indeed no greater distinction among human beings than that between those who love life and those who love death. This love of death is typically human acquisition. Humans are the only beings that can be bored, they are the only beings that can love death. While the impotent human (not referring to sexual impotence) cannot create life, one can destroy it and thus transcend it. The love of death in the midst of living is the ultimate perversion. There are some who are the true necrophiles—and they salute war and promote it, even thought they are mostly not aware of their motivation and rationalize their desires as serving life, honour, or freedom. They are probably the minority; but there are many who never made the choice between life and death, and who have escaped in busy-ness in order to hide this. They do not salute destruction, but they also do not salute life. They lack the joy of life which would be necessary to oppose war vigorously. Mr. Goethe once said that the most profound distinction between various historical periods is that between belief and disbelief, and added that all epochs in which belief dominates are brilliant, uplifting, and fruitful, while those in which disbelief dominates vanish because nobody cares to devote oneself to the unfruitful. The “belief” Mr. Goethe spoke of is deeply rooted in the love of life. Culture which create the conditions for loving life are also cultures of belief’ those which cannot create this love also cannot create belief. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
The historical future is already determined; there are certain limited and ascertainable alternatives. Our alternative is that between the end of the nuclear arms race—and destruction. Whether the voice of this prophet will win over the voices of doom and weariness depends on the degree of vitality the World and especially the younger generation has preserved. If we are to perish we cannot claim not to have been warned. Every word becomes a concept, not just when it is meant to serve as a kind of reminder of the single, absolutely individualized original experience to which it owes its emergence, but when it has to fit countless more or less similar—that is, strictly speaking, never equal, hence blatantly unequal—cases. Every concept arises by means of the equating of the unequal. Just as certain as it is that no one leaf is exactly the same as any other, so, too, it is certain that the concept leaf is formed by arbitrarily ignoring these individual differences, by forgetting what distinguishes one from the other, thus giving rise to the notion that there is in nature something other than leaves, something like “The Leaf,” a kind of prototype according to which all leaves were woven, drawn, delineated, coloured, crimped, painted, but by unskilled hands, so that no specimen turned out correctly or reliably as a true copy of the prototype. We call a man honest. We ask, “Why did he act so honestly today?” Our answer is, usually, “Because of his honesty.” Honesty! Which is again like saying, “Leaf is the cause of leaves.” We really have no knowledge at all of an essential quality called Honesty, but we do know countless individualized, hence unequal, actions, which we equate by leaving aside the unequal and henceforth designate as honest actions; finally, from them we formulate a qualitas occulta with the name Honesty. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Overlooking the individual and the actual yields concepts, just as it yields forms, whereas nature know neither forms nor concepts, hence no species, but only what remains for us an inaccessible and indefinable X. For even the distinction we draw between the individual and the species is anthropomorphic and does not stem from the essence of things, though neither can we say that it does not correspond to the essence of things, for that would be a dogmatic assertion and as such just as indemonstrable as its counterpart. What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphours, metonymies, anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations that have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, translated, and embellished, and that after long use strike a people as fixed, canonical, and binging: truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions, metaphours that have become worn-out and deprived of their sensuous force, coins that have lost their imprint and are now no longer seen as coins but as metal. We still do not know where the drive to truth comes from, for we have hitherto heard only of the obligation to be truthful, which society imposes in order to exist-that is, the obligation to use the customary metaphours, hence morally expressed, the obligation to lie in accordance with a fixed convention, to lie in droves in a style binding for all. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Humans forget, of course, that his is how things are; one therefore lies in this way unconsciously and according to centuries-old habits—and precisely by means of this unconsciousness, precisely be means of this forgetting, one arrives at the feeling of truth. A moral impulse pertaining to truth is awoken out of this feeling of being obligated to designate one thing red, another cold, a third mute: in contrast to the liar, whom no one trusts, whom everyone shuns, man proves to himself how venerable, trustworthy, and useful truth is. As a rational being he now submits his actions to the rule of abstractions: no longer does he let himself be swept away by sudden impressions, by intuitions, one first generalizes all these impressions into paler, cooler concepts in order to hitch the wagon of one’s life and one’s action to them. Everything that distinguishes man from beast hinges on this capacity to dispel intuitive metaphours in a schema, hence to dissolve an image into a concept. For in the realm of those schemata something becomes possible that could never be achieved by intuitive first impressions, namely, the construction of a pyramidal order of castes and degrees, creating a new World of laws, privileges, subordinations, and boundary demarcations, which now stands over against the other intuitive World of first impressions as the more fixed, more universal, ore familiar, more human, hence something regulatory and imperative. Whereas every metaphour of intuition is individual and without equal and so always knows how to escape al classification, the great edifice of concepts exhibits the rigid regularity of a Roman columbarium and in logic exhales the severity and coolness proper to mathematics. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Whoever has felt that breath will scarcely believe that concepts, too, as bony and eight-cornered as dice, and just as moveable, are not the lingering residues of metaphours, and that the illusion of the artistic rendering of a nerve stimulus into images is, if not the mother, then at least the grandmother of every concept. In this dice game of concepts, however, “truth” means using every die s it is marked, counting it dots precisely, establishing correct classifications, and never violating the order of castes and rankings of class. Just as the Romans and Etruscans carved up the sky with rigid mathematical lines, installing a god in each circumscribed space as in a templum, so, too, every people has above it just such a mathematically divided Heaven of concepts and understands the demand of truth to mean that each concept of god is to be found only in its own sphere. In this, one may well admire man as a great architectural genius who manages to erect an infinitely complicated cathedral of concepts on shifting foundations and flowing water. Of course, in order to rest on such foundations, it must be a structure made as if of spiderwebs, delicate enough to be carried way by the waves, firm enough not to be blown apart by the wind. Measured thus, man as architectural genius far surpasses the bee: the latter builds with wax, which it gathers from nature; man builds with the much more delicate material of concepts, which he must first fabricate from out of himself. In this, he is to be admired—but not on account of his drive to truth, to the pure cognition of things. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 