Childhood Origins of the Holocaust
https://psychohistory.com/articles/the-childhood-origins-of-the-holocaust/
This speech is astounding. I think what is contained in deMause's analysis is highly related to what we see happening in Russia and the Ukraine right now and even the USA with the rise of Authoritarianism.
The Childhood Origins of the Holocaust
Lloyd deMause
Over thirty years ago, my book The History of Childhood was published, opening with the following words:
“The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused.” 1
In the three decades since then, a dozen books and over a hundred articles in The Journal of Psychohistory have been written by myself and fellow psychohistorians giving overwhelming evidence of the truth of this astonishing view of childrearing evolution. Furthermore, psycho-historians have written hundreds of additional books and articles showing the crucial effects of childrearing evolution on historical personalities — what we term “psycho-classes” — and on history itself, particularly on wars and genocides, which we have found to be caused by this routine child abuse, by the lack of love and care during the early years of life, by the severely fragile selves that are the results of extremely insecure early attachments.
Since I am giving this speech celebrating the release of my book Das emotionale Leben der Nationen in Austria — the home of Adolf Hitler and one of the countries that carried out the Holocaust — I feel I must address the emotional origins of the Holocaust in Austrian and German childrearing in order to understand why it occurred, so as to avoid a world-wide nuclear holocaust in the future. I want to do this because I hope you will be able to agree with me that Germans and Austrians were born innocent — as all humans are — but were made violent racists during their early years by childrearing practices that if I describe them to you I think will allow you to better understand your ancestors. I do this not to “excuse” them but rather to understand the developmental causes of the Holocaust, so genocides and wars can everywhere be eliminated in the future.
I hope you will find that my psycho-historical view of the origins of the Holocaust makes better sense than views like that of Daniel Goldhagen,2 who recently portrayed Germans and Austrians not only accurately as “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” but also as mysteriously containing seemingly inherited antisemitic personalities. I will furthermore show that the great reduction in German and Austrian antisemitism in the past half century is due to the vast improvement in childhood — that is, in the childrearing you in my audience actually experienced. Psychohistory’s main discovery is that war and genocide, like homicide and suicide, is a psychopathic disorder that simply does not occur in the absence of widespread early abuse and neglect, and I hope to show you that Austrian childrearing today has advanced sufficiently so that similar genocides and racist wars have become impossible for Austria in the future.
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#childabuse #holocaust #authoritarianism #Russia #Germany #Austria #Ukraine #war #violence #childrearing #Trump #USA
